chapter 7

Eddie worked early mornings, so catching the Fredo show live wasn't going to be a possibility. He had no choice but to watch the nighttime rerun later in the week.

It was now later in the week. Bombshell's take on Big Tech was all he could think of as he sat at his uncomfortable desk, in his too-roomy chair, daydreaming of spilling over the armrests instead of perfecting the build for CSI's latest malware-blocking software…

Until he was no longer just daydreaming.

***

Gasping, flailing--or at least giving it his best attempt, but finding each doughy, inflated limb too heavy to move--he fought for a view of her over his quivering dome of a belly, but to no avail. There was her voice, and only her voice: "Wow, even I didn't know I could make 'em this big. But I guess the punishment fits the crime: you racked up quite a laundry list, didn't ya?" She sat down on his naked lower belly, leaning her full, but comparatively insubstantial weight into him. "Dang! It's like a waterbed, but with blubber instead!" She pushed backwards into him, gripping a roll of fat with her hands. "Cops won't be here for a hot minute--let's have some fun, huh?"

She was so much more playful than he'd always imagined. Maybe that was why this felt far more real than any of his fantasies to date.

If only he could move his hips, even an inch. He just needed a little more friction...

"Eddie?" came a new voice, this one hauntingly familiar. Its source bent over him and he was forced to look up into her eyes, flashing green as a neon sign surrounded by a halo of blonde hair against the backdrop of an impressively overcast sky…

Oh no. Tegan.

"Is this what everything has been about?"

Shame burned him from within, radiating outward from a tight knot at his core,l. It ate away at him and yet somehow elevated the rush that rolled through his massive form in waves. There was a satisfying ache, a damning deliciousness, in at last having his most secret sins lain bare.

"If you're gonna psychoanalyze the boy, you might as well grab a seat," said Bombshell. "C'mon, plenty of room!"

"Yeah, Tegan." A new figure bent over, and Leo's smirking face joined Tegan's concerned one above Eddie. "Have a seat. Stay a while. After all, you're the reason we're all here…"

***

"Eddie? Eddie!"

"Whu--?"

Eddie blinked against the harsh fluorescent light as he was shaken awake at his desk. He pulled out his ear buds and looked around for the source of his salvation: it was the head of the analytics team, whose name he had learned once but promptly forgotten.

"Tom expected that code in his inbox an hour ago, and he's pissed. I came down here so he wouldn't do it himself--I know you engineers don't do well with the yelling. I won't tell him you fell asleep at your desk. But unless you have a good explanation--"

"Sorry, sorry," Eddie mumbled.

Even now, he could hear his mother's soft, yet stern admonitions: 'Now, now, I know you're more articulate than that, dear.'

"This machine's just been giving me trouble. I think it's compromised. I've been messing with it all morning, and I guess I crashed waiting for the malware scan to finish," he lied.

The department head nodded. "I see. Well, if you think you've been hacked, I'll send one of my guys down here to check it out."

Eddie turned beet red, the panic alarms in his brain going off rapid-fire. "Y-you don't have to do that! No sense in slowing down your team, right?"

He was met with a cold, incredulous stare. "Eddie, if you've got a virus, it could potentially spread and take our whole company offline. I'll have someone down here shortly."

Of course, the analyst was this broad, muscle-bound gym-bro type--a guy named DeAndre who Eddie had met once at the company's mandatory 'team-building' dodgeball match. At the time, Eddie had all but walked into the path of a ball clumsily tossed by a little blonde girl from sales just to spare himself from this guy's heavy hits. In the months that had passed since then, the analyst had put on even more muscle, and it only made Eddie all the more self-conscious about his own fat-filled fantasies.

He yielded his chair to the other man and stood in the corner, wallowing in his anxiety like a puppy kissing the carpet, knowing he'd done wrong, waiting to be exposed in his lie.

"I dunno how long this is gonna take," said DeAndre, clacking away at the keyboard. "If you want, you can take a walk or something. Oh! Oriana made these little cupcakes for the whole office. They're in the break room. I'm doing Paleo right now myself, but everyone else says they're fire. Even Melissa! And you know Melissa."

Eddie actually didn't know Melissa, and in any case, he'd rather be present at the moment of his exposition, rather than wandering around upstairs wondering whether or not his head was already on the chopping block.

"It's okay, I'll just stay here."

Would losing this job really be so bad?

At this point, it was more of an alibi than anything else.

That, and something to occupy his days and keep him from doing anything too stupid. Well, stupider than he had already.

"A-ha! I found the malware!"

Eddie blinked. "Wait, what, really?"

"Yeah, this'll be an easy de-install," said DeAndre.

"What was it?"

"Well, it's not a virus, exactly," DeAndre explained. "You just had a program dropped in here via a backdoor Trojan."

"What kind of program?"

"Let's take a look!"

DeAndre's next words made Eddie sorry he'd asked.

"It runs a binaural audio file in the background of whatever you're doing--a hypno file, if you will. Looks like it's open source, too. Let's see if we can figure out who made this...huh. Wouldja look at that. It's supposed to put you out and make you have freaky sex dreams. You been looking at porn on the company machine? It's okay to say yes, we all do it. Ori's the worst. She thinks she's slick, but you can hear all the moaning through her cheap, shitty headphones. Eddie? You still with me, bro?"

Eddie was stunned speechless.

***

"All good down there?" asked Oriana once DeAndre had returned to his cube.

"Yeah, one of the developers downloaded a Trojan off a porn site. No big."

"Ouch. You gotta use a VPN."

"Gotta have that VPN," DeAndre agreed.

"Flowers for Oriana Taylor-Moore!" It was this harried unpaid intern at the opening of her cube, holding a huge bouquet of flowers, so tall he could barely see over them, in an ornate glass vase.

"For me?" she said, eyes wide with surprise. DeAndre flashed her a wide smile over their cubicle wall.

"Look at you, finally with a boyfriend!"

"But I don't have a boyfriend."

"Girlfriend, then? Look, I don't judge. Love who you love."

Nevermind that there was no one she talked to, either at work or otherwise, on a regular basis. Sure, there was her favorite cashier at Taco Shack and her auto mechanic, but they had no reason to know where she worked. Even Scarlet Flame, whose unrequited crush was more than a little obvious, didn't have that information.

But Oriana couldn't very well leave the intern in her--well, it wasn't exactly a doorway if the company hadn't given her a door, was it?

"Thank you," she said, accepting the bouquet and sliding a five dollar bill into his pocket.

"You know you don't have to tip them, right?" said Melissa, who had popped up to see what all the fuss was about. Oriana decided to ignore her this time.

The flowers, despite the inexplicability of their arrival, really were gorgeous. Sprigs of delicate white wisteria accented a billowing arrangement of elegant orange lilies and fat blue hydrangeas. Setting the vase down on her desk, she noticed an envelope attached. She tore it open and examined the card, only for a chill to shoot up her spine as she read the inky black scrawl:

HUGE fan of your work!
Kisses!
-Big Tech.

Well, fuck. It seemed the man she'd become obsessed with had decided to do a little stalking on his own time.

Only he was better at it than she was.

But how had he found her?

Did he know she'd been tailing him?

And what did this mean for Bombshell?

***

"Leo? Leo, this is serious," Eddie hissed into the phone as he parked his car and made a beeline for his apartment. "I think someone else knows about Big Tech." More terrifyingly, whoever it was knew his motivations.

"Everyone knows about Big Tech," said Leo. "You're something of a celebrity, after all."

"You know that's not what I mean," said Eddie. "I think I was the victim of a targeted cyber attack today."

"What makes you think that?"

With shaky hands, he entered the six-digit pin that opened the SmartLock on his front door. It had set him back a decent chunk of a paycheck, but you needed more than a deadbolt to keep out burglars in the crime-addled westside slum. "I don't want to get into the details, okay?" As he entered the sad, neglected unit, with its flickering lights and arrangement of cardboard boxes serving as a coffee table between moth-eaten second-hand couches, he heard a small, faint echo of his own voice. "Leo...where are you?"

"Guess."

Tentatively, Eddie crept toward the bedroom, nudged the door open, and turned on the light.

"Surprise!" cried Leo, laying on one side of the bed and opening one palm with a flourish to mime throwing confetti.

"No shoes on the bed!" Eddie screeched as a knee-jerk reflex.

Wow, for a second, he thought he sounded exactly like his mother.

"Fine, fine." Leo rolled himself off the bed and plodded out into the living room, past a small partition, and into the kitchen. Eddie followed a few steps behind, struggling to process what the hell was going on…

Then again, this wasn't even the strangest thing that had happened today.

"What are you doing here?"

"They're about to re-air the Fredo show. I figured we could have ourselves a little watch party. Oh!" said Leo, bending down to rummage in the fridge. "I took the liberty of picking up takeout. You had nothing in your kitchen except baking soda, lemon juice, and for some reason, aquarium tubing." He gasped and popped up, staring at Eddie over the bar counter that separated the kitchen and living space. "Do you have an aquarium in here?" He tilted his head, grinned widely, and blinked his eyes slowly, theatrically, and, perhaps most unnervingly, out of sync with one another. "Will you show me your fish?"

"I, uh...it's a plan in the works." In truth, the equipment, along with the reactive kitchen staples, were reserved for nights when Eddie lost the battle with his most shameful sexual cravings. But he'd be damned if he told Leo, or anyone else, what they were for.

"Fair enough. Anyway, sit down, sit down!"

Too disoriented to question the irony of being invited to sit in his own home, Eddie took a seat on the edge of the sofa while Leo sauntered in with armfuls of greasy bags. He set them down on the makeshift table, causing the cardboard to bow slightly under their weight. "Jeez, with five million dollars I'd have thought you'd invest in decent furniture. Anyway, I got all your favorites: there's Thai, Chinese, enchiladas, some Burger Queen--"

"Leo, I've never tried any of this in my life."

"I know, but your personality matrix indicates you'll love 'em once you do!"

Maybe if he hadn't been so overwhelmed, he would have noticed when Leo turned on the TV without the use of the remote.

And there they were, Fredo Flores and the voluptuous vigilante herself. Eddie leaned in, elbows resting on his knees as he waited for Bombshell to reveal her plans for Big Tech: how she would pin him in place under pillowy piles of flab, repay his crimes with an outright onslaught of obesity, and then? Even as he struggled to move, as he fought to so much as breathe, she would force another couple hundred pounds onto his helplessly blubbery body, for no other reason than her own personal viewing pleasure…

But that monologue never came. Instead…

No. This was impossible. This was a downright disaster!

Not only did she have no plans to end Big Tech's reign of terror...as a matter of fact, she endorsed it!

"Aren't you hungry?" asked Leo, gesturing toward the mountain of untouched food.

"I don't like eating in front of other people." Rather, he liked the idea far too much to trust himself. Letting his head fall into his hands, he swallowed a dry sob. "I can't believe she doesn't want to fight me."

"Right? What a bitch."

***

ONE YEAR AGO

“She’s a bitch, Eddie. A bitch.”

Cecilia Salvidar, a short, dumpy woman currently clad in frumpy faux-denim shorts and a flowy floral top fresh from Dillard's, sashayed into her living room, teacups in hand. Nearly tripping over the neatly arranged shoes she left beside her front door, she made her way to her couch, and carefully placed the cups atop coasters on the coffee table. The cups actually contained bubble tea, or rather some low-calorie chemical approximation of it, but Cecilia (and she would only ever be called Cecilia, never Cece) placed great importance upon looking fancy. Even if she sometimes struggled to afford it.

“I don’t want to sound bitter,” Eddie sighed, taking his cup, “but… you never knew her.”

“I know enough." Cecilia frowned worriedly. “Look at you. She’s a bitch.”

“You know we’re still friends, right?”

“That’s good.” She placed a wrinkled hand on her son’s shoulder, her long red nails gently scratching his skin beneath his shirt. “Hold on to that.”

“But you said…”

“I say a lot of things, it’s all nonsense, really. You know I’m nowhere near as bright as you.”

“Yes, mom,” Eddie nodded like a good boy or a model student or an indoctrinee to the latest, hottest cult.

“The thing is Eddie…” Cecilia continued, “Tegan’s not bright either, not like you are.”

“What the hell does that matter?” Eddie’s voice quivered. He wanted to be angrier, more violent, but it was his mother he was talking to after all.

“Honey… you know it does. It’s just the way the world works.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Then stop sulking and change it. You’ve got the power to.”

“Mom, that’s…” Eddie stopped himself, biting his cheek in the process.

“Didn’t I always tell you you could be anything you want to be? The world’s your oyster, Eddie.”

“I loved her, okay?” Eddie blurted out, finally. “I loved her.”

“Oh honey…” Cecilia stared into Eddie’s eyes as only she could, radiating some strange, familiar cocktail of weariness and raw love. “I know it feels… but there’s plenty more fish in the sea.”

Eddie couldn’t restrain himself this time.

“Mom, that’s bulls--”

“Don’t finish that,” she snapped. “You know we don’t have that sort of language in this house.”

“Yes, mom.” Eddie’s chin sank down, his depression rooted too deeply to let him call her out on her hypocrisy.

“Just do your best to forget about her, okay? Hold on to her, but forget about her. And whenever you’re feeling down in the dumps, just remember: I’ll always love you. No matter what.”

She took his head against her breast and said it so tenderly, as she always did, her tongue dripping with sincerity. So why did it always sound like a threat?

***

TODAY

After the end of Bombshell's segment, Leo let himself out unceremoniously, leaving Eddie alone with the TV, his misery, and a veritable buffet.

He didn't want to open the bags...but he kind of had to. All he'd eaten all day was half of a tuna salad sandwich he'd bought from the discount section of the gas station store on his way to work, and he was running on fumes.

As a new hero commandeered Fredo's couch and went off on a spiel about gender inclusivity in the super scene, Eddie pulled one of the boxes of Chinese out of its bag and cracked apart a pair of cheap takeout chopsticks.

As it turned out, chopsticks weren't his forte, but he still managed to shovel down his throat a few heaping, sloppy bites of salty, brownish noodles and vegetables sauteed in an amount of oil that ought to have been against the law.

And yet, for all its fatty, oversalted excess, the dish was immaculate, cold as it was. The decadent flavors and textures were everything that he craved. Mouth watering with need, he inhaled half the container mindlessly, letting the influx of carbs almost fill him up…

Almost.

There was a good reason he kept the kitchen understocked. If he had food on hand, what was to stop him from gorging himself to his rotten little heart's content every night? If he thought he could control himself, keep the stuffing sessions to once in a blue moon, things would be different. But he already knew if he started, he'd be powerless against the urges compelling him to force himself ever fuller and fuller until he was ready to explode in his underpants, and who wouldn't notice that? Even though he only talked to his co-workers on an as-needed basis, it wouldn't escape them if he steadily began to outgrow his secondhand work shirts and khakis. And what about his neighbors?

Good God...what about his mother?

There was only so much that carelessness could excuse, and after that...

If he were to truly live like he wanted to, nobody wouldn't know he was a dirty little fat-obsessed degenerate.

Better to let Bombshell finish him quickly.

Better that she dig him a fifteen foot hole in the dirt. He'd lay in a coffin as wide and deep as it was long, decaying as the years went by, his secrets buried with him.

If only she would notice him.

He willed himself to stop eating, and, walking out onto his patio, chucked the takeout container over the railing.

"What the fuck!?" exclaimed a passing pedestrian. Eddie ducked back behind the door, smacked it shut, and, head spinning from his utterly exhaustive day, fainted facefirst onto the carpet.