Blind Date

I can’t see.

I clung to the porch railing, smoothing my palms over the weathered texture of old paint. The autumn breeze sent a bunch of leaves scratching across the driveway, and a windchime rang about from the next-door neighbor’s yard.

“Come on,” I quietly told myself. “You don’t need your cane for the simple stuff.” I took the first step down and started counting to twenty-seven, walking in a broad arc, cutting through the grass. At twenty-eight I stuck an arm out and caught the top of my mailbox as I went by. “Next…”

I turned to the right and began going on a long stretch of sidewalk, no guideposts. I tried to hear anything above the marching of my sneakers, my arm groping about silently. Another mailbox.

“Ow.” I shook out my wrist.

At the fourth house I faced the street again and really focused. Though the leaves were swirling everywhere, nothing sounded like a car. I bounded across the road, did another short stretch of curb, and hurried up a paved hill. My heart was pounding above my scuffling shoes as I realized I was really doing it.

I latched onto another home’s railing and pulled myself onto the porch, landing a bulls-eye on the doorbell. I had to have on a goofy smile as the front door squealed open.

“Wait, Kelsey?” came a voice. “I was just going to come get you…!”

“Surprise!” I laughed and leaned up, letting Andrew wrap himself around me.

The typical boy-down-the-street pairing between us made me feel like a normal girl. Andrew went to the trade school nearby and I took marketing classes at a local community college. We had been in the same grade since elementary school, but it was only after high school graduation that I realized I needed either a friend or just somebody special. When you can speedwalk from class to class swinging a stick around in front of you, nobody gets in your way and nobody bothers you.

We finished our kiss. “You shaved your chin,” I told him.

“Ahaha, I can’t believe you can always tell when something’s different.” Andrew took my hands and led me inside, shutting out the brisk air behind me. “I’ve got something upstairs for you. Just a gift, you know?”

“Show me,” I grinned, and futzed around with the zipper of my jacket before he gently took over.

Stepping into his room, I did my usual walk to the bed and then a little flop onto it. I rested the back of my head against his sheets, which always had a hint of body spray no matter where I ended up. Something underneath my shoulderblades made me squirm and I dug it out.

“An album?” I said instantly, recognizing the weight and thinness. “Aww, thanks!”

“Uh-huh!” He sat by my side and kissed above my ear. “Another indie band for your endless music collection. The Pennsylvania Kites.”

“How do you manage to find groups I still haven’t heard about?” My nails sought for a breach in the plastic wrap.

“The internet’s a big place. Here, I can tell you about the album cover. Where your thumb is now, there’s a wooden toy train in some snow. And if you move to the right: a stuffed bear lying beside it. Towards the back is a sandbox. It’s all an old photo.”

“Sounds kind of silly, like a kid’s CD,” I joked, and leaned back all the way to put the case up behind my head.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Andrew said as I felt the shift of his weight over my thighs. He was lightly perched on them, smoothing the tips of his fingers around the waistband of my jeans.

“I’ll listen to it,” I said with a yawn, stretching my back. “There isn’t an album I didn’t li— Ooh!” My ribs started to tickle and I leaned up to grab his wrists. “Ha ha, warn me before doing that.”

“Then tell me where you want my hands…” His whispers drew nearer and nearer and he tucked his lips against the side of my neck.

I hugged his form, the weight and the warmth bearing down on my chest and abdomen, to which I sighed out my thanks. “You want me to start talking dirty already…?”

Andrew leaned up. “Speaking of dirty talk… I kind of wanted to tell you something. A personal thing.” He sounded hesitant, switching to lie beside me, and I felt around his chest instead. I smoothed over the material of his sweatshirt and the hint of muscle tone and bony flatness underneath.

“Yeah?”

“We’ve been together for over three months, and, well… There’s this sort of piece of me around the bedroom that I’ve kept secret from like, everyone. Can I trust you with it now?”

“Sure…” Under my palm I felt his heart palpitating. “Is it something—“

“It’s inflation,” he cut in.

“…WHA-ha-ha—! What?! So— So you like seeing prices go up or something?” I clamped my hand over my mouth to stop giggling.

“No, no! It’s not about the economy or the markets…! Body inflation, Kelsey. I don’t think you’ve ever heard of it...”

“Nope! Never…! Ohh, I’m sorry… How do those two things go together at all?”

“It’s people… swelling up like balloons.” I heard him sit up to force out the words. “Air, water, just women… I can’t explain what’s exactly so great about it.” A yelping sort of laugh, injured and nervous. “Back when I was a kid— you know what happened to cartoon characters sometimes?”

“No, no I do not...!”

“Well, I think it’s just where it started…” Although he was seriously confusing me, I reached for him and felt for his hands. His forearms were crossed over his knees, his posture stiff like if I were to tug on him, parts would break off and he’d crumble into dust. “It’s basically everything to do with balloons… Remember your birthday party in third grade?”

“The one when you blew out my birthday candles from underneath me?” I couldn’t help but grin as I massaged his shoulder. “And because you were such a jerk, you started pulling down the balloons and playing with them until they popped, and started doing it right in front of my face to scare me… Oh my god, you ass…!” I wanted to hug him and beat the shit out of him— nicely, and so I settled to wrestle him down instead.

“You see?” Andrew let himself tip over. “I’m weird. And I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to break up with me for being so sick in the head.”

“Will you shut up?” There was a clumph as he suddenly fell off the side of the bed. “So if you were going to do this type of thing with me… what’s supposed to happen?” He got quiet and I groped about and found the top of his head. He was kneeling on the floor and I did the same on the bed.

“I’d probably… I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t show you any of the art there is online, I guess. If there’d be a way I could demonstrate…” He poked my middle ever so lightly and I flinched. “It’d have to be using that.”

“Seriously…? Like how, doing… what?”

“Filling up. Rounding out.” His tone had grown a little hopeful, his voice wispy with awe as he circled his palm over my front.

I steadied his hand with my own to stop my skin from tingling. “Can we just listen to that album, whatever it’s called?”

“No thanks,” Andrew replied.

“What?”

“Sorry, that’s the title of it. ‘No Thanks’.” The bed crawled as he laughed and got back on, and I knew he was going to reach for the CD case. I lunged and missed it completely, and so he picked it up.

“Nooo, let me try putting it in your stereo…!”

“Heh, you’ll smudge it up trying to feel it, Kelsey…”

And so the afternoon passed without much else. We didn’t even talk about his kink at all afterwards. But when Andrew walked me home and kissed me goodbye, I couldn’t stop thinking he was suddenly a little different. I realized he had different definitions of what was beautiful.

Obviously when we tried sex, or just cuddling, I had to be enough then. But maybe this was a sign that he wanted something additional out of me.

And it had something to do with appearance, the one thing I couldn’t manage very well by myself when I had thought my whole life that personality was the only thing that mattered.

In high school, back when my girl friends would hold my hand and steer me around stores at the mall, sometimes they’d start giggling and whispering to me that a guy or two was checking me out. On the inside I only felt like a girl with her eyes squinted shut being dragged through a maze of clothing racks. If I was pretty, I couldn’t tell.

I closed the door to my room and started undressing, ready to do the thing when I was usually curious about me, or anything else. Sprawled out on my bed I moved my hands over myself, fingers crisscrossing, groping and pinching. I felt my face, smoothed over my modest B-cups, my slim waist and flat stomach, down around my narrow hips, tracing all the way to my knees where everything past those seemed really far away. I was just soft skin and the occasional lump of bone.

When I sat up, I had one final check: my index finger into my navel. Maybe the one unchanging, locatable point on myself, just a little hole that touching brought forth the ache of sensitivity. The thought of it ever bulging out in front of me sent a shudder through my spine.

I crawled under the sheets, held my stomach, and tried to empty my mind as much as possible so sleep could take over.

-~-

“A groundswell,” read the narrator, “is referred to as a social trend which people harness technology to obtain information from sources other than corporate entities.” I was studying on Andrew’s bed, a little voice recorder in my hands and a textbook speaking to me through my phone’s earbuds. He left me in the bedroom while he was off doing something else, probably making dinner at this hour.

A hand rested on my knee and my earbud was taken out. “Back,” Andrew said.

I paused the book. “Alright. Mmm...” My humming was his cue put his lips to mine briefly. “So, what’s for dinner? Can’t smell a thing.”

I went to jump up, but I kicked something hard, something that stubbed my toe with a klonk that was never there before, far as I remember. “What the hell was that?” I asked, recoiling.

“I-It was nothing...” Now my other headphone was swiped out and he made a sudden push at my chest. Fumbling with my jeans, he perched his knee on top of my thigh, and a click began the most disorienting, frightening noise.

Whrrrrrrrr!

”What’s going on?” I screamed above the buzzing. He knew how much I hated being lost and yet he pried down my zipper without any explanation.

“I’m just going to try something...!”

“Tell me what it is!”  My hands reached for his, got brushed away.

“Relax, relax, this isn’t going to hurt...! I love you!” It was his voice coming down from above and his hold on my hands against my chest that shut me up. “I need to slip these down. We’ll go nice and easy...”

“What are you doing, what are you doing...?” I couldn’t stop my mindless questions as Andrew went through all the careful motions that would normally get me in the mood. The brush of our legs together and the easing down of my jeans, the row of fingers hooking underneath my thighs, separating them, massaging them. Instead of my skin tickling from the open air, the constant roaring noises just shook everything from the surroundings to my very core. It sounded so angry, whatever it was, putting me on edge for the moment my last line of defense would be stripped away next.

I gasped as a pencil-thin blade of air grazed my loins, sweeping to and fro with a shrill hiss.

“This is air,” Andrew reassured me. “It’s harmless, see?” It went sspsh-sspsh-sspsh as he prodded it into my skin, cutting off the flow for only a few fleeting moments.

I wanted to be confident; he had told me many times before that with my disability I was still the bravest person he ever knew. But that intruding, weaseling little gust made me whine and kick as it advanced upwards. In a flash it had curled itself over the edge of my panties, and despite it slipping in with infinite care, it sent a hot, vicious torrent lacing through me, the air sputtering from my squirming, my tenseness. All I could do for a moment was arch my back and cry out.

“There you go, there you go...” he whispered calmly. “Can you feel it yet?” He leaned on my body to steady my arms, and I should have expected the touch of his bulge against me. It terrified me that I was actually rising to meet him, grinding together while motionless there.

Was all this tingling, shifting and tickling I felt from the air? It was this constant sensation of a million little fingers running up and down my middle, some wandering through my chest, some in my thighs, diverging and colliding again and threatening to overwhelm me. Centralized in my stomach, something was making a ball that pushed and pushed outwards, like all the times I’d take a deep breath just to see how puffy my belly could get. But it kept going and going; I expected it to hurt as I kept swelling against Andrew, but there wasn’t pain in the slightest.

“Get off!” I moaned out anyway, breathless and still struggling.

“You’re doing it though...” he encouraged me. “I-I can actually feel you growing...” He took a hand away from mine and felt for himself, digging into some bloated curve I didn’t have a minute ago. I wailed as his fingers jolted me like tasers, triggering another spasm. When he lifted away my skin just bulged back out into place, any softness I had swapped with rubbery stiffness.

“Stop it! I’m all sensitive...!”

Pushy as he was, he slipped back, hands settled on my thighs again. Free to move I scrabbled to peel up my sweater, touch for myself. There really was a tight mound growing inside of me, a globe that broadened and spread my palms apart. Lightweight and hollow I felt, trying to get accustomed to my body warping itself.

“It’s like you’re as big as a basketball,” Andrew admired, his compliment paired with a kiss to my belly, then to one of my knuckles.

“A-Am I...?”

He didn’t answer and pecked and smoothed my skin here and there. All the smothering affection did its part to settle me down at least; it was easy to get engrossed in the cuddling and let the swelling-up get as natural as breathing. I made a little game of it by taking deep breaths and pushing up my back into his face. I’d surge up a bit with a light creak, sigh and then flood with warmth as he came back down with his weight, laughing.

Commanding all this attention, it became empowering. Growing so easily, getting rewarded with little pinches and suckles, I grunted out for more and he teased me with a small slap. I tried hoarding my belly as my personal toy, pulling my sweater up and over my bulge. It wouldn’t go halfway. I rolled it back up and groaned in bliss.

“So h-how big are you going to make me get?” I panted, my toes curling.

Andrew lifted my knees up and hugged around my thighs, holding my ticklish waist. A part of his head balanced on my belly. “I never want you to stop...!”

It was a challenge, then, to hold myself together and fill up bigger and bigger for him. The tube inside me stuffed my body relentlessly and I welcomed it in, moaning, wriggling a bit to dance with the plumes between my loins. The tautness of my skin ebbed with his massaging, his compressing, our hands drifting further away from each other to the point we were exploring separate continents of myself. My belly dominated so much of my being, it pushed the air out in my lungs, ripened my thighs up thick and fat with extra volume. Andrew’s grip couldn’t encompass me anymore and let my legs fall. I squealed as he straddled them like an inflatable chair for a moment.

“Ouch, okay...!” he cracked up. “Can’t split my legs that wide... God, you’re getting huge!”

“Mmmmnngh...!” I bit my lip and blew out fiery air from my nostrils, the sweat beginning to form on my forehead, a little twinge crackling in my sides for only a moment. I squeezed my thighs together and it only narrowed the flow, rifling the shots of pressure higher up into my dome. And the hissing noise being made, it rose above the humming and whistled right between my ears. We pressed up against each other as closely as we could, abdomens wrestling together and getting my insides to grumble. Rocking together never felt so dangerous until now.

I groped about for my navel. Where was it? If I could sit up easier with my bloated fucking thighs I might be able to reach over the top of my belly. I swore my thumb nicked the hole before it seemed to disappear for good. That was the sign I was getting too large, probably unrecognizable at this point.

I leaned back with a grunt, keeping still while my skin kept crawling on its own. I was getting tight. My ribs kept hammering against a ceiling, like a bell on a carnival game ringing over and over. The pressure was ticking up on a scale, my thighs spreading themselves further and further apart, tremoring with tension. I swung out my legs as they started to get numb hoping that my toe could switch something off.

“It’s starting to hurt...” I whined weakly, then I snapped to attention. It might be too late. With my whole frame shuddering, seemingly seconds before failure, I leaned up and shrieked above the whirring and groaning. “Turn it off! It’ll—! I could—!”

As I screamed, all I heard was piercing silence. If it weren’t for my drum-tight skin proving I could still feel, I swore I’d have blown and left behind all my perceptions for good. Andrew nestled back against my gut, panting as he was draped over me and rubbing reassuringly.

“I s-stopped it... You’re okay... I-I got it in time...” He blew out a long, grateful sigh; I was still afraid to breathe. He slid around the side of my belly and flopped down beside me, planting a firm kiss between my lips. “Kelsey, I’m so sorry I did this to you, but at the same time... You were so amazing!”

It seemed like all I could do was move my arms and get them stroking through my hair to relax. I felt amazing, too, but volatile, even this spent. Nothing felt over with. I thought I could melt as I slid my hands over my bust for the first time and realized it also had grown as stiff as cannonballs bundled by wire. Whatever size they were at now, I would have to keep caressing to know for sure.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “We had our fun... How do I go back to normal...?”

“It’ll take some time,” he replied unsurely. Maybe he didn’t know, maybe he wanted me to stay like this forever. Gingerly he retreated back to my legs and began to ease out the tube. My panties let out a twang as he let go of them, a spring trap covering my crotch back up. “This is wet as hell...” Andrew chuckled in surprise, and I heard the hose drop to the carpet.

“I’m worn out,” I told him, trying to budge my knees. The rumbling groans my insides let out didn’t faze me in the slightest. I truly felt like a balloon, eyeless and only conscious of its internal pressure.

Andrew was lifting my shins for me, turning my hips to the side. “Can you scooch up a bit on the bed? I think it’s best if we lie down and let this go away on its own.”

In a few moments I had my cheek against the covers, part of my swollen side cushioned by the mattress, but the rest of me hovering out in the middle of nowhere. I had to giggle as I wrapped my arm around it and rolled my sweater up, sort of proud to expose my gut, explore it with my smoothing palm. Andrew snuggled up behind me and joined in, rubbing and pinching my outer thigh. He angled through to my underbelly as well. “You’re massive, you know,” his breath carried into my ear. “It’s incredible...”

I was silent for a moment; something felt different, small. “If we,” I wondered aloud. “Try again and put the hose in my ass, would that make it grow too?”

A hot length grew along my lower back before he answered. “...I hope so.”

We were silent together, and to stave off the sleepiness creeping in I took a series of deep breaths, letting my body creak with the gracefulness of a rocking crib. Nuzzling my hair, laying his hand on top of mine, Andrew spoke up. “You’re so beautiful...”

And nothing for once was more visible to me than that.