FSE

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formerly SoFurry search engine

Thicker

Chapter Ten

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868

Things calmed down a little on some fronts for the stag but he could not forget, not in any way, just how big he was. His rolling, heaving stomach beckoned and begged his attention at all times as much as he worked out and tried to make it go down. He couldn't fit into most of the machines at the gym anymore and had resorted to walking and jogging, although he huffed and puffed more than ever. The energy and vitality that had accompanied his original weight gain had not lingered for that long as the warmer months chased away the cold, spring flourishing in full swing with life and love in the air. But he didn't like others to see his fat rolls jiggling and heaving as he tried to work them off and tease them down, grunting and heaving just at a walk, moving through air as thick as quicksand with all the extra pounds he had to lug around.

Of course...that exercise was undertaken with darkness as his shroud, shielding and protecting his modesty better than any clothes. There were free weights and exercise classes at the gym too, though he had not yet found the courage to join the one specifically for those that were overweight. Whereas he may have found himself in better company there, he knew that he would be the largest and it was that that stopped him from walking in the class door every time he tried to get up the trembling courage to take an even more active role in managing his weight.

_ _

Maybe next time...

Work was not much better, his mind wandering and distracted as he settled into his larger chair. It was bigger than the one that had broken in that embarrassing first incident but, alas, it was not the second one that he had had. No, he'd already laid waste to another heavy-duty chair (hah!) that had been designed, supposedly, for his weight range, though that one had only lasted a couple of weeks as his increasingly rapid weight gain ballooned out his gut more and more. It didn't squeak as much but it was still annoying, the stag on high alert for that telltale "thicker" to once again rear its ugly head.

He couldn't concentrate, googling taco trucks in his area (and even further afield too, in case they'd moved on somewhere else) over and over again as if he was trying to crack a code. With Gehart's fat bulging out into the space between the seat and the fixed arms of the chair, he heaved and grunted, sometimes even struggling to draw breath while he was seated if he leaned forward in just the wrong way, gut heaving and wobbling. He didn't even pretend to do up his belt anymore when he was in the semi-privacy of his cubicle - it just hurt too much to do.

"Taco trucks, taco trucks..." He muttered to himself, glad of the soundproofing, at least in part. "But what was it called?"

He was not the best at Google searches, however, where his forte lay elsewhere and his searches, well...

"Taco something...something."

No... No hits that looked like something that he should have been looking at during work hours. Gehart's eyes grew wide. Or at all!

"Taco...truck. My area."

With the periods, of course, that wasn't getting him anywhere but he still growled and plopped his chubby fist down on the desk with enough force to make his stapler jump.

"No! Not Maine!"

Why did the thing think he was in Maine? Didn't it know where he was? No, no, he had to try again, something would work.

"Taco lady."

Fuck, that was worse than the first one!

"Crazy taco lady truck curse."

Thicker...

_ _

"Where is the truck taco with crazy curse lady?"

Thicker...

_ _

He flinched.

THICKER.

_ _

No, not thicker. Not thicker, never thicker. His fingers tapped all the more frantically, trying crazy combination of words after words until he sweated with the worry of it all.

No more of that. He pushed his chair away from the desk with another squeak that sounded just like the word that he was trying, against all hope, to avoid. What about his tracking app? Surely he was due his next snack or meal as his stomach churned and gurgled, anxious even then for the sustenance his growing body craved more and more each day.

Entering the numbers from breakfast was disheartening but he played around with things for a few moments, forgetting entirely that he was supposed to be working.

Thicker...

_ _

The chair creaked. But what if he cut his calories down by another hundred per day? How much would he lose then?

Thicker...

_ _

Squeak, squeak, squeak. It was all in his mind, yes, all in his head. What about an extra cut of two hundred calories over the weekend? He could better distract himself at home from mindless eating...

THICKER!

_ _

The creak sounded so much like the word of hatred itself as he gasped and swung but, yet again, it was too late to take back the sudden and sharp movement as he plummeted to the floor in a crack and a crash that shook the foundation of the floor that he and his colleagues were on. If he'd paid attention to the warning signs, the grumbles of his body and the fat rolls spilling out, he would have caught the chair going before it actually did, but that would have been a very different story entirely.

Collapsing under his mighty girth, the chair gave up the ghost and he rolled around like a beached whale, flailing and cursing under his breath, although the entire office had already been more than alerted to his predicament from the crash alone. Floundering and jolting back and forth with his shirt pushed forward and belt helplessly hanging against his thighs, jostling his crotch, the metal clinking and clanging, sounding far too loud for such a small bit of metal.

Once again, his gut had won a battle that Gehart had not even known he was fighting.

It drew everyone's attention and he had barely hauled himself back to his hind paws before his boss took him lightly by the elbow away from the scene to his office. Gehart didn't hear much of that conversation, shaking all over, but the gist of it was that he needed to go on disability leave for some time until the "issue" was sorted. He needed to look after himself, his boss said, a pitying look in his eye. He'd sign him off, full pay, of course. They only wanted the best for him, nothing less than that.

Mortified, Gehart left in a daze with his favourite coffee cup from work in paw and it only seemed reasonable and rational to call an Uber, knocking over a road cone and sign that denoted some sort of thing or the other on his way to the door. The driver eyed him up speculatively and Gehart wondered if he thought he was not going to fit in the car itself; well, he'd show him! He could still do things, even if he'd gained weight, and he wasn't going to let a bulging belly stop him as he grunted and wedged and wiggled himself in, using one hind paw on a lamp post for some leverage.

Regardless of how ungainly the whole ordeal was, he got himself in, pushing his belly down so that it squashed under the dashboard, his whole body squashed up against it. It rumbled as if it was trying to push him back, his belly a living entity in itself that dominated his every day. Gehart hardly looked as if he was sitting there but rather leaning forward, the thickness of his back keeping him leaning and bowed towards the front of the car. Getting the seat belt around his mass was another ordeal in itself and Gehart groaned mightily as he tried to yank it around until the driver, wordlessly, passed him an extender that must have been kept in store for such a situation.

"Thank you..." He muttered. "Now... I'm looking for a taco truck."

The driver, a leopard with quivering, white whiskers and a curly mop of brown hair that could have been better-kept, raised an eyebrow.

"Yes? But where to?"

Gehart shrugged.

"It's okay..." He didn't want to make a big deal of it. "Go down to the mall, start there. I want to look for the taco truck. I'll pay you the whole way around, don't worry."

Well, few would mind being paid for driving around aimlessly and the leopard shrugged as the car merged into traffic, the middle of the day, at least, quieter for the most part. It was by no means the wisest way in which to spend his money just after he'd been sent off on what was basically sick leave but he still had something like full wages for a little time and, damn it, he didn't have any other leads to go on. As if the wonders of the internet were going to set him right with what a wild goose chase that shit had sent him on!

Even in the privacy of his own mind, it felt good to swear as the Uber driver took him around wherever he directed, Gehart's head craning this way and that, antlers scraping up the roof of the car. Although the driver noticed, he cringed without letting his guest notice. It was an easy job to keep him in the car for longer and the interior was hardly in the best condition to begin with for a fur who was just trying to make a quick buck around his regular work hours. Let the car be a bit scraped up because of one crazy stag. It'd be fine.

But, no matter where they went, the driver even suggesting places that they could try to look for one, a taco truck, when Gehart ran out of ideas. It kept Gehart busy and that was just what the driver wanted for him, greedily taking advantage of a fur who was so very desperately trying to make things right again, to see his waistline get smaller once more rather than larger and larger, threatening his very existence.

When would it ever stop? Gehart gulped. That wasn't a question that he was at all willing to dig into. Better to keep searching, hunting, while his stomach rumbled and grumbled all day long.

Thicker.

"Where to next?"

The leopard was accommodating but, still, there was a hint of amusement in the twitch of his whiskers, humming softly to himself as he sang along to the radio, a song that Gehart did not know. With a heavy sigh, the stag tipped his head, leaning his forehead against the relative cool of the window for a touch or relief, although twisting his antlers out of the way with the set of his muzzle did not allow much relief, truly, to be had.

He knew why the driver was being so accommodating, why he eyed him up and why he pushed his own snacks to the side as if he was both trying to hide them from Gehart and himself in a single moment. He couldn't have been more obvious about it but, in all honesty, Gehart could not have said whether he thought Gehart or himself was more likely to go for it. The driver, surely, didn't want to end up like him and, in logical terms, there was only one way that a fur got to Gehart's size and that was by gross overeating.

Thicker.

He was, wasn't he? He was thicker than ever. And, without finding the crow again, there wasn't a damn thing he could do about that. He wished he could tell the driver just why he was so obsessed with finding a taco truck, not just any taco truck, but the answer rather than the driver's assumption. Just what was that assumption though? Oh... Oh, Gehart already knew and it set his guts churning, aching for the snack that he'd left back in his desk drawer at work, destined to turn mouldy and rank with no one there to snaffle it up into a hungry, yawning cavern of a maw. It should have been for his afternoon break.

And the driver? What did the driver think of him, the stag that he would, very likely, never see ever again? All the driver thought was that he wanted to find the trucks because, well...

...Because he was fat.