Muffin Top - by Big Beautiful Dreamer (~BHM, ~~WG, Romance)

[Big Beautiful Dreamer]

~BHM, ~~WG, Romance - A very interesting summer begins for one couple when one notices the other is developing a "muffin top".

Muffin Top
by Big Beautiful Dreamer​

“Ooh,” my girlfriend, Casey, said, catching sight of me wearing nothing but jeans. “Muffin top.” She brushed her fingers along the side of my waist.

I put on the shirt I’d been holding (“I brake for Hobbits”) and shot her a puzzled look. “Muffin ... top?”

Casey smirked. “Yes, muffin top.” She lifted her own shirt a bare half inch to illustrate. “It’s what you call it when your jeans are a little too tight to go around your tummy and some of that flab mushes out over the waistband.” Of course, Casey’s own tummy, only the barest bit soft and lightly tanned, sat decorously within the confines of her own size 14 jeans.

“They call it a muffin top because it’s like the top of a muffin ... get it?”

“Ha. Ha.” I ran my hands through my hair. “Muffin top. Very funny.” I watched in silence while Casey slipped on a teal trench coat, picked up her purse, blew me a kiss, and left for her job as an insurance adjuster.

I padded into the kitchen, poured myself a cup of coffee, added cream, and lifted the lid on a container of ... muffins. I stood looking at them for a long minute. The way the tops flopped over their little paper wrappers. They were moist-looking and the sugar and cinnamon on top sparkled. Casey had brought them home the evening before, saying they’d make a good breakfast, but she had left without eating any of them.

I grabbed two. Then, after a moment’s thought, a third.

I worked from home, editing technical articles for a medical journal. I’d gone to journalism school and worked as an editor for a year. Then when my father had died and I’d gotten a modest inheritance, I’d fulfilled a longtime yearning and gone back to school, becoming an R.N. five years ago, working as a nurse for four years before spotting an ad in a nursing journal for editors. Ding! The light bulb had clicked on.

Now I loved the fact that I could work from home, loved the fact that I was combining my interests, and loved the fact that I was still involved in nursing but free of hospital politics and policies.

I called up the first new article that had come in and skimmed over it, giving it a first read. I was soon immersed and absently polished off the first muffin, then the second. I reached for the third and found only empty wrappers. I looked around. Had I knocked it off the desk? Nothing but the peeled-back wrapper. Shaking my head, I stood, stretched, and padded out to the kitchen for a Coke. After hesitating only a minute, I grabbed the lone remaining muffin.

The rest of the day was uneventful. I fixed myself a hoagie and a pile of chips for lunch. Casey came home. We talked about our day while she made a chicken and rice casserole with broccoli and carrots. She quickly warmed a package of rolls as she dished up.

As we were washing up, she spied the empty muffin box.

“Did I eat a muffin this morning?” she asked, sounding doubtful.

“Ah ... um, actually, I think I made the muffins all gone,” I said sheepishly.

Casey reached past me for a dish and, in passing, brushed her fingers along my waist.

“Jim ... you’re really getting a little muffin top there. You might want to watch it,” she mumbled, a blush warming her cheeks.

That evening, showering after my workout, I inspected my abdominal region. There was pudginess, slight but noticeable, on my sides, and maybe my belly was a little soft. I finished showering and eyed the scale. Maybe in the morning.

In the morning, after relieving myself, I stepped on the scale in only my boxers. The digital readout read 168. I was five foot seven, and I usually weighed in around 157. Five seven, one five seven. Some part of me appreciated the symmetry, and 157 was ... or had been ... my default weight for years, the weight I maintained without much effort or thought. Maybe I was reading the number wrong. I blinked hard, rubbed my eyes, and looked again. It sure looked like 168.

I toweled my hair and pulled on jeans. Were they a little snug through the belly? I cautiously ran my hand along one side. I could feel the little flab of flesh that Casey had called a muffin top. I mulled it over as I pulled a T shirt from the stack (“RNs are Really Nice”) and pulled it on. Was it my imagination, or did it snug just a little at the waist? I’d been roughly the same height and weight for years, never giving either much thought. Now, though ... if the scale was right, a good ten pounds had sneaked in when I wasn’t looking. Maybe it had to do with turning 30, when the metabolism, I knew, slowed a notch. I shrugged, then headed out to the kitchen.

Casey was making pancakes. She handed me a plate with four good-size cakes stacked on it, then flipped a third cake onto hers and sat down. I grabbed four of the six slices of bacon from a plate on the table and poured syrup enthusiastically over everything before tucking in.

We both ate quickly, since Casey had to get to work. She ate about half her stack, then yelped as she noticed the clock.

“Yikes, gotta run,” she exclaimed. She jumped up, dashed into the bathroom. Brushed her teeth, brushed her hair, and blew me a quick kiss.

“I’ll clean up,” I called after her.

“Thanks, you’re a dear,” floated back down the hall.

I simplified the cleanup by finishing off first the contents of my plate, then hers, adding a little fresh syrup and the remaining bacon. Considering that Casey was telling me I had a little muffin top, she wasn’t placing reduced-fat oatmeal in front of me, so how bad could it be?

On the other hand, the scale ...

I finished breakfast, read the sports section over a cup of coffee, then stood to wash up.

*Urp.* A large belch rolled up, surprising me. Instinctively I patted my belly, producing a couple more belches.

“Whew,” I said aloud. I gently massaged my stomach for another moment or two, then got on with the dishes.

That evening being Friday, Casey and I had our standing date night. She’d phoned me as she was leaving work, asking if Ventana’s was okay.

It was very okay. Low prices, large portions, and delicious Italian food, accompanied by freshly made breads.

At Ventana’s, I helped Casey off with her coat.

“You look gorgeous,” I said, frankly admiring. Casey was almost my height, five five, and today was wearing stacked-heel pumps that made her exactly my height. She wore her dark brown hair in a thick wedge bob, showing off a heart-shaped face with great cheekbones, a soft, full mouth, and just a hint of fullness in the chin. Today she was wearing a burgundy wool wrap dress, the V neck displaying creamy chest and the folds softly draping her hourglass figure. She had truly lovely curves, a full round bottom nicely balanced by her full round breasts, a C cup, she’d told me once, as if that meant anything to a guy. Who knew?

“You clean up pretty good yourself, muffin,” Casey said, as if without thinking. I was freshly showered and shaved and wore a cotton shirt and blue-and-silver-striped tie with khakis. I could dress like a grownup on occasion.

We both ignored the Freudian slip and plunged into pleasant discussions of what to order, settling on an appetizer of stuffed mushroom caps and a bottle of Merlot. I had chicken carbonara, served in a cream dill sauce over orzo, bits of cured pork and flecks of bell pepper dotting everything. I added a side of seasoned potato wedges, just slightly spicy.

Casey had pasta piscina, farfalle noodles with a light clam sauce dotted with chunks of crab and lobster, and a green salad on the side.

We both hit the bread basket decently; I know it was refilled at least once; so it was no real surprise when Casey pushed her plate back still a third filled.

“Oof, no more,” she said with a little hiccup. She took a swallow of wine. “You want some?”

“Sure,” I said, and happily scraped her noodles onto my orzo, a promiscuous mingling of flavors. Casey amused herself by finishing her neglected salad and asking the waiter for coffee.

“Oh, and an order of cannoli, too,” she added. At my look of surprise, she said, a little defensively, “You like their cannoli.”

“Sure,” I said, and let the matter drop.

I scraped my plate, savoring the last traces of my mixed entree, and addressed myself to the cannoli. I took two of the three, leaving one for Casey, who after most of her coffee groaned that she shouldn’t and did anyway.

In the taxi home, she leaned against me. “Mmm, little buzz,” she murmured happily. Idly she stroked her hand up and down my own belly, which was unmistakably stuffed. I’d downed two large chicken breasts, a plateful of orzo, and some of Casey’s pasta. Plus four, or five, or six garlic rolls, most of the stuffed mushrooms, close to three full glasses of red wine, and two large cannoli. My aching stomach was stretched and tender and I could hear it gurgling and groaning with efforts at digestion.

I waited for Casey to say something about the muffin top, but she didn’t. Drowsy, flushed, contented, she merely slid her hand gently across the topography of my gorged belly until we got home. We slowly meandered down the hall to the apartment, got in, and toddled into the bedroom.

There, Casey tugged her dress off and sat down to shed her stockings. Then her underpants (high-cut briefs, very sexy) and bra. Naked, she stood and stretched, her tummy visibly full in the lamplight. A little roundness round the navel, a gravid glow to it. I finished taking off my shirt and tie and came over to embrace her from behind, laying my hands gently on her tummy, feeling the warm firmness beneath my fingers.

She turned in my embrace and slowly undid my khakis. I just barely managed to stifle the resulting belch, which made her giggle.

“Spaghetti bear,” she pronounced, sliding her hands down my bloated abdomen, distended and heavy. She spread her fingers, cradling my own taut fullness, then eased my khakis and boxers down.

“I’m awfully full,” I mumbled doubtfully, but Casey’s skillful fingers found a way to silence my protest. I let her lay me down and when she climbed onto me, bracing herself, I groaned with pleasure.

As our coupling progressed, she gently lowered herself onto my achingly stuffed belly. To my surprise, it felt marvelous. The warm pressure heightened my arousal, and our coordinated motion was strangely soothing.

A few weeks later, Casey added to her “muffin top” descriptor. I padded out on a Saturday morning to find waffles, blueberries, and bacon awaiting. I was wearing jeans and had a shirt in my hand (“Minions Wanted”).

Casey kissed me good morning and poured a cup of coffee for me. She gave me a sideways glance as she reached into the microwave for the syrup.

“You know, Jim,” she said softly, “you kind of look like you’re getting a little pudgy in the tummy.”

I pulled on the shirt and sat down. “Um, maybe?” I forked several waffles onto my plate, layering with blueberries, added some bacon, and poured warm syrup over the plateful.

Casey shrugged, sitting down. “Just, you know, saying.” She put two waffles, blueberries, syrup, and a single slice of bacon onto her plate and poured syrup over all.

We made idle conversation, and after cleaning up, sat down side by side to tackle the Sudoku. After finally admitting defeat, Casey headed to the grocery store and I went to shower.

First, though, I gave myself a look in the mirror. Casey was on to something. A month or so ago I had noticed a little rollover at the waistband. Now my belly, though admittedly full of breakfast (mmm ... syrup), was visibly softer and pudgier throughout. I was down to my boxers, and my stomach was definitely starting to look, well, poochy. I glanced at the scale and decided to risk it, telling myself that weighing with a full tummy would notch the number up a little.

This time the scale read 170. I’d packed on over ten pounds from my Standard Starting Weight, even allowing for breakfast. Thirteen, actually ... closer to fifteen than to ten. No wonder I looked poochy. Grimacing, I peeled off my boxers and stepped into the shower.

And so the spring progressed. Casey and I pored over the sports section, discussed with cautious optimism this year’s possibilities for the Red Sox (in April, every fan has a winning team), and carried on with our jobs. Casey put in long hours looking into a suspicious-sounding textile warehouse fire on the outskirts of Roxbury and I edited my way through articles about palliative-care studies, dispensing controlled substances, optimum shift staffing, and the like: the sort of stuff that is eye-crossingly boring to those outside the profession and fascinating to those inside it (“Fascinating, Jim.” Ha!).

And my weight ticked up.

Casey’s behavior was starting to perplex me. We’d lived together for a year and change. Every so often she’d say something about my size. At the same time, she dished up hearty breakfasts and dinners, there were always plenty of lunch fixings on hand for me, and she never said a word about appetizers, desserts, or bread basket contents tumbling into my steadily ballooning belly.

Ballooning it was, too. The scale mercilessly tracked my progress: 168, 170, 174, 173 (??), 176, 179, 180, 177 (again: ??), 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 181 (okay, I actually did try eating less and exercising more, making a point of hopping on the treadmill at every commercial break when the Sox were on), 182, 183, 185, 186, ... 187.

The last number seemed to mock me as I peered down at the scale that muggy August morning. The Red Sox were in third place, four games back, not too terrible, considering that both Beckett and Papelbon were on the DL, and yes, I had to peer down at the number. As in crane slightly forward to look past my protruding gut.

That was thirty pounds. Thirty pounds since however-long-it-was since I’d been 157. I dimly remembered that back in March, after Casey’s initial muffin top comment, I’d clocked in at 168. Okay, make it twenty, not thirty. Still, those first ten or eleven pounds had been a surprise add-on, and now the scale was showing me at close to 190 pounds. It was not hard to imagine going from 190 to 200, a lot of poundage for a guy only five foot seven.

Casey had gone from muffin top to pudgy to kind of a belly there to Jim ... I’m not sure there’s any good way to say this.

At the same time that her comments had gotten considerably more pointed, her behavior in other areas was unchanged. Good breakfasts, usually with bacon or sausage available; always kaiser rolls or hoagie rolls or the like on hand for sandwiches, lots of cold cuts, banana peppers, pickles, condiments, and always bags of chips or pretzels or crackers to go alongside; our Friday night dates, which almost always included an appetizer and dessert. Not or, and.

It was after Labor Day weekend that the penny finally dropped. We’d enjoyed our long weekend. We’d eaten out several times, gone to a movie, gone to a concert, watched the Sox, who were now only half a game back, wonder of wonders.

It was Monday evening, work loomed the next day, and we were on the sofa, feet up, snuggled together, watching the ball game. Casey was, as was now habitual, idly sliding her hand up and down my gorged and achingly bloated belly, which contained all of a large pizza (Casey had managed to down half of the second one) and all but one tumblerfull of a two-liter Coke. She tripped her fingers across the circumference of my visibly thickening waistline. At the seventh-inning stretch, she got up and tugged me to my feet.

“I want to show you something,” she said, a blush warming her cheeks.

Obediently, I followed her into the bedroom, where her laptop sat as usual on a little table in the corner. My work desktop, and workspace, was in the smaller, second bedroom.

She sat down and I stood behind her, curious.

She tapped some keys and logged on to a Web site where, it appeared, she was a member.

“I’m ... um ... that’s me.” She’d opened a thread in a chat room and pointed the cursor onto someone’s handle: “Baystate FA.”

“Baystate fah,” I read.

“Not fah,” Casey said, giggling. “Eff Ae.”

She was blushing furiously now. “It, um, it, um ... it stands for fat admirer,” she blurted, dropping her gaze. After a minute, she recovered herself and stood up.

“Jim, I’ve always loved you for who you are.”

“Thank you,” I said cheerfully. “Mutual.”

She shushed me. “Listen. I loved you when you were a hundred fifty-something pounds and I love you when you’re a hundred-whatever.”

“Eighty-eight,” I said automatically.

“Whatever! Shush, please.” She laid her hands on my protruding and tautly distended gut.

“I, um ... it was like a dream come true when I saw you starting to put on weight. I’ve had the best summer of my life watching your gorgeous tummy grow.” She poked at my belly button and shivered at the firmness of my full stomach, swollen and firm.

“Um, I’m not sure what to say,” I spluttered. “I didn’t know that anyone ... liked ... um ... found attractive ...”

“I know.” She drew me into a loose embrace. “Most people don’t know. But I’m not alone by any stretch of the imagination. Lots of people are FAs. Including me,” she said.

I backed up a step. “So what about all the ... you know ...”

“All the what?” Casey asked.

“All the ... times you said ... muffin top ... pudgy ...”

She blushed again, sliding her hands up my chest and back down to my protruding midsection. “Um, diversionary tactics,” she murmured, “would you believe?”

“Insurance adjusters see a lot of those,” I murmured. “So you like my muffin top?”

“Not just the muffin top,” she murmured, pulling me back in. “The whole muffin.”

And she led me to bed and showed me what it meant to be an FA as the Sox pulled off a win and “Sweet Caroline” echoed through the apartment.

~*~*~*~*~​

A year later, we made sure to schedule our wedding day for the Saturday after Thanksgiving, both to ensure that our families could be there easily and just in case the Red Sox season ended up going through October.

Which it did. It wasn’t quite as exciting as the 2004 Series win that broke that damn 86-year drought, but 2007 was nevertheless very, very sweet victory.

The city was just winding down from its excitement by Thanksgiving. Casey and I somehow shoehorned fourteen people into our apartment, Casey roasted a 25-pound turkey, and we ate ourselves into a satisfied stupor. A lot of Casey’s family had known of my existence but never met me, so there was not much talk, at least to my face, of their discovery that Casey’s intended was five foot seven and two hundred forty pounds. At least, two hundred forty before Thanksgiving dinner.

My mom had been forewarned by our regular e-mails that I was “fighting a losing battle against metabolism” and that I had “begun to put on weight,” was “still exercising, et cetera,” and, just before Thanksgiving, that she should “not go into shock ... I confess, I’ve gotten pretty pudgy lately.” She controlled herself admirably, as was her habit, and refrained from lecturing. The couple of cousins, uncle and aunt, my stepfather and stepsister all seemingly took their cue from Mom, because I remarkably got through the Feast Day without overt criticism.

Even afterward, as we all lay sprawled around, belts loosened, jeans undone, and nursed our stuffed and achingly distended tummies, the good-natured complaints were all mutual and no one said anything about the way my own mound of belly outdid most of the others.

The apartment continued crammed through Friday evening, when Casey, her parents, sister, and grandparents all departed to rooms in the hotel where the reception was.

Saturday dawned crisp and clear, a perfect New England fall day. Casey and I officially tied the knot. Throughout the reception, Casey unobtrusively managed to keep a hand on my magnificent belly, which I now had come to enjoy instead of grimace at.

When it came time for the cake, I got a surprise. She took me by the hand and led me to the designated place, waiting for the thing to be wheeled into the room. I was by now faintly perspiring in my wool-blend morning suit, although I had to admit I thought I looked very nice: The cut of the coat and the pearl-gray waistcoat flatteringly framed my two hundred sixty pounds. Casey looked breathtaking, her own lushly curvaceous two hundred twenty pounds draped in a Grecian-cut, off-the-shoulder dress with fingerless opera gloves that came to a point over her softly plump hands.

In lieu of the traditional wedding cake, what was wheeled out was a gigantic pyramid of chocolate muffins, tier after tier, dusted with confectioner’s sugar. At a nod from the caterer, Casey stretched up, plucked off the top one.

Unwrapped it.

And shoved the whole thing, tip first, into my mouth. As I scrambled to chew and swallow gracefully, she drew close and whispered in my ear.

“Muffin top.”

 

[chubsixtysix]