Baking Class

   Professor Murphy was quick to inform us that, due to the fact that there were more students this semester than there were cooking stations, we were to work in groups for the entirety of this baking course. We got to choose our partners at the end of his introduction. I didn't know anyone, so I got stuck with Ashley.

   We introduced ourselves. I was a culinary arts major starting my first year at that college. Ashley was a Liberal Arts major with little to no actual interest in cooking. Immediately, it was clear to both of us which partner was going to be putting in more work this semester. As we spoke, she opted out of looking at me and instead kept her eyes locked onto her smartphone. It was almost relieving; as a pretty shy person, I wasn't exactly looking for a someone to talk to during class. Ashley, with her apparent lack of any motivation, seemed to be of much the same mindset. Neither of us were remotely disappointed with the fact that we'd be spending this three-hour-long, biweekly, double-semester course with someone who didn't expect any small talk.

   The following class period was our first with an actual assignment, and now that we were working together, it became apparent that Ashley's disinterest was even greater than I'd initially imagined. Murphy gave us a simple project—a batch of chocolate chip cookies—expecting us to have enough prior knowledge to make one from scratch. We were given a sheet of instructions, but he told us he wouldn't be offering help.

   Ashley was nothing but a detriment in the kitchen. All she did was eat while I worked. She stole a more-than-negligible amount of chocolate chips as I was making the dough, and once it was finished and ready to bake, she made off with quite a few dollops of the stuff from my tray.

    She didn't hesitate to ask for a taste when the cookies were done. I obliged, and she ate four of them. At first, I was nervous about that, being that our batch was already short from her earlier snacking, but as I looked around the classroom, I could tell that most of my other classmates had also succumbed to temptation here and there. Sure enough, we received a good grade for my work regardless.

    Ashley’s appetite caught me off guard at first, given she was pretty thin, but I would soon see her in outfits that better showed the effects of her overeating. The following week, when she showed up in a new top that was far more form-fitting than the one she'd worn on the first day of class, I noticed her doughy tummy for the first time. I'd always had a thing for girls who were well-fed, so this revelation instantly made me more excited to go to Baking 101 every day. Don't get me wrong — Ashley wasn't really what you’d call a fat girl, but I knew that soft potbelly and her propensity to stuff it would be more than enough to entertain me throughout the rest of this school year.

    Between her abdomen and her appetite, I found myself thinking a lot that day about the potential of a girl like Ashley to get huge while she was in college. Her lack of motivation told me she wouldn't be exercising much. Her inability to cook told me she'd be getting lots of take out. Her incessant snacking was self explanatory. Ashley was a ticking time bomb of young-adult obesity, and I was suddenly very excited to see it go off. When it came time for each group to divide up their remaining cookies up and take them home, I told Ashley she could have them all. That was the first time I ever saw real excitement in her eyes.

   All of the next few projects went the same way. Whether or not my contributions were the cause, my predictions about Ashley were coming true at a speed I never would have thought possible. By the third week of the semester, Ashley was already looking noticeably plumper, and by the fourth, her clothes were looking snug. It felt like changes were happening overnight. Surely this class couldn’t have been the only reason, but it had to have helped. There was simply no way six three-hour sessions of constant carb intake couldn't have contributed to her weight gain. Highly impressed at the way her appetite could rule her body, I became obsessed with the idea of helping it erode Ashley’s self-control.

   Baking was my second culinary class of the day, so I always had leftovers from the first one waiting for me in my book bag to be dumped into the fridge when I got back to my dorm. On that particular session, I ‘happened’ to take them out and set them aside while looking for something in my bag. Ashley noticed this right away.

   "What's that?" She asked.

   "This? Just some chicken parm leftovers from this morning."

    I could almost feel her mouth watering.

   "Want a taste, Ashley? I could heat some up for you."

   "Oh, no, that's okay. I don't want to take your food."

   "It's fine," I insisted. "Honestly, I probably won't even eat it later. Are you hungry? You can finish it if you want."

   She shrugged, then nodded, then pretended not to be excited as I popped a plate of the stuff into the microwave. She gobbled it up quickly as I began our baking assignment, and once she was finished, didn't rest for a moment before she started stealing my damn ingredients again.

   From that day forward, my leftovers were always included in Ashley's classroom experience. It was also around then that I started pushing the amount of butter and sugar in all of these recipes to the limit and making the batches extra-large. Ashley's weight gain sped up accordingly. It wasn't long before all of her shirts—which had already been tight to begin with—were unabashedly outgrown, with the pants soon to follow. Her belly was now puffy enough to stick out further than her already considerable breasts, and her yoga pants were swiping more loudly against one another as her thighs grew closer together. Muffin tops appeared over even her loosest and laziest sweatpants now, giving me the impression that she must've been awfully soft to the touch. Her arms and neck were thicker too.

    We were a month into the first semester and Ashley had already crossed the freshman fifteen off of her to-do list. She was kind of short, so each one of those pounds counted triple as much on her as they would on somebody my height. Noticing this only made things more exciting; I was totally invested in her waistline.

   Eventually, as the foods in my earlier class got more complex and less fatty, I became nervous that Ashley wouldn't have as much to snack on during class. So, instead, I began cooking things that were purposely fattening and over-proportioned back at the dorm and putting them in my bag alongside the actual leftovers. Then, I'd offer that to Ashley instead of my actual academic food. She never noticed the swap. One day, I had her eating several cheesy potato skins with sour cream and bacon, licking extra-buttery cupcake batter out of a mixing bowl, sneaking spoonfuls of chocolate icing and devouring multiple cupcakes all in one class period, then bringing home ten or eleven more cupcakes for later. Even having such a big belly these days, I was often shocked that she could put away so many calories all at once.

   Ashley was the biggest girl in class by the end of November. Having ballooned beyond any semblance of thinness, she was even starting to show signs of a second chin every time she looked down at her phone. She had been a fairly thin and pretty girl at the beginning of the semester, but now, she was fat. I was sure she'd be hard-pressed to get attention from most boys. That being said, I thought she was looking phenomenal. Eventually, she bought some new—albeit, equally lazy—clothes, which helped her to look like she gave at least a tiny bit of a damn about her appearance for a little while. Before long, though, she would outgrow those too.

   After a while, I began to worry that the amount of butter I was cramming into all of these recipes would start negatively affecting my grades, so I began making two smaller batches for each recipe to compromise. One of them would have the glut of butter Ashley was now used to, while the other would be the one that my professor would sample. This proved to be an even better idea than I'd initially thought when I remembered that Ashley would now be taking home an even more ridiculous number of baked goods each day.

   As Ashley got fatter, she almost seemed to lose her femininity. It was like she somehow got less curvy instead of more. Her bottom got a whole lot flabbier and wider as she grew, but it hardly gained any depth, so it did little to balance out the heaving mass of belly that dominated the other side of her body. Every week, her dimpled cheeks and swollen gut bulged more aggressively through the fabric of her gaudy pink yoga pants. Her arms and legs were impractically thick, and the sugar-dusted fingers that tapped incessantly on her phone throughout class were turning into sausages faster than they should have. It was only December—nearly halfway through the course—and Ashley was already nearly unrecognizable.

   It soon dawned on me that I could've been offering Ashley both the food I'd cooked for her and the actual leftovers from my previous class, instead of only offering her the stuff I'd cooked at home. To my surprise, she managed to eat all of that the very first time I tried it. All of the other students, as well as my professor, were now struggling not to stare at Ashley while she ate. I often overheard them speaking, saying they felt bad for me for having to put up with my piggish partner. They were blissfully unaware of the fact that I was both encouraging and secretly adoring her. She may have been conversationally dull, but I'll be damned if she wasn't becoming one of the hottest human beings I'd ever seen, and I loved knowing I'd had a hand in it. All I wanted was to contribute as much as I could.

   She came back from winter break looking like a Christmas ham, and when the midterms of our spring semester started, I noticed that she was starting to waddle. Her voice sounded different now; it was padded with fat. It was huskier and more labored, seldom heard except when it was asking for more food. I was always there to answer its call. She was rounding out beautifully, and I was thrilled to find it was affecting everything about her.

   Unfortunately, though, the course was not going to last forever. Before I knew it, Professor Murphy was giving us our final assignment. We were to bake the best dish we could possibly bake, whatever that might be, and we were to do it entirely outside of the classroom. Working with our partners was optional, but allowed. Having not actually touched an oven once this semester without the professor standing over her shoulder, Ashley insisted that we work together. I met her in her dorm room that weekend.

   It was evident that she'd tried to gussy herself up at least a little before I came over, but the attempts were marred by the fact that her cute outfit was far too small to adequately fit her great big manatee body. On that day, the Ashley that stood before me was not just chubby or fat — she was clinically obese. Utterly round. Her neck and face were wrapped in fat. Her belly dominated her form.

   I offered to cook her dinner before we started the actual project. She was so complacent with her own gluttony at that point that she didn't even pretend like she didn't want me to do that; she just said yes and told me where all the food was, even though I'd brought my own. While I was cooking, I gave her a rather excessive amount of "leftovers" to munch on, all of which she ended up finishing. When I was done, we ate on her couch, and she downed a portion of pasta that was literally four times larger than mine. She ate ravenously, the momentum of her hands and jaw causing various parts of her body to jiggle incessantly. Once she was finished, she cast the plate aside and sprawled out across the bed, belly up. I almost doubted she could lie down any other way these days.

   "I'm so full," she told me through a mouthful of over-buttered, extra-cheesy carbohydrates. "You're such a good chef. It's really amazing. Thank you for making me so much food this whole time."

   "Thanks, Ash. And you're welcome. I know I did all the work, but… watching you enjoy it made it really fun."

    Ashley’s gut deflated slightly as she let out a melodramatic sigh. This was the noise she made when she wanted something, but for once I didn’t think it was food. She'd just told me for the first time in my life that she was full, after all.

   She placed both hands on her mountainous belly and burped. "Ugh. I'm sorry. I’m just so bloated. My belly really hurts."

   "I know my cooking is good, but you ought to pace yourself sometimes,” I teased. “There is such thing as too much of a good thing.”

   ”Is there?”

    Ashley grabbed one of my hands in her doughy fingers and placed it onto the dome of her belly. She started moving it across her stomach for me, then let go and allowed me to pick up where she left off. I complied eagerly, taking over and sliding my hand all around the circumference of her gut.

   Judging her with any kind of conventional wisdom, Ashley would've looked utterly disgusting at that moment. The sight of her obese, engorged body, sprawled out in tight, sweaty, crumby clothes, was too embarrassing to be used as the before picture on a weight loss brochure. Her face, despite its cute features, was fat now, flushed, and even more food-covered than her body. I was enamored with her slobby physique. Finally touching it was an ecstatic feeling.

   I slid my hand under her shirt and continued rubbing. She moaned without shame. Seeing how much she enjoyed it, I proceeded to raise the shirt above her belly altogether. Finally, I could see every detail, each freckle and zit.

    All of a sudden, Ashley pounced on me like I was a jelly donut. She grabbed my arms, yanked me on top of herself, and shoved her sugarcoated tongue down my throat. She tasted like my cooking. My fingers ran across her skin, affirming all of the assumptions I'd made over the past few months about the way her fat would feel in my grasp. Certain parts were soft. Others, where her body bunched up against the mattress, were more taut. And even though I got the sense she had showered before I arrived, she was already sticky all over with the slight sweat she’d worked up just by existing. Straddling her without putting too much pressure on her engorged belly was difficult, but I happily managed. Eventually, we managed to get her clothes off, and that's when things really got serious.

   As soon as we were done, the big piggie fell asleep. Lying beside her, I was filled with a perverse pride. She had become so addicted to my cooking. I'd fed this girl so well that it both had both gotten her fat and gotten me laid. That was a major ego-boost for me, even if it meant I was a weirdo. I tucked the blob in, left, and took care of the final on my own.

   We passed with flying colors. On my way out, the professor, noting my partner's appetite, work ethic and triple digit weight gain, apologized to me for pairing the two of us. I told him I didn't mind; I'd wanted to do my own work anyway, so she didn't drag me down.

   "Are you taking Baking II?" She asked.

    “I am.”

   "Then maybe I'll see if I can get my advisor to let me switch into it before the next fall semester starts. I’d like to be partners again.”