Big Beautiful Dreamer
ridiculously contented
~BHM, ~~WG (Mutual). A little overindulgence arouses the girlfriend.
Moving cautiously, I heaved myself up on the bed and with a grunt of effort unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans. My bloated and aching belly, swollen with a positively disgraceful amount of Christmas dinner, ballooned even farther once released from the prison of my suddenly snug waistband.
I lay flat on my back in a food-induced stupor, absently petting the dog, so out of it that when I heard a small voice beside me, I started.
“Liam? Are you sick?” My eight-year-old sister, Siobhan. “Cause if you are, I can make you better.” Shav wanted to be a doctor and had received an actual stethoscope for Christmas from my optimistic parents.
She bounced up and down on the bed, something my stretched and sloshing tummy did not appreciate. “Are you sick?” She laid her little hand on my forehead.
“Mm… got a stomach ache,” I admitted.
Hauling up my shirt, Siobhan giggled at the sight of my gut. Eager for Mam’s home cooking after the past term at college, I had stuffed myself to the brim even before the plum pudding – my favorite. I was unable to hold back from having what I told myself would be just a bit, and somehow ended being two large helpings, with quite a pool of hard sauce, and now I was repenting my sins. My midsection was stretched tight as a drum, the skin pulled achingly taut from ribcage to hips, and my gorged and gurgling stomach was churning away audibly at its efforts to digest.
Now Siobhan had expertly placed the tips in her ears and, solemn and absorbed, laid the other end of the stethoscope smack on my navel. Her eyes widened.
“Your tummy’s making noises,” she announced. I made myself look wide-eyed and anxious.
“What do you prescribe, then?” I asked, trying to keep the chuckle out of my voice.
She frowned and tapped her chin. “Don’t eat too much plum pudding,” she said at last.
“That’s very good advice, Doctor,” I said through a huge yawn.
“Nap time,” she pronounced. “Shall I tell you a story?”
“Yes please,” I said, and shifted a bit, trying to ease the immediate discomfort of my heavily warm belly.
“In 1540,” she began, snuggling into the spare pillow, “the annals of Loch Ce recorded a very special Christmas celebration when Ruaidhri MacDiarmada invited all the poets and olluna of Ireland to join him for Christmas.”*
She continued, “A school invitation was given by Ruaidhri…” I must have drifted off because that’s all I heard.
When I awoke an hour or so later, the worst of my aching belly had eased, though I still felt stuffed to bursting. With an effort, I managed to do up my jeans and staggered out in time for a reviving cup of tea, strong and hot.
I tried to exercise a bit more moderation during the rest of the school hols, but by the time I returned to London, I was still a good half a stone heavier and my jeans were pinching a trifle, giving me a nagging reminder (as if I needed it).
“You look different,” my girlfriend, Philippa, said. Hands on her shoulders, coming up for air after a welcome-back kiss, she cocked her head to the side and studied me.
“Ah, need to shave?”
Pippa smiled and pursed her lips. “No… well yes, but that’s not it.” She considered me some more. “I don’t know, but I like whatever it is.” She linked her arm through mine and we clattered down the stairs for the Tube.
Half an hour later, we were in her flat, her roommate conveniently at work, and she was peeling away my travel-rumpled clothes.
“Mmm,” she murmured, gently running a fingertip down my bare front. “Enjoyed the plum pudding, did we?”
I grunted, more interested in the placement of my hands on her bottom.
During the pleasantries that followed, it seemed to me that Pippa devoted more attention than usual to my belly. She was fully engaged below the waist, but as we rode each other, her hands were constantly pushing, squeezing, pinching, and rubbing my midsection.
Afterward, as she lay on my chest, she murmured, “Perhaps that’s it.”
Drowsily replete, at least in one area, I mumbled, “What’s it?”
“You have put on a bit of weight, love,” she replied. “It feels … um … nice. Squashy.”
I barked out a laugh. “Squashy. That’s lovely, that is.”
“No, I don’t … Hang on … it’s a compliment,” she sputtered.
I raised an eyebrow.
“It is,” Pippa insisted. “It’s warm, it’s comforting. It feels better than it did … what, a stone ago?”
“Half a stone,” I corrected.
“Half a stone, then,” Pippa agreed, running her hand down my front. “Shall we get some takeaway?”
Later, as we sat up in bed watching television, surrounded by empty cartons from China Express, we considered The Belly.
“See, it’s nice and round now,” Pippa commented, giving my belly a poke. It was warmly stuffed full of rice and pork and sauce and rested above the sheets like a pale football.
“I rather thought that after I came back I might … oh, I don’t know … lose the half a stone I packed on, rather than inviting friends aboard,” I grumbled.
Pippa laughed and began massaging my stomach, bloated and taut. It felt marvelous.
“I told you,” she murmured. “It makes you look rather like a teddy bear. Perhaps I’ll start calling you Paddington.”
“Paddy?” I said ironically.
“Um. Paddington.”
“Emphasis on the ton,” I said dryly, and Pippa simply smiled like a cat and went back to stroking my aching belly.
The term began, my last at University, and consequently rather stressful. No one gave me too much trouble about my tubby tummy, however, as we were all working too hard and too late and taking our breaks at the chip shop or with a quick pint or two or three. As a group, we probably gave the wheat farmers a rather good year.
By the time the Easter holidays came round, I couldn’t even get the trousers of my only suit round my steadily expanding waistline, and my good shirt would not let me do up the last three buttons. I was up more than a stone and rapidly closing in on the twenty-pound mark, and it showed. Grumbling all the way, I let Pippa drag me to Dress for Less.
“You need a new one anyway,” she chided me. “You can’t go off to Guy’s in jeans you can scarcely do up.” She reached up and chucked me under a dismayingly pudgy chin.
“Hmpf.”
“Paddington,” she cooed, and though I wasn’t in the mood to be appeased, I had to admit I felt better after getting kitted out in a gray suit that actually fit, plus several shirts.
As a bonus, the new suit showed me to enough of an advantage that I escaped comment from Mam about my distinctly rounder gut over Easter. Even if I did have to undo the trousers after dinner. Roast pork with crackling, red onion tarte tartin, leek risotto with parmesan crisps, and two … all right, three … helpings of bread and butter pudding. Well, who wouldn’t want to do it justice?
By the time I actually started on the bottom rung of the accountancy department at Guy’s Hospital, the gray suit just fit and I had a funny feeling I was going to have to devote some of my first pay packet to another trip to Dress for Less.
Pippa, meanwhile, was working long hours as a desk editor at a scientific journal, snatching a quick takeaway lunch and coming home to the bedsit we now shared at 8 o’clock most nights too tired to do more than peel off her stockings and beg me to go for Chinese. She began to grumble that she was putting on weight, chained as she was to a desk.
She was, a bit, though I had a cracking head start. By the time we grabbed a weekend in Calais, it was mid-July and I was hauling around two stone extra, nearly 30 pounds. Most of it right in front. Second chin, apple cheeks, flabby pecs, and a good-sized spare tire.
Pippa displayed what were to my eyes were adorably softening features, a lovely enhancement in the breast department (mini-handfuls were ripening into large peaches), and an uptick in the gentle curve of waist and hip, a bit of tummy cushioning that felt positively welcoming when I happened to be in that neighborhood. It looked even better in her bikini, which, she claimed, had shrunk over the winter.
It must have been in Calais that I picked up that bug, because we were scarcely back on British soil before I headed for the nearest Gents’, emerging pale and sweaty.
“Something I ate,” I managed weakly. Pippa furrowed her velvety brows.
“What did you have that I didn’t,” she mused, and ticked off possible candidates as we rattled back to London. I was sick twice more before we got back, and spent most of the rest of the night pointing one end or another at the toilet. Called in sick on Monday, which no doubt was greeted with skepticism following a weekend jaunt, but received proper sympathy when I returned on Tuesday, still gray and hollow-eyed.
“It’s not catching,” I told my cubicle mate.
“Whatever it is,” he replied, eyeing me up and down, “it must be serious, mate. You look like you’re losing weight there.” Originally from Australia, Russ and his family had moved to London when he was 15, and his accent still had Antipodean traces to it.
“Shall I keep sicking up, then?” I asked sourly, and set to work clearing out my email.
Chastened, Russ kept quiet after that.
I stopped actually being sick, but my appetite took its time returning, and I did actually lose 10 pounds before I was able to look at food without feeling a bit queasy.
“Eat up, love,” Pippa chided me. I’d scarcely made a dent in my shredded chicken with peanut sauce.
I made a face. “Finally managed to shift some of my gut. D’you want me to pile it all back on?”
There was a long silence. Pippa drank a rather large swallow of red wine.
“Well… well… well, yes,” she finally managed. She looked away.
“I told you once … I like the feel of it. It’s warm, it’s sexy, it’s comfortable, it makes me feel cuddly and safe when I’m in your arms. Paddington,” she concluded.
I put my arm round her and rubbed her shoulder. “Do you really, truly mean it?” I asked slowly. “If I turn into a great slob, you won’t scold?”
She sniffled and buried her head on my chest. “Really, truly,” she said.
I took a deep breath. “Well then. I’d better get going, hadn’t I?”
Suffice it to say that by the time we were standing in the register’s office, exchanging rings, that gray suit was but a distant memory, seeing as I now tipped the scales at twenty stone exactly, two hundred and eighty pounds’ worth of Liam O’Rourke. And, incidentally, two hundred pounds’ worth (though much more lovely) of the bounteous new Philippa O’Rourke. And a devout hope from the groom that she would wear the new bikinis I had sneaked into her suitcase.
*Taken from The Mac Diarmaida Christmas gathering of 1540, from The Irish Annals. Olluna are master poets, professors, or wise men.
Moving cautiously, I heaved myself up on the bed and with a grunt of effort unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans. My bloated and aching belly, swollen with a positively disgraceful amount of Christmas dinner, ballooned even farther once released from the prison of my suddenly snug waistband.
I lay flat on my back in a food-induced stupor, absently petting the dog, so out of it that when I heard a small voice beside me, I started.
“Liam? Are you sick?” My eight-year-old sister, Siobhan. “Cause if you are, I can make you better.” Shav wanted to be a doctor and had received an actual stethoscope for Christmas from my optimistic parents.
She bounced up and down on the bed, something my stretched and sloshing tummy did not appreciate. “Are you sick?” She laid her little hand on my forehead.
“Mm… got a stomach ache,” I admitted.
Hauling up my shirt, Siobhan giggled at the sight of my gut. Eager for Mam’s home cooking after the past term at college, I had stuffed myself to the brim even before the plum pudding – my favorite. I was unable to hold back from having what I told myself would be just a bit, and somehow ended being two large helpings, with quite a pool of hard sauce, and now I was repenting my sins. My midsection was stretched tight as a drum, the skin pulled achingly taut from ribcage to hips, and my gorged and gurgling stomach was churning away audibly at its efforts to digest.
Now Siobhan had expertly placed the tips in her ears and, solemn and absorbed, laid the other end of the stethoscope smack on my navel. Her eyes widened.
“Your tummy’s making noises,” she announced. I made myself look wide-eyed and anxious.
“What do you prescribe, then?” I asked, trying to keep the chuckle out of my voice.
She frowned and tapped her chin. “Don’t eat too much plum pudding,” she said at last.
“That’s very good advice, Doctor,” I said through a huge yawn.
“Nap time,” she pronounced. “Shall I tell you a story?”
“Yes please,” I said, and shifted a bit, trying to ease the immediate discomfort of my heavily warm belly.
“In 1540,” she began, snuggling into the spare pillow, “the annals of Loch Ce recorded a very special Christmas celebration when Ruaidhri MacDiarmada invited all the poets and olluna of Ireland to join him for Christmas.”*
She continued, “A school invitation was given by Ruaidhri…” I must have drifted off because that’s all I heard.
When I awoke an hour or so later, the worst of my aching belly had eased, though I still felt stuffed to bursting. With an effort, I managed to do up my jeans and staggered out in time for a reviving cup of tea, strong and hot.
I tried to exercise a bit more moderation during the rest of the school hols, but by the time I returned to London, I was still a good half a stone heavier and my jeans were pinching a trifle, giving me a nagging reminder (as if I needed it).
“You look different,” my girlfriend, Philippa, said. Hands on her shoulders, coming up for air after a welcome-back kiss, she cocked her head to the side and studied me.
“Ah, need to shave?”
Pippa smiled and pursed her lips. “No… well yes, but that’s not it.” She considered me some more. “I don’t know, but I like whatever it is.” She linked her arm through mine and we clattered down the stairs for the Tube.
Half an hour later, we were in her flat, her roommate conveniently at work, and she was peeling away my travel-rumpled clothes.
“Mmm,” she murmured, gently running a fingertip down my bare front. “Enjoyed the plum pudding, did we?”
I grunted, more interested in the placement of my hands on her bottom.
During the pleasantries that followed, it seemed to me that Pippa devoted more attention than usual to my belly. She was fully engaged below the waist, but as we rode each other, her hands were constantly pushing, squeezing, pinching, and rubbing my midsection.
Afterward, as she lay on my chest, she murmured, “Perhaps that’s it.”
Drowsily replete, at least in one area, I mumbled, “What’s it?”
“You have put on a bit of weight, love,” she replied. “It feels … um … nice. Squashy.”
I barked out a laugh. “Squashy. That’s lovely, that is.”
“No, I don’t … Hang on … it’s a compliment,” she sputtered.
I raised an eyebrow.
“It is,” Pippa insisted. “It’s warm, it’s comforting. It feels better than it did … what, a stone ago?”
“Half a stone,” I corrected.
“Half a stone, then,” Pippa agreed, running her hand down my front. “Shall we get some takeaway?”
Later, as we sat up in bed watching television, surrounded by empty cartons from China Express, we considered The Belly.
“See, it’s nice and round now,” Pippa commented, giving my belly a poke. It was warmly stuffed full of rice and pork and sauce and rested above the sheets like a pale football.
“I rather thought that after I came back I might … oh, I don’t know … lose the half a stone I packed on, rather than inviting friends aboard,” I grumbled.
Pippa laughed and began massaging my stomach, bloated and taut. It felt marvelous.
“I told you,” she murmured. “It makes you look rather like a teddy bear. Perhaps I’ll start calling you Paddington.”
“Paddy?” I said ironically.
“Um. Paddington.”
“Emphasis on the ton,” I said dryly, and Pippa simply smiled like a cat and went back to stroking my aching belly.
The term began, my last at University, and consequently rather stressful. No one gave me too much trouble about my tubby tummy, however, as we were all working too hard and too late and taking our breaks at the chip shop or with a quick pint or two or three. As a group, we probably gave the wheat farmers a rather good year.
By the time the Easter holidays came round, I couldn’t even get the trousers of my only suit round my steadily expanding waistline, and my good shirt would not let me do up the last three buttons. I was up more than a stone and rapidly closing in on the twenty-pound mark, and it showed. Grumbling all the way, I let Pippa drag me to Dress for Less.
“You need a new one anyway,” she chided me. “You can’t go off to Guy’s in jeans you can scarcely do up.” She reached up and chucked me under a dismayingly pudgy chin.
“Hmpf.”
“Paddington,” she cooed, and though I wasn’t in the mood to be appeased, I had to admit I felt better after getting kitted out in a gray suit that actually fit, plus several shirts.
As a bonus, the new suit showed me to enough of an advantage that I escaped comment from Mam about my distinctly rounder gut over Easter. Even if I did have to undo the trousers after dinner. Roast pork with crackling, red onion tarte tartin, leek risotto with parmesan crisps, and two … all right, three … helpings of bread and butter pudding. Well, who wouldn’t want to do it justice?
By the time I actually started on the bottom rung of the accountancy department at Guy’s Hospital, the gray suit just fit and I had a funny feeling I was going to have to devote some of my first pay packet to another trip to Dress for Less.
Pippa, meanwhile, was working long hours as a desk editor at a scientific journal, snatching a quick takeaway lunch and coming home to the bedsit we now shared at 8 o’clock most nights too tired to do more than peel off her stockings and beg me to go for Chinese. She began to grumble that she was putting on weight, chained as she was to a desk.
She was, a bit, though I had a cracking head start. By the time we grabbed a weekend in Calais, it was mid-July and I was hauling around two stone extra, nearly 30 pounds. Most of it right in front. Second chin, apple cheeks, flabby pecs, and a good-sized spare tire.
Pippa displayed what were to my eyes were adorably softening features, a lovely enhancement in the breast department (mini-handfuls were ripening into large peaches), and an uptick in the gentle curve of waist and hip, a bit of tummy cushioning that felt positively welcoming when I happened to be in that neighborhood. It looked even better in her bikini, which, she claimed, had shrunk over the winter.
It must have been in Calais that I picked up that bug, because we were scarcely back on British soil before I headed for the nearest Gents’, emerging pale and sweaty.
“Something I ate,” I managed weakly. Pippa furrowed her velvety brows.
“What did you have that I didn’t,” she mused, and ticked off possible candidates as we rattled back to London. I was sick twice more before we got back, and spent most of the rest of the night pointing one end or another at the toilet. Called in sick on Monday, which no doubt was greeted with skepticism following a weekend jaunt, but received proper sympathy when I returned on Tuesday, still gray and hollow-eyed.
“It’s not catching,” I told my cubicle mate.
“Whatever it is,” he replied, eyeing me up and down, “it must be serious, mate. You look like you’re losing weight there.” Originally from Australia, Russ and his family had moved to London when he was 15, and his accent still had Antipodean traces to it.
“Shall I keep sicking up, then?” I asked sourly, and set to work clearing out my email.
Chastened, Russ kept quiet after that.
I stopped actually being sick, but my appetite took its time returning, and I did actually lose 10 pounds before I was able to look at food without feeling a bit queasy.
“Eat up, love,” Pippa chided me. I’d scarcely made a dent in my shredded chicken with peanut sauce.
I made a face. “Finally managed to shift some of my gut. D’you want me to pile it all back on?”
There was a long silence. Pippa drank a rather large swallow of red wine.
“Well… well… well, yes,” she finally managed. She looked away.
“I told you once … I like the feel of it. It’s warm, it’s sexy, it’s comfortable, it makes me feel cuddly and safe when I’m in your arms. Paddington,” she concluded.
I put my arm round her and rubbed her shoulder. “Do you really, truly mean it?” I asked slowly. “If I turn into a great slob, you won’t scold?”
She sniffled and buried her head on my chest. “Really, truly,” she said.
I took a deep breath. “Well then. I’d better get going, hadn’t I?”
Suffice it to say that by the time we were standing in the register’s office, exchanging rings, that gray suit was but a distant memory, seeing as I now tipped the scales at twenty stone exactly, two hundred and eighty pounds’ worth of Liam O’Rourke. And, incidentally, two hundred pounds’ worth (though much more lovely) of the bounteous new Philippa O’Rourke. And a devout hope from the groom that she would wear the new bikinis I had sneaked into her suitcase.
*Taken from The Mac Diarmaida Christmas gathering of 1540, from The Irish Annals. Olluna are master poets, professors, or wise men.
