Chapter 4: Vibrating Revenge
RESTART
The world was a distant, muffled thing. Sound came through layers of padding—the constant hum of the house’s central air, the faint drone of a game show from his parents’ room, the wet, labored rhythm of his own breath. He was in his bedroom, a place that had shrunk around him or that he had expanded to fill. The half-unpacked boxes from his brief, aborted notion of “moving out” after graduation were now permanent fixtures, their contents—old comics, video game cases, sketchbooks—spilling onto the floor like viscera from a gutted animal.
He lay on his bed, a twin-sized torture rack that groaned under his weight. The mattress bowed severely in the middle, cradling him in a vinyl-covered embrace. He was naked. The air was cool on his fur, but beneath the great, overlapping shelves of his body, everything was hot and damp. He stared at the ceiling. A glow-in-the-dark star, peeled at one corner, hung directly above him. He’d put it there when he was nine. He couldn’t reach it now even if he stood on the bed, which was an impossibility.
A different vibration started. Not internal, this time. External.
It was a low, persistent buzz against the inner wall of his right thigh. His phone. He’d lost it three days ago in the床上 sheets, the food wrappers, the topological nightmare of his own body. He’d given up looking, letting its battery die, a quiet surrender. But someone must have plugged it in. His mother, probably, tidying the catastrophe.
The buzz came again. A call.
It wasn't just sound. The plastic and glass device was pressed firmly into the soft, sweat-slicked fur of his groin, nestled deep in the valley where his colossal thigh met the even more colossal mound of his lower belly. With each buzz, the vibration traveled through the dense fat, a weird, diffuse hum that resonated in his buried genitals.
He froze.
Another buzz. The phone skittered a millimeter, the hard edge rubbing against his perineum.
A low, involuntary sound escaped him. It wasn’t a moan of pleasure, not exactly. It was a noise of startled, confused sensation. He held his breath. The buzzing stopped. A second of silence, thick with the smell of old pizza and his own unwashed animal scent.
Then it started again. Insistent. Bzzzzt. Bzzzzt. Bzzzzt.
Penny’s name would be flashing on the screen. He knew it. She was the only one who called anymore. The texts had dwindled to one-word answers from him, then to none. But she still called. Every few days. A ghost from the world of movement and light.
With each cycle of vibration, the strange feeling intensified. It was a deep, internal massage, a rhythmic thrumming right at the root of him. His cock, hidden beneath the pendulous swell of his gut, began to stiffen. It was a slow, pressured inflation, trapped and straining against the heavy weight pinning it down.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered to the stars.
He didn’t move to answer. He didn’t even try to dig the phone out. Instead, he shifted his hips, a minute adjustment, grinding himself down against the vibrating rectangle. The sensation sharpened. It was filthy. It was absurd. The phone buzzed, voicemail picking up, then shortly after, started buzzing again. She was calling back.
Bzzzzt. Bzzzzt.
He pressed down harder, a pathetic, grinding hump. The pleasure was dislocated, impersonal. It wasn’t his hand or his imagination. It was a machine, a ghost-girl’s insistence, translated into a weird electricity in his flesh. His breath came in short, sharp pants. His hands, which lay like stranded sea mammals on the continent of his belly, clenched into fists.
He imagined her face, not as it was, but as it might be now—confused, hurt, angry. He imagined her voice saying his name through the tinny speaker, muffled by his own fat. The vibration seemed to sync with his heartbeat, which was pounding in his ears.
He was close. It was building too fast, a shaky, precarious tower. He was grunting, drooling a little onto his chest. The phone buzzed on, a stubborn little engine of stimulation buried in the meat of him.
“Calling… calling… fucking calling…” he chanted, a desperate mantra.
With a final, sustained vibration, the call timed out. The silence was absolute. He was poised on the edge, trembling, the need acute and unresolved. A whine of frustration tore from his throat.
Then it started again.
BZZZZT. BZZZZT.
That did it. The renewed, relentless buzz pushed him over. His back arched as much as it could, a slight tremor in the mountain range of his body. He came, a thick, pulsing rush that had nowhere to go, hot wetness flooding the trapped space beneath him, mixing with the old sweat. The orgasm was a convulsive, full-body shudder that made the bedsprings scream and his stomach quake like a bowl of gelatin. His eyes rolled back, seeing nothing but the dark behind his lids.
As the tremors subsided, he felt the phone, now slick with his sweat, slip deeper. It slid down the soaked fur of his inner thigh, falling into the dark, warm crevice between his leg and the mattress, completely swallowed. Gone.
He lay completely still, a beached leviathan. The only sound was his ragged breathing and the faint, tinny voice from the depths of the bedding saying, “Hey, it’s me again. Just… call me back, okay? Or text. Something. I’m… I’m worried.”
The message ended. The room was silent.
Slowly, he reached a hand down. He patted the vast, quivering landscape of his belly, then over the side, fingers probing the soaked sheets. He couldn’t find the phone. He was too tired, too heavy, too utterly spent to search properly. He let his arm flop back onto the bed.
There was a knock on his door. Two sharp raps. “Gumball? You awake in there?” Nicole’s voice.
Panic, cold and thin, sliced through the post-coital fog. He was naked, covered in drying sweat and cum, the room stank of sex and salt, and his ex-girlfriend’s worried voice was literally trapped somewhere in his bed.
“Yeah,” he croaked.
“Dinner’s in twenty. Meatloaf towers. With that gravy you like.” A pause. He could feel her standing there, waiting. “Are you… decent?”
He looked down at himself. The glorious, terrifying ruin of his body. The stained fur. The sheer, undeniable mass of it.
“Yeah,” he said again, the word hollow. “I’m decent.”
He heard her footsteps recede. He continued to stare at the glow-in-the-dark star. A stupid childhood thing. It wouldn’t glow anymore. The magic had worn out years ago.
He knew he should feel shame. A crushing, existential horror at what he’d just done, at what he was becoming. He waited for it. It didn’t come. All he felt was a deep, vacuum-like emptiness. And beneath that, a faint, nascent twinge of hunger. The meatloaf would be good. The gravy would be rich. He thought about the phone, buried somewhere in the mess. He’d find it later. Or he wouldn’t. It didn’t seem to matter. The world outside the room, outside the relentless cycle of filling and emptying, was just a faint, buzzing idea. And he had learned how to make that buzz mean nothing at all.
And he had learned how to make that buzz mean nothing at all. The meatloaf helped. It was a geological construct on his plate, a layered cliff face of dense gray beef and binder, slathered in a viscous, salty brown lava. He used both hands, a fork in one to shovel, a buttery dinner roll in the other to sop, his jaw working in slow, endless rotations until the plate was clean and his gut was a solid, agonizing sphere of leaden fullness.
He waddled back to his room, his gait a wide, shuffling sway to accommodate the new mass. The world narrowed to the fire in his esophagus and the crushing pressure against his diaphragm. He fell onto the bed, not lying down but collapsing back at an angle, propped against the headboard, his breath whistling. His hands instinctively went to the distended mound, pressing with dull fascination at the undeniable hardness there.
He had just begun the familiar, post-feast ritual of unbuttoning his straining pants when a new sound cut through the house’s murmur. Not the TV. A voice. A female voice, talking to his mother in the living room. Light, melodic, achingly familiar. Penny.
Ice flooded his veins. He froze, fingers hooked in his waistband. He heard his mother’s bright, plastic cheer. “He’s in his room! I’m sure he’d love to see you!” Footsteps approached, too light to be Nicole’s. A tentative knock.
“Gumball?” Penny’s voice was right on the other side of the door.
He looked around in animal panic. The room was a forensic portrait of decay. The lost phone was still buried somewhere in the sweaty trenches of his bedding or his body. He was bloated, shirt stained with gravy, pants digging a deep red furrow into his bloated waist. “Uh. Yeah. One sec.”
He sucked in his gut, a futile gesture that only made his head swim, and yanked the button closed. He grabbed a random, crusty shirt from the floor and pulled it on. It was too small, riding up his stomach immediately. “Come in.”
The door opened slowly. Penny stood there, backlit by the hall light. She’d changed her hair. It was shorter. She looked like a visitor from a forgotten country, all bright eyes and hesitant smiles. Her gaze took him in, and he saw the micro-expressions flicker across her face: the shock, swiftly buried under concern, then a forced neutrality. “Hey.”
“Hey.” The word came out as a grunt.
An eternity passed in the space of her next glance around the room. She stepped in, closing the door softly behind her. The smell of his habitat—sweat, old food, cum—seemed to thicken with her presence. “Your mom said you lost your phone.”
“Yeah. It’s around here somewhere.” He gestured vaguely, his arm sweeping over the disaster zone of his bed.
“I kept calling. It was going to voicemail, then it just died.” She took another step, her eyes not on him now but scanning the sheets. “You didn’t answer any of my texts.”
“Been busy.”
“Doing what?”
He just looked at her, at his own massive hands resting on the dome of his stomach. The answer was in the room, in the air, in the very fabric of his being. She followed his look and her lips pressed into a thin line. She wasn’t here to fight. She was here on a rescue mission. “Let’s find it. I’ll call it.”
She pulled out her own phone. A second later, a faint, muffled buzzing began. It wasn’t in the sheets. The sound was dull, buried. It was coming from him.
He felt the color drain from his face. The memory of the vibrations, of what he’d done, roared back. The phone was still on him, or in him, swallowed by the folds of his own flesh. Penny’s eyes widened, tracking the sound. It was emanating from the deep, shadowed canyon where his stomach flowed into his thigh, right where he’d ground himself against it.
“It’s… it’s on you,” she said, her voice oddly flat.
“I can get it,” he mumbled, his face burning. He tried to lean forward, to reach, but his stomach was a wall of painful concrete. He couldn’t bend. He pawed clumsily at the general area, his fat fingers patting the surface, unable to delve into the deep, sweaty crevasse where the buzz hummed.
“Jesus, Gumball.” The pity in her voice was worse than disgust. She put her phone down, the buzzing continuing its persistent, accusing drone. “Let me.”
“No, it’s fine, I…”
“You can’t reach it.” She said it not as an insult, but a simple, devastating fact. She knelt beside the bed. Her scent, something clean like soap and rain, cut through the room’s foulness. He held his breath. Her hand, small and cool, touched the hot fur of his lower belly. He flinched.
She paused, then pushed gently. Her fingers slid into the tight, damp space where his enormous gut met his leg. He groaned, a mix of shame and sudden, sharp arousal. The buzz of the phone vibrated against her knuckles. “It’s deep,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.
She pushed further, her entire hand disappearing into the fleshy fold. Her fingers probed, slick with his sweat, tracing the hard edge of the phone. He was rigid, trembling. Her wrist brushed against his buried cock, which was already swelling, trapped and eager. She felt it. Her eyes flicked up to his, and he saw a complex storm there—horror, fascination, a heartbreaking sadness.
“Found it,” she whispered. Her fingers curled around the device and she began to slowly extract it. The plastic dragged against his sensitive, hidden flesh. As the phone cleared the fold, his cock, suddenly freed from the pressure, sprang partially into view, thick and ruddy against the matted blue fur.
They both stared at it. The buzzing phone was in her hand, dripping with his perspiration. The air crackled. The look on her face shifted, the pity burning away into something darker, more visceral. She dropped the phone on the floor with a clatter.
Her hand didn’t retreat. It returned, not searching now, but claiming. Her fingers wrapped around his shaft, and her touch was nothing like his own detached, frantic grip. It was specific, intentional, a cool, firm ring that made his hips jerk. “This is what you do now?” she asked, her voice low and rough. “You just lie here and get off with your phone buried in your fat?”
He couldn’t speak. He could only nod, a desperate, shameful bob of his head.
She made a sound, a sharp exhale that wasn’t quite a laugh. Then she bent her head. She didn’t kiss him. She took him into her mouth, all at once, sucking the entire swollen length of him deep into a wet, shocking heat.
He cried out, a strangled yelp. Her tongue lashed the underside of his cock as she sucked hard, her head bobbing with a ruthless efficiency. It was nothing like his fantasies. It was raw and angry and real. Spit dripped down onto his fur. He grabbed fistfuls of his own gut, his claws digging in, as pleasure, white-hot and devastating, ripped through his core.
“Penny… fuck… I’m gonna…” he slurred.
She pulled off with a wet pop. “Yeah,” she spat, her lips glistening. “You are.” She climbed onto the bed, straddling his immense thighs, her weight barely registering. She yanked her shorts and underwear down in one savage motion. She was already wet. He could see the gleam on her.
She didn’t guide him. She reached between her own legs, took his cock in her hand again, and slammed herself down onto him, sheathing him completely in one brutal, downward stroke.
The sound he made was pure animal. She was so tight, so hot, so impossibly vivid. She began to ride him, not with passion but with a furious, piston-like intensity, using him, punishing him, punishing herself. Each drive of her hips mashed his pubic bone into the soft, vast expanse of his lower belly. Her breasts bounced under her t-shirt. Her face was a mask of fierce concentration.
“Is this what you want?” she grunted, slamming down. “Just this? Nothing else?”
He could only gasp, his hands flailing before gripping her hips, his blunt fingers sinking into her flesh. The bed roared in protest. The world dissolved into the slap of skin, her ragged breaths, the overwhelming sensation of being inside her while his overstuffed gut quaked beneath them. He was hurtling toward the edge, his balls drawing up tight.
“Look at me,” she commanded.
His eyes, which had been squeezed shut, flew open. She was staring down at him, her expression shattered, tears cutting tracks through the flush on her cheeks. She rode him harder, faster, a final, furious crescendo.
“Come on, you fat fuck,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Come for me.”
It detonated. His orgasm was a seismic event, a raw, pulsing eruption that emptied him into her depths in long, racking spurts. He shouted, a meaningless vowel sound. She kept moving, milking him, until he was twitching and spent beneath her.
She climbed off, the obscene, wet sound of their separation loud in the quiet. She pulled her clothes up, not looking at him, not looking at the mess. She stood by the bed, breathing heavily, staring at the wall of his comic sketches—the heroic, slim-figured fantasies of a future that had curdled.
She picked up his phone from the floor, wiped it on the sheet, and placed it on his nightstand. Her fingers were trembling.
“Answer it next time,” she said, her voice empty now, all the fury spent. She walked to the door, opened it, and left without looking back.
He lay there, impaled by the silence, filled with her and the meatloaf and a void so complete it felt like death. The phone on the nightstand sat there, inert. A thing that could buzz. A thing that could connect. It meant nothing. It meant everything. He could not move.