Kinktober 2022 #12: Eating Contest/Weight Gain Bet (Patreon)

Just a reminder to everyone to make sure you vote in the two Like Mother, Like Daughters polls before they close next week! Here's the link to the Who's Gaining? poll and the link to the Gain Method poll, as well as a link to the LMLD tag with all the previous chapters.

***

We were acquaintances in high school. At least, that was how I saw us. We never hung out outside of school, so I wouldn’t call us friends, but we were friendly in the way that only kids who are trapped in the same advanced placement classes for close to eight hours a day, five days a week are friendly. Where you somehow barely know them and yet you know the way they think, their sense of humor, the weirdnesses they put on display as they figured out who they were.

Even though we weren’t friends, Lily and I gravitated toward each other. We were two of the only out kids at school, and the only out lesbians. We never dated, but we understood each other. Also, I was kind of shy and hadn’t actually dated anybody. And Lily was cute, but not really my type. She was one of those girls who was so skinny you worried about them, surviving on Monster energy, always in scuffed boots and thrifted oversized overalls and painter’s pants. Meanwhile, my biggest crush was on our chubby, twenty-something AP Calc teacher whose ass jiggled every time she erased something from the board at the front of the classroom. Lily was the only person who recognized the abject lust in my eyes and had teased me good-naturedly about it ever since. Her favorite was when she overheard anybody asking me what my “type” was and her magically appearing to say, “Oh, Julie only likes math girls.” This would, of course, make me blush immediately, confusing everyone and sending Lily into fits of giggles.

The last week before we graduated, everyone was itching to leave. Excited about the future. Simultaneously drunk on possibility and terrified that we would all now be free to make our own choices. We were in our English class, everybody passing yearbooks around. Lily’s desk was right next to mine, so we swapped ours. As she signed mine with her favorite purple pen, she asked without even looking up at me, “Do ya wanna get married?”

I gasped, in half-real, half-mock surprise. I replied with a faux-British accent, “Lily! I had no idea you felt such a way about me. Shouldn’t you take a girl out to dinner before you propose?”

“You didn’t let me finish! I was gonna say, if we’re like, single or whatever in ten years. I dunno, if we can make it through four years of this shithole together I feel like we could probably make a marriage work.”

I considered this. Honestly, it didn’t feel like she was wrong. But there was one tiny problem, and graduation and never seeing anybody from high school again was so close that I actually said it out loud: “You’re so skinny, though.”

Now it was Lily’s turn to pretend to be offended. “And here I thought you’d be willing to look past my physical flaws and fall in love with my mind.” She sniffed. “Well, I could always try and fix that, I guess. If it would mean saving our marriage.”

I laughed. “Fix it how? You’re like two pounds.”

“Just trust,” she said, holding out her hand. “Do we have a deal?”

I took her hand and gave it a shake. “Sure, Lily, of course we do.”

***

Like many other college-bound high school kids, I let the memory of high school fade from my mind as soon as I stepped onto my university campus. I kept in touch with a few people from high school, Lily included, and by “keeping in touch” I mean occasionally scrolling past posts on Instagram or Twitter. I forgot about Lily’s proposal almost as soon as we’d made it.

By the time I graduated college and got my first “real” job, I barely even remembered Lily’s name.

Lily didn’t forget, though. I didn’t know it, but she’d had a crush on me all through high school. She didn’t turn into a stalker or anything, but to her, I was the one that got away. And even though our whole conversation about marriage had been pretty lighthearted, my offhand comment about her size had made her rethink things. Like, what if she hadn’t been a size 0 in high school? What if she’d been chubby instead? Would I have crushed on her instead of our math teacher?

It was impossible to say, but as she did all her wondering, she was also running into the onslaught of calories that was the campus meal plan. She never intended to get fat, but as her pant size climbed from 0 to 6 to 12 over the course of four years, with no sign of slowing down, she never really fought it, either.

A whole decade passed, slowly sometimes and faster at others. I’d moved a couple times and ended up in a city on the other side of the country for work. As fate would have it, Lily had moved there a year prior. She saw one of my posts about moving and reached out, asking if I needed a tour guide or just wanted to meet up for coffee. We settled on coffee.

I did check up on her on social media, as one does before seeing someone you haven’t seen in years. I was, to put it mildly, completely floored. At first, I thought her more recent posts were photos of a sister of hers I had never known about, because it seemed impossible that it was her. But no, the further I scrolled back, the smaller she was, becoming more and more like the bony kid I’d known back in high school. As I scrolled back up, fully processing her gain, I thought I would pass out. She wasn’t just fat, but huge. Lily had always been petite in every way, barely 5’2” on top of being skinny as hell, and all the extra weight made her look astonishingly round.

Still, it was clear it was her. She still had the same thrift store style, the same devil-may-care personality, just with the addition of a serious gut, doorstopper hips, and a really fucking cute double chin. Suffice it to say that I was more than a little smitten. I was also glad I’d looked her up beforehand, because if I had met up with her at the coffee shop and had to process all of this in person, my brain would have short-circuited.

So thankfully, I was composed by the time we met up for coffee. Or, mostly composed. Because I did kind of short-circuit seeing her in person. Her most recent photo was from about a month before, and either she’d gotten bigger or was one of those people who just looked fatter in person than in photos. In either case, she was wearing a cropped sweater and a high-waisted skirt tight enough that I could see the indent of her bellybutton when she walked in.

When we both sat down with our orders (hers, I noted, was basically a caramel shake topped with whipped cream, which wasn’t so surprising when I remembered she used to keep multiple huge cans of Monster in her bag just to get through the day), we started with pleasantries, catching each other up on the last decade. I’d worried it would be awkward, but it was like we were sitting together in class again, all our old inside jokes bubbling up easily.

“It’s such a small world. I can’t believe we ended up both moving here. What are the odds, right? I feel like everyone else is either back home or at least mostly in the same state,” she said.

“Well, it’s not like we weren’t always a little different than everyone else,” I said with a smile. “Have you seen how many of them are married with like, whole entire grown children at this point?”

“Seriously! And like, how are we still single? I know our dating pool is smaller, but…” She paused for a moment and then laughed. “Oh my god. Oh my god, I completely forgot. Didn’t I propose to you like a couple days before graduation?”

“You did!” I said, the memory of our handshake coming to mind right as she said it. “What was it we said to each other? That if we were both single in ten years we’d get married? And here we are, 28, both single.” I left out the other bit I remembered, about how Lily had promised her thinness wouldn’t be an issue. It seemed like she was avoiding mentioning it, too.

We both chuckled a little, sipping our drinks. After a few moments, I decided to be brave, figuring the worst that could happen was that I embarrassed myself. “You know, I feel like we should probably go on a date. If we want to keep our promises, and all.” My voice was pitched a little lower by the end, making sure she knew I was flirting, not joking.

The dimples in her chubby cheeks when she smiled made my heart pound a little. “You know, I’m pretty sure I’ve been waiting since high school for you to say that.”