Café Window
Age 28, mid-afternoon. The window seat at Paw and Plume, the Seaport District, Morphelio. Around 295, plush and settled, three tails curled into the groove of the cushion. The too-tight tee riding up and, for once, staying there.
Two o’clock sun finds the same square of fur every day, and I do my obliging best to sit still and let it.
This seat fits me now, worn into my own shape over a few hundred afternoons. One cheek on the cushion, a tail tucked along the groove, mug braced on the soft of my belly. Quiet in the full way.
Yeah, that mug. The chipped one, navy glaze, a little moon-sigil where a thumb went into the wet clay. Some of you track it in the background of my streams like it’s a recurring character. It kind of is. Holds heat, fits the paw, stays mine.
Downstairs, Paw and Plume is its usual gorgeous mess. You can smell cardamom and oat milk climbing the stairwell before the frother even kicks in. There’s a crash and a burst of cheerful cursing in three languages, because the cat spirits run the café and they still knock things off the shelves the way any cat would, café of their own or not. Nylo, the one who looks out for me, will have it swept up before the milk’s done steaming.
The hum of the place stopped being noise a long time ago. It’s home-audio now: fur on flannel, old floorboards under bare paws, the little tick of crumbs hitting the windowsill a half-second before a curious tail flicks them off. Speaking of, one of the spirits just batted my second pastry off the ledge, a flaky apple thing with too much cinnamon, and it landed square in my lap. I sighed, picked it out of the fur on my thigh, and ate it. No notes.
A shadow crosses below on the lantern-lit boardwalk: courier wolf, green satchel, wiry build. He looks up, catches my eye, gives a lazy two-finger salute. Could be a flirt, could just be a wolf saying hello. I send back a slow tail twitch and a sip of coffee. Some gestures do fine without subtitles.
I used to hate sitting still. Stillness meant somebody might look too long and clock that I took up more room than I used to, that I’d quit shrinking. As a cub I only ever stopped running when I was alone; stillness was a thing you earned after the win, if it came at all, never something handed to you.
Now I just let gravity have me. No stopwatch, no relay handoff, only my weight and the cushion under it and a shirt that’s given up trying to ride back down. I used to tug it flat on reflex. These days I let it bunch and put the slope of my stomach in the sun, with nobody for company but my own reflection in the glass. Apparently this is what contentment looks like when it isn’t moonlighting as ambition.
Nylo snuck up the back stairs earlier and left a sticky note: extra syrup, the way you like. She didn’t wait around for a thank-you, just vanished back down like a reverse raccoon, and she drew a tiny heart under the y. I’m going to give her hell for it later.
My tails have come in fuller this year, full enough that I catch myself shifting how I sit so one doesn’t get pinned. One of them is herding crumbs into a slow spiral across the cushion while I write this. I don’t mind. Claiming space doesn’t have to be loud. Sometimes it’s just letting your belly settle where it wants, leaving the shirt alone, and not flinching when a glance lingers a second too long.
I might stream tonight, same seat, monitor glow instead of window light. Something silly, maybe, or something quiet and slow. Drop a game in the comments if you’ve got one. Bonus points for bad lighting and a sluggish pace. Bonus bonus if the character’s thick.
And if you happen to be somewhere still right now, really still, with nobody asking anything of you, let it hold you a while. You don’t have to have earned it. You’re in it, and that’s the whole qualification.
Reforging Balance
Age 28. The attic over Paw and Plume, the Seaport District, Morphelio. 5’9″ and 295 pounds. A thickly muscled frame wrapped in softness now, belly full, hips and rear heavy, arms strong and full. Three tails, lush, drifting in the breeze off the open window. Plum fur clean and brushed, amber belly fur warm and faintly sweet from the bath oils.
This is the era I could feel coming the night I first sat down to write all this. It got here.
I’d just finished a script, the slow teasing praise and ASMR the audience comes for, and I’d squatted heavy that morning so my hips and thighs were pleasantly wrecked. Window open, city hum drifting in with the incense and the last note of my own voice still in the headphones. I sat cross-legged on the cushion at the mic, belly low and warm in my lap, one hand resting on the curve of it and the other smoothing fur where it had bunched into folds. The whole room smelled like honey and cedar. My phone buzzed with comments I wasn’t ready to open, and for once that was just peace. I let it stay quiet.
I used to chase control like a job I clocked into. Then I chased pleasure like it owed me interest. Neither one held. These days I wake up and the body feels like a place I live in, one where I can work and rest and feel things all the way down without filing an apology first.
There’s softness here I never planned, belly spilling when I sit, the spread of me when I squat low, sweat pooling behind my ears when the city runs hot, and I’ve stopped reading any of it as failure. It’s the weight I carry, and some of it is the weight I chose, and I can finally tell the two apart. The strength is all still in there too, deadlifts and long walks and quick hoists, just padded under cushion now and somehow more responsive than it ever was when I had it carved down to nothing. When I stretch floor to ceiling after a long session the gut leads the arc. I flex slow in the mirror and watch the mass shift and settle, and I take it in without flinching. It feels lived-in. It feels like mine, and I can say that part now without bracing for the rest of the sentence.
I’m still a work in progress. I’m also done hiding. This is the body I spent years terrified I’d collapse into, and it turns out to be the one I chose to grow toward.
The café runs full all day below me, students and spirits and businessmen and creators, the whole district drifting past with pastries and plans. Sometimes one of them asks what the setup upstairs is for, or what I do with my mornings. I tell them I work with voice, with story, with bodies and how they want to be heard. The strange and good part is that I mean it.
Why I Keep Changing
Age 28. The attic, late, ring light just switched off. Still around 295. Belly warm from where my hands sat all session, a tail twitching slow at my side.
The export bar crawls across the screen, and every tick of it reminds me of the shape I was ten minutes ago, a little smaller, a little more braced against being looked at. The work keeps changing that.
People ask why I keep coming back to transformation. Why a body this big and this solid still circles the idea of more. I’ve turned it over enough nights to have an honest answer.
Transformation was the first honesty that ever made sense to me. Other kinds show people who you are. This one shows you what you’ve been hiding from yourself. For years I did the opposite. I sucked in and stood tall and flattened the magic until it didn’t read. Every diet and weigh-in and too-tight shirt was an argument against changing, a way to bolt the body in place where nobody would flinch. The work I make now runs the other direction. It says the growing is allowed. The overflowing is allowed. You can outgrow the shape they signed off on and have that be the good part.
The muscle was the hardest piece to make peace with, and it took me longest. You’d expect the old sprinter-fox to welcome it back, but size scared me, because I already knew what I did the one time I didn’t respect my own power. The shove on the field. The laugh instead of the offered hand. A smaller kid’s trust draining out of his face. I spent a long time certain that if I got big again I’d turn back into that boy, the one people brace around.
That isn’t what happened. I built a body that holds more, and learned that more room can mean more room to gather someone up. The size that once put a kid in the grass is the same size that could keep him safe. The lesson was simple once I could hear it: put your weight where it’s wanted, and never on anyone who didn’t ask. The strength and the softness were never the opposites I’d been raised to think they were.
There was a day I wore a pregnancy bump for a collab and expected nothing from it, just a prop, just the bit. Then I sat down and my hands went to it on their own, cradling, palming the curve like I’d grown it myself. It read less like a costume than a memory from a life I hadn’t lived yet: softness that wasn’t weakness, creation as its own kind of want. It stayed with me for days.
That’s the whole reason I keep returning to this stuff, the gaining and the growth and the change of it. It undoes the rules. The ones that said big boys can’t be soft, soft boys can’t want power, desire is supposed to shrink you, strength means somebody else has to lose. Growth makes room: fat, muscle, magic, fiction, all of it opening space where there wasn’t any. And the kid who never had a word for what he wanted gets to be the one writing the words down now.
I’m palming the new curve as I type this, softer and warmer and rounder than it was this morning. Tomorrow this belly won’t fit the same shirt. Good. I’ll bring a bigger one.
Creator’s Calling
Age 26, just out of the shower. The apartment desk. 5’9″ and somewhere past 360. Belly huge and heavy, pooling onto my thighs, limbs thick but undefined, voice gone deeper, breath gone slower.
Fan on full blast and the sweat still pooled behind my knees. I’d showered standing with my hands on the wall, belly against the tile, the water trying and failing to cool me down. Now I’m back at the desk, no shirt, gym shorts stretched low under a gut that sits on my thighs like it owns the ground. Warm, dense, settled.
My browser’s still open to the thread I posted last night. A cropped photo, chest and gut and thighs, no face. I figured I’d get a couple of likes and feel stupid about it. There are thirty-seven comments. That gut is gorgeous. Would kill to fall asleep under that belly. How are you real. I scrolled and tried to feel nothing and felt everything anyway, mostly heat and that old thing underneath it I still don’t have a word for, which by now is familiar ground.
I always assumed I’d slim down after college, that once the job locked in I’d find some sensible middle: gym after work, dinners that made sense, easy weekends. Instead the office drained me dry. Meetings, deadlines, and the weight kept climbing, until one day I stopped pretending I was going to turn it around. No cutting, no tracking, no fixing. Just growing, and people watching me do it.
I started recording audio because I couldn’t stand to be seen. Photos, mirrors, any of it. But I could talk: comfort pieces, ASMR, slow body-praise whispered into a cheap mic, the kind of thing I’d never once aimed at myself. At first it felt like a game, the idea that maybe one person out there would want what I was saying and that would be enough.
Somewhere in the middle of it, escaping the job and growing past every line I swore I’d never cross, I worked out what I was actually doing. I was recording the things I’d needed to hear. Building little worlds where weight got worshipped instead of corrected, where soft meant safe instead of failed, where somebody stayed afterward instead of flinching, where growing made you worth more rather than less. Same kid as ever, really, still trying to hand other people the shelter I could never find the door to myself.
Then the messages started coming. Your voice made me feel safe. I didn’t know I was allowed to like my body until I heard yours. I had no idea what to do with that, because I still hadn’t let myself like mine. I just liked that they did. Turns out I could give away permission by the bucketful and still not figure out how to sign my own.
When I lean forward the rolls press into the desk edge. My breath slows if I talk too long on a full stomach. I spread wide across the chair and it creaks if I move too fast, and walking, my thighs run high and hot and the tails drag behind me like anchors, so most days I feel like I’m moving through honey. But at night with the mic live and nobody watching, I feel something steadier: massive, yes, and also grounded, present, like all this weight might finally add up to something on purpose.
I didn’t build this body the way I built the last one. No counting, no cutting, no plan, and somehow it still became something people want. Maybe I’m even allowed to want it too. I’m not there yet, but I can see it from here, which is further than I’ve ever gotten.
I still don’t show my face, not even in the cropped clips. I tell people it’s about mystery and control. The honest answer is I’m not sure what I’ll see when I look straight down the lens. Every upload chips a little more off that wall, though. Every whisper, every comment, a little less silence than the night before.
Summer Shift
August, the last days before the move to Morphelio. A roadside diner bathroom, 1:23 a.m. 5’9″ and 194 pounds. Muscle still in charge but layered now with something softer, belly heavy and tight with bloat. Two full tails, dragging low, warm with salt and sand.
We hit the beach right before sunset, the air thick with brine and somebody’s beer breath. Shirts came off fast out of pure habit and I followed without thinking. Then the wind found my fur and the low light found my belly and I felt watched, and the eyes that mattered were my own, the part still measuring me against tighter.
Somebody whistled. Somebody shoved me toward the water. I laughed and ran with it and pretended the self-consciousness had no teeth.
Later, dried off, the group scattered into little knots of talk, and one of the track guys from another school pulled me behind the rocks. Broad shoulders, blue trunks. He kissed me first, pressed in and waited to see if I’d move, and I did, clumsy, never even got his name. It happened fast, like our bodies had agreed on something neither of us had said, his hand skimming the curve of my gut while we kissed, and I let it. I think I liked it. After spending so long with no word for the wanting, I almost didn’t recognize it once it finally had somewhere to land.
We packed into the diner after, all of us sunburned and half-drunk, fries and shakes and three orders of pancakes, everyone talking over everyone about dorms and majors and which schools threw the best parties. We were already gone, really. Already somewhere else.
I ate everything, no timing, no tracking. My gut swelled tight under the table until it pushed at my waistband, and I leaned back and rubbed it once before I’d decided whether I was allowed to. Logan caught it and lobbed a roll at me. You’re gonna hibernate through freshman year. I flipped him off. It was funny. I laughed.
Now I’m in the bathroom with my shirt pushed halfway up, watching my belly round out under the light, and it isn’t only the food. I can tell. There’s a layer settling over everything I used to define myself by. I press into it, feel the weight shift, warm and dense, my abs flexing somewhere underneath, still strong. I can’t decide whether I’m proud of it or just holding very still and hoping it isn’t happening. The light buzzes overhead. My face looks older in this mirror. Fuller. A stranger I don’t mind meeting.
I used to earn every inch of this body, every line and cut and clawed-back pound. This one arrived on its own, no permission asked, and I honestly can’t tell yet whether that means I’m losing the grip I’ve held so hard for so long or finally setting some of it down.
Ryker’s voice still turns up sometimes. Discipline separates the good from the great. So does Gavin’s. You’re not wrong for wanting softness. Tonight they’re both just echoes. Neither of them stopped me from kissing a stranger behind the rocks, or from eating until I had to pop the top button on my jeans, or from standing here reading my own belly like there’s something written under the skin I’m finally getting close to making out.
Campus Growth Spurt
Sophomore year, second semester, late at night. Dorm room. 5’9″ and 235 pounds. Powerfully built but thick all over now, gut heavy, thighs dense, arms stronger than ever and rounder for it. Two tails slow in the heat, plum fur slick with sweat, amber belly fur pushing out under the shirt the way it just does these days.
Came back from a house party where somebody had strapped a keg to a dolly and called it engineering. I’d already put away enough takeout for two before we left, wings and cheese fries and something breaded I don’t remember ordering, and the beer stacked on top of all of it.
I peeled my shirt off before I even reached the bed, too tight, stuck to the sweat at the small of my back. My roommate and I were laughing at something on his phone and then at me. You’re gonna explode, he said, and lifted his camera. I groaned and let my arms flop wide, gut domed up and rising with every breath, and told him I couldn’t even roll over. My own voice sounded thick in my ears. I wasn’t drunk anymore, just full enough to feel the whole round shape of myself.
He filmed me fighting my way upright, three tries, panting, the weight of me settling into my lap, and we both laughed. But I caught his eyes snag on me a beat too long, and I caught myself catching it. He sent me the clip later and called it motivation. I saved it, and I won’t pretend it was for the reason he gave.
I used to lift for speed, for applause, for the right angle in the mirror. Lately I moved through a room like I was claiming more of it just by being there. At first I called it a bulk, still on the plan, still a number with a purpose, but the plan blurred a little more with every plate of seconds, every night I went to bed stuffed and warm and humming and unsure that what I felt was discomfort.
Somewhere in there I started reading. Googling words that snagged on something in me and following them out: gainer, feedee, inflation, transformation, mpreg. Half of it I didn’t understand. The part that stopped me cold was recognizing myself in it. The thing I’d carried since I was a cub, the wanting with no name, the certainty I was the only one shaped this way, turned out to have a whole vocabulary and a whole crowd of people already speaking it. I wasn’t a category of one. Something I’d kept welded shut for years cracked open right there at the desk, half relief and half a shame I couldn’t account for, like I’d flunked a test nobody had handed me the rules to.
This body had stopped being about discipline. It was about wanting something, and the open question was whose wanting it answered to: mine, or the version of me other people kept reaching for, or some third thing I hadn’t met yet.
Ryker always said I was building a machine. Gavin said softness could be its own kind of pride. Neither of them mentioned what happens when the thing you’ve spent years building turns out to be the thing you secretly wanted, and you have to decide whether that’s a problem. I had a feeling this didn’t end where I’d assumed it would, and I was no longer sure I wanted it to.
The First Page
May 9, 2025. Late, rain still ticking on the skylight. The attic loft over Paw and Plume, the cat-spirit café in the Seaport District of Morphelio. Tonight I’m 5’9″ and 295 pounds. Belly round and proud under a tank that’s earned its softness, legs still carrying their gym miles.
Went down to drop my empty caramel-chai mug in the bus-tub Nylo leaves by the side door after close. The café was dark but still warm with toasted oats and the last of the vanilla scones. On the climb back up, dishwasher steam ghosting through the floorboards, a thought nipped my ear: line up your past, page by page, before it shapeshifts on you again.
So here’s a diary. Where I’ve been, where I am, and whether there’s a thread running through all of it. The body, the work, the three tails. We’ll get to the tails.
The hope is that if I write it honest I’ll finally see the shape of the thing. The fear is that ink has no undo key. Some mornings I worship these stretch marks and some mornings I’d take them off with a butter knife, and putting both feelings on one page makes both of them true. That’s the part that scares me.
Heart’s doing little parkour tricks anyway. Belly’s heavy from one too many curry buns. Quads are buzzing because I took the stairs two at a time, that eager to start.
A few rules before I lose my nerve. No wallowing and no sugarcoating; the cringe and the win share the page. And no sprinting it. One era at a time, breathe, then flip. Intervals, like the old track days.
Tonight’s curry buns are already negotiating with tomorrow’s deadlifts, which feels about right for where I’m headed. And I owe this page the whole story of Nylo and the rest of the café’s cat spirits someday, starting with the first time they all eyed my tails like they’d seen a ghost.
Kitsune Cub
The before-school summers. Rain and moss in the air, the whole world holding its breath after a thunderclap that never quite landed. The woods past our den, where the meadow gave out to creek banks and slow fireflies. Back then I was all wire and wind. Skinny, paw pads stained green from clover, claws chewed short because my mouth always needed a job. One tail, deep plum going dark at the tip, barely thicker than a paintbrush.
Start at the start. Before the loft, before the café, before there were three of them.
The woods felt like mine. They seemed to know I was magic even on the days I’d been told magic wasn’t allowed. There was a charge in me with nowhere to go; it would surge up when I was alone and drain out the second anyone looked.
I used to chase one firefly in particular, the one that blinked a little bluer than the rest. I decided it glowed that way for me. I’d whisper to it like it could hear me. Just let me catch you, so I know I’m real. Dramatic kid. I stand by him.
That summer I ran the town fun-run barefoot, moss underfoot, wind pouring through my ribs. Tore the ribbon clean. The applause came fast and stopped faster, and I was already tugging my hoodie over my tail when I caught the look from a human on the porch, arms crossed. His face had gone tight, the way you look at something spilled that you’d rather not touch. The sparks fizzled off my paw before I’d had one second to feel proud of them.
I’d won that same race the year before, and that was the summer I stopped running with the other boys. One of them, Chase, tried to tag me mid-game. I shoved him off without thinking, sure he’d shove back laughing. He didn’t. He folded up small in the grass with a hand over his ribs and went quiet, and I stood there over him understanding for the first time exactly how strong I was. Strong enough to hurt the people I was supposed to protect. I wanted to pick him up and dust him off. My paws just hovered. The coach came and checked on Chase without once looking at me, and when I turned around the other boys were watching me with this awful certainty, like they’d already settled the question of what I was.
After that I still ran. I just never ran toward anyone again.
There was an older boy two houses down. I couldn’t have told you what I wanted from him, only that I wanted to be near him, that I’d imagine sitting tucked against his side with nothing expected of me. I had no name for the wanting, and that was the lonely part, because everybody else’s feelings seemed to come with labels and mine showed up blank. I couldn’t ask without admitting I was already standing outside something.
So I did what I did with any feeling too big for the room. Dropped to the floor in the dark and pushed until my arms shook and the heat drained out through the boards, leaving something tighter and more acceptable behind. The wonder never actually left me, by the way. It just turned and pointed inward.
That’s how I learned praise came with conditions. It showed up for being useful, or quiet, or funny at the right volume, and never just for being real. They loved the running. The runner was optional. I started chasing the sound of applause like air and hating how much I needed it.
Be strong, but gentle. Loud enough to win, quiet enough to disappear after. I still catch myself moving like a room is watching.
Late that summer Coach Ryker caught me tearing across the dry creek bed and shook his head with half a laugh, like he’d seen something wild enough to be worth keeping an eye on. Come find me when your tail catches up to your legs, he said, and ruffled my hair on his way past. My chest went hot with a pride I had no shape for yet.
Up in the trees a cat-shaped shimmer watched me. Green eyes, a tail ticking like a slow clock, no sound at all. For once, being looked at didn’t ask anything of me. I didn’t know yet that I’d meet those eyes again one day behind a café counter, or how much side-eye one set of cat spirits could aim at a fox with too many tails.
And right before I went inside, the blue firefly came back. It landed on my tail-tip, pulsed once, and was gone, and my fur glowed faintly where it had touched, like I’d been marked for something I wasn’t ready to understand.
I told nobody. Not about the light, not about the green eyes, not about standing out there afterward with my fur still glowing, trying to work out whether I’d been chosen for something or warned off it.
Varsity Vulpine
Early September, the last sun-heavy week before the chill. Birch and scorched rubber off the track. Silverpine Junior Academy. Lanes fenced in chain-link, bleachers hot enough to burn. By then I was 5’7″, an early bloomer, lean but dense, the kind of muscle that twitches before you tell it to. One plum tail gone black at the tip, restless. A second one pushing up under the skin, always aching. Last year’s singlet biting into my lats, the tail slit no longer lining up.
This is the era I gave a name to back on the first page without explaining it. Here’s where it earned one.
I was growing faster than anything around me. The mirror said strong. I felt uncontainable, which is a different thing.
Running stayed the one place it all made sense. Stride after stride, blue sparks snapping off my heels, and I’d cross the line and keep going because I didn’t want it to end. Coach Ryker would catch up at the grass and grin like I was a fire still learning its edges. Speed’s only half the hunt, Reynard. Weights start next week. Time to build the rest of the engine. I lived for that, the singling-out more than the lifting, the proof that the size meant something to somebody. I’d have run through the fence for one more sentence like it.
The locker room was the harder room. Thick air, detergent and sweat, everyone too loud to hear themselves. Gavin sat across from me peeling off his shirt slow and careful, taking up as little space as he could manage, and he hadn’t yet learned to flinch away from me. He muttered something to himself and Logan caught it. What? Gavin shook his head, and Logan shoved his shoulder into the locker, hard enough to own the moment. Don’t mumble like a freak. Gavin flinched, and I laughed, fast and loud, exactly loud enough to put myself on the safe side of the joke. Relax, Logan, he just talks to himself ’cause nobody else will. They cracked up. Gavin didn’t. He looked at me like this was the part he’d stopped hoping would go differently.
After, I sat counting grout lines and pressing my claws into my palm just to feel something honest. I wasn’t even ashamed yet. I’d gotten good at floating an inch above the part of me that was.
The truth I couldn’t have said out loud: I watched Gavin more than anyone. Part of it was wanting to be near him. The rest was that he moved through the world like nothing about him needed fixing, and I envied that down to the bone. I wanted to believe my own body didn’t have to be rewritten before it counted. I still had no name for any of it, which was the lonely part, same as always.
That night the whole day looped: Ryker’s voice, the red on Gavin’s neck, my own laugh ringing like it belonged to a stranger. Then the loop softened into a dream where I was sitting on warm porch boards and Gavin crossed the yard slow, like he wasn’t sure I’d meant any of it, and got close, and tucked himself against me, and I held him steady while the night went quiet. For once my hands knew how to do the one thing I was sure they’d only ever break.
I woke with my arms curled around nothing and my chest aching like something was trapped in it. I sat on the edge of the bed and didn’t move, because moving would make it real, the holding and the fact that awake I never had and never would.
That whole year ran on evidence. Every medal, every extra rep, every new ridge of muscle was supposed to add up to somebody I could live inside. So I started managing myself like equipment. Skipping meals to stay tight, then doubling them to grow, then cutting again, and calling it strategy when it was just control loud enough to drown the rest of me out. The tightness felt like safety. I know now what it actually cost.
The size was becoming its own problem too. Too much fur where the human kids were still smooth, a voice that dropped a year early, shoulders that quit fitting the school desks. Adults started looking at me like I ought to know better, like I was already dangerous just by standing in a room. Some days I felt like Achilles running into the wind, and the pride curdled the instant a face changed. I wanted to be strong without making a room go careful. Admired without being misread. So I chased big and straight and stoic and easy-to-read so hard I lost track of what the first danger had even been.
A few days later Ryker’s lift sheet turned up in my locker, every line circled in red like a dare. And Gavin handed me a dog-eared book of myths without a word, like he’d decided on his own that I was worth talking to again. We didn’t say much after that. The book just started traveling back and forth between us, our handwriting stacking in the margins, a whole conversation we could keep going without ever having to look at each other.
The ache in that second tail wasn’t pain. It was a reminder that no matter how hard I performed the easy version of myself, something underneath was still, quietly, coming in.
The Bulk Build
Late junior year, after hours. The locker room again, fluorescents and cold tile. 5’9″ and 182 pounds. Muscle packed tight to a compact frame, belly taut and glossy from a bulk shake. Two tails now, the second still raw at the base, more weight to swing when I walked fast.
This is the one where the building stopped being mine.
I locked out 315 for the first time and the bar snapped like a whip, sharp and metallic, ringing down into the bone. My arms didn’t even shake. Pecs blown up like plating, fur along my biceps standing wet and flared, the amber across my chest bold against the plum. I racked it and looked around half-expecting a sound. Ryker just nodded, small and controlled, like I’d done exactly what was expected and nothing past it.
After, stripped to the waist, I studied my own belly in the mirror while the sweat cooled, domed and glossy from the shake I’d slammed before lifting. I ran a hand over it, claws dragging back through the gold fur, until I found them: the firework-thin stretch marks down my lower lats. You couldn’t see them unless you went looking. I always went looking.
I never pictured myself on a wrestling mat. Fall was football, spring was track, two uniforms and two scripts already memorized. Then Ryker caught me in the weight room one evening and slid a sign-up sheet across the bench like it was already settled. Upper bracket. You’ve got the mass. You’ll toss these lightweights like lawn chairs. I laughed, mostly because I didn’t know what to do with the way he was looking at me, like I was a machine he’d built and was proud of. Some part of me wanted to belong to someone. It was easier than answering who I was doing all of this for.
So I signed, and the margin for error vanished. I had to stay massive enough to look the part and hit a number exactly. Muscle counted as praise, fat as failure, and every weigh-in turned into a verdict I couldn’t argue with. One pound over and everything I’d built tipped into too much.
That’s when I started running myself like equipment again, except worse. Weighing in before class and after lunch, sometimes twice more before bed, just to confirm the number was doing whatever I needed it to that day. The first time I missed weight I jogged in sweats until the room blurred. The second time I lost the thread entirely and ate everything I’d been denying myself, and then undid it, the way I’d read you could, alone in a bathroom with my hands shaking too hard to unlock my phone. I told myself it was a one-time correction and memorized the safer numbers the next morning anyway.
If I could reach that kid, I’d skip the part about the scale and tell him the real danger: how fast a system stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the floor.
The second tail had been pushing through for weeks, and it finished the job mid-rep: a sharp internal pop, the bar down before I’d decided to drop it, the room going still around me. I didn’t have to look. I could feel the air change, feel it behind me, raw and heavy and swinging a little, brand new. I hated that everyone got to watch it happen. One more thing I’d have to explain to people who’d already made up their minds. I picked the weight back up and finished the set, because I wasn’t going to walk out while they were still looking.
I used to think getting bigger meant getting closer to the version of me that counted, the one they clapped for, the one Ryker nodded at. Standing in that locker room, I couldn’t have told you who the body was for. I tracked every calorie and rep like scripture and none of it felt like mine, and the parts I swore I was controlling kept changing on their own, on the scale and in the mirror and mid-lift. If that was power, I couldn’t work out why it felt so much like vanishing.
Gavin loaned me the myth book again, spine cracked, pages soft at the corners. One story was circled in pen: a selkie boy who hid his sealskin under the bleachers so nobody would know what he was, slipping between two worlds and belonging to neither. He could’ve gone back to the sea, Gavin said. Maybe it just felt safer in between. Then he looked at me like he already understood the whole thing. You should write your own version. One where he stops hiding. I didn’t answer. I never stopped thinking about it.
