The Bachelor Pads

Chapter 1

I really don’t know why I do what I do; I guess it just makes me feel good. Something about making myself look bigger, rounder, softer and fluffier - making myself look and feel so much fatter than I am - it’s just so soothing, so comforting.

My name is Bernie and I'm a scrawny kid from the suburbs who at the tender age of twenty four moved out to the big city all on my own. After graduating from college I got a job working for a big law firm as a paralegal. I'm not making much money, but it's a foot in the door and I am grateful to have a job at all.

The building I moved into is only about a half hour away from my parents house, but my mother still calls me almost everyday and sends me letters and care packages, as if I were enlisted in the Peace Corps or something. From the moment I moved in to this place I've found myself feeling like an outcast, seeing as how I am the only non-person of color on the entire block. It really isn’t a big deal to me, but to say that I stick out like a sore thumb around here would be an understatement.

The neighborhood is loud and always full of excitement. Something is always going on. People are yelling and arguing, babies are crying, kids are running around and laughing, car horns and sirens blaring all hours of the night and day. Typical sounds of a city neighborhood, I suppose. I feel fortunate however, that the building I live in is relatively quiet. I can hear my neighbors talking once in a while; the guy directly upstairs from me has a piano he plays every so often, and he's not too bad either. All things considered, I guess I'm pretty lucky.

Just the same, I've often found myself feeling lonesome and isolated, and in need of some creature comforts. I’d call and reach out to some of my old classmates from college, most of them having moved back to wherever they had come from or to some far off location for a job they’d found. It's been good to keep in touch, but it just doesn't feel the same as when we were all hanging out on campus together. I feel as though I'm in a whole new world, all on my own.


When I was a kid, I developed this strange habit of stuffing pillows and rolled-up blankets under my shirt and into my pants, making me look like I was fat. I’m not sure exactly when I started doing this, I was maybe around nine or ten I guess, and I really can’t tell you why. All I can tell you is that it provided a lot of comfort to me. You see, when I was around the age of ten, my family moved from the city out to a small town in the country. I felt very isolated and out of place back then. There were no kids my age to play with, and seemingly nothing to do but sit around and watch TV.

It was a lonely life, but something about padding made me feel safe and secure. For years I thought I was the only crazy person who did something like that - it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realized that there were others who experienced similar feelings and reacted in the same sort of way. Finding a community of random “padders” online made me feel a little bit better about myself. Still, it's always been something that I kept to myself.

There was this one time when I got caught padding by my mother. I was home from college for the holidays - I must have been about nineteen years old at that point. I hadn’t done any padding in years, but something about being back in that house on that quiet country lane in the middle of no place, that made me long for that old feeling of comfort and security.

I stuffed all sorts of pillows and blankets under my shirt, and I crawled under the heavy down-comforter on the bed. Normally, I would have just stayed like that for a few minutes, maybe rubbed myself off real quick, then taken it all out and just gone to sleep. Maybe it was the traveling I’d done, or all the food my mom made for dinner that night that made me extra sleepy, but I ended up just passing out with all that padding on me.

In the morning, my mom walked into the room to wake me up for breakfast, and she totally saw me laying there in bed with my faux-belly sticking up under the heavy covers. She didn’t say anything about it, but she must have noticed that something about it was weird. We never spoke of it though — that’s just how my family is, I guess. We keep our feelings to ourselves.


Recently I've found myself feeling the impulse to pad again, mostly just at night when I am in bed. Sometimes when I am just walking around the apartment by myself though, I will stuff my shirt full of pillows and wobble around like I weigh four hundred pounds. It doesn't provide quite the same level of comfort and excitement as it did when I was younger, but it does feel good. It makes life feel familiar and “normal” again somehow.

At night I fall asleep, holding and rubbing my big, soft and fluffy belly, pretending that I’d just eaten an entire Thanksgiving meal all by myself or something. I’ll inevitably find myself getting aroused, then I touch myself until I release every last drop of pent-up tension and anxiety inside of me. Then I’ll pass out and sleep the night away with my padding fully intact, with no worries about my mother or anyone else walking in on me and discovering my secret. I'm all alone.


It's kind of strange and maybe a little bit disturbing to me that it is in fact such a turn on for me to pad. In talking with other padders online, I discovered that this is also not unusual, that there seems to be endemically a sexual component present for others as well. I started to wonder to myself, what would happen if I ever did meet a girl. How would I explain this to them?

As time has gone on, I seem to have fallen into something of a routine; dealing with the stress of my job and the loneliness and anxiety I've been feeling is a little bit easier when I have my nighttime padding sessions to help me cope. I still find myself wishing that I had more of a social life. One day at a time, I suppose.