Chapter 5 - sabotage from a rival

When Cassidy arrived at Adalyn’s home, it was beautifully spotless and filled with the most expensive furnishings. Unlike Cassidy, Adalyn came from money- her mother was a successful businesswoman and her father a stock broker with an eye for fraud. Adalyn had offered to leave the door unlocked so Cassidy wouldn’t have to stand outside in her current state, and so she didn’t see her guest until she entered the living room and plopped down on the sofa. Seeing Cassidy arrive, Adalyn rushed over as quickly as she could to assess the damage.

“Oh, you poor thing!” Adalyn cried out in an exaggerated display of sympathy, immediately moving to grab a handful of Cassidy’s stomach fat. “I thought you were exaggerating for sure, all this in just a month?”

Cassidy’s face turned bright red. “A little more than a month.” Try as she might to resist it, though, she had already been hungry before this, and now her stomach was receiving the one most reliable cue of a stuffing to come: the exploratory touch of hands not used to feeling so much fat. Before Adalyn even had a chance to lift her hand off of her friend’s stomach, it tumbled and growled in anticipation.

“Wow, somebody’s hungry, huh?” Adalyn laughed, shocked at Cassidy’s transformation, before moving on to feel her arms. “You didn’t mention this, have you even noticed? Your biceps always used to be your best feature, now they’re almost gone! I bet I could lift more than you now. I mean, even if your ankle was better.” She continued to pinch, grab, and rub different areas of Cassidy’s body, before wrapping up her assessment by saying, “Yeah, that’s a lot of damage, alright. I don’t think there’s a single part of you that made it through this unscathed. You’re gonna have to do some extreme cutting back on the snacks! Here, I’ll bring you in a more appropriate snack.” With that, Adalyn rushed out of the living room, leaving Cassidy alone to stew in the humiliation she’d just experienced.

Unbeknownst to her, Adalyn considered herself to be Cassidy’s rival before her friend. This could be a good opportunity for Adalyn to build upon their friendship and grow closer, or it could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remove her biggest rival, the only girl with any chance of beating her at the upcoming competition, from the picture. Out of those two goals, only the latter would bring Adalyn prestige and fame. She had considered simply leaving Cassidy alone to destroy her figure by herself, but decided she couldn’t risk her getting herself back together too soon, and hatched a plan to make sure Cassidy wouldn’t ever get her fit body back. It would take a steady hand and careful planning, but Adalyn had already come up with a plot to make Cassidy even fatter and weaker, not just until her ankle healed but for at least a few years. Before Cassidy even arrived, Adalyn had set out huge bowls of the most fattening snacks available all around the house, hidden enough that Cassidy would not realize their purpose but visible enough that she’d be sure to spot them eventually. Now, she was preparing a healthy, low calorie snack for Cassidy, a small, plain salad and tall glass of vegetable smoothie with two special ingredients: Inside that healthy drink, Adalyn had crushed up a strong dose of appetite stimulants and a low dose of muscle relaxants. If Cassidy drank even a third of it, she’d be on the road to the kind of hunger that could drive a person to seek food by any means possible, and the kind of weakness that could foil even the most basic attempts at staying fit. Cassidy wouldn’t be getting any meals other than those salads and smoothies unless she took the initiative to get them herself. Adalyn would start the meals off genuinely low calorie, so that if she somehow managed to resist the odds, Cassidy could lose a little weight and not get too suspicious, but at the first sign of successful resistance, the smoothies themselves would become calorie bombs loaded with heavy cream and even higher doses of drugs. Adalyn’s final piece of subterfuge was that she had stocked her own refrigerator and pantry with as many tempting, delectable high calorie foods and drinks as she could find, in case her rival were to be so rude as to raid her host’s kitchen without permission.

“Here you go, eat like this every day and you’ll slim down in no time!” Adalyn returned to the room beaming, no sign of malice on her face. “Since you can’t work out and burn calories off until your ankle is better, we should cut you down to two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. If you stay right there on that couch and rest, you won’t have to worry about accidentally binging, just eat what I bring you and nothing else. It’ll be easy!” Adalyn flashed that bright smile of hers again before pinching and shaking Cassidy’s muffin top with one hand and adding, “I know you don’t want this sticking around. I’m going to go make my own breakfast now, I’ll see you later!”

As Adalyn disappeared back into the kitchen, Cassidy looked down at her meager meal and sighed. This would be difficult, after the way she’d been eating lately this looked like a starvation meal. It would be worth it, though, to melt off her fat gut. Cassidy tried to lie to herself that Adalyn’s playful words and pinches didn’t cut her to the core with such deep shame that she felt like vanishing, and dug into her flavorless bowl of salad. It wasn’t good, and she felt like she may as well have not even bothered with it, especially since just as she was finishing the delicious smell of bacon and eggs began wafting into the room from the kitchen. Desperate to distract herself from the craving-intensifying fragrance, Cassidy chugged her entire vegetable smoothie in a matter of seconds, hoping it would bring her some satiety.

For a few blissful moments, the nausea caused by downing her smoothie so fast distracted Cassidy from her hunger pangs. However, this was not to last, as the cravings quickly returned with a vengeance, more intense than ever, paired with a vague sense of fogginess and exhaustion that made it much more difficult to think clearly or even to move. All that Cassidy could think about was food, and just as she was experiencing this, Adalyn returned to the room with a heaping plate of the most delicious looking, strongly scented bacon and eggs Cassidy had ever seen, and began eating them right in front of her, smirking as her target stared with jealousy at her meal. “You can’t tell me you want to eat my breakfast, too! I thought you were trying to lose weight, and I’m still bulking for competition, you know, so this would be a terrible amount of calories for you to take in right now. Stick with what you’re given, your next meal’s in about ten hours.” Adalyn pretended not to notice Cassidy’s despair at that piece of information, and after finishing her breakfast, declared, “I’m going to the gym and then out for coffee. Don’t eat anything while I’m out,” and waved at Cassidy on her way out of the house. This was going to be too easy.