A Likely Story: A Wayward Ink Publishing Anthology (9 page)

But he was straight-up round. Like gut-stretched-around-a-basketball round. It wasn’t like he’d just popped a little squeeze on his love handles. No, he was pushing around a solid, swollen sphere, and he could contract his stomach muscles until he was blue in the face without sucking it in a centimeter. He grew rounder and heavier every week, and every step he took to get his gut under some kind of control was undermined by cravings for food so distracting he was afraid he was going some kind of crazy. As if that wasn’t enough, his chest was filling, threatening to push up two little nipple-crowned peaks atop his ever-flat pecs. God, if he grew man-boobs at thirty-four, he’d kill himself.

He was sideways in front of the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing his shape over his right shoulder, both hands assessing the heft of him when Jax stumbled in.

“Whatcha doin’?” Jax asked. He poured a monster piss into the bowl for at least fifteen seconds, then padded across the floor to snuggle Cassidy in front of the mirror. Jax nuzzled Cassidy’s neck and pressed against his plush backside, and when Jax spied Cassidy’s hands against the hard round of his belly, he gave it a playful rub, too. “Dang, Pickle.” He whistled. “What the fuck do you
eat
when I’m not lookin’?”

Cassidy flushed, but Jax play-wrestled with him to keep him in front of the mirror, their contrast—and Cassidy’s not-so-subtle swayback—laid bare. Jax was a head taller, Cassidy a soft butterscotch against Jax’s brittle ice-white and ink-blue. Jax was ridged and slender and Cassidy, inexplicably, carried a balloon of distended stomach that he did not want but could not help but feed. He did not answer Jax’s flip question aloud. He was embarrassed to cop to two pints of Ben & Jerry’s already that morning, for one thing, seeing as how it was barely eight-thirty.

He’d always had the hips. His brother Wade had them, too, and called them “load-bearing” hips. That always got a laugh. But even a couple Thanksgivings ago, when Cassidy came home from a Caribbean cruise with a load of buffet weight on a swollen ass looking like someone had stuffed an emergency flotation device into his pants and then yanked sharply on the red cord, his tummy had stayed flat. Maybe he hadn’t always been hard as a cast-iron skillet like Jax, but he’d always worn his narrow waist as a badge of honor. The ass was hereditary—and not exactly a liability on a good-looking guy who liked to bottom, Cassidy knew—but his flat belly showed pride. It showed discipline. It showed self-respect. And frankly, it lent credence to his straight-arrow, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps political image that a specialty-cut suit jacket for Porky undermined.

God, maybe the weight was hereditary, too. Cassidy’s brother had chubbed up like a blow-up doll when his wife had their first son. Everybody called it sympathy weight and thought it was adorable. And it had pretty much melted away after Oscar was born, but last Cassidy had seen him, a couple weeks after Cassidy’s youngest nephew Olaf was born, he’d been lugging an immense fat belly with him. Wade was older—did the Uematsu boys hit 34 and go chubbo? Their dad was built like a blade of grass, but maybe there was something in the Japanese/Norwegian combo?
Apparently
, Cassidy couldn’t help but mope, absently letting his hands ride Jax’s as they explored the swell of him.

“I’ve made my mark on you, huh?” Jax muttered into his ear with a laugh. He rubbed Cassidy in circles and Cassidy felt him gradually grow hard. Soon, Jax probed Cassidy’s hole, entreating entry, but when Cassidy bent to offer it, he glimpsed the swell of his fat in the mirror and stood up straight. Sure, he was horny, but how the fuck was he supposed to feel sexy carrying this watermelon around?

“Aw, please, Pickle?” Unfortunately, Jax not only had to settle for a handjob, but, when Cassidy lumbered off in search of breakfast, he had to give it to his damn self.

HE WAS big as a house, out of breath all the time, and lately everything he put in his mouth gave him heartburn. Cassidy wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to go home for Thanksgiving. But it was only a hundred miles away, and the House was in recess until December. He’d shortly run out of excuses, and when his mom threatened to send Wade down to fetch him, he knuckled under just to get her to quit calling.

Cassidy invited Jax, but was secretly relieved when he said he couldn’t get away from work. The Road was famous for the feed they put on for the city’s non-turkey-eaters, and nobody in town made a meatier meat-free gravy than Jax. As his belly grew insistently more round, Cassidy felt conversely less sexy, and he’d begun to struggle with a (not-so) thinly veiled resentment towards the younger man. Jax wasn’t even slightly turned off by Cassidy’s weight gain, and Cassidy resented feeling the need to beg off sex with a young dude to whom he was so strongly attracted. Jax was an amazing cook, and Cassidy resented him for staying skinny as a twig and flat as a pancake while Cassidy ballooned with every bite. Jax couldn’t have given less of a shit what people thought about him, and Cassidy resented his unfeigned ease with his gangly, ink-stained body, goofy face, fucked-up hair and disreputable, rough-and-tumble history. Jax would have just barged into the Uematsu Thanksgiving like he owned the place, put his big ol’ feet on all the furniture and laughed too loud at all the wrong jokes, and what Cassidy resented most of all was his own reluctance to claim this boisterous boyfriend. The way Jax moved through the world, with his middle finger hoisted at anyone that took issue, was what Cassidy loved most about him. In Capitol Hill. In Grand Lake, Cassidy would have been a writhing, wincing mess, and he blamed Jax for that because he had enough on his mind without trying to confront his own hang-ups at his brother’s dinner table.

Not that Wade gave a shit. Cassidy’s straight-and-narrow Republican repression was deep-seated, but self-inflicted. But it was easy for Wade, Cassidy reasoned: in a world run by rugged, manly men, none was more rugged or manly than his brother. He was athletic, he was fearless, he was kind and he rooted for the underdog. He loved beer, guns, and chicks with big tits. Growing up in a small town, he’d had everything going for him and nothing to hide. A guy could afford to be himself, Cassidy figured, if ‘himself’ fit the bill of what people expected of him as if he’d been custom-ordered out of a catalog.
Citizens for your Community!,
it might be called, with Wade’s guileless, grinning mug plastered on the cover. “Made to Order!” “Now available: Red hair!” Cassidy had always felt more like the Free Gift With Purchase: the right size and maybe an okay color, but too modern and flashy a style to ever fit quite right. So he kept his hair short, his chinos pressed, and promised to fight tax-hikes. If he was going to go through life with a ‘reputation’, at least this way it was highly public and could be shaped by consultants as necessary.

Wade lived and he let live. He got up early, he worked hard, he drove a truck, and drank cheap beer. Baked wrinkled and coppery by the high-country sun, the three years that separated him from Cassidy looked more like fifteen, but half the time he still acted like a teenager and called over-cautious Cassidy “Old Man”. He was faithful to his wife, crazy about his kids, and wished his little brother would cut himself some slack once in a while.

Cassidy had a great house in Grand County, a little blue one-bedroom up the hill from town with a view of damn near the whole lake from its tiny front porch. Like with his office in town, his cousin Kirk looked after it, and rather than crowd in with Kirk and sleep on his own couch, he usually stayed with his brother, who’d built the wife nothing short of a mansion teetering over the lake. When he pulled into the gravel drive, the front door was open, and his brother was out on the wrap-around pine deck by the time Cassidy had levered himself—with no small effort—out of the car.

“Damn, Old Man,” Wade called out, pulling Cassidy sideways into a bear hug. “When’s the baby due?”

So much for his painstakingly chosen cache of new XL sweaters being able to hide anything. “Very funny.” Cassidy smirked his disdain for the cheap shot, but he felt his cheeks redden, too. He’d kind of been counting on Wade’s whopping weight gain during Elvira’s second pregnancy to shield him from four days of fat jokes, but Wade’s gut was as flat as Cassidy had ever seen it. Yeah, he had the weathered face of a peasant farmer, but fuck if Wade hadn’t recouped the body of a seventeen-year-old soccer star. How exactly was
that
fair?!

He gave Wade an obligatory admiring pat. “You lost yours, I see.”

“I thought I’d lost it,” Wade boomed. He hefted Cassidy’s gut with an exaggerated
oomph.
“But now I see where it all went. Shit, little bro, how far along are you?”

“Shut up.” The expectant look stayed on Wade’s face, so Cassidy chucked his duffel bag into his brother’s arms. “Am I sleeping out here, or you wanna show me in?”

The Uematsu clan had been clomping through the Rocky Mountains for generations. SUVs from all across the high country disgorged aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and hangers-on into Wade and Elvira’s house for two days. On Thursday afternoon, thirty-two people crowded around four tables loaded with food, bowed their heads for about two seconds, and then tucked in. Wade had roasted four pheasant, two turkeys, and a duck to crispy perfection. Cousin Chaz whipped wasabi into her mashed potatoes until Cassidy was crying over each buttery mouthful. There was tray after tray of store-bought sushi—Aunt Lorraine had abandoned hand-rolled for the Safeway deli counter years ago. Using a solid dozen of Elvira’s homemade tortillas, Cassidy ladled in bowl after bowl of her green chile. His mom brought Norway to the table in a bowl of berries and cream and a platter of rolled krumkakes—his favorite—which he shoveled in long after he should have had no more room. Much was made of his weight, although it was agreed that the ostentatious swell suited him.

“You must like it,” Lorraine remarked. “You’re practically glowing.”

“Glowing, hell,” his caretaker cousin Kirk chimed in. “That’s sweat, Ma. That was a damn workout! I’ve never seen anybody put it away like that.”

“You’ve eaten your share in your day,” Lorraine assured him.

“And you could beer me under the table any time,” Cassidy said.

“Can and will.” Kirk popped the top on his umpteenth can, downed half of it in one gulp, and let out a burp that cleared the table.

“Manners!” cried Lorraine as she scurried away, prompting Kirk to take another swig and belch out a long and fragrant “E
xcuse me”.

“We’re so proud of him,” she quipped to Elvira.

“And rightly so.”

Post-dinner activity options consisted primarily of snoring on the couch, hollering at the football game on TV, or doing millions of dishes. Cassidy dried a couple plates, but Elvira shortly relieved him of his tea towel. “You should rest, Daddy,” she said with a knowing wink. And Cassidy was wrecked, although he didn’t realize he’d let it show. His swollen feet hurt, his back was killing him, and he was huffing and puffing in the hot kitchen. He wasn’t sure what Elvira thought she ‘knew’ with that wink, and he sure as hell couldn’t remember her ever calling him “Daddy”, but he gladly surrendered his towel and waddled off to the deck for a breath of fresh air.

That was Jax’s euphemism for sucking down a smoke, which Cassidy was dying to do. He crept around the side of the house to a tucked-away corner of the deck that overlooked town rather than the lake, lowered his awkward bulk into a lounger, and lit up. He put his head back and let his brain unlatch. He was zoned out, watching Jax float in and out of his mind’s eye, thinking about nothing—a phone gone dead, plugging into one cigarette after another in hopes of drawing a charge.

“You started
smoking
again?!” Wade’s over-reactive alarm jolted Cassidy back to the deck.

Cassidy shrugged. “Not really,” he lied.

“You sure that’s such a great idea?” Wade leaned his hip against the smooth wood rail of the deck.

Cassidy shrugged again. “What’s the big deal?”

Wade raised a sun-bleached eyebrow and gawked pointedly at Cassidy’s gut. “What about the baby?”

Cassidy sighed and put his head back. “That was barely funny the first time, Wade. I get it, I’ve put on a few pounds. I’m working on it, okay, but it’s fucking Thanksgiving. I’m not gonna go to the gym tonight, so you wanna get off my case?”

Wade shook his head with a little chuckle. “Oh wow. You don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Lemme guess: you met a guy.”

Cassidy allowed a half smile. “Kinda. But I did know that.”

“What’s it been, about six months? At least six months. …” Wade muttered this last bit as if to himself.

“Yeah,” Cassidy said. “Thereabouts. How’d you know that?”

“He fucks you?”

“Wade!” His brother had always been open and accepting—he was the first person Cassidy had come out to, and even at sixteen it had been a mere technicality—but they
never
talked about sex. Cassidy shifted his ass uncomfortably, but Wade was undeterred.

“Without a condom?”

“Wade!”

“At least once,” Wade insisted.

Cassidy narrowed his eyes. “We don’t use condoms,” he acknowledged. “What exactly are you getting at?”

“And you’ve gained a shit-ton of weight since you’ve been with him, huh?”

Cassidy flushed. “I don’t know about ‘shit-ton’. But he’s a cook. A pretty good one.”

“All in your belly, huh?” Wade pressed on. “Well, and your tits,” he said with a nod towards Cassidy’s chest.

“Well I’ve always had the ass,” Cassidy said, crossing his arms protectively across his front. “As you well know.” His turn to nod.

Wade perched himself on the edge of the chair facing Cassidy’s. He glanced around the deck, including over the railing, as if to make sure they were alone. He took a sip of his wine and set the glass by his feet with a little clink.

“You remember how I gained all that weight before we had the boys?” he asked, confidential-like.

“I remember,” Cassidy said, happy for paybacks. “When Olaf was born you were a moose. What’d you gain, fifty pounds?”

“More like eighty,” Wade said. “And he didn’t weigh but six pounds, three ounces when he was born. Took me a while to work that off, I don’t mind sayin’.”