Alex Gets Soft

Chapter 1 - The Man on the Beach

Let me tell you about my boyfriend Alex. I know I’m not the most objective source, since we’ve been together for five years and we’re full-on soulmates, but he was objectively the most handsome man you could imagine. Six foot two, dirty blond, and beyond ripped.

That “ripped” part, a lot of that had to do with his genetics. His parents were both Russian, both former dancers. Beautiful people. And they’d passed all those good genes onto him. He worked out a couple times a week, but even if he didn’t, he’d never lose his definition. I’d never met anyone before who just naturally had abs without having to earn them. There was just something magical about his body.

I loved him more than anything. Not just his body, of course. His personality. His kindness. The way he made me feel.

I know this might sound crazy (and don’t judge me for saying this), but after being with him for so long, I’d kind of stopped noticing how unnaturally beautiful he was. It’s sort of like having the Mona Lisa hanging on your living room wall. You walk by it often enough and after a while, you just take it for granted.

I said that wrong. I didn’t mean I wasn’t turned on by him. Just that I never thought about how perfect he looked until we were out in public and literally everyone around us started ogling.

That’s exactly what was happening two summers ago, when we were strolling on the beach. Oceanside, our favorite. Alex wore board shorts and flip flops. Nothing else. Everyone we passed—men, women, young and old—turned their heads in his direction.

I was glad I was wearing a tank top. Otherwise, I’d feel pretty self-conscious.

Alex, of course, didn’t really notice. He was so used to the stares that they didn’t mean much to him.

We’d just passed the pier and were rounding a corner when Alex skidded to a stop. His eyed widened.

“What is it?”

He was staring at a group of gay guys waiting for ice cream.

“I wish I looked like that,” he mumbled. Then he gulped. He had this scrunched up expression, like the words had fallen out of his mouth and he wished more than anything to slurp them back up. “Did I just say that out loud?”

It was really cute. I hadn’t seen him look that flustered in a long time.

I scanned the group to figure out who he was talking about. The guy in front was pretty muscular. Shorter than Alex, but a bit beefier. His lime-green shirt hung loosely from his wide shoulders.

“Babe,” I said, squeezing his hand. “You’re way hotter than that guy. And I mean, lime green? Yikes.”

“I, um, wasn’t talking about him.”

The muscle guy was standing next to an absolute mountain of a man. He was shirtless and hairy, with drooping pecs and a spherical gut.

And I mean literally spherical. He had no definition. But there was definitely some muscle buried underneath all that fat, because his whole body was thick and solid. Aside from those moobs, none of him drooped. He stood with the wide stance of someone who was comfortable in his skin and proud of his size.

The muscle guy handed him an ice cream cone, and he absolutely went to town on it.

“You’re talking about the guy eating ice cream?” I asked Alex.

He nodded. He was still staring.

“That’s… a lot to unpack.” We were still holding hands, so I gently guided him toward a bench facing the ocean. We sat together.

A long time passed before either of us said anything. As the silence stretched on, realization washed over me. I felt terrible. Just absolutely awful. Alex had just admitted to being attracted to the kind of guy who was the exact opposite of me. I was the dictionary definition of a twink. Small. Submissive. More pretty than handsome. I thought he liked that. I thought I was his type.

I built up the courage to speak. “Alex, is that, um, what you’re attracted to?”

“Yeah, I mean…” He noticed my pained expression. “No! It’s not like that. You’re my type. I just…” He gulped. “I like that kind of body type… for me.”

“Oh.” I pictured him expanding to the same size as that sphere of a man, his perfect body disappearing under layers of fat. It was such a strange image.

“Jake, please forget I said anything.”

He looked so sad. So vulnerable. I hated to see him like that. He was waiting for me to say something.

“Well, you have the right frame for it if you ever wanted to…”

“Okay!” he blurted out.

I froze. He’d taken my words as a suggestion instead of, like, general encouragement. And he seemed so freaking excited.

He jumped off the bench. “Let’s go get some ice cream!” When I didn’t stand, he asked, “You’re okay with this, right?”

Everything was happening so fast, I still didn’t quite understand what “this” meant.

But I loved the excitement on his face. And the relief.

I stood. “Let’s get some ice cream.”

***

Whatever doubts I had about Alex’s confession faded when we ate ice cream.

He went a bit overboard, ordering four large bowls just for himself. (I got a coffee.) As he slowly ate bite after bite, he told me how much he’d been fantasizing about getting bigger. Since he was a kid, I guess. He said he had this image of himself, of how he should look, and that image was always thick and round. “Solid” was the word he kept using.

Multiple times, he asked me if I was okay with him gaining weight. He asked me at least six times, giving me plenty of chances to tell him to stop.

I said no every time.

At first, it was because I didn’t want to disappoint him. But the more he ate, the more his enthusiasm was spreading to me. I loved to see my man happy, and he’d never looked happier than in that moment. Savoring the cream, gulping it down, letting messy dribbles of it slide down his pecs and onto his flat stomach. It was like he was putting on a show just for me.

Though his mouth was constantly full, he kept talking about the future, about how he saw himself. The floodgates had opened, and even though I still couldn’t picture him as anything but muscular and fit, I could definitely see him with a hard, little potbelly. He could definitely pull that off.

We sat outside, so plenty of people walked by during his gorging session. As always, he was the object of stares, but this time, the looks were more confused than turned-on. It didn’t help that he was talking so animatedly while eating with such abandon.

By the third bowl, he was slowing down. His stomach made painful gurgle noises from the sudden onslaught of all that lactose. He eventually stopped, wiping away the streaks from his chin but not his torso.

He asked me one last time, “Are you really okay with this?”

To answer his question, I pushed the half-finished bowl closer to him.

He breathed deeply, gathering up his strength, and took another spoonful. “You know, what you said to me back there was exactly what I needed to hear.”

“What was that?”

“You said I had the right frame for it,” he said. “You said that if I got big, I’d be solid and thick, that I’d look like that other guy. The one with the belly.”

Alex was misremembering things. I had said the “right frame” part, but he cut me off before I could finish my sentence. He was the one who kept using the word “solid,” not me. I didn’t correct him.

I figured he was right, though. People gain weight in different ways. Belly-heavy or pear-shaped. Round or flabby. With Alex’s wide shoulders and lengthy torso, he definitely wouldn’t be flabby. He’d grow outward and he'd never lose his muscular base.

And just like that, I was imagining my model-handsome boyfriend getting just as big as that guy we saw. An hour ago, that image would’ve been comical, even gross. Now it felt natural.

It was like Alex was pulling me into his madness or something. Our simple trip to the beach had taken a very strange turn.

He looked at me proudly, having finished the third bowl of ice cream. There was just one bowl left, sitting half-melted in the center of the table. When he glanced at it, his proud look disappeared. “I think I’m done.”

I opened my mouth, ready to say that he’d done a valiant effort, but then I stopped myself. I wordlessly grabbed the last bowl and walked back inside the ice cream shop. I asked the girl behind the counter if she had a microwave in the back that I could use.

She raised any eyebrow but took the bowl out of my hands and heated it up for twenty seconds, until it was completely melted.

Then I took it back outside to Alex, whispered a word of encouragement into his ear, and watched him chug the pink liquid into his mouth.