Chapter 8

The short walk to Cam's apartment while dodging the rain was surreal. My head was ablaze with a ton of questions, and I wanted to confront the elephant in the room even more. Not having all the context and beyond the apparent 25 pounds she'd put on while with Drake, I wanted to know why and how Cam had continued to balloon up like a parade float after they broke up. No one just causally put on (what looked like) 200 pounds of weight in less than four years. Still, outwardly asking and drilling into the core of her weight woes would be rude, and from our brief conversations about her weight earlier, she'd been a bit embarrassed.

Sincerely, those questions aside, a large part of me wanted to catch up with Cam. She'd unintentionally impacted my life in a big way, often being the girl I compared my myriad of short-term relationships to. For so long, she'd been my unattainable gold standard, and after getting over and giving up on her all those years ago, I wasn't prepared to process what had happened to Cam in the gulf of time we'd been estranged. A lot of me was still very much in shock.

By the time we got to the lobby of Camry's apartment complex, neither of us had gotten hit that hard by the rain. I did notice that even though Cam's hair was still mostly dry, her white shirt looked a bit wetter than it had been when we'd been outside the burger shop. Luckily, it wasn't wet enough for me to see through (thank god), but I did see that her bra straps were pink and that her top was clinging to her stomach in a bit more of an unflattering way. Near moments after we got inside, the rain outside began to downpour, making an intimidating sound as it hit and cascaded against the large glass lobby windows.

"We made it just in time." Cam said heavily, turning to look at the rainstorm outside. "It's really coming down now. Let's get you upstairs, and I'll warm you up with some tea." She added, smiling at me, indicating for me to follow her.

I noticed Cam taking me toward the elevator. In her condition, I would've recommended the stairs to burn some calories. It was noticeable she hadn't been making the climb up them very often (or at all) since she'd moved to this apartment complex. For those few seconds in which we went from the ground floor to the third, I heard something I hadn't noticed before. Cam's heavy breathing. We'd barely walked two blocks from the burger place, and her mouth was hanging open like a fish as she sucked in oxygen. It was rather pathetic and got incredibly even more pathetic when I watched her wipe some sweat from her forward with her fat arm. Of course, my mind was boggled about how someone could be so unacceptably out of shape, but the smell of the burgers reminded me that it was clear Cam had more profound issues than a proper fitness regime.

When we got to Camryn's apartment door, I stood behind her as she fiddled with her keys and took in the extent of Cam's backside for the first time. Yuck. From behind, there was a zero percent chance I'd have ever been able to tell that this morbidly obese person had ever been Cam. The first thing I saw was her two overly mushy love handles poking over the top of her yoga pants and unable to be fully covered by her embarrassingly outgrown top. On the curve of that disgusting fat love handle were a few more pink and dull silver stretch marks similar to the ones I'd seen earlier on her lower belly. Obviously, it was a sign that her body couldn't keep up with her rapidly expanding waistline.

At least the top covered her back, but it was too tight, showing off how fat, doughy, and full of rolls it was. That's when I noticed that Cam's shirt wasn't wet because of the minor shower we'd walked but because she'd apparently been sweating on the walk here. The sweatline on her back was very noticeable to me, given it was a sweatline that most people get after a gym session. Yikes.

The lower I looked, the worse it got. Cam's porky butt was a disaster. I remembered her butt used to have an alluring pert heart shape back in her hot days, but this massive thing was just an overblown distorted version of that shape. It looked as if Cam had gotten so fat so fast that her body hadn't known where to put the extreme amounts of excess ass fat, so it stuffed a good part of it wherever it could fit on her titanic tush. I could see the cellulite caked across the broad expanse of her ass through the material of her yoga pants. The entire thing was just a giant mess of fat that wiggled in an unappealing way as Cam shifted her weight while she tried to unlock her door.

Having had so many fond memories of Cam's freshman year ass, I didn't linger on this severely downgraded version of what my college friends and I typically called pig ass (Aka fat girl ass). Beyond that, I registered her new over-cushioned, flabby thighs from the back and decided they looked worse from this rear angle. I was understandably upset that Cam had let herself end up looking like this. An absolute shame.

We finally pushed into her apartment, and the first thing I noticed was the smell. It wasn't a stereotypical bad smell, yet it was a prominently pungent smell. Beyond the scent of burgers coming from the bag Cam had been carrying with her back to the apartment, the smell inside was a cacophony of what I could only describe as fast food scents. A bit of pizza, fried chicken, burgers, fries, and baked goods seemed to waft through the air. Nothing about these smells being present was a surprise, but it did help put more context around Cam's rapid college weight gain.

Then, I was greeted by the sights that confirmed those initial smells. We walked into a large room that was essentially a hallway with an open living room on the right and a kitchen on the left. At the other side of the large room was what appeared to be a hallway going left and right, presumably leading to bedrooms.

My first impression of Cam's apartment was that it was... well, a mess. Not nearly at the level that would make me think an earthquake or hurricane had hit her apartment, but it looked generally unkempt. This was mainly due to the large array of food bags, boxes, and containers strewn across half the available surface area. Though the floor looked mostly clean, I saw a corner near the kitchen with a large stack of recyclable bottles and food boxes piled very precariously.

Near the door on hooks, Cam had a few beach towels hanging. She grabbed herself one and started to wipe her face and parts of her body that had either gotten wet from the storm or the sweat she'd worked up.

"Want a towel?" She asked, pointing to the free towel next to the one she'd grabbed.

"I'm all set. Rain didn't get me that bad." I said, watching Cam continue to wipe herself down.

"You're lucky. It got me real good." Cam huffed, giving both of her arms some attention before hanging the towel back up. I wondered to myself if this was a regular routine of Cam's, rain or not.

"Tea?" Cam said, moving towards the kitchen and plopping the bag of hamburgers she'd brought home with her down next to the stove.

"Sure. Got Chamomile?" I asked, watching her turn on the stove. I mused to myself that the disorder looked similar to that of a frat house the morning after a party, though, in Cam's case, the beer was food.

"Coming right up." Cam chirped and proceeded to fiddle around in the kitchen while I wandered around her living room. The couch was a bit disheveled, and there was an empty pizza box and ice cream container on the coffee table, but otherwise, it wasn't in complete disarray. On the TV, a movie was paused. It was a scene from what looked like a decade-old movie I didn't recognize, with Jack Black and the gorgeous Gwyneth Paltrow walking down a street together. It seemed as if Cam was in the middle of watching it.

As I walked over to her couch, I noticed a long white device with a large round head and handle with a cord coming out of it lying there on it, with a hand towel under it. It took me a second, but I realized what it was. A vibrator. I'd never seen a vibrator this long at my ex's or fuckbuddies dorms and apartments. I'd known some girls with long dildos but not elongated vibrators. This was a little over a foot long, and, unlike the other girls I knew, Cam's vibrator was flagrantly sitting out instead of hidden away in a bedside drawer.

I heard heavy footsteps behind me, announcing that Cam was coming from the kitchen. Seeing as she'd set herself up for this little embarrassment, I didn't know what to do, so I tried to move away from the couch to pretend as if I hadn't seen.

"Here is your tea." Cam said, handing me a warm mug. "Do you want any..." Cam looked past me to the spot on the couch where her vibrator sat out. Her face flushed red, and her eyes widened. "Fuck... oops." Cam squeaked, then moved as quickly as she could (which was comically slow) past me while I stepped aside to give her ample body the space she needed to get to the couch. With one hand wrapped around her hamburger bag and the other around her vibrator, Cam opened a drawer under the large coffee table and haphazardly tossed her vibrator and the hand towel inside. "Sorry about that... That was... sorry." Cam laughed awkwardly, quickly grabbing the remote off the coffee table and turning off the TV for some reason.

"All good. What were you watching?" I asked, trying as hard as I could to change the topic, pretending as if what had just happened hadn't been awkward as fuck. As hot as it would've been to picture Cam masturbating when I was attracted to her, the image of this hamplanet going to town on herself was gross enough to send blood rushing anywhere but my cock. Ew.

Cam was still jittery as she looked at me, confused. "What? That?" There was a pregnant pause that lasted a few seconds too long. "That was a movie called... Shallow Hal."

"Oh, never heard of it. What's it about?" I asked.

"Ummm... it's about..." Cam still looked flustered from the earlier issue with her vibrator. "...inner beauty." She said, tossing the hamburger bag on the coffee table in front of the couch.

"Oh.. cool. That's a Good message." I said, not getting a ton out of Cam's answer but decidedly not wanting to dig further.

"Great message." Cam agreed as she plopped herself down on her couch. She came down so heavily, in such an audible way, that it sounded like the structure was being tested, groaning underneath her. Cam opened the bag without skipping a beat and pulled a hamburger out. As if I wasn't still there, she immediately shoved the burger into her mouth and ate at a pace that made me believe she was looking forward to eating it far too much. As Cam occupied herself, I sat in a chair near her in the living room and slowly sipped at my chamomile tea.