[Story] The Gluttonous Twink

“I quit the team.”

“What?” I asked. “Why?”

Lucas ran his fingers through his blond hair and grinned. “I’m tired of soccer. It’s boring.”

“Boring? That’s not what you said when we signed up.”

“You can keep doing it. But I’m done.”

I rolled my eyes. Of course he would quit. We got together once a week, and finding anything that would keep Lucas’s attention was torture.

“What are we going to do on Saturday mornings then?”

Lucas shrugged. “We can just grab coffee like normal friends.”

“Normal friends, ha. We can’t be normal friends as long as you’re part of the equation.”

“Speak for yourself, Trav.”

We were both gay guys, but we were very different gay guys. I was a former football player who transitioned seamlessly to frequenting pretentious breweries in baseball caps with his bearish boyfriend. Lucas was a rail thin flamboyant twink who loved the old-style gay nightlife and practically fought with me when I suggested we do anything he deemed too “normal.”

“How about we just pick a place to eat out?” I suggested.

“I can’t eat out.”

“My treat.”

“It’s not the money, it’s the calories,” he whined.

“You can have one cheat meal, I promise.”

“Ugh, fine.”

We drove to a diner. No sooner did we have our food, but Lucas had devoured all of it.

“Looks like you were hungry.”

“Whatever, you’d be hungry too if you were on my diet. And if you were on my diet, you wouldn’t have that spare tire.”

Lucas loved to poke fun at my beer gut. I couldn’t help but chuckle. If he had a boyfriend like mine, he’d know to shove his criticism up his flat ass. Of course, I wouldn’t say this out loud. I would only say, “At least I get to drink beer instead of vodka sodas.”

“There’s nothing wrong with vodka sodas.” Lucas’s eyes were fixated on the side of pancakes that I had barely touched yet.

“You want a pancake?” I asked.

“No.” Lucas’s mouth was almost agape as he stared at the pancakes.

I lifted one with my fork. “You sure about that?”

Lucas huffily assented and tore into the pancake with vigor.

“Good?”

He nodded.

I watched over the next few weeks as Lucas began to order larger and larger meals, all of which he demolished with an ease that his slender body belied. At first, I thought nothing of it. I would be hungry too if I had starved myself down to the size of a twink. But before long, Lucas was begging to follow up our meals together with trips to ice cream parlors, donut shops, and bakeries. He would purchase enough for my bear of a boyfriend, and consume the whole thing until he was moaning because he was so full.

I wasn’t sure what brought about this change, but there was another change that came that I did understand. Lucas began to fill out. His cavernous cheeks became fuller, and his shirts began to cling to his chest and middle.

“You look good,” I told Lucas one day. “Healthy.”

The biting retort I expected never came. “Yes, I’m positively glowing these days,” Lucas said as he cut into a cheesy omelet.

It was not long before Lucas’s portion sizes made me look like I was the one on a diet. Nor was it long before Lucas’s body began to reflect the mind-boggling gluttony he displayed every time he and I spent time together. He was beginning to develop a soft belly, and his ass plumped up to fill out his jeans. His face wasn’t just “fuller” now: I could see a slight double chin show through the scruff that he had fallen into the habit of ignoring.

Should I ignore it all too? Lucas had become if anything more fun to hang out with. He loved to talk with me about cooking and baking. He always had new recipes to share with me, like I had my own little chef to tell me what was trending. Well, not so little anymore.

Lucas’s gluttony continued unabated. Every time I saw him, he ate like his life depended on it. And as he ate, he grew softer and bigger. I never brought it up, and neither did he. I asked how he was doing, and he said he was doing great with such conviction that I believed him. And still he continued to balloon before my very eyes. His belly became bigger than mine. The slight double chin became a permanent one that rolled about as he laughed and grinned with me.

“Seen any guys lately?” I asked.

Lucas put down his fork. “No, still on a break.”

“Oh, really? Any particular reason?”

“Just been focusing on me. I’ll get back into it when I’m ready.”

I nodded. “So no clubbing lately?”

Lucas shook his head. “I’d rather bake a cake and stay in than go clubbing.”

“I mean, me too, but would have never expected you to say that.”

“Dunno, Travis, just haven’t been into it lately.”

Lucas shrugged and picked up his fork and began shoveling in food.

Every time Lucas attended one of our little parties, my boyfriend would give me a knowing look which I chastised lest it upset Lucas, but it never seemed to. He would occasionally ask me if Lucas was any fatter, and I would reply that yes, he was bigger than ever. In fact, to describe Lucas as anything other than fat was now little else than a lie.

One day, an old mutual acquaintance happened to be in town. Unthinkingly, I invited him to the small gathering that my boyfriend and I were hosting. This acquaintance, a man named Dan, had gone to drag nights with Lucas, me, and some others back in the day. It wasn’t really my thing, however, so I’d rather lost track of Dan.

Dan warmly greeted me, met my boyfriend — told us we were cute “husbears,” and I blushed and grinned as a charmed host would. But things became complicated when Dan came to Lucas. Not because there had been any animosity between them, but because Dan literally didn’t recognize Lucas because of how fat he had grown.

“My name is Dan.” He extended his hand.

“Of course it is,” Lucas said happily. “Good to see you Dan!”

“Sorry, I’m a bit embarrassed, you are…?”

Lucas gave his full name.

“Wait…Lucas? What happened, man? You were a twink last time I saw you.”

“I got hungry.” Lucas patted his belly.

“You doing okay though? Like…I didn’t even recognize you. You’re huge!”

I felt a knot in my stomach. This was exactly the conversation I had been doing my best to avoid.

“I’ve never been happier.”

Dan’s blustering response faded into the background. I kept glancing at Lucas, those words echoing through my mind. At our next meal together, I waited for Lucas to unload his order on the server before saying, “Hey, man, sorry about Dan last week. I didn’t know he’d be so

rude.”

“You don’t have to apologize.” Lucas shrugged. “People say what they want.”

“But what he said was totally uncalled for.”

“I mean, he was kind of right.”

My mind raced for something to say that was both polite and accurate.

“You told him you were happy,” I at last managed.

“It’s obviously not that simple. My life is fine. I’m not depressed or anything, but there’s no denying that I totally lost control of how I eat. I was a fucking twink, Trav. Now look at me.” Lucas allowed his chubby fingers to sink into his belly. “I’m fucking obese.”

I followed his gaze to his middle. He was so fat now that he hung out over his pants in every direction. His belly poured over his pants and into his lap. He was bigger than my partner, who was himself well over 250 pounds.

“If you want to lose weight, you have my support.”

“You think I haven’t tried? Food is too fucking good. I can’t go back, no matter how much I want it. Food is always on my mind. Everything connected to food flares up my hunger. It’s gotten so bad, just touching my belly makes me want to eat.”

“Wow.”

“Which reminds me…” He rubbed his big soft gut. “We should get ice cream after this.”

“Man, that sounds good. But maybe we should skip it?” I glanced at his belly.

“If god wanted me to be a twink, he would have made ice cream taste like shit.”

“But you were a twink.”

“Twink me is in here somewhere.” Lucas sighed. “He just got hungry.”