Aphrodite

"You too," Corrie said. "Isn't it amazing?"

"I kind of love it."

"I kind of love you."

"I kind of love you more."

"You know what I love almost as much as you?" Corrie murmured as she kissed my neck.

"What?"

"Cheesecake."

"Me too."

"I kind of want to eat the rest of that cheesecake."

"Me too."

"And I think I'm going to want more than one."

"Me too."

"I am going to call room service," Corrie mumbled, stuffing a slice into her mouth, spraying me with loose crumbs, "and I am going to have them send up a whole cart of cheesecake."

"Get a cart for me, too."

DAY 2 -- 7:29 AM

So, obviously Corrie's brilliant stuff-ourselves-stupid plan didn't work. I woke up from a light doze and the lingering effects of Aphrodite to find her lying on the bed, struggling with the zipper of her jeans. Maybe I'm not always as sensitive as I'd like to be, but even I realized that this was absolutely the wrong time for an I-told-you-so.

Luckily for us and our stomachs, today was going to be Aphrodite-free. We were scheduled to take a train down the coast to the next luxury hotel on our itinerary. I think moving hotels was mostly just an excuse—they wanted to keep up off the stuff for a day to make sure we weren't showing any signs of physical or psychological addiction. I couldn't have been happier about it. Aphrodite was delightful, but I desperately needed a day to just relax and digest my obscene binge. I felt like a refrigerator that had been crammed with so much food the door wouldn't close.

With a groan, Corrie finally managed to pull the zipper all the way up. She flopped backwards, breathing hard. "God damn."

The waistband was cinched so tight the button strained, and a roll of blubber squeezed out of the top of the jeans. It looked painful. I didn't see how she'd even be able to sit up.

"Honey," I said. "You know you can wear your 'fat' jeans if you want."

She shot me a dirty look.

"I mean, not saying you're fat! Just that your extra-big pants might be more comfortable right now."

The look wasn't getting any cleaner.

"What?" I asked.

"These are my fat jeans," she growled.

"Ohhh," I said. "Uh. They look great. I couldn't even tell."

"Why don't you put on your pants and see how easy it is?" she said, wriggling into a camisole top with wide horizontal stripes in white and navy blue.

I did, and it wasn't.

"Um. Where does the waistband go?" I asked. "I've got this, um. Curve here now."

"Yes, I see it, dear. In technical terms, we call that a pot belly."

"So do I close the waistband straight across, or..."

"Give it a try."

I struggled to button my slacks, but it wasn't happening. I was just too big around the middle.

"I can't," I said, blushing.

"Okay, so your two choices are over the gut or under the gut. Pick one and pull like your life depends on it."

"Um, sure. I guess I'll go...under," I decided. "I mean, I don't know if I'd say I have a 'gut', though. I'm just really full. You're really full! We're both just...full."

"It's a gut, Ains," Corrie said, propping herself up on her elbows. "You've got a gut. Last night you hand-fed me enough cheesecake to kill an elephant and called me...what was it again? 'My cute little bouncing butterball.' You don't get to be self-conscious."

My ears turned red. "I'm sorry, Corrie," I said. "This stuff makes me say the weirdest things. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

She sighed. "No, I'm sorry. That wasn't cool, especially after I called you a 'spicy-pussied burger slut.'"

"Wait, when did you say that?"

"Uh, never mind. Look, I'm just cranky right now. It's these damn pants! I think they're cutting me in two. First thing today, before we get on the train, I am getting myself some stretchy pants. I don't care if I look like the sloppiest housewife in Yogatown."

I pulled my black turtleneck over my head and snaked my arms into the sleeves before giving myself a once-over in the mirror. My hands went to the sides of my stomach. Jesus, I did have a gut. It was just a little mound where everything had been flat before, but it was there.

Corrie's arms wrapped around me from behind. I felt her comforting softness pressed against my back, the tickle of her fluffy hair against the back of my neck. Her hands covered mine and she squeezed.

"You know something, Ains?" she whispered. "I never had a chance to realize it before, but I think I like you a little chubby, too."

DAY 2 - 6:13 PM

It was a wonderful day. We walked in the sunshine. We road the train down the coast, watching the ocean roll past. We checked into our new hotel and then went out and spent the afternoon at an art museum, then strolling through downtown. And—thank every goddess and/or god there is or was or ever will be—we didn't eat a single fucking bite. By the time we headed back to the room we were practically able to walk without waddling. It was delightful.

We decided to hit the hotel pool and lowered ourselves gratefully into the hot tub. The soak felt wonderful on our tired legs. Corrie leaned back and signed, sinking a few inches deeper.

"Wow," I said.

"Wow?"

"In an emergency, you could use those things as flotation devices."

She laughed. "I am kind of busting out of this suit, huh?"

"They're huge." Her stomach was breaching the surface of the water, too, but I didn't mention that.

"You just better tell me if one of them pops out. Feels like they could go at any time."

"Oh, I promise I'll tell you," I said. "Eventually."

She looked at me. A slow smile tugged at the sides of her full lips. Then she lunged.

"Stop!" I said, giggling as she grabbed me.

"No way," she said, wrestling me onto her lap. "I have to check my little 'Audrey' out." Her hands moved down to my waist. "My, my, my, Audrey. You've been hitting the breakfast at Tiffany's pretty hard lately, haven't you?"

"Stah-ha-hop!" I wheezed. "Let me go! Your boobs are out. YOUR BOOBS ARE OUT!"

"Excuse me, ladies?"

The lifeguard was standing over us. I winced. Corrie took her hands off my stomach roll and covered her chest. We slunk back to the roof, trying not to look at anyone else in the pool.

"Oh my god," I said, tossing my bikini top into the sink. "I don't think I've ever been so emba—"

Corrie tackled me, and the two of us tumbled onto the bed.

DAY 2: 11:41 PM

Moonlight fell across my face, and I woke to find myself in bed, alone. I'd fallen asleep in Corrie's arms, absolutely exhausted. Not from lack of sleep—Aphrodite seemed to eliminate the need for sleep altogether. If it didn't make you so hot to trot, they could have sold it as a study aid.

No, I was exhausted because Corrie wore me out. Usually she doesn't even like making love when she feels heavy. But today...whew! I'd conked out right afterwards.

I was actually getting a little hungry by now. I must have finally digested the gross mountain of food I'd gorged myself on the day before. That meant—

I cupped the little pot at my waist. Yup. Couldn't blame it on a food baby any more. This little pudge-pillow was all me.

I got up to look for the meal bars in my luggage and noticed the silhouette through the gauzy drapes. I pushed them aside.

Corrie sat at the table on the balcony, wrapped in the terrycloth hotel bathrobe. She took a long pull from her cigarette and exhaled. Smoke hung about her life a wreath as she stared out at the moonlight-speckled sea. She didn't notice me.

"Corrie?" I said, as softly as I could.

She jumped in her chair, immediately spat the cigarette out and flicked it over the edge. "Shit!" she said. "I didn't mean to—that better not start a fire."

"I think it's just concrete down there," I said. "What I'm wondering about is why you were smoking when you told me you had your last cigarette five months ago."

"That was an emergency pack," she said. She made a face. "It was stale."

"Good."

"And I swear it's the first one I've touched since then. I'm not starting up again. I just—really needed to think."

I put a hand on her shoulder. "Need some help?"

"Nah, it's okay," she said. "Go back to bed."

"Corrie, something's bothering you."

"Yeah," she sighed. "It is."

"Aphrodite?"

"It's just..." She rubbed her forehead. "This would be so much easier if we'd had withdrawal symptoms. I almost hoped we would have them today, because then we'd know, hey, we need to quit using this stuff. Easy decision. Instead...we made love. As ourselves. And it was crazy good!"

"It was really good," I agreed.

"If Aphrodite did that—and I'm not convinced for sure, but it's the most obvious variable—if it did that, it's affected our relationship in a real and very positive way. It's good. We should keep taking it. But..."

"The side effects," I finished.

"Yeah," she admitted, putting a hand on her stomach. "The side effects. I don't know what to do here. I want to keep exploring this, but..I'm worried."

I stood there, my hand buried in terrycloth, feeling the heat radiating from the warm shoulder beneath, completely unsure what to say. I could never trust myself in these situations. I loved the hell out of Aphrodite; loved being on it, and loved what what it seemed to be doing for us even when we weren't. And I loved what it was beginning to do to Corrie's body, too.

But she didn't.

It's the same battle I went through when she was quitting smoking. I encouraged her to quit. I even nagged her, kind of. It was justified, I told myself. I was helping her to be a healthier person! And I was her wife—and I had to live in the house too, after all, and I deserved a house that didn't stink. And those were all real, true reasons.

But I knew that she might gain some weight, and deep down, I was salivating over the possibility. I wanted it to happen to her. When it did, when she settled into a new plateau ten pounds higher than her old one, I was gleeful about it. I knew she was self-conscious about it, but I couldn't help feeling what I felt.

"I...you know I have...a preference," I said. "But if you're not comfortable, if this is making you feel even a little bad, then I think we need to stop."

"But you don't want to, do you?" she pressed. "I want your honest answer. You want to use Aphrodite through the whole two-week testing period."

"Yes," I admitted. "But that doesn't matter if—"

"And you've considered the consequences? Really considered them?"

"Corrie," I said putting my arms around her. "Of course."

"I don't think you have," she said. "I think you've thought about what Aphrodite will do to me, and you know you like it, but you haven't thought about what it's going to do to you. And it is going to do a number. You're not immune, you know. I just have a head start."

"I know, I'm know, I'm fat now too," I said. "It's...different...but—"

"Oh, honey," she laughed. "Oh, my sweet summer child. That's the Freshman Fifteen. That's the first week of January. You're not fat. But you are getting fat, and I don't know if you're going to like it when you're there. The world is a cruel place, and fat isn't just a costume you can take off when you're done playing."

"You said you liked me chubby," I said.

"I love you no matter what," she said. "But yes, it's cute. I'm more worried about—well—about you liking yourself, when everyone, everything around you is screaming that you're ugly."

"You won't be, and that's all that's important. Who cares what you look like on the outside?"

"That's very easy to say when you're conventionally attractive."

"Corrie, you're attractive. You're so attractive it's not even funny—"

"I said conventionally, and don't just blithely say that doesn't matter when you've never experienced life without it. Ains. Get dressed and look in the mirror. Really look. If you can tell me you're comfortable with what you see, we'll keep going."

I grabbed my slacks and turtleneck from where I'd tossed them over the chair and pulled them on. I glanced in the mirror.

"Looks fine to me," I said, turning back to her.

"No, I said really look. Don't think about me or my feelings." She crossed her arms. "And don't think how you want my ass to get bigger, either, okay? I want you to really consider how you feel about yourself. If I think you're not taking this seriously, I'll call the experiment off."

Okay. If it makes her happy, it won't hurt anything to give myself a once-over.

I looked—fine, like I said. I mean, fine for someone who just crawled out of bed and into yesterday's clothes. My hair's sticking out every which way, but she's not asking about that. She's asking about my body, and my body looks—

It's fine.

I mean, I can tell I've gained weight, and not just in my stomach. Not a ton, thought. It's mostly only noticeable because my clothes are a little on the tight side, now. They cling more than they used to, hugging every curve. Still sexy, though—that is, sexy in a way even the unenlightened philistines who'd say Corrie was "too fat" would appreciate. Sexier, if anything. Well, okay, except for the muffin top. I'm going to have to get bigger pants.

Actually, I'm going to have to get bigger everything. That's new. It's not like I've never gained weight before, but usually it comes right off again—just a standard fluctuation, retaining water, whatever. If I keep taking Aphrodite, that won't be the case. How much weight am I going to gain in two weeks? Thirty pounds? More that that. Fifty? Shit, a hundred? What would that even be like? How long would it take to lose afterwards?

I felt—scared. Like I was on the brink of giving up my life.

No, this isn't right, I thought. This is binary thinking—either I stop now, or I'm committing to two week's worth of extra weight. But those aren't my only two choices, are they? Maybe I use Aphrodite for one more day and decide, nope, getting too big. We can stop then. We don't have to make the decision now. I'm not committing to a hundred pounds. I'm only committing to, maybe, ten.

"I'd like to continue the study," I said. "With the caveat that if either of us feels uncomfortable, or wants to stop, we will. No questions asked."

Corrie nodded. "Okay. Agreed. Oh, wait, um. Can I—"

"Yes?"

"Can I, uh, request one other condition?"

"Sure."

She looked down at the floor, then forced herself to look up into my eyes.

"I want us to stop immediately if you—if you ever—"

"Corrie?"

Her eyes dropped again. "If you ever start feeling less attracted to me."

"Jesus, Corrie!" I said. "You know that's not going to happen, come on. You're gorgeous."

"But if I start putting on a lot of—"

"Not. Gonna. Happen," I said. "You could gain two hundred pounds and you'd still be hot as hell."

"Oh, god," she said, shuddering. "Don't even joke about that."

"I didn't mean you were going to."

"I better not," she said, elbowing me. "No matter how much I'm sure you'd like it. We can't let this get out of hand. The last thing we need to is go back home after this so fat we can't fit through the front door. God, the looks I'm going to get already..."

"The looks you're getting right now," I said, giving her figure the once-over. She grinned and rolled her eyes at me.

We sat on the balcony, looking down at the lights, until I fell asleep with my head on her shoulder. She must have led me to bed after that, or carried me. I guess my extra pounds weren't too much for my wife's mighty muscles—not yet, anyway.

DAY 3 - 9:37 AM

The mall near our hotel opened at nine, and we were supposed to take our next dose of Aphrodite as close to ten as possible. That didn't give us much breathing room for an extremely vital errand—shopping. There was really no putting it off. Our clothes weren't giving us much breathing room either. We were about one day of gluttony away from having to go out wrapped in the shower curtain.

You probably don't have a great idea of what our personal styles are like, since for most of this account we've been lying around in underwear and bathrobes, so let me give you a quick overview. Corrie dresses pretty casually, considering she's a professor. She's usually in jeans, though she likes skirts, too—long if she's going to class, short if she's not. She likes those T-shirts you can get off the internet, the ones where they mash a couple of popular things together so you've got, hey, what if Rick and Morty met Doctor Who or the kids from Stranger Things were the Peanuts characters? Half the time you can barely tell what the picture is because her chest distorts it so much, not that that's something I particularly mind.

I have more of a mid-20th-century beatnik sophisticate kind of style. I guess part of this is just leaning into the Hepburn thing era-wise, but also I just really love the fashions. Lots of turtlenecks and really nice sweaters. Sometimes I'll go all-in and do the skirt-nylons-heels thing (low ones, though; you don't have to torture your legs to wear cute shoes.) I look pretty academic, even though aside from helping Corrie edit her manuscripts my only job is part time at the candle store. There have been times when I've been by her office and somebody came in and assumed I was the professor and she was one of my students, which gets a little awkward, especially the time when we were making out.

So that's our usual style, but of course, today we had some additional factors to consider. Namely, buying clothes in our size at this point would be a waste of money, because anything that fit us today, we'd be bursting out of by tomorrow. With that in mind, I picked up a couple of big, bulky cable-knit sweaters that I looked like I was drowning in and some packs of one-size-fits-all leggings. I figured, one-size-fits-all is a pretty gutsy claim in a country full of litigation and giant asses, so these really ought to last.

Corrie picked up a long, lightweight hippie skirt with an elastic waistband, which she hiked up to right under her boobs, and a stretchy camisole top, along with a few absolutely gigantic t-shirts, "just in case." The skirt flowed gently down and around her gut, concealing the shape but not the fact that it was there. I thought it made her look kind of pregnant, but I kept my mouth shut.

My stomach gurgled. We'd both woken up absolutely starving, since we'd barely eaten anything all of yesterday, but it seemed stupid to eat when we were going to take Aphrodite in a few hours and stuff our face on anything we could get our hands on.

"I can't wait to get back to the room and snort a rail of sex drugs," I said.

"Kind of wish you wouldn't put it like that," Corrie said. "Anyway, we're not snorting it."

I shrugged. "Maybe it we were, we wouldn't be buying new clothes right now."

When we got back to the room, we put the clothes aside, changed into T-shirts and panties, held hands, and fed each other our cubes of Aphrodite. It melted away in our mouths, and we melted into each other.

DAY 5 - 10:12 AM

I don't have much to report for the next two Aphrodite-filled days that wouldn't just be repetitive. It's not like you can't figured out what we did: we made love, we ate, we snuggled, we ate, we ravished each other, we ate, we banged our brains out, we ate, we kissed, we ate, we ate, we ate, we surfaced long enough to survey the damage, and then we gobbled our little magic chocolates and screwed and snuggled and ate some more.