auld acquaintence
When I met you, you were slender, with just a hint of a belly. You look gorgeous at all sizes. I know this. You know this. But you had been even thinner not too long before. Here’s the story of a New Year’s Eve, a couple of years before ever I crossed your path.
You’d got separated from the girls. Shanté had got way too hyper for someone who doesn’t drink. Gemma and Erika spent a lot of time convincing her to climb down from tables. Then she fell off and hurt her ankle or something, and they went to a back room, and to be honest you’re not mad to be out of that needlessly sloppy mess.
The crowd is tense and excited. The canal-side bar is lit by fairy lights that hang like a canopy overhead. Groups of friends hang out around tall tables and talk loudly over the R&B.
You’ve been good for a long time. It feels appropriate. You’re trim, blood-fed but dieting. There’s scarcely an ounce of fat on you to pinch between fingers. Lost in your thoughts as you look out over the black water, you don’t realise you’re actually pinching your flank through your dress. Yep. No padding.
“Do you think you’re dreaming, beautiful?” asks a voice. The mildly obnoxious opener is softened by a pleasingly gentle voice, carrying a faint accent you can’t place. Its owner leans against the railing next to you, smirking.
He’s lean but big. Surely a personal trainer or something. In some respects he could be the opposite of you: dark-skinned where you’re white as milk; sculpted to the point of anatomy books where you are a study in elegant minimalism. His boobs are a tiny bit bigger than yours and you don’t know how to feel about that.
“Hmm?” comes your witty rejoinder. Three drinks is about your limit, and you’ve had five. No body mass to soak up the alcohol metabolites.
“Pinching yourself,” he explains. His smile is nice and comes easily.
Now you’ve had a chance to feast your eyes on him, your brain kicks in a little more. “Maybe I just can’t believe my luck.”
He laughs as easily as he smiles. “The luck’s all mine. Aren’t you here with friends?”
“I don’t know,” you say, raising a glass you forgot was empty and sucking air through a straw. A brief annoyed look at it. “Depends how quickly we can become friends.”
“Friends don’t let friends go dry. Let me get you a drink.”
His name is Antoine and his parents moved here from Nigeria. He is a personal trainer (nailed it). He specialises in body type conversion, helping people gain muscle or lose weight. He learns very little about you, but has the grace to try.
“Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?” he asks over his lemon and lime. You nod at his drink.
“Maybe cut down a little. My body is a temple. Doesn’t feel like it. Need to… throw out the moneylenders. Or something. You don’t drink?”
“No. Never touch the stuff. I am a temple too.” He grins his charming grin and doesn’t flex anything. He doesn’t have to: you find yourself looking anyway. His muscles have muscles.
“So I couldn’t tempt you to take a sip from mine?”
You tip your tequila and coke towards him so the straw slips around and faces him. Your lipstick paints the tip. He regards it and takes a long moment to consider.
His grin deepens into a knowing look bordering on filthy. “I think you could tempt me to do anything.”
As you’re watching him lean forward to close his lips over the straw, your stomach rumbles. You’re so drink-dizzy and hungry that your head is light. And he… well, he’s health food, right? Maybe you could just take blood, like you have been doing. Maybe leave him unconscious but breathing. Maybe—
“You are deciding what to tempt me with?”
“It’s a couple of minutes to the countdown,” you say. He mistakes the hunger in your sharp eyes and your parted lips for lust. An easy mistake: your own body confuses the two as well. “I want to tempt you to come somewhere quieter for the new year.”
He releases the straw. “Then lead on, my queen.”
You find a sheltered spot near the bar, tucked down by the water.
He is a fantastic kisser. No right to be so good. Sensitive and forceful in just the right amounts. With his lips on yours and his arms around you, paired with the alcohol buzzing your system, every part of you is tingling. You practically climb him . Beneath your fingertips and between your thighs: muscle to the excess. He’s perfect.
“I did not know I would be ringing in the new year with such a—”
“Ten!”
He’s cut off by the crowd starting its countdown; but also by two ice-white knife-points that part skin like butter. They’re so sharp he doesn’t quite believe he’s injured until you’ve already taken five beautiful, throat-stretching swallows from him. He tries to push you away and is strong enough to manage it, but you twist so that his force expends itself uselessly.
“Nine! Eight! Seven! Six!”
His fight is already weakening. The body knows when it is impaled and doesn’t want to make the injury worse. You’d tear him a new smile if he pushed you wrong. So you wear him down, taking each beautiful, swelling mouthful with all of its deep, coppery vibrancy into yourself. His body is a temple and you drain the communion wine, empty the fonts, and as he drops to his knees, begin devouring the congregation. Rich as cream and sweet as sex, his blood swells your belly tight within your dress.
“Five! Four! Three! Two!”
You release him, red mouth panting. He gazes imploringly up at you, pale beneath his colour. “Please, stop this, let me—”
You can’t stop. It’s been too long since a proper meal. Far from cutting down, your body calls to gorge. And he’s perfect.
The last thing you see is his eyes widen as you dart forward, open-mouthed. Then it’s perennial darkness for him, and pure sensation for you.
The structures of your mouth and jaw will always find such prey a challenge. Your lips are wire-taut around his buky shoulders, and the arch of your throat burns with the most pleasing fierce ache. But, big as he is, they cope.
The real challenge comes after the crowd above cheers, in the middle of Auld Lang Syne. As you suck down his hips those massive shoulders hit the bottom of your already-stretched stomach. So small, so unused to gorging, his chest gives you a stretch so visceral you want to scream. It only gets worse as you chug the rest of him down, still weakly struggling.
Your skin-tight dress almost crushes you to paste. Only by an emergency crop top conversion by your red-tipped claws do you make it at all. As he swells out your midsection you can see every muscle of his back beneath a thin coating of your pale skin.
Gulp. Gulp. It’s not long before your lips close him inside, and the final swallow chases him down and seals him in gastric hell. When your neck is freed you watch in horror and fascination as his body rolls within your gut, plain as day.
He’s enormously strong, even drained, but your stomach is built for this. To contain life. It groans and sends pain like silver fire through your system, but you hold on. A desperate belch empties out every scrap of air in your gut, and maybe some people on the balcony hear.
Breathe. As he suffocates, or possibly drowns in the blood you drank, you focus on rhythmically filling your chest. It helps. He goes still and you reach for inner calm as stomach contractions grind his bones against one another. By the time you’ve got yourself under control you feel the first warm rush of bloodsugar. He’s beginning the next step: part of him is draining into your intestines.
Digestion is going to be long and gassy. He’s pure protein. As you drunkenly stagger to the road in search of a taxi or a takeaway you contemplate what is to come. You’d kill for a tummy rub. But over the next day or so, that proud specimen of potent, sculpted masculinity will melt and cross the greedy coiled field of your intestines. You’ll drink down the remnants of his body and craft from them some muscle, yes. But mostly fat. He will become a vastly softer belly, breasts to fill cupped hands, and an enhancement to your already gorgeous arse. Maybe that the change he wanted, for this new year.
In the meantime, you think to yourself: fuck cutting down. You waddle out into the new night in search of cheesy chips.