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Ethan flops back on the chaise longue with a groan, one hand resting on the mound of his stomach beneath his waistcoat. “Oh, god,” he says, letting out a rumbling belch. “Excuse me, Miss Ives. Those men at the club know how to eat.”
“Oh, do they,” says Vanessa, closing her novel around a bookmark and getting up to perch on the edge of the chaise next to him. His eyes are closed, eyelashes resting long against his plump cheeks, and his face is flushed pink with effort. He’s been attending the fat gentlemen’s club in Chelsea for a few weeks now, and each time he returns to Grandage Place, he makes a similar scene for Vanessa. She’s quite sure it’s genuine, if the labor of his breathing and expansion of his waistline is anything to go by, but she appreciates his dedication to including her in his fun.
“What was dinner tonight?” she asks, thumbing his straining buttons and gently undoing them. She’s taken to keeping a blanket draped over the back of the chaise to pull over Ethan should Sir Malcolm or Sembene come down to investigate the fuss, lest they think her indecent for exposing him so.
Ethan groans again, as if even the thought of dinner is enough to add more weight to his stomach. “So much. I wish I could bring you along, you’d just faint. There were chicken vol-au-vents, to start, and a beef consomme. Shrimp — I guess you’d call them prawns — in some herby sauce, I forget what it was.” He stifles another heavy belch in his fist. “Sorry. I’m so stuffed I can barely think.”
“You poor thing,” Vanessa soothes, rubbing gently at his overtaxed middle. “I’m sure it was irresistible.”
Ethan’s softening jaw doubles as he bobs his head. “Oh, cooked to perfection, all of it. Even well-seasoned. I had half a mind to go bother the cook about showing me how to make them myself.” He hiccups, a little whine chasing the sound. “And that’s not the half of it. There was curried lobster and rice, roasted pork with stuffing, mutton and vegetables, all with mashed potatoes and kale. Everything drowned in — hic — cream and butter and lard. Oh, and Yorkshire pudding. I thought I was going to burst, and that was before dessert and cheese.”
Carefully, demurely, Vanessa untucks his shirt from his trousers and unbuttons his fly to give him a bit more breathing room. “I’m certain they didn’t skimp on either.”
“Oh, no. Each table had a cheese plate the size of that coffee table. I don’t know how I was still eating, but I managed a lot of it. And plenty of — urrrp — dessert. Battenberg cake, bread and butter pudding, sponge pudding with syrup, trifle with plums … I could barely waddle to my carriage by the end of the night. And I — hic — think I need to get my pants let out again. These are starting to get snug.”
Vanessa, doing everything in her considerable power to keep her hands from slipping beneath his undershirt to feel the plush give of his skin and hard bloat of his stomach, swallows with effort. “You must have one of your companions refer you to a tailor used to working with men of size. I think the one we usually see has rather tired of our antics.”
Vanessa has accompanied Ethan to have his clothes let out on several occasions already, puffing up with increasing pride at the tailor’s increasingly snide remarks about how well-fed she must keep him. As perversely satisfying as it is for her, it can’t be altogether pleasant for Ethan, especially at the rate at which he’s been gaining weight — and, she hopes, the rate at which he’ll continue. His soft stomach sags over his waistband now, hugged on either side by his braces — suspenders , Ethan calls them — and his hips and thighs have widened into what she can only describe as a pear shape. Even his upper arms strain the sleeves of his shirts, and from what she’s gathered, he looks most comfortable in the soft, less structured clothes he sleeps in, fewer snug seams to bite into his plump flesh.
Ethan raises his head slightly, his warm brown eyes heavy-lidded. “Actually, I was going to ask you about that.”
“About finding a tailor?” she asks, tracing circles on his stomach over his undershirt.
“No, about — maybe this is foolish, I’m not sure.”
Vanessa, curiosity piqued, cocks her head. “Yes?”
“I wanted to ask you,” he says, stomach jumping with a hiccup, “if that’s something you could do, with your … abilities. It’d save us a number of trips into town, and it might be easier if I keep growing.”
“Oh,” she says, surprised. “I’m not sure. I’ve never tried to — my powers have never seemed domestically inclined, you understand. Far more repelling the devil than darning socks. But … I’m sure there are spells or some such for it. Surely someone else with these powers has existed with a much more mundane fate than I.”
“Just something to think about,” he says. “And call me crazy, but I’d enjoy being at your mercy a hell of a lot more than some smug fellow with something disparaging to say.”
Vanessa laughs. “I’ll see what I can find.”
“Perfect,” he says, eyes closed again. “And — Vanessa?”
“Yes?”
“You can touch,” he says with a drowsy smile. “I don’t mind.”
“I am touching,” says Vanessa, drawing circles.
“You know what I mean,” he says, taking her hand gently and slipping it beneath the cotton of his undershirt. “This is hardly the most indecent thing about everything else we’ve been up to.”
“I suppose,” she says, with the barest minimum amount of proper hesitation. He’s so soft that her mind whites out the instant her fingertips make contact with the plush fat at his waist. Ethan exhales with something that sounds like pleasure.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he murmurs. “Help me get up to bed? You can stay a while if you’d like.”
“May I touch you again?”
Ethan’s lips curve into a smile. “Of course.”
—
Ethan’s weight climbs steadily, what with all the good meals he’s receiving at the club and Vanessa’s own supplementary stream of baked goods and leftovers. By the time he’s reached twenty-one stone, barely any of his clothes fit him comfortably, everything straining or creaking or on the verge of bursting. His shirts no longer span his heavy waist, and most of his pants are threatening to burst their buttons — or worse, their seams — when confronted with the expanse of his hips and backside. Even the inseams of his trousers are beginning to pill from how heavily his thighs rub together. And, of course, the constraints of his clothes make movement more uncomfortable, so he grows more sedentary as he eats, loath to test the limits of his closet any further.
Vanessa, for her part, has been keeping her nose to the grindstone, spending hours in Malcolm’s library with every vaguely supernatural tome she can find to see if there’s some ritual she can tweak to serve their needs. She longs for the wealth of knowledge stowed in the cabin on the moors — surely Joan knew some way to expand clothing for use in maternity or rheumatism — but it would take days to get out there, and she’s not at all sure that she’d prefer to go alone, and Ethan is quite involved in his work at the club, so — she reads. Evening after evening, as Ethan works through his post-dinner meal or as she waits for him to return home, she makes attempts on a basket of rags she sweet-talked out of Sembene, but nothing useful has emerged yet.
“Why are you still eating like this?” she asks Ethan suddenly, frustrated after a promising charm results in nothing but split cloth. “You’re well beyond the weight minimum, and they’re feeding you exceptionally well at the club. Surely it would be easier to slow your intake?”
Ethan shrugs and catches a hiccup in his fist. “The club’s great for maintaining my size, but there’s one pretty notable downside.”
Vanessa waits, one slim eyebrow arched.
“You’re not there with me,” Ethan says, as if it should be obvious. “Sure, it’s great eating these huge gourmet meals and all, but watching you get hot and bothered about it’s half the fun. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
Vanessa almost laughs. “You’re doing this on my account?”
Ethan grins. “I mean, I’m doing some for the vampire job. But I realized some time ago that now that I’m in at the club, I probably don’t need to keep eating at quite this capacity. But you make such cute faces when I do. And then you asked if you could touch me, and I wasn’t going to say no to that —”
“You’re unbelievable,” says Vanessa, though she’s laughing. “You wouldn’t even need a tailor so badly if you weren’t so inclined to play the wanton.”
Something changes in Ethan’s grin, from good-natured to almost coy. “I don’t know if I can stop myself now,” he teases. “I’ve got quite the appetite to satisfy.”
With some difficulty, he sits up straighter, his belly rolling into his lap. He’s quite fat now, and she never tires of how it colors his movements, how he’s grown aware of how to spread his legs to give himself more room to bloat, how it takes him a couple of tries to lever himself off the sofa when he’s overfull. Tonight he’s made prodigious work of the leftover mince pies and custard tarts Vanessa squirreled away for him after dinner, and she can see his bloat high at the crest of his stomach, before it gives way to softness. His trousers are unbuttoned, his sweater rucked up above his waistband for comfort, and he looks so deliciously debauched and overfed that she just wants to shove something else in his mouth.
“Yes,” says Vanessa, regarding with a cool remove that she hopes comes off as flirtatious rather than off-putting. “I think you’re far too gone to stop now. How could you deny yourself, after so much indulgence? You’d hardly last a day without stuffing yourself just to feel sated.”
Ethan whines, pausing with his whiskey halfway to his lips. “And where’d you get so good at that kind of talk, huh? All those books on witchcraft?”
“No, these are my own virtues, I’m afraid,” she returns wryly. “Though I will confess to finding you bewitching. Especially at that size, with something in that pretty mouth of yours.”
Ethan coughs mid-sip. “Miss Ives! And here I thought you were some kind of proper lady.”
“Oh, you know me better than that,” she says, abandoning her basket of rags and squeezing herself beside him on the chaise. “What can I say,” she murmurs, tracing the slope of his stomach into his lap. “You bring it out in me. There’s just something about a large, strong man such as yourself completely at the mercy of his appetite — his animal instincts, as it were — until his penchant for excess becomes so evident that he can no longer hide it.”
Ethan’s breathing is shallow in a way she suspects isn’t entirely from the glut of his diet. “I have put on a bit of weight, haven’t I?”
Vanessa exhales raggedly. “A bit?”
“Vanessa?” calls Sir Malcolm from upstairs, and both of them freeze. “What are you still doing up?”
With practiced speed, Vanessa yanks the blanket from the back of the chaise and tosses it over Ethan’s bulging midsection. Ethan straightens as much as he can, one hand pressed to his protesting stomach, and schools his face into a neutral expression. By the time Malcolm looms in the doorway of the sitting room, they’re both arranged naturally in separate chairs, nothing but their glasses of liquor on the coffee table.
“Mr. Chandler and I were just discussing some of his findings from the club,” she says, mostly smoothly. “The vampire faction seems quite well-embedded in the social fabric of London, so we’ve been puzzling out possible motives or next moves.”
“Ah,” says Malcolm, eyes sliding between them with a tinge of suspicion. “Shall I join you?”
Ethan stifles a belch. “Just wrapping up, Sir Malcolm. I can barely keep my eyes open.”
“And besides,” Vanessa hurries to add, “we haven’t come up with much, anyway. Better for us all to get some sleep and resume in the morning.”
“All right,” says Malcolm slowly. “In the morning, then. I’ll have Sembene call on our doctor and Mr. Lyle.”
Vanessa nods and smiles benignly, holding her face stiffly until Malcolm turns back to the stairs. The moment he’s out of sight, her gaze meets Ethan’s, wide and stimulated.
“My room?” he offers in a low voice. “Ten minutes?”
“Yes,” agrees Vanessa, with perhaps too much fervor. “Ten minutes. There’s still more custard in the icebox. Shall I bring it?”
Ethan raises an eyebrow. “Do you have to ask?”
—
Finally, she finds something suitable in a book full of cloaked language around keeping resources plentiful at sea, what seems to be a spell for lengthening rope indefinitely, and then something supplementary in a compendium of medical spellwork she recognizes from Joan’s own collection. If she can figure out some way to combine the two, if it works the way she guesses it will, then she should be able to charm Ethan’s clothes to expand with him.
And — Vanessa is loath to take the Lord’s name in vain, but by God, does he need it. He’s fairly overflowing his trousers, his stomach hanging heavily over his waistbands and untucking his shirts and sweaters with its sheer heft. She estimates he’s put on at least half a stone since they last weighed him, maybe a bit more. His bulk jiggles when he moves, and he seems to always be a bit out of breath now. Probably with a bit of conditioning, they could get him back into shape despite his size — and perhaps they should, considering his role in their work — but for now, while he’s simply gathering information, Vanessa relishes the little markers of how much bigger his body is now, how unused to his new weight. She loves to watch him navigate Grandage Place, with its bevy of furniture, antiques, and end tables; his stomach bumps trinkets and vases he clearly thought he made enough of a berth around, his hips catch in the narrow spaces between furniture pieces, his backside spreads over more and more of the sofa. If he’s not careful, his belly will soon bump the dinner table from his seat.
She meets him in his room one evening as he’s coming back from washing up, hair damp and stomach still overfull from dinner and dessert. “Miss Ives,” he says, a note of surprise lingering in his voice, and she smiles up at him.
“Do you have a moment? I think I may have found a solution to your — clothing problems.”
“For you?” he says, returning her smile. “I’ve got all night.”
She instructs him to put on one of the shirts that no longer fits him, and he stands before her in his undershirt, his collared shirt hanging unbuttoned on either side of his gut.
“If I try to button it, it’ll burst before you have time to say your abracadabra or what have you,” he warns, and she tugs it around his belly as far as it will go, which isn’t much.
“All right. I had hopes, but I suppose you’ve outgrown them a bit.”
She has him stand before her and then she balls the edges of his shirt tightly in her fists, murmuring the words she pulled from the books and focusing all her intention in his direction. She imagines Ethan growing plumper, plumper still, and his clothes growing with him, wrapping the curves and bulges of his body with properly fitted menswear that will never strain or tug or burst.
When she opens her eyes, the shirt hangs undeniably longer around Ethan’s plump waist. Carefully, she pulls both sides together, and while the fabric hugs his round belly, it certainly fits. She’s able to do up every button with a bit of room to spare, and she can’t help but beam as she looks up at Ethan.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” she asks, and he grins back at her.
“You’re magical, Miss Ives. Not that that’s anything new, but it does bear repeating.” He smoothes a hand down the curve of his belly and admires himself in the mirror. “I don’t think even the tailor could do as smart a job as that.”
“Tomorrow we can go through the rest of your clothes,” she says, stepping behind him in the mirror. Gently, he takes her arms and pulls them around his waist, and she presses her cheek to his broad, soft back, eyes slipping shut with bliss.
“Now, Miss Ives,” he teases, and she savors the vibration of his voice against her. “You’re not at all worried that this gives me carte blanche to keep satisfying that gluttonous appetite of mine, are you?”
“Not in the least,” says Vanessa into his back. “In fact, I encourage it.”
Ethan grins into the mirror. “You’re on.”