Olivia is now exploring your inner thighs. Her kisses sometimes depress your pillowy skin, sometimes trace the curves where the suspender straps compress that skin into smooth valleys. There is one valley she discovers all of a sudden. Her pursed lips place a soft, melting kiss on your own. Without parting, her lips massage circles into you, trail kisses up and down your blossoming labia. You let out a sigh and Amelie leans down to kiss your mouth, deeply.

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.

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.

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.

You wake at 4am with heartburn and realise fuck, you frenzied again. You breathe through the discomfort, allowing it to dissipate as you struggle to remember the faces and, more importantly, the bodies of the last three days. The fat woman you met while clubbing started it. Jayda? She had pretty eyes and immaculate nails that utterly failed to protect her against her swift consumption when you isolated her in a bathroom.