All You Can Hold

Chapter 1

Helena learned two things in the twenty-six months after her wedding.
The first was that a sweet tooth is not a personality. It is a slow, patient animal. It waits in the pantry. It waits behind bakery glass. It waits in the way a husband says just a bite and then looks at his phone when the bite becomes the tin.
The second was that some love has a weight limit, and she found hers the hard way.

She had been chubby on the altar. Soft arms in lace. A belly that already sat on the waistband when she sat to sign. People called her curvy and a handful, compliments that were already measurements.
Two years of cinnamon rolls cooling on the counter, leftover carbonara at midnight, ice cream eaten standing in the freezer light, and she was sixty kilos heavier. One hundred and forty-eight kilograms. Five-foot-four. Dresses became tents that still cut into her. The husband who had once pinned her to the kitchen counter started sleeping on his edge of the mattress like fat was contagious.

He left on a Thursday. Two suitcases. He said he needed someone who took care of herself. He said it gently. Helena stood in the doorway in a stretched T-shirt and watched the car go. Then she ate the rest of the lasagna from the pan with a fork, standing, because sitting made her thighs pour sideways and she did not want to feel that while she cried.

The apartment was suddenly too quiet and too full of her.
She kept the office job. Spreadsheets. A headset that dug into the soft place under her ear. At lunch she ate at her desk with the camera off and promised herself Monday. Monday became a bakery. The bakery became a second pastry in the parking garage, crumbs in her cleavage, the steering wheel already closer to her belly than it used to be.

The internet found her the way it finds lonely people: a search she would have deleted if anyone had been in the room.
Men who like fat women.
Feeder.
Feedee.
She watched a woman the size of a sofa eat pizza while a man rubbed her gut and called her good. Helena's hand was in her underwear before she understood the assignment. She came with her other palm on the soft dome of her own stomach, ashamed and soaked and furious at how simple it was.

She made an account that night. HoneyHelena. Bathroom picture: belly over panties, breasts already a cup bigger than the wedding day, double chin from below, a fork in her mouth. Just starting my journey.
Journey meant: I am going to get enormous on purpose, and I am going to make men work for the privilege.

Twelve dollars for access. Then a man in Ohio paying her to eat a pint on camera and say his name when she was full. She did it on the couch in her work blouse. The spoon shook. She said his name. She moaned because fullness made her moan.
By the end of the month the strangers paid better than overtime.

By the end of the year she had a system.