Fattened by My Fiancés Best Friend

Chapter 1

Emma had been with Ryan since sophomore year of high school. They had been each other’s firsts: first love, first kiss, first everything. For years, she believed their story was the kind of fairy tale that grew from shared locker notes and Friday night football games into forever. When Ryan slipped a ring onto her finger after college graduation, she thought her future was secured.
But the ring had come with conditions.
“Em, you’d be perfect if you just lost a little weight,” Ryan would say, his words dripping with casual cruelty disguised as concern. Sometimes he would pinch at her waist, or comment on how her dresses fit tighter than before. More than once, he’d leaned close, grabbing her stomach, whispering, “I don’t want to marry someone who lets themselves go.”
Every comment left Emma raw, as if love was something she had to earn by shrinking herself smaller and smaller.
The only person who seemed to notice was Jake, Ryan’s best friend since childhood. Unlike Ryan, Jake never made her feel like she had to apologize for existing. When she broke down after one of Ryan’s remarks, Jake was the one who found her outside, sitting on the curb with her hands pressed over her eyes.
“Hey,” he said softly, kneeling beside her. “Don’t listen to him. You’re fine exactly the way you are. If anything, you could gain a few pounds.”
She wanted to believe him.
But the man she had promised her future to kept looking at her like she was a problem to be fixed.

At first, Emma thought Jake was just being kind. When she confessed through tears that she was starving herself to meet Ryan’s demands, Jake shook his head and pulled her into his arms.
“Don’t do that to yourself,” he murmured. “If you’re hungry, eat. You deserve to feel good.”
The next day, he showed up at her apartment with a tall cup in hand.
“Made you something,” he said. “Protein smoothie. Chocolate peanut butter.”
She sipped it hesitantly, surprised at how rich it was. It filled her up in a way her diet shakes never did. Soon it became a habit, Jake showing up with a smoothie before work, after gym, late at night when she texted him that Ryan had made another cruel comment.
What Emma didn’t know was that every glass was laced with weight gain powder, calorie dense enough to tip the scale in Jake’s favor. Slowly but steadily, her body softened. Her jeans grew snug, her face rounder, her belly pressing more firmly against her blouses.
Ryan noticed, and he was furious. “I told you to lose, not gain!” he snapped one evening when she tried to squeeze into a dress for dinner. “You’re not even trying, are you?”
He had her step on the scale and she was up 8 pounds from 150 to 158. Emma was so embarrassed, her cheeks burned with shame. But later, when Jake appeared at her door again with smoothie in hand- she couldn’t help but feel comfort in the way he smiled at her curves instead of recoiling.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered as she drank. “Let him be mad. He doesn’t deserve you like this.”