The cabin of the black sedan had become, over the course of the last year, his precision caliper.
He didn't need a scale to measure the disaster. He only needed to observe how the interior geometry deformed, month after month, to accommodate her obese weight. When he had bought that car, the passenger seat was a triumph of pristine synthetic leather and negative space. A time consisting of dozens of kilos ago, back when she could still sit down without too much difficulty, almost cross her not-yet-so-swollen ankles, and toss her bag into the empty space between her not-yet-completely-destroyed knees and the glove compartment.
Tonight, that volume simply no longer existed.
Outside, the fine November rain was exhausting its final drops, reflecting on the asphalt the distant lights of the ring road and the intermittent flashes of red traffic lights. The humidity sealed the cabin, condensing on the windows as if to lock inside the scents of past binges: sweet and savory, countless, exaggerated, increasingly frequent and intense. The condensation acting as a memory and physical imprint of how he had sealed, mouthful after mouthful, her fat destiny.
He rolled down the window and remained parked at the wheel, engine idling, favorably positioned just a few meters from her front door. He watched the silhouette of her clumsy, awkward body step out into the yellow halo of the streetlamp. She was saturated with lard. Drops of water beaded on her face, stuffed with pounds of fat, mixing with the sweat that already coated her forehead just from the sheer effort of waddling. The building's front door was much wider than a normal interior door, yet, out of pure habit dictated by her bulk, she waddled through it sideways.
He watched her with that cruel, smug half-smile curving his lips. He was savoring the disaster he had helped inflate with lard.
The operation of exiting the building had already exhausted her. The operation of getting into the car, they both knew, would be anything but a given.
She first had to let go of that obese fat ass, sinking into the seat with a dull thud that visibly tilted the car to the right. Then, she tried to leverage her arm—a limb now thickened by rolls of incredibly dense, pendulous fat—to drag her massive thighs inside. But she failed, obviously. She leaned forward, desperately trying to grab her own leg to lift it, but the mountain of her belly blocked every useless movement, colliding with the overflowing volume of the thigh itself. Too much lard everywhere. But never enough for him.
She stayed there, wedged halfway in, already panting. "I can't do it... it's too tight," she whined, adopting that bratty tone, complaining about the trap he himself had built around her. "My back hurts and it's all your fault..."
He didn't answer. He got out of the car, walked around, and positioned himself behind her. Without a word of comfort, he sank his hands into the soft flesh of her hams. His fingers dug into the dense cellulite, manipulating and shoving her bulk with the brisk force of someone handling heavy livestock. He forcefully wedged her into the seat, then grabbed the door and slammed it with methodical firmness, compressing metal and plastic against the flesh of her hip that was already spilling over the perimeter.
The sound of her panting immediately filled the car when he got back behind the wheel. Her breathing was short, shallow, paced by a slight wheeze. The simple act of defying gravity to get into the car cost her oxygen. He didn't look at her immediately. He let the silence highlight her wheezing, and he savored it the exact same way she savored the blocks of butter and Nutella he regularly used to put her back in her place when she disobeyed. He had fattened her up so much specifically for this: to be able to hear her heavy breathing always, in every single moment, and to know with absolute certainty that this feral exhaustion was solely and exclusively his doing, placing his signature and branding his mark onto her thin, soft, stretch-marked skin.
He watched the dashboard while she fumbled uselessly with the seatbelt, now equipped with an extender. Her stubby fingers, also made clumsy by the fat, desperately tried to navigate around the lard sack melting over her thighs. The hard plastic was already pressing against her belly, rounder and more convex than ever. The visceral mountain where their hands instinctively crossed in every moment of intimacy was no longer contained and cradled by the seat; it dominated it.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked, even though they both knew the answer. The car was already loaded with caloric expectation.
"We're going to test how much this container is willing to give way tonight," he replied, merging into the suburban traffic. "And I don't know if the reinforced seat of this car is ready for the load you'll be coming home with, let alone you."
She huffed, trying to maintain a shred of dignity in her tone. "You keep treating me like a balloon to inflate. I swear, if you make me pop tonight, I'll puke in your ca—"
She didn't finish the sentence. With a fluid, invisible motion, he had fished a king-size chocolate and caramel bar from god knows where, unwrapping it instantly. Before she could even realize it, he pressed it against her lips, forcing her mouth open. Her instinct overpowered her rebellion. Her jaws opened and sank into the caramel. She ate. She ate like the greedy fat cow she had become, her eyes closing for a moment, the sweet taste shutting down her brain and humiliating her soul and tongue.
Her hunger was no longer gastric; after all, she had already spent the entire day eating. It was an obsessive buzzing that he knew how to perceive. It radiated from her dense body, a frequency that disturbed the normality in which other people lived. He knew he could feel her sweaty thighs, compressed against each other by the tightness of the space, generating moist heat.
The yellow McDonald's sign appeared in the distance, a beacon of ruin in the wet night.