tub of fried chicken wings packaged with a tub of barbecue sauce and a microscopic corn on the
cob.
‘Not tonight.’ She was totally starving, but the humiliation had been too recent. Even her loose jeans had gotten snug around the waistband.
‘Sure?’ He was surprised.
She ignored the growling in her stomach. ‘Yeah. Thanks.’
On the long drive back to Venice, Megan checked herself out in the rearview mirror of her beat-up Flat It was practically a felony to drive a car this old in the city of gleaming Mercedes and personalized Polls-Ikoyces, but at least it was night. And there were some advantages to having lousy wheels. Like nobody would bother carjacking someone who so obviously had nothing worth stealing, and the drive-by shooters wouldn’t waste a bullet. Megan smiled to herself, with grim humour. She better find something to laugh about. Because her reflection wasn’t funny.
The weight was the first thing; OK, so she wasn’t fat fat, not obese, tkoseanne Arnold was fat fat. Oprah before the diet. No, Megan was just-what? Plump? Fleshy? Nearly a stone heavier, and she’d been no Kate Moss before she left San Francisco. Now it showed on her face, as well as her
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ever-thickening thighs. An unsightly bulge under the chin. A rounding of her features, enough to give her a moonfaced expression. And a stomach that was nudging at the waistband of her loose jeans. Megan knew that when she sat down in the bathtub a small roll of flesh would crease over her midriff. She’d started to use bubblebath regularly, and now she guessed it was so she wouldn’t have to look at what was happening to her. At those little dimpled cushions that were developing at the tops of her knees.
Tears started to ftlm across her tired eyes. Oh, God. She didn’t want to see this, didn’t want to take a good look at herself. What would R.ory say if he could see her like this? tory, her last boyfriend up in Frisco, the one that she’d dated for nearly a year and then dumped, three months ago now. There had been nothing wrong with lory, which is why they’d lasted so long. He’d been as comfortable to Megan as her favourite old jumper. But there had been nothing much tight with him either-he’d never been able to get passionate about anything except sex, he was happy with their little world exactly the way it was. Though M’egan had looked forward to going back to lory at nights, she’d never managed to get worked up about it. The thought oflory waiting for her had never given her that wet, sticky, pressing feeling in her pussy she got when she was fantasizing about Harrison Ford or Keanu leeves in the library. And lory on his own had only been able to give her quick little orgasms, not the more satisfying, deeper spasms she got when she shut her eyes and guiltily imagined it was Zach Mason she was fucking. So eventually she’d got round to chucking him, because she couldn’t shake the feeling that as long as she was with tory she’d be missing out on something. Something special, something different. Passion. Infatuation. Her heart speeding up, that faint sickness … the. stuff she saw in the movies, the stuff she read about. Sleepless in Seattle, Romeo and Juliet,. Scarlett O’Hara melting for Rhett Butler. God,
6o
listen to me, Megan thought, pressing her foot on the gass, picking up speed. Even thinking about it, it sounds ridiculous. When does it ever happen to anyone? How many Richard Geres are out there waiting for your average streetwalker? And dumping Kory, for that. What a joke. If he’d seen her like this, he wouldn’t have stayed with her for ten minutes. Even Dec would have been embarrassed by the total mess she was sliding into.
It wasn’t just the pudginess. The whole thing was a disaster. Poor diet and no exercise and lack of sleep had shot her skin to hell. Her face was grey-complexioned, pallid and dull. On top of that, she had breakouts, nasty little whiteheads peppering her
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