crows paula

(The woman who gave you an extra bagel when you ordered two. She was happy to meet for coffee, and in an upstairs nook you warded for privacy, she settled down and melted inside a belly still pudgy with the girl from Whitby.)

It’s funny. As you put on weight you still catch people’s eyes. It’s just different people.

Paula is a friend of a friend. She has just finished her PhD in religious semiotics and you surprised her by having something to say about alternative scripture. She caught your eye by having the cutest pot belly, shyly displayed beneath the lip of a crop top, itself hanging away from her skin due to the swell of her breasts. Her small waist funneled out into generous hips and it made your mouth water. When you hit it off the topic of food and its enjoyment came up: she stared at your belly approvingly when she thought you weren’t looking.

(Oh, a good old fashioned hunt one evening. You ran down a young woman who had just parked her car, carried her squirming back into it, and in the privacy somewhat awkwardly but satisfyingly crammed her down your throat.)

You arrive at her block with a bottle of rather good red. She buzzes you in and you navigate counter-intuitive corridors until you reach her flat.

“Hope you’re hungry,” she says after she accepts the gift and leads you to a cute modern kitchen diner in full swing. “I took your bet and cooked for eight. Kind of want to see how far you get before I win my hundred quid and… forfeit of my choice.”

(A man outside a club, hair dyed blue, purple and neon green, was a seized opportunity.. You don’t relish dining in alleyways but once you’d drained him to the point of fading consciousness you decided to add him to your waistline, too.)

You can feel her eyes on your new shirt. You’ve bought several recently as a feeding spree buried women and men beneath your skin. With each metabolised person you grew larger and larger, until now you are threatening to overhang your trousers when you sit. The gentle suggestion of a curve beneath your chest shows fat collecting there too. Your thighs still feel powerful to use but soft to touch. Perhaps this Paula is interested in touching them.

A steaming plate of moules marinière is set before you. Ah, perhaps your should have warned her off garlic. Still, the sauce the mussels are cooked in tastes good, leaving flecks of creamy savouriness in your moustache which you delicately clean off with your napkin. When you lick your fingers clean she watches. You do the same. Crusty bread completes the course, whose generous portion would be a fine main course for someone who hadn’t been inadvertently training their stomach with immense feeds. “Delicious,” you say, pouring her more wine. “May I ask what’s next?”

Her eyes sparkle.

(Oh God, then there were those actual twins. One of them cried and cried while you crushed the life out of her ingested sister. You thought you were doing her the favour of not feeling said sister scrabbling desperately at her. Her ingratitude made you consider dropping your trousers and showing her how else you might take her… But in the end she hugged her sisters melting corpse as she died for you.)

She’s a damn fine cook. No wonder she is a little on the heavy side herself. Courses come thick and fast: seared tuna with a pepper crust, leek mashed potatoes and a port reduction. Then leaving seafood behind she feeds you spaghetti carbonara, rich and indulgent, a giant portion you savour from beginning to end.

By now your shirt has developed extra folds as tension around your belly stretches the buttons apart. Paula practically purrs as she tells you, “I like a man who can eat.” Then, blushing and avoiding eye contact, she lets you know you can unbutton if you’d like; she wouldn’t mind.

(In a glass building in town you entered a lawyer’s office and left with a decade’s worth of legal training melting delicately inside your gut. This was a favour to a friend, though gladly done as the target was big enough to stretch out even your practiced stomach. His receptionist watched with wide eyes as you waddled out of his office.)

You shrug off the shirt entirely after the lamb course.

Her tighted foot rubs against your calf beneath the table. She seems to like your thick neck, barrel chest; the ring of doughy flesh now settling into your own lap. When you brush your hand casually from collarbone to navel, tracing the skin and the dusting of downy body hair, she actually bites her lip.

“You can’t still be hungry.”

“You’d be surprised.” When you slap your fat belly the foot playing with your calf jerks like she’s been electrocuted.

“Such a greedy boy…”

(A life model went missing after a session shading her meltingly soft thighs left you hot and bothered. She gave you all sorts of interesting bulges and shadows as she squirmed, and you stroked yourself idly as you watched in the studio mirror.)

The masterpiece is Beef Wellington with mushroom forcemeat. It comes out like a continent made of pastry. Paula doesn’t serve herself any, just places the entire thing on your plate.

You’re stuffed approaching discomfort and this will tip you over the edge, but you’re not about to lose to or disappoint those sparkling green eyes. Your stomach grows visibly larger, not with every mouthful, but over time as a full kilo of painstaking culinary inspiration is carried off by your fork and crammed down inside you. It sounds like your abdomen contains a cement mixer. You grunt as you set down your cutlery. By this point you’re thinking of unbuttoning your trousers.

To be honest, it looks like Paula might be, too.

(You were so gripped by the cute spiderweb rights of a maybe first-year goth-dressed student buying shoes that you stalked her down the high street. Her brand new Doc Martens were left behind and the rest of her was carried away in a screaming bundle at your waist.)

“I can’t believe you ate all that, Crow. I… Dessert is chocolate cake. Lots of, ah, frosting. I think… would you like to eat it off… me?”

You fix her with a smouldering stare that freezes her in place. Meanwhile your gut groans and glorps around a meal that would have been far too much for the intended eight. The fat is silent, inches of unburnt flesh taken from a dozen lives in a short few weeks. It’s a little while before you answer Paula.

“If I eat from you, I won’t be able to see you again. I’d like to.”

“I don’t understand…”

You’re not quite sure, yourself. Devouring living humans is extraordinarily satisfying and fulfilling. It might be your life’s purpose. But they don’t taste a patch on Paula’s Wellington. Maybe you want both. She is right: you are a greedy boy.

“Feed me dessert by hand. It’s… safer. And then we can do this next week?” You gesture her to come over, even though it’s her house, and she comes, perching on the edge of the table. Your hand, powerful and sensitive, snakes behind her head and pulls her in close for a deep kiss. You explore and in so doing drain every scrap of resistance from her. She melts in your mouth, so to speak.

“Get me dessert or be it, Paula.”

“Yes, Crow.”