Model Husband (Chapter 6) (Patreon)

Chapter 6

By 2020, most of your previous clients have dropped you. You’re just too big now. You still have Sports Illustrated, and you have your partnership with Olay, but you’re left to spend most of your time on your All Worthy clothing line in conjunction with QVC.

“Oooh, you went to Starbucks?” you say as you hoist yourself off the sofa. You’re wearing your usual outfit as of late, Alo leggings and a matching sports bra, as if you plan to spend the day on the treadmill that you almost never use. “Did you get anything for me?”

I hand you an iced venti vanilla chai and a pastry bag. “They were out of the bagels, so I just got you a few cake pops.”

You take a quick sip of your drink, then gasp as you shift your weight to one hip. “Omigod Brian, you know I’m trying to cut down on junk food.”

I look you up and down. With your hair in a high messy ponytail, your so-called yoga outfit is squeezing you like a sausage casing. Your thickening white midsection is oozing over the waistband of your overly snug tights and your bra is digging into your sides and back like a vise grip. How can you even breathe in that thing?  “I’m sorry, it was either this or cookies,” I say.

After a bite of the cake pop you look at me with an eyebrow raised. “Chocolate (chew, chew) chunk cookies?” You turn and lower your ass back onto the sofa with a surprisingly forceful impact. “It’s okay, (chew, chew) I forgive you. I’m doing a workout video tomorrow so I guess I can afford to cheat, maybe just a little.”

God your thighs and hips are really getting astoundingly wide. “For sure babe.”

Your attitude towards food and your weight still never fails to amaze me. It’s not that you're getting dangerously obese, in your mind you’re just loving your body and  it’s society and trained health professionals that are wrong. But you’ve been told you’re now  pre-diabetic, and I see the way you get out of breath from simple tasks, the way you crave fats and sugars like an addict, and I notice your increasing lack of motivation to move your body or do anything that involves physical activity.

But even you have your limits.

With the sudden onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the shelter-in-place mandates that come in March and April of 2020, your wardrobe balloons all the way up to a size 24. You seem to be constantly overheated and out of breath, and you break a sweat from simply getting up off the couch for another one of your frequent pantry and fridge raids.

In late spring you announce to me that you felt sexier when you were a size 18 or a size 20, and you tell me that you think being a size 24 is just too much weight to carry for your feminine frame.

Yeah, no fucking shit. If you were a size 22 and 262 pounds back in December of 2019, then God knows you must be in the 270 range now.

You’re not working much at all anymore, but not even a pandemic can stop the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. In preparation for the shoot, I notice that you're making a concerted effort to get more active, walking Stella to the park for a change and doing your best to suppress your cravings for potato chips, pizza, and mint chocolate chip ice cream.

You order one of those electronic fitness mirrors and I have to chuckle to myself when you show me with pride that you exercised for 15 minutes and burned a whopping 180 calories, calories you could no doubt put back into your curvaceous figure with a handful of M&M’s in two seconds flat.

It’s kind of cute to watch you struggle to shed the weight it took you several years to acquire, although I must admit that it saddens me to watch your luscious excessive curves slowly dwindle back to a size 22.

Despite your attempts to slim down, I notice that when the swimsuit edition of SI is finally released in the summer, no longer are you naked covered in bodypaint or even wearing a skimpy bikini as you had done in years past. This year you’re in a long sleeve maillot, and in the shots where you are in a two-piece, the bottoms are high waisted, as if the sight of your exposed belly flab would be too shocking for the viewers, especially in a magazine that is also showcasing world class athletes that did nothing but train their asses off their whole life.

I love you and I love your plush and ample curves and I would never tell you this but you are starting to look more and more out of place in Sports Illustrated. The pro athletes are one thing, but even the other plus models featured in the magazine could still be considered toned and in shape, and then there’s you, with your fluffy fleshy arms, your deepening thighbrow and your doughy wobbly trunk-like legs, you have so much fat on your body that you make Tara Lynn and Ashley Graham look anorexic.

Slimming back down to a size 22 may be an accomplishment for you, but size 22 is still pretty fucking big compared to the 14 that you were I met you, or the even the 16 you were as an SI rookie back in 2017.

Throughout the remainder of the year your weight seems to plateau and stabilize, much to my chagrin, but in November you give me the most wonderful surprise of my life when you tell me you're pregnant.