She's Beck by Big Beautiful Dreamer (~BHM, ~BBW, ~SWG)

[Big Beautiful Dreamer]

~BHM, ~BBW, ~SWG - Romance. Boy loses girl, but gains more than he ever expected.

She's Beck
by Big Beautiful Dreamer​

I paced around my little house, frustrated and bored. My girlfriend of a year and change had left me – not screaming and throwing things, but quietly, logically, irrevocably left me. She’d gone about it in the cool and infuriating way she went about everything.

“I’ve booked a trip to Boston,” she’d said one Saturday morning over coffee.

“Hey. Cool.”

She listed the hotel, the flight leaving Friday afternoon, and then the clincher. “And Red Sox games Friday and Saturday.” Then she dropped the bombshell. “Um … you’ll be going by yourself.”

“What?” I’d asked stupidly.

“Alex. Please don’t make this hard.” The pained look, as though her leaving me was an act of inconsideration on my part.

“It’s not working. I need to leave.” She wanted me gone for a weekend so she could pack up and move out. Her brother, Fred, and a couple of his friends, plus Andrew, whoever that was, were helping. She’d be gone by the time the plane brought me back.

Put that simply, there was nothing to say.

I did what she wanted me to do … one last time. I flew to Boston. Walked the Freedom Trail. Saw the graves in the Granary Burying Ground and Copp’s Hill. Walked through the North End with narrow streets smelling of cannoli and freshly ground coffee. And yes, used the tickets she’d bribe me with to go to the Red Sox games, against Toronto. Beckett pitched the first night, Dice-K the second, not my favorites, but my guy Mike Lowell licked in a two-run double in the eighth on the first night and Varitek, catchers’ knees and all, stole – stole! – third base the second.

And now I was back, and of Rebecca Alice Monroe, calm, logical, eminently right, there was no trace.

I’d read the Sunday paper. Tidied the living room. Taken out the trash. And started channel surfing. It was 5:30 and I was hungry. Beck wasn’t going to be making us supper, there was no more us, so impulsively I got into the car and drove to the nearest McDonald’s. Angus burger, fries, Coke, and the apple pies, the sign flashing TWO FOR $1.

I scarfed it all down, in my TV-watching chair, not bothering with a plate, all the sort of behavior that used to drive Rebecca up the wall. Licking my fingers, I leaned back and pressed my hands to my belly. Oof. I’d eaten too fast. I belched, twice, and suddenly realized there was no one to object. Free at last!

I channel-surfed, found something to watch, and dug a pint of Ben & Jerry’s out of the freezer and ate it out of the carton, without getting the arched-eyebrow look and, “That’s disgusting.”

I’d loved Rebecca. Once. I suppose, to be fair, we hadn’t worked at it, and it had died down like a fire if you don’t tend it. Still, I hadn’t seen the walkout coming. I could hear Rebecca’s response: “QED.” My very obliviousness would have been cited as cause for her departure.

The spoon scraped bottom. I looked into the carton in surprise. It had been a new carton when I’d started. A belch rumbled up, then another, fueled by ice cream and Coke and with a hint of fries. Yuck. I stood, stretched groaningly, feeling a warm and uncomfortable heaviness in my full stomach. The ice cream on top of the Mickey D’s gorge had probably been a bad idea. Now that I was paying attention, I could tell that I had eaten way too much. My aching belly was stretched and sore, and my stretching had pulled my T shirt up, exposing a strip of distended waistline. I grunted my way to my feet.

Rebecca, whose unspoken motto was Control In All Things, would have arched an eyebrow at me and not said a word – but there would absolutely not have been any sex to follow. I padded into the kitchen, tossed the spoon into the sink, and threw out the carton. Fast food had delivered the bonus of nothing much to wash up. Since Rebecca had done the cooking, I’d done the cleaning up afterward as a matter of course. Feeling virtuous, I washed the single spoon and, feeling a smile quirk the side of my mouth, padded back to watch the Sunday Red Sox game on the tube. My aching and swollen stomach distracted me – I’d pounded down way too much, too fast, and I groaned out loud as my overwhelmed belly churned and grumbled. Every move, even every breath caused discomfort, and I paid more attention to massaging my distended midsection than to the game.

I fell asleep there, watching. When I awoke in the morning, there was no one to stand over me, tingeing her look of disdain with the honest amusement that had been one of Beck’s saving graces. So I’d pigged out and fallen asleep in the chair. So what? I felt curiously liberated as I started the coffee and headed for the shower.

Breakfast was easy, a no-brainer. There were always bagels, oatmeal, and fruit on hand. I made a bowl of oatmeal and sliced half a banana into it, eating the other half in four large bites, and slurped up the oatmeal.

Then I headed out to my job as a history professor at the local university. Okay, associate professor, but I’d been granted tenure the previous semester. The gradations start at lecturer and work up: instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor. If you haven’t gotten tenure by age 35, it’s a little worrying and, ironically, tends to work against you from that point on in your effort to get it. I was 30, with two books and six articles to my credit, and had just the week before sent off an article to a peer-reviewed journal on the often-overlooked group of men on the home front during World War II: Not those under- or overage, but men between the ages of 18 and, say, 35, who looked healthy but who were 4-F for something the general public couldn’t see: heart murmur, flat feet. The article was co-authored with a colleague from the psych department, exploring the emotional impact both on these men and on the home front in general, with really interesting figures about productivity and morale.

So I had things pretty well lined up – or I had thought so. While the first night might have been spent in quiet pleasure at breaking the rules in Rebecca’s absence, each evening after that got successively longer. Each day, I told myself I’d stock up on frozen dinners, and each afternoon I’d decide it was easier to grab some fast-food takeout. I was buying my lunch every day as well, since there were never any tasty leftovers from the night before to take along. My day began to feel incomplete without regular ingestions of salt, carbonation, and burgers.

I limped through the rest of the semester, even agreeing to take on a remedial summer session out of sheer boredom.

My best friend Jon, and his partner, Evan, came down during the summer session for a week. My little house was nestled in a pretty part of Pennsylvania, and they swore the peace and quiet was just what they needed after the bustle and high prices of Boston. We hadn’t seen each other since that fateful “cushioning the blow” weekend in mid-April, and it was now July.

We exchanged our usual greetings, and I got the steaks going on the grill and made sure we each had a beer. There was something charged about the silence and the way the conversation died down. They knew about Rebecca, of course; we’d rehashed that all in Boston.

“Dude,” Jon finally said.

“Um, yeah,” Evan added. I turned around, tongs in hand.

“You look … different,” Jon said. Automatically I ran a hand through my hair. Was it thinning?

“Put on a little weight,” Evan finally said. Oh, that.

I shrugged. “Yeah …” I made my voice as bored as I could manage. “Eating a lot more takeout, I guess.”

Jon and Evan seemed relieved. Asked and answered. We moved on to the Red Sox and their annual July drought. Nothing more was said about my less-than-svelte figure, thank you. We’re guys.

We went to movies, we ate out, we tossed the ball around the back yard, and not another word was said about my weight. As soon as I got back from delivering them to the airport, though, I made myself take a full frontal look in the mirror. No question. My once-average and unremarkable shape was now unmistakably pudgy. I worked out my upper body and legs, so they still looked okay, but in between was a distinctly round gut, protruding out over my package and interrupting my view when I looked down. I made a face and dragged out the scale. It read 217. That couldn’t be right. I was 5’11” and usually clocked in around 190. I shook my head, vowing to throw out the scale that had been Rebecca’s. She’d been the one who cared about it.

Each morning, when I saw the scale, I made a mental note to toss it. And there it stayed. On one level, I suppose I was subconsciously a little dismayed at my weight gain, but deep down, I couldn’t really make myself care. About the weight, about the way my eating habits had become so sloppy and lazy since my live-in good cook had vanished, about the way I was undoubtedly clogging my arteries with takeout and delivery meals, about the way my gut had started to roll over my khakis, about the modest love handles, about anything. I found myself sleeping much too long and telling myself it was summer catch-up. In August, the academic hamster wheel would gear up again.

I couldn’t make myself care.

One afternoon in late July, I was collecting the mail when a car pulled into the driveway. Rebecca’s. She got out of the passenger side, her eyes a little wide, her lips pressed together.

“Alex.”

“Beck.”

Her eyes narrowed at the use of the nickname – too late, I’d forgotten that she disliked it – and she cleared her throat.

“I, uh, I think I left my bathroom scale and a couple of house plants here,” she announced. “Do you …”

I nodded, then held the door open for her. “Go ahead.”

She did, and I was treated to a delicious view of her pert little backside and long, shapely legs. I swallowed hard.

“How’s Andy?”

“Andrew is fine. Thank you,” she said. She retrieved the scale and held it up in the afternoon light of the kitchen. “Um, it’s a little dusty. Do you have …” she helped herself to a wipe from a canister on the counter. “Thanks.” Even when she’d been breaking my heart, Beck … Rebecca … had impeccable manners. Then she looked from the scale to me.

“No wonder it was dusty.”

I shot her the look that deserved.

“Oh, come on, Alex,” she said. “You have to admit you’ve got a little out of shape.”

“So what if I have?” I sucked in my gut, which didn’t exactly make it vanish entirely. It was a fourth-grade comeback and not worthy of Beck. Rebecca. I supposed she was right.

“Well … yeah,” I admitted. I looked over at her again. “Lost my best cook.”

I thought she’d bridle at the implied insult that that was all she’d been, but she laughed, and the stiffness left her face. A knock at the door made us both jump.

“Becky?”

What the hell! The interloper had opened the door and now stood just inside. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with curly brown hair and a trim waist.
And he’d called her Becky. As much as she disliked Beck, Becky was a trillion times worse, as I’d learned early, to my peril.

“Becky. I’m not a Becky,” she’d insisted. “I am Rebecca.”

To my shock, Beck … oops, Rebecca … now bent her head and bowed her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Andrew,” she murmured. “I’ll just get the plants.” She hastened to pick up the plants and juggled them with the scale. Andrew didn’t offer to help. I stepped forward, but she shook her head.
She was wearing a sleeveless, skimpy top and shorts. There were no bruises, no marks, not a one. But this Andrew seemed to have Rebecca thoroughly cowed, and I didn’t like it. He stalked out the door, nearly slamming it in her face.

I grabbed her arm. “Call me,” I whispered. “When you can.”

She nodded, then she was gone. I waited until I heard the car pull out before I went to the window and looked out afterward. The brief visit had stirred up all kinds of emotions, as had the knowledge that she was with a guy who didn’t treat her well.

The next day, as it happened, I got a letter that blew most other thoughts, including Rebecca and my weight gain, out the window. The publisher’s had accepted my latest book offer. A modest advance, since they’d published my two previous books. Yeeha! The university, pleased at the prestige it would bring, sublet my fall classes to a promising instructor – I didn’t worry, I had tenure, baby – and I was off to the races – er, the library. I was researching the surprising little fact nugget that the divorce rate had taken a huge jump in 1946-48. Those hasty war marriages that worked fine via letters, but not so fine once the veteran and his bride were actually homemaking.

I’d received a brief note from Rebecca in the same mail. Don’t worry, she’d written. I won’t stay with him. Be patient – do nothing. I’ll write again.

I fretted, but to be honest, I had to focus on the book. I worked insane hours, closing the library down many nights. I’d start when they opened, take a breakfast break around nine, a lunch break around one, then, starving, hit an open-all-night drive-through on the way home. I’d gorge, shower, and fall into bed. Get up in the morning and do it all over again. I was eating a lot of food that had to be unwrapped – that’s the charitable way of putting it.

Unsurprisingly, my weight ballooned. I watched the book notes and my waistline expand steadily, as if in tandem. My once-modest pot was a definite paunch, a round protruding gut, with love handles, and my pecs were growing soft and flabbily prominent. I didn’t care. The book had captured my excitement. Everything else was secondary.

Periodically I would get cryptic Rebecca-grams. It’s okay. Making plans, she’d write, and Don’t worry. At her request, I never replied.

By the time Thanksgiving came around, I had finished the first three chapters of the book and headed to Maryland to my parents’ house. I was ridiculously nervous. I hadn’t seen them since Memorial Day, when I’d weighed somewhere around 200, 205, a little up from normal … whatever normal was … but now I guessed that I weighed at least 230, and I cynically supposed that to be very wishful thinking.

My parents greeted me enthusiastically. I followed Mom into the kitchen and she pushed a tray of brownies my way. “Get you some lemonade,” she urged.

I picked up a brownie automatically. “Maybe I shouldn’t. I’m … um … putting on a little weight.” There, I’d said it.

“Oh, land sakes,” Mom clucked. “You’re a grown man. Eat whatcha want.” Since Dad was about my height and easily 250-plus, I supposed he wouldn’t have many objections either. My sister was spending Thanksgiving with her husband’s family, so it was the three of us plus a couple of stray aunts and uncles.

My mom, of course, cooked enough to feed thirty or forty people at the Legion hall, and we did far too much justice to the spread. Afterward, we sprawled around, sluggish and groaning, pants undone, swollen and distended bellies bulging upward and outward like hot-air balloons.

“So,” Dad said drowsily, stifling a belch. “Book coming?”

“F-hic-finished … three-hic-chapters. Ohhhh.” I was so full I was puffing. My sides were stretched and sore, my abdomen pulled taut, my belly button a slit. Every time I tried to take a little deeper breath, the resulting pull on the skin of my belly hurt so much I was resigned to shallow breaths. That as well as the pressure on my diaphragm was probably causing the hiccups. I tried leaning back a little and gently tapping my bloated middle. “Urrp.”

Uncle Randall was already asleep. His bulging stomach, in contrast to his slight build, made him look like an ambitious python.

I belched again. “Ate too much.”

Dad thumped his belly. It was pulled taut, straining against his sport shirt. “Yup.”

After that we both lay in a food-induced stupor, dopey and sated, a football game on. I felt muzzy and stupid, unable to think of anything, and so simply lay back and massaged my stomach. My belly was heavy and sore, so full of food that what had by now become a couple of flabby spare tire rolls had swelled out into a firm protuberance. I’d undone my jeans in sheer self-defense, and I didn’t have a hope of doing them up again.

“Shame Rebecca couldn’t come,” Mom murmured, coming in with disgracefully large slices of pie for us.

I hadn’t told them. At first it had been too soon. Lately, I harbored a hope that we might be back together again. Although if I kept up being a fatso, that was unlikely.

She left the room and came back with coffee. Uncle Randall blinked and muttered to life. Automatically, we all reached for the pie. I was full, I was stuffed, I was aching, and I was swallowing the first warm heavenly bite of a very large piece of pumpkin pie. Ignoring the fact that I was so gorged I was leaning back and half-balancing the plate on my own roundly swollen gut.

The pie vanished much too quickly, and the coffee did its digestive work.
Sometime later, I woke up enough to stumble to the basement sofa where I’d been relegated.

When I got back to my house on Saturday, there was a car in the driveway. Rebecca in it. Alone. She got out and stumbled stiffly over toward me. I could tell she’d been crying. And worse. She was disheveled and sleepless. I’d never seen her look so lousy.

“Oh, Beck,” I said without thinking.

She didn’t correct me. She just clung to me. She was shivering. How long had she been in that car?

“C’mon inside.” Still hanging on to me, she followed me in.

“You’re freezing,” I exclaimed. “Here, take off your outer layers. I’ll get something warmer.”

She took me a little too literally. When I came back into the living room, she was wearing only a tissue-thin T shirt and thermal underwear. I was relieved to not see any bruises – but she was far too thin, almost skeletal. She sat obedient as a child as I tugged on a pair of my sweatpants, a long-sleeved T, a sweatshirt, fuzzy socks. Of course, they all swam on her.

“Tell me everything,” I commanded, “while I make you some Russian tea.”

She shuffled into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Between sniffles, I learned:

• Andrew had met her at the gym where she worked out. He was a part-time instructor.
  
• They’d begun having a few “innocent, friend-like” dates.
  
• He’d somehow convinced this bright, strong woman that he was much brighter than she was, and that she would benefit from allowing him to make more of her decisions.
  
• He constantly chided her about her figure, which had once been textbook luscious and now looked stick-thin. She had shadows under her eyes and her hair was limp and long. “Andrew likes it long.”
  
• He’d never been physically abusive, but had tightened control so gradually and implacably that by the time she realized she was trapped, there was no one she felt comfortable turning to.
  
• It hadn’t been until the morning before, Friday, that she’d learned how come a part-time gym employee had so much extra income.
  
• Andrew had figured he could game the system by cooking meth without ever once using it. He’d frequently bragged about his iron self-discipline, while reminding Rebecca that she had none, without ever elaborating.
  

Then the police had come to the door. It seemed that Andrew had been working in his meth lab, a seemingly abandoned house a couple of miles away from his apartment, and something had exploded. Andrew was in critical condition in the hospital with third-degree burns over 85 percent of his body. He was not expected to live. Rebecca had spent most of the last twenty-four hours in police custody until they at last had seemed convinced that she’d known nothing. She was free to go, for the time being.

“Oh, Beck,” I said, flabbergasted. I tugged her to her feet and we hugged, rocking her gently, murmuring into her hair. “I’ll never let him hurt you again,” I promised. I mentioned restraining orders. Moving. Anything.

It wasn’t until that evening and several beers that I said what had been bugging me all day. I know, it was selfish and childish. Beck was worried, with good reason, about her safety and her future. And I was worried for her. But I said it.

“You don’t want me,” I blurted. “I’m fat.” While she stared, I continued. “I eat out of the carton, I eat in front of the TV, I do all the things that drive you up the wall.”

Beck waited patiently while I blathered on some more. Then she said:

“Alex.”

“What.”

“Alex.”

“What?”

“Alex.”

“What!?”

She was smiling. She was lit up like I hadn’t seen her smiling in a long time.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Okay, like … you’ll give me time to lose weight and shape up?”

“It’s okay,” she clarified. “I think you look terrific this way.”

I sat down, hard, on the footstool.

“So will you let me stay with you?”

“As long as you like,” I said. “On one condition.”

She bit her lip. Her eyes widened. Dammit, I wasn’t Andrew.

“We need to fatten you up, little missy,” I said cheerfully. “If you turned sideways you’d disappear.”

“Andrew,” she began, then stopped.

“Andrew,” I said firmly, “is a meth-dealing abusive jerk. We are not going to let him within a thousand yards of you. And he’s wrong.”

That was the beginning.

Thanksgiving slid into December. The restraining order was in place. Beck – insisting she liked this nickname – went into therapy. I failed to lose weight. December being what it was.

The therapy slowly began to reverse some of the damage that Andrew had done. She kept her hair long, because Andrew liked it long. She jumped whenever I asked her to do something or voiced an opinion that even hinted that it might, someday, be contrary to hers. And she continued a punishing diet. I tried coaxing, humor, everything I could think of, but she continued far too thin. I survived breakfast okay, because that was never a large meal anyway, but took to supplementing with a midmorning vending machine snack. I’d get fast food at lunch. And fell into the habit of grabbing a quick fast-food sandwich in late afternoon – because supper was usually not ready until 7 or so and was always miserable – small portions of poached or broiled meat and some steamed vegetables, nothing more. It was no hardship to manage to eat it all.

Slowly, though, the therapy began to help. Beck started dressing in less modest clothing – nothing shocking, but she began to feel free to display a little bare skin at the neck and arms and to wear outfits that didn’t bag on her so terribly. I bought her an early Christmas present of a Kohl’s gift card, and we went shopping together. Gradually the meals became less punitive, and I could see Beck slowly, but steadily, begin to regain her figure. Slowly, but steadily, she began to relax a little, even to enjoy life and realize that we were in the midst of the holiday season. From cowed and skeletal, she was beginning to blossom once more into the lissome and curvaceous female who was my once … and present … girlfriend.

December became Christmas. Andrew went from the hospital directly to the prison infirmary on an eight-year sentence.

Beck began to relax even more, a combination of good therapy and the feeling of safety that the sentence brought. Relaxed, she baked. And baked and baked and baked. Needless to say, someone had to give those poor orphaned goodies a good home. So I did. And she did.

By the time Christmas break was over and school started back up, I could swear that I was beginning to see just the hint of a round tummy on Beck, who now swore that she’d never disliked the nickname. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. A, I was one to talk, and B, our relationship had never been better. She was less Icily In Control, and I was more Attentive To My Loved One.

“Mm,” she announced one Sunday, drawing her hand back from the cinnamon roll.

“Go ahead,” I mumbled from the sports section. “’s yours.”

She made a face. “I shouldn’t.”

“Because …?”

“I’m getting fat.”

I choked back a snort. “Beck. Babes. Look. I believe I have the monopoly on being the house fatty.” I stood up. Even in my T shirt and pajama bottoms, my now-248 pounds were on unmistakable display.

Bit by bit over the last eight or nine months, my chin had been softening, a second buddy sliding out from beneath the first, so that I had an undeniably double chin. My cheeks were fuller. My upper arms thicker. My thighs chunkier. My butt broader and softer. My pecs were now full and soft, even a little floppy. My midsection had been stolen away and a couple of inner tubes substituted for it, a full spare tire going all the way around, so that I now had to crane to see the number on the scale. A number that was uncomfortably close to 250. What would come after 250? How fat would I let myself get? And why didn’t Beck care?

Beck stood and pulled up her own shirt. “Look.” She was using her thumb and index finger to pinch an inch or so of soft tummy, a little cushion, the feel of which I frankly enjoyed under me in bed. Her hips were bordering on bodacious, and her slightly fuller face made her green eyes pop gorgeously. I told her all this as I slowly picked up the cinnamon roll in question and fed it to her. Bite by delicious gooey bite. She licked my fingers. My first class wasn’t until 11. Beck, who had been in law school – and taken a “leave of absence” during the Andrew Debacle – didn’t have a class until 1. Suddenly we needed to be not in the kitchen but in the bedroom.

By now, I was racing to finish my book. It was virtually done, just the notes and index, but that can be the hardest part. Law school and all, Beck was still the cook. She made, I ate. I honestly didn’t notice that instead of the skimpy meals of broiled chicken breast and steamed asparagus, she now served up heaping plates of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, butter-laden broccoli. And – forgive me, Beck – I didn’t notice her figure, though she griped about it regularly now. And she resumed wearing clothing that was baggy and shapeless.

Finally, finally, my book was finished and off to the publisher’s. Beck’s semester ended. We planned a trip to the beach to celebrate. When we got there, though, Beck refused to take off her over shirt.

Slowly and gently, I coaxed her out of it.

Wow!

Rebecca, hell. Rebecca was a prim, slender, uptight woman who thought being even a little pudgy was a moral failing. This was not Rebecca. This was Beck.

Feeling my admiring gaze, she grinned. “Told you I was gaining weight,” she said, a little defensively.

I stood with my mouth open. I almost couldn’t speak.

Beck had cut her hair – Andrew liked it long – and it bobbed thick and shining around a full, heart-shaped face. As she modeled, her second chin peeped in and out. Her bikini top revealed outstanding cleavage and cradled two ripely sweet, full breasts. Her once-tiny waist was now more generously padded and a promising muffin top peeped over the bikini bottom, while her legs, now more luscious than ever, flowed gorgeously from solid hips in sweet sweeping arcs. That sweet bottom was now full and tempting, the thighs womanly, the calves beautifully curved.

“Beck,” I finally breathed. “You’re beautiful. Holy … moley. Where have you been hiding yourself? Stop wearing those oversize sweats you keep stealing from my closet.”

Beck’s lips twitched. “You don’t wear them.”

“They don’t fit anymore,” I said automatically. Oops.

She grinned and padded over to me. She slid her soft arm around my side and gently patted my rolls of spare tires. I was up to 260, and no one lost weight on vacation.

“I love it when you call me Beck,” she murmured into my ear and then licked it.

The ocean could wait.

* * *​

At the mid-October party the university was throwing for the release of Stateside Splits: Marriage and Divorce in Postwar America, Beck’s arm never left my side, though her hand was more often resting on my back. I was up to 297 and she couldn’t quite reach all the way around.

Of course, that might have been partly because her own arm was a little plump its own self. My gorgeous Beck, who seldom ever went by Rebecca anymore, was in her third year of law school. Her hair was now in a glossy pageboy, and she proudly wore a shimmery silver dress with the thinnest of straps, a deep cross-V neckline, and scarcely any back. Her luscious, womanly curves had never been on more advantageous display.

Beck, who was 5’5” except for the high heels she wore at the moment, now carried 225 soft, lovely pounds on her breathtakingly soft frame. Cushiony shoulders were proudly bared. Her chin doubled often, her full apple cheeks shone. The dress hugged her lovely padded tummy and grazed her full, tempting hips. As she moved, the slits in the skirt gave me tantalizing glimpses of curve of calf and rounding of thigh. She had never looked more beautiful.

Someone finally quieted the room. I stepped onto the small dais at one end.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “I thank you very much for being here tonight. I am especially glad to have you here because the woman in my life is a law student, and I want witnesses.” Laughter.

I pinned my eyes on her. “Beck Monroe,” I said loudly, “You are the light of my life. Keep lighting my way for all eternity. Will you marry me?”

It took her a minute to get to the dais. I helped her up.

“I will.”

 

[lily352]

 

[fat hiker]

 

[Big Beautiful Dreamer]