Meredith & Minh
This was too much. Meredith had gotten back from work and slumped on the couch five whole minutes ago and she was still catching her breath from the exertion of walking, wings working to sooth her pained thighs. “Maybe… maybe I should start dieting,” she spoke aloud.
“Nonsense. You’re perfectly thin,” came a prompt the reply from the kitchen.
She looked down at the black, bulging belly poking out from between the buttons of her blouse, wincing as she remembered the numbers that had come up the last time she had weighed herself. She wasn’t thin. She was very not thin.
“I really think I should go on a diet, Minh,”
An otter poked his head around the kitchen door, briefly judging his corvid housemate. “Well then,” he said, “If you’re gonna go on a diet it better be after the dinner I’ve spent the last two hours making. I’ve made so much sushi you wouldn’t believe…”
⁂
Meredith blushed profusely. A restaurant as nice as this one and she was here in a stupid pink hoodie and a tatty skirt—the best of what she could pull together upon finding her only formal dress didn’t fit anymore. Everyone must be staring at her. It’s embarrassing.
Across the table, Minh was staring at her. He hadn’t even looked at the menu he was holding.
“I appreciate you taking me here, really, but I… I feel a little underdressed for this place,”
Minh chuckled. She evidently hadn’t noticed that her hoodie had ridden up her stomach, a heavy roll of fat filling her lap and pushing against the table edge. She was becoming more underdressed by the day.
“Oh it’s fine, Mer,” he chided, “It’s not like they’re gonna kick us out or anything. We have a reservation after all,” he laid down the menu in front of her, “and they have the best seafood buffet in town,”
⁂
“Here, drink this,” he insisted.
“Miiiiiiiinnnhhh,” she whined before voluntarily opening her beak, the otter depositing a spoonful of hot fish soup into it.
Bird flu was a serious matter for avian species, and Meredith was no exception. Downside of working at a library, she supposed, so much contact with random people and handling books that had passed through hundreds of hands. Luckily Minh had been a most attentive housemate and carer in these few days of sick leave. In fact, she had barely needed to move a muscle.
“Shh, shh. Eat up, now. You need to keep up your strength if you’re going to get better,”
He meant no ill will, but he felt lucky that sickness had knocked her off kilter. She had yet to register the seemingly endless bowls of soup he was providing, or yet to complain about it, anyway. He’d give that great big dome of bird belly some attention later on.
⁂
“Minh… help. I… I can’t…”
Meredith huffed breathlessly, struggling for air. The presence of the stairs proving an insurmountable challenge as she tried to squeeze her way through the ever narrowing corridors of their home. Her uncovered gut sagged and swayed close to her feet, her lovehandles both pressing to either side of the stairwell, thighs as far apart as she could get them and yet still pushed to one another as she tried to ascend steps she couldn’t even see past her own bulk. She tried to look around for her housemate but her swollen neck pushed up against her cheeks, obscuring her view and dislodging her precariously balanced glasses.
With no help in sight she persisted onwards, puffing and starting to sweat as she tried to make her laborious way to the third stair as Minh silently watched from behind with glee.
⁂
The living room grumbled uncomfortably; the sounds of a hungry raven emanating from the belly of that great, black, feathered blob. She was too far gone now, no regime of diet and exercise capable of returning her to her once relatively trim physique. Her feet were too fat to move her, her gut and butt too grounded to the floor to be lifted, her wings too stunted to reach past her own bosom. Between her cheeks and neck rolls she could at least still see a letterbox of the world around her. Minh was there now, sleeping atop her distended, feather-lined stomach, lost to dreamland.
By the time he became explicit in his lust to see her grow it was too late, she was doomed to immobility from the moment she became too wide to pass through the kitchen door, dependent entirely on her housemate to prepare her meals and (especially recently) feed them to her. He was thankfully a studious cook and provided a variety of pescatarian preparations for her, but his dedication to sheer quantity and—she suspected—something he was adding in secret had only pushed her to rapidly more immense sizes.
With his confession had come a more comfortable life; she had heart monitors and oxygen tanks clustered around making sure she could breathe easily, air conditioning to cool her, and books to read. He was willing to indulge her literary vices, at least, turning the pages of books perched against her highest chin when she asked. It wasn’t a life she asked for or wanted, but she could probably put up with it so long as she had a good book.
