Chapter 1

Lauren shifted in her chair and rubbed her eyes. Reading weightgain story after weightgain story had gotten her wet, but also frustrated. She pushed back the chair from the computer and went into the kitchen to get some ice cream. But as she stood with the freezer door open, she sighed and felt like crying.

Eating by herself wasn’t enough. The fantasies running around in her head were appetizers that only left her longing for more. The stories she read only fed the longing and made it more poignant. Online, there seemed to be a world of fat admirers and feeders and gainers and feedees. But when she chatted with them, they all seemed so shallow and hungry for sex, and most of them were men. There was nothing wrong with men, but she was a lesbian and just couldn’t relate to the guys who wanted to chat. And in the real world outside the computer, no one was admitting to having any kind of fat fetish. She slammed the freezer door shut without eating any ice cream and crawled into bed. It was late anyway, and tomorrow, she had to go to work.

Tomorrow came early, as it always did during the workweek, and Lauren got up, took a shower, and went to greet the day. Sharon was in the courtyard smoking. Her apartment was next to Lauren’s and every morning, she sat in the chair by the pool and smoked and drank tea, and always, she had a smile and a greeting for Lauren. Sharon was the kind of woman that no one really notices, and Lauren didn’t give her a moment’s thought as she muttered a response and walked out to her car.

Sharon thought Lauren was the most beautiful woman she’d ever laid eyes on. Sharon saw Lauren as confident, opinionated, interesting, intelligent, successful, and always on the go. She imagined that Lauren had hundreds of friends and lovers with whom she had many adventures. While a few of them came over for dinner parties at Lauren’s place, she figured the 16 to 18 hours that Lauren was gone each day was surely filled with a pageantry of dalliances.

The reality of the matter was that Lauren had a few good friends who she hung out with fairly often, but most of her time was spent doing what she most loved to do. After work at the office, Lauren went down to the pier and fished. She fished until the sun set and then kept fishing. She used barbless hooks and threw back anything she caught, but the sound of the water lapping against the pier, the seagulls crying out, the boat motors, and the way human voices played across the water kept Lauren enchanted day after day.

Sharon wanted desperately to talk to Lauren, but Lauren was always in such a hurry, and seemed to have no time for a shy neighbor. Most of the time, she barely noticed Sharon. She sipped her tea each morning and pondered ways to get Lauren’s attention, but those trains of thought always came to a screeching halt when they led to the obvious. The best way to get Lauren’s attention would be to directly and clearly ask her over for dinner. But Sharon was so sure of rejection that she would rather live in this place of uncertainty, for what would she do once Lauren said ‘No’?