“I think this will be fun,” Olivia says, pacing over and kissing you on the lips like she has five or six times in as many minutes. She’s just this side of nervous. If you didn’t know better you’d say she was prowling. “Ever since that time with Gemma, when she was inside you and we were together… God, I haven’t been able to get that out of my mind!”

Olivia is drunk and giggly, hanging arm-in-arm between Amelie on the one side and Erika on the next. Erika’s coldness seems to have melted away as the evening progressed and the three are thick as thieves as they stumble into the lift. Amelie reaches for your hand and pulls you in after them. Your weight sways the box and the others are made to stand so close they brush your belly.

“Olivia likes you,” says Amelie. “Hmm?” You’re both selecting earrings in the same narrow mirror, crouching down to see half-faces. The casual sharing of space feels new and exciting—I’m always far more giving of space, whereas Amelie gives and takes. She spots you looking at her in the mirror and blows you a kiss. “I agree with her taste, of course. But do you like her?” “She looks delicious.” And she does.

The afternoon and evening are spent in a delirium of exploration of Amelie’s new body. Everything is new to her, from the weight to the ache inside her pelvic cradle where her virgin guts are being pressed down like they’ve never been pressed before. You see everything fresh through her eyes, even though your practiced body readily and roughly is sucking the marrow from your breakfast while hers sits almost whole in her stomach.

You’ve learned a thing or two. The brothers you lured were firmly tied using fabric you shredded from hotel bedsheets, one kept restrained and mute under the increasing heft of your midsection while you tied the other. You felt him try to push you off like a desperate massage and the stomach grumbles that he must have heard up close and personal set him kicking for his life. No avail, though.

Another time, another place. This was the first time I’d ever seen you gain significantly. The ins and outs of your diet were at that time a mystery to me—still are, though I’m a little better acquainted with the “outs” now. You woke with the heat and pleasure of a stomach full of meat, freshly sloughed off the bones of a uni student you got talking to on a bus. She’d had interesting things to say about America’s place on the global stage, and once you’d had your fill of conversation you switched to discussing her own place in the world.

You know of only one way to make someone like you. And that’s to devour them. Hard to be more like you than when they’re part of you, hugging you as tight as fat beneath your skin. You never got back to sleep. You don’t sleep well unless you’re full, yet here you are with a belly groaning through the final stages of an immense feed still unable to sleep.

You check your phone in the early hours. Amelie is asleep beside you. When she sleeps on her back she snores, quiet and regular. You hold the phone so it doesn’t throw light on her, just your face. There’s a message from me: “Hi Rey, hope you are having a good time. I can’t wait to see you again. Missing you brutally.” You smile slightly in the darkness. You tap out “Told you you couldn’t go the whole week without texting me” and send.

It’s the second time you’ve had to pee, and the fact that your stomach still sloshes as you waddle to the bathroom means it’s probably not the last. The heat inside you pulls at your consciousness, making you crave sleep or something close to it. Your food coma amuses you in an abstract way. Perhaps whatever put you here designed it in so you would be too lazy to do anything too war-crimey.

During the day, Club Deliquesce is like so many clubs on the island: An unassuming two-story building in grey or white rendering, blistered with air-con units and flanked by an electricity substation. During the night, bass seeps from the walls, animating the fairy- and neon-lit front with an insistent form of life as if the earth itself is inviting the queuing supplicants to dance. There is something primal and hallowed about it, if you ignore the giggling hen dos with their dealy-boppers and identical white dresses, the lads groups chanting football songs, and the furtive gentlemen standing by selling glow-sticks and little packets for a reasonable number of Euros.