Chapter 2: The Morning After
The morning light was a rude guest, slicing through the gaps in her blinds and painting hot stripes across Sally’s closed eyelids. She groaned, turning her face away, seeking the cool dark of her pillow. Her mouth tasted stale. Her body felt heavy, languid, but thrumming with a peculiar, residual electricity.
Then she felt it.
A pressure. A firm, constant presence against her abdomen. Not the soft give of a pillow, but something unyielding and full.
Her eyes snapped open.
The green balloon was there, right where she’d left it. But it wasn’t resting. It was pressed tight against the curve of her belly, distorted by the contact. And it was… moving. Not floating. Pulsing. A slow, rhythmic inflation and deflation, as if it were breathing in time with her own lungs.
“What the fuck,” she whispered, the words cracking in her dry throat.
She tried to sit up. A strange resistance held her down. She looked at her own body under the thin sheet.
Her Blow Up Dolls t-shirt was straining across her chest, the fabric stretched taut over shapes that were not her own. Her breasts, normally modest, were swollen mounds, pushing aggressively against the soft cotton. The print of the lead singer’s face was distorted, widened into a grotesque parody. She lifted the sheet with a trembling hand.
Her lounge pants, with their cheerful balloon print, were digging painfully into her hips and waist. Her stomach was a smooth, hard dome, rounding out like a second moon beneath the fabric. The elastic waistband was a cruel, biting tourniquet.
This wasn’t bloating. This wasn’t a dream.
This was geometry.
A sharp, terrified inhale caught in her throat. As she breathed in, she felt a corresponding expansion. A soft, internal whoosh. Her breasts tightened further. The balloon against her belly pulsed, a sympathetic echo.
“No,” she said, louder. “Stop.”
She flung the sheet off and swung her legs out of bed, a clumsy, unbalanced motion. Her center of gravity was all wrong. She stood, wobbling, her hands going to her distended stomach. It was firm. Warm. The skin felt strange—smooth, too smooth, pulled tight like the surface of a drum.
She stumbled to the full-length mirror nailed to the back of her closet door, her gait a wide, awkward waddle.
The reflection stole the air from her lungs.
A woman she barely recognized stared back. Her green hair was a wild mess, a stark contrast to the surreal changes in her body. Her t-shirt was on the verge of ripping at the seams, her breasts straining the neckline, their outlines sharp and full. Her stomach was a perfect, grotesque hemisphere, so round and tight it looked like she’d swallowed a beach ball. The balloon-print pants were stretched obscenely, the printed balloons themselves bloated and distorted.
But it was her skin that made a low whimper escape her lips.
A glossy sheen coated her. Not sweat. It was a reflective, rubber-like finish. The morning light gleamed off the curve of her belly, off the slopes of her breasts. She touched her arm. It felt smooth, slightly resistant, like the powder-dusted surface of a brand-new balloon.
The green balloon, her companion from the night, drifted over and bumped gently against the back of her head. She shrieked, batting it away. It bobbed placidly to the corner of the ceiling and stayed there, spinning slowly.
This was impossible. A panic attack. A psychotic break. She needed to breathe, to calm down. She took a deep, deliberate breath.
Whoosh.
The sound was inside her. Her breasts pushed further against the tortured fabric. A seam on her t-shirt, under her arm, gave way with a quiet rip. Her belly tightened, the skin stretching another impossible millimeter, the glossy sheen brightening. Arousal, hot and immediate, stabbed through the panic, a traitorous lightning bolt straight to her core. Her pussy throbbed, wet and insistent. The sensation of being so full, so taut, was terrifying.
It was also deeply, shamefully exciting.
“Oh, god,” she moaned, not to any deity, but to the reflection, to the room, to Sarah who wasn’t there. Her hands roamed over the dome of her stomach, feeling the incredible tightness, the lack of give. She pressed. It pushed back, a firm, living pressure. Her clit pulsed in time with her racing heart.
She remembered Sarah’s words. The tension is yours.
This was the ultimate tension. She was the balloon.
The thought unspooled something dark and hungry in her gut. Her fingers, trembling, trailed down from her stomach, over the straining waistband of her pants, to the hot ache between her legs. The fabric was already damp. She rubbed her palm hard against herself, a frantic, grinding motion, her eyes glued to her swollen reflection. The pleasure was sharp, twisted, fused inextricably with the terror of her transformation.
She needed to see. She needed to know.
Fumbling, she hooked her thumbs into the elastic waistband of her lounge pants and pushed them down, over the vast curve of her hips. They caught at her thighs, then fell in a puddle around her ankles. She wasn’t wearing underwear.
Her pussy was exposed, slick and glistening, a stark, wet contrast to the dry, glossy latex-like skin surrounding it. The lips were swollen, darker. Aching. She spread her legs wider, an awkward movement with her new balance. The cool air from the room kissed her wetness, making her shudder.
One hand stayed on her belly, feeling its impossible firmness. The other dove between her legs.
Her fingers found her clit, a hard, needy pearl. She circled it, once, twice, a whimper breaking from her lips. The sensation was magnified, echoing through her taut, overfilled body. Every nerve was on the surface. Every touch was a shockwave.
“Fuck,” she hissed, her head falling back. Her eyes closed, but the image of her transformed self was burned on the inside of her lids. She imagined herself as that blue balloon on Sarah’s screen, at the perfect point of tension. She imagined a nail, pressing into the tight, round curve of her belly.
Her fingers moved faster, her breath coming in ragged gasps. With each gasp, she felt herself expand infinitesimally. The stretch was a exquisite pain, a filling that stoked the fire lower down. She was a vessel being pumped full, nearing her limit.
She slid two fingers inside herself. They slipped in easily, she was so wet, but she was also tight, clenching around the intrusion. She fucked herself with them, a rough, punishing rhythm, her hips jerking forward to meet her own hand. The slapping sound of skin on skin, the wet, filthy squelch of her own arousal filled the quiet room. She pictured the pop. Not of the green balloon by the ceiling. Of herself. The catastrophic release. The ultimate fuck.
“Yeah… yeah, gonna…” she chanted, a broken mantra. Her fingers worked her clit furiously. The pressure inside her built—sexual, physical, a screaming tautness in every cell. She was a balloon knotted at the neck, straining, singing that high, unseen note.
The orgasm, when it ripped through her, was not a wave but a detonation.
It was a silent scream, her mouth open in a soundless ‘O’. Her body bowed, rigid, her back arching off the door. Her internal muscles clenched in a violent, rhythmic spasm around her fingers. The pleasure was so intense it whited out her vision, a searing blast that felt like it was tearing her apart from the inside. For a suspended second, she was nothing but pure, shattering sensation—the culmination of every squeak, every stretch, every forbidden thought from the night before.
She collapsed against the closet door, sliding down it to the floor, a tangle of glossy limbs and heaving breaths. The cool wood pressed against her back. Her spent body throbbed. The acute arousal faded, leaving behind the deep, pervasive reality of her transformation.
She was still full. Still tight. Still glossily, undeniably changed.
She pulled her fingers from herself, bringing them to her nose. The scent of her own sex, musky and human, mixed with the sweet, artificial latex smell that now seemed to emanate from her very pores.
From the ceiling, the green balloon drifted down, coming to rest softly on the immense, rounded plane of her stomach. It sat there, a perfect, placid green disc on the ivory curve.
Sally stared at it. Then she looked at the laptop on her desk, dark and silent.
The ghost of the pop echoed in her bones. The tension, however, remained. It had just changed shape.
She had no idea how to undo this. No idea if she even wanted to.
A strange, hysterical calm settled over her. She lifted a hand, watching the light play on the rubbery sheen of her forearm. She touched the balloon on her belly. It squeaked softly.
The potential was no longer in the bag in the closet. It was in the mirror. It was in her.
She took a breath, a small one this time, bracing for the whoosh. It came, a faint internal whisper. The balloon on her stomach wobbled.
A slow, unsettling smile touched her slick, human lips.