Chapter 2: The Pizza Pact
The basement air still felt like it was clinging to Erik’s lungs, even a week later. The memory of those stacked supplies, the clinical calculation of it, would flash behind his eyes at random moments—mid-game, brushing his teeth, staring into the fridge. He’d see Glen’s calm, smiling face in that dull bulb light. A project.
But then Glen would appear with a plate of still-warm brownies, or a fresh, frosty milkshake, and the sharp edge of the fear would blur. The comfort was a physical thing, a warm, heavy blanket smothering the alarm. His body, increasingly soft and sluggish, seemed to agree with the treatment. It was easier to float than to fight.
So he floated.
The pool water was bath-warm from two weeks of relentless sun. Erik drifted on his back, a pale island in the crystal blue. His new stomach formed a distinct, rounded peak above the waterline, a soft hill of flesh that the sun pinked gently. His swim trunks, bought last summer, dug tightly into his hips and groin, the patterned fabric straining at the seams. He wasn’t oblivious anymore. He was accommodative. The weight was a fact, like the humidity in the air.
The sliding door from the house hissed open. Glen stepped out, balancing three large, flat cardboard boxes in his arms. The change in him was more pronounced in daylight. His athletic build had softened into a solid, powerful thickness. His stomach, once flat, now pressed against the waistband of his own trunks, a clear, heavy curve. His long hair was tied back, but damp tendrils stuck to his neck. He looked like a Renaissance painting of indulgence.
“Lunch delivery,” Glen called, his voice easy, as if the basement conversation had never happened.
Erik righted himself, his feet finding the sandy bottom. The water sloshed against his chest, which was fuller, heavier. “You order the entire kitchen?”
“Just the essentials.” Glen laid the boxes on a wrought-iron table already littered with empty glasses and a forgotten, melted pint of ice cream. He flipped the lids open one by one. The scent hit Erik like a wall: garlic, pepperoni, burnt cheese, salty grease. A supreme, a meat-lover’s, and a white sauce with extra bacon. “Fuel for the marathon of doing absolutely nothing.”
Erik waded to the steps, heaving himself out of the water. Droplets cascaded down his body, catching in the rolls of his sides, the soft crease where his stomach folded when he sat on the pool edge. He didn’t try to suck it in. There was no point. He padded over, the concrete warm and rough under his feet, and stared at the spread. His stomach emitted a low, hungry gurgle, a traitorous sound that had grown more frequent, more insistent.
“See?” Glen said, pulling out a chair. It creaked under his weight. “Your body knows what it wants.”
“My body is a dumb animal,” Erik muttered, but he sat. He reached for a slice of the meat-lover’s, strings of cheese stretching and snapping. He took a bite. A groan escaped him, involuntary, deep in his throat. It was perfect—salty, fatty, overwhelming. “Oh, fuck off.”
Glen’s smile was slow, satisfied. He took a slice of the supreme, folding it expertly. They ate in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds their chewing, the distant traffic, the persistent hum of the pool filter. Grease shone on their fingers, their chins.
“Here,” Glen said, his voice quiet. He held out a bite of the white pizza, dripping with oily bacon, toward Erik’s mouth. “Try this one.”
Erik hesitated. The gesture was intimate, loaded. It was a test. He looked at Glen’s face—the dark eyes watching him, the placid expectation—and then at the offered food. The easy path was to accept. The only other path was… what? A confrontation? Leaving? The thought was exhausting, abstract. He was soft, full, and anchored here by his own inertia.
He leaned forward and took the bite from Glen’s fingers, his lips brushing against greasy skin.
“Good?” Glen asked, his thumb swiping a smudge of sauce from the corner of Erik’s mouth.
Erik just nodded, chewing, his eyes closing. It was a surrender. A delicious, greasy surrender.
They finished the first box, then started on the second. They fed each other slices, their movements becoming slower, more deliberate. A thumb tracing a lip. A knuckle brushing a soft jawline. The food was the conduit, the sacrament. Erik felt drunk on it, on the heat, on the sheer tactile reality of his own body—so present, so managed.
When the last crust was gone, buried under a pile of greasy cardboard, the air between them crackled. Erik felt stuffed, profoundly so. His stomach was a taut, sensitive drum. He leaned back in his chair, the metal digging into the flesh of his back, and breathed through his mouth.
Glen didn’t move. He just looked at him, his gaze a physical weight. “Come here.”
It wasn’t a question. Erik’s pulse kicked, a frantic beat against all that food. He stood, his body feeling alien, massive. He took the two steps to Glen’s chair.
Glen’s hands came up, not to his waist, but lower, gripping the soft, overflowing flesh of his hips. The hold was firm, possessive. He pulled, and Erik stumbled forward, losing his balance, and landed heavily in Glen’s lap. The chair groaned in protest. Erik gasped, the impact sending a jolt through his full belly.
“See?” Glen whispered into his ear, one hand sliding up to splay across Erik’s stomach, pressing gently. The pressure was immense, almost painful, and utterly electric. “You fit.”
Erik’s head fell back against Glen’s shoulder. He was pinned, by the hands, by the weight, by the awful, seductive logic of it all. Glen’s other hand pushed the damp fabric of Erik’s trunks down, just enough. There was no preamble, no tenderness beyond the brutal intimacy of the act itself. Glen was already hard. He positioned himself and pushed up, into him.
The sensation was a shockwave—a sharp, bright pain that melted into a deep, filling pressure that mirrored the fullness in his gut. Erik cried out, a raw, choked sound lost in the humid air.
“Shhh,” Glen murmured, his breath hot on Erik’s neck. He didn’t move, letting Erik adjust to the feeling of being filled in every possible way. His hand never left Erik’s stomach, massaging the tight curve. “Just breathe into it.”
Erik trembled, awash in sensation—the heat of the sun, the smell of chlorine and pepperoni, the invasive, claiming pressure inside him, the heavy, kneading hand on his softest part. He was being rewritten from the inside out.
Then Glen began to move. Slow, deep, punishing thrusts that rocked Erik’s entire body. Each movement pushed a helpless sound from Erik’s lips—a gasp, a moan, a ragged sob. His own neglected arousal was a distant thrum, overshadowed by the overwhelming reality of being used as a receptacle, a testament to Glen’s work.
“You feel that?” Glen grunted, his own breath becoming ragged. His pace increased, jostling Erik in his lap. “You feel how deep I can go now? There’s more of you. Everywhere.”
The words unlocked something. A shameful, dizzying thrill. Erik’s own hand came up to cover Glen’s on his stomach, pressing it harder into the soft, well-fed flesh. The approval was the final drug.
“You’re… you’re going to make me even bigger,” Erik gasped, the words tumbling out, a confession and a plea.
Above him, Glen smiled. He could feel it against his skin. It was a smile of pure, unadulterated triumph.
“I know,” Glen said, and thrust deeper, harder, snapping the last of Erik’s coherence into bright, silent sparks behind his eyelids.
After, Erik lay sprawled on a sun-warmed lounger, a towel hastily thrown over his hips. He felt gutted, empty and full at the same time. A familiar, deep ache warred with a terrifying sense of peace. The sun was lowering, casting long shadows from the solitary palm tree across the patio.
Glen emerged from the house again. He carried two tall, frosty glasses. They weren’t the shake glasses. These were wider, brimming with something creamy and pale brown, topped with a mountain of whipped cream and a drizzle of chocolate sauce.
He set one on the small table next to Erik’s lounger and took the other for himself, settling into the adjacent chair with a contented sigh. His own body, slick with sweat and pool water, looked monumental in the golden light.
Erik stared at the glass. Condensation already traced paths through the frosting. “What is it now?”
“Malt. The good kind. With a shot of espresso. Called a ‘Freddo.’” Glen took a long sip, leaving a cream mustache on his lip. “It’s a digestif.”
A bitter laugh bubbled up in Erik’s throat. It came out as a cough. “Of course it is.”
He didn’t reach for it. He watched the cream slowly melt and collapse into the drink. The discovery in the basement was a cold, hard stone in his gut, but the memory of Glen’s hands on him, in him, was a brand. One contradicted the other, and his body, tired and sated, voted for the brand.
“It’s not going to stop, is it?” Erik asked, his voice flat. He wasn’t looking at Glen. He was looking at his own stomach, rising and falling under the towel.
Glen was silent for a long moment. He swirled his drink. “Do you want it to?”
That was the real question. The one Erik had been avoiding. Did he want to go back to being hungry? To being lean and anxious and hunting for his next meal, his next place to crash? This was security, wrapped in fat and grease and a terrible, devouring kind of attention.
He thought of the stairs in the basement. How hard they’d been to descend. How impossible they’d feel to climb now, to anywhere else.
Finally, Erik reached out. His fingers were cold against the frozen glass. He pulled it to him, the weight of it solid and promising in his hand. He didn’t sip it. He took a long, deep pull, the sweet, cold sludge filling his mouth, coating his throat, adding another layer to the heavy sum of him.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
The message was in the swallow, in the quiet, accepting sigh that followed. Glen watched, his eyes dark and knowing, and took another drink of his own. The two of them sat in the dying light, growing heavier by the minute, the distance between their chairs feeling like the only manageable space left in the world.