“My other prey told me I’m on a diet,” you say conversationally. The woods are peaceful and your breathing after a hard sprint has long since returned to normal. Only a light sheen of sweat hints at your past exertion. If there is a response, nothing is audible. “I know I said I wanted to lose the weight and drop to eight stone, but I adore being this size. I adore eating.

The next day you suggest we go to the park: The same park we went to ages ago when you were down and I thought you needed a break. There’s no sign of Lucy or Shaun yet but it’s a lovely weekend day. Maybe you want to walk them both off, work them both out. I don’t know, and honestly I’m drained from the pace of your appetite. I should have got suspicious when you wore a long skirt.

Sleep doesn’t last half as long as you want it to. Someone’s knocking the door down. You startle awake, fighting the weight in your belly that’s more than just fat, and also a blanket that has mysteriously appeared during the night. We didn’t make it upstairs after Lucy so I’m sitting bolt upright on the couch. Lucy’s harder edges are softening nicely inside you. When you sit up the motion must coincide with a contraction in your stomach.

With air, she lasts just shy of an hour in your stomach. The first ten minutes are serene and beautiful. Her hands stroke symmetric patterns in the stretched walls of your stomach, a gesture that feels loving and intimate. Her shoulders and wonderful, oversized backside glide around as she moves, spreading a feeling of fullness and contentedness. But it feels incomplete somehow. Completion comes when she stops being calm. First comes stillness.

You open the door. Rainclouds make it dark in the late summer evening. The hallway light illuminates the pale face of Lucy, mascara trickling down from her eyes. Her hair is wet-through and she is wearing no coat. “Raven,” she says, her voice firm despite everything. “I want you to take me. All of me. Don’t argue.” You were not going to argue. Still, it’s unusual to have someone make a demand like this and, frankly, you’re a little on the back foot.

Even when you pack on weight, you keep up the gym. The same meat-heads and Barbies who didn’t understand you when you were fat and lifting heavy things can’t get their head around you gaining fat and still lifting heavy weights. Still, a number of them nod greetings, or say hi. You’re part of the regular crowd. You look forward to seeing Lucy on Sundays and Thursdays, but she’s been hit or miss recently.

That night you rouse past midnight to feel me resting my head on your belly. Your own arm rests on my shoulder. We must have fallen asleep like that. I stir. Perhaps your breathing changed. When we first slept my cheek was resting on a tight cannonball of digesting meat and takeaway. Without any external change, my head slowly sank further and further into your flesh as the night went on.

We shower while waiting for delivery. You get the hiccups, which basically never happens. I take to kissing you for each one, on lips, cheek, neck, collarbone… You smile at the gesture as red and pink swirls down your alabaster body, the stream parting where Tracy and her child make a firm protrusion under your ribs. Your stomach is taut with meat which, for once lacking the major bones, squelches down into a tight sphere palpable under your soft and generous belly.

She doesn’t quite believe you all the way, even after you flash your fangs, but she’s concluded you are probably dangerous. Her blue eyes scan the room in circuits. She is a rat caged with a snake. Her desire to escape makes her fidget and fight against the crippling rope tying her arms across her chest and her legs straight together. She keeps whimpering, often after your stomach interjects something. You lie back and wait for the spasms to pass.

Five hours without food isn’t something your belly isn’t used to, but it’s acting like lack of snacks is the end of the world. You’re appalled and grudgingly impressed by the way it rebels against outside restrictions. You would never have guessed that your independent and headstrong nature extended to your body parts, too. You hear the car pull up and, shortly after, the garage door open. There are fewer witnesses if I bring people in through the back entrance.