Good Girls get Tummy Rubs

A deep sigh breezed from my lips, still damp with my cocktail, and I licked them dry before perching the glass back on the poolside. It had been a wonderful idea, sinking into the cool water on a day like that, where the sweat evaporated from my skin by simple virtue of bathing in sunlight.

It was hot, and I was in constant danger of overheating. Thirty-five degrees in the shade; madness. I wasn’t sure whether my sunhat was helping, or trapping the heat in my brain. My pulse beat heavy through the cloth uncomfortably. I stripped it off, tossing it towards my other shoulder.

“Please be careful, sweet, I don’t want you to burst into flames,” he quipped, not even looking up from his book.

I scowled, but the light was hurting the parts of my flesh that weren’t dripping. Dunking helped, though I felt quite pathetic spluttering and wiping my eyes. “How much longer are we staying?”

“You’re bored already?”

“Mmmm, no,” I said musically. “But I’m getting hungry.” The small bite of my lip as I watched him was perfectly executed so that, when he turned towards me, I looked playful and sultry. Chiefly, though, was that at my size, claims of hunger shook him like an air raid siren.

He swallowed. “We’ll slip into the drive-through, alright? Come on, let's get you dried u-”

“I’m hungry now.”

Stroking the small brush of stubble I’d told him to shave, he huffed quietly to himself and went back to reading. “Make it quick, keep it quiet; if investigations shut this place down too we’ll never make it through the summer.”

I was already gone. I used to be quite an agile swimmer, with stamina enough to last me several thousand meters. Age and diet had mostly ruined that for me. I had the technique, but my large stomach was anything but hydrodynamic. Still, I managed.

It was busy, filled with mostly naked morsels I could take down on dry land as effortlessly as a panther. Here I was clumsy. The fat beneath my skin pulled me constantly upwards as if I were some overinflated buoy. It’d make stealth impossible, but at least keeping afloat was easy.

When I was a girl, the deep end of the pool terrified me. The waves came from within this grate of iron bars like a yawning cell for some underwater monstrosity. I daren’t dangle my legs anywhere near it for fear of being snatched up and dragged down. It meant that only half of my attention was on swimming, while the other was keeping safe from invisible threats. I didn’t have the mind power to keep safe from real threats too.

And that’s where the mistake lie. Because when no one was looking - least of all my phobic lunch - I came down on top of her, sucking in a mouthful of water and carrying her down with it. Sure, it tasted foul, and I’m almost certain there are things in public pools you do not want to be drinking, but it made the feast effortless. When I rose back to the surface, Nothing seemed to have changed. Refraction is marvellous for the waistline, if you didn’t know.

I waded back into the shallows and plopped down to breast height well before the disturbance was felt. By that point, she’d already drowned. A wet buUuuuuUurrhp signalled that much. Every motion made me slosh like a heavy water balloon, and I did it near constantly.

“How old?”

“Old enough to be food,” I said sharply. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

“Right,” he relented. I could hear how hard his teeth pressed against one another, but the bulge in his trousers meant I was in the clear.

“We can stay for longer now.” My hair plastered itself down the shoulder I parked my cheek upon. Another gurgly belch brought something up along with it and I gagged, pulling the disgusting bikini top free from my throat. I considered for a moment, looking about myself, before swallowing it back down.

“Good girl.”

I smiled. “Good girls get tummy rubs.”

The book found his lap, closed, and he swung his legs over the side of the chair as he chuckled. “Yes; I very much believe they do.”