Vo l . 7 N o . 2 “I’m done. This was the last time.” “You are not.” “I am,” Jeff stood. Although he was a head taller than Clare and outsized her by 150 pounds, he seemed diminutive under her gaze. She was so close he could smell wisps of her perfume, Anais Anais, over the smoke. “I’m done and I’m not doing another feeding.” “And what would you infer if this evidence,” Clare motioned at the bed, “reached the little woman at home? Or your commanding officer?” Jeff’s face hardened, “Just because you’re the dom in this, doesn’t mean you don’t have your own screws I could turn.” “Role reversal. Cute,” Clare said, then with a sigh, she continued, “fine. Will this ensure your return? I had mentioned a reward,” She slid a hand into his briefs and began to work. Jeff, despite his wishing otherwise, found his genitalia operating on instinct. When Clare Heartwood finished and the inside of Jeff’s underwear was sticky, she removed her hand. “I’ll text,” she said. Jeff didn’t reply. ### In the beginning, Clare was timid. The whole idea of feeding Jeff was an enormous object in her mind, a massif, an entity so great and full of such inertia that she found herself weak before it. She was ignorant of what to do or how to react or what limits could be approached and which ones transgressed in the novel situation in which she discovered herself. Her shyness required Jeff to coach her through the first two feedings. At the third, emboldened by an urge she couldn’t name, she’d broached the idea of recording the sessions. Jeff seized this insight and extrapolated that it would be fortuitous to have records of the event: one for him to relive in the safety and comfort of his own masturbatorium and another as training footage for Clare, should she desire to refine her techniques. He encouraged such a review of the tape and later, after she’d compiled and replayed several hours of feedings, the original, impossible idea of gorging Jeff, the one that held
133 such a perceived immovability in her mind, rolled through her thoughts of its own accord, spinning into something larger than what it had been. If she was honest with herself, which Clare often was, the thought perturbed and uplifted in equal measure. Clare, having been naive to the feeding world, knew well that “real life” was populated by freaks enough. She herself, before the stumbling into the dominatrix/ feeder role with Jeff, had been no stranger to conjugal depravity or oddness concerning food. Her own family was rife with examples: her mother, Linda, was a closet anorexic/bulimic in equal measure; her father ingested quantities of “hormone replacements” of dubious legality, spent hours weekly in the gym, and regimented his diet such that, at nigh 60, he had a body enviable of a man half his age; despite Clare’s misgivings, she and Andy had experimented, sexually, with each other during Janet Klein their high school years; her younger sister, Amanda, retained a coat of prepubescent fat, despite her having turned 18, that Linda incessantly and obliquely criticized. Clare too had been subject to her mother’s nitpicking during adolescence which had resulted in a sort of demi-paranoia about calorie intake and a compulsion to cut all the tags out of her clothes to prevent Clare from acknowledging the sizes she wore. Upon review, Clare was surprised to find that her past had not germinated, organically, in the loam of her soul, as grotesque a fetish as she currently enjoyed. The striking face about Clare’s present reality, though, was the acceleration of that enjoyment. She texted Jeff the next Monday with instructions to arrive at her apartment, promptly at 6 PM the following day. When Jeff neither answered the text or showed, Clare whirled into an uncharacteristic fury. He’d never disobeyed before. Pacing her living room, she texted all manner of messages, some cajoling, others demanding, others still on the brink of a needy supplication, for the next 45 minutes, until she received a singular reply, “No.” Rage gripped Clare and she almost shattered her phone against the far wall. She stalked to the bedroom for a cigarette. The nicotine did little to alter her mood.