Emergence, Part Five: Afternoon Indiscretions

It had been 4 days since my little adventure in space/time where I’d spent a handful of hours as an 18 year-old Ohioan named Meghan Cafferty. While I had passed a quiet morning as Meghan, my reality, the one I had so mysteriously leaped away from, had advanced 8 full days. This was how, upon my return, I found myself minus several vacation days at work but plus one in the girlfriend department. Perhaps girlfriend is too strong a word. Let’s just say ‘it’s complicated’.

Erica, a sixth year Ph.D student at a local university and I had shared two lengthy phone-calls over the course of my four days back. I was able to deftly play the ‘so tell me more about what you do’ card to get past the fact that I had no memory of what had happened while I was away. I was only very slowly getting access to what Erica and Meghan had experienced together while the latter has been passing as me.

Erica seemed flirty and fun, though a great deal smarter than me. We hit it off pretty well. I already wondered how I was going to mess this up. I wouldn’t have to wait long for my life to present me with just such a chance.

Today, I was busy catching up on budget stuff for the firm I worked at downtown. It was nearing noon, and I eagerly anticipated lunch with Erica, our first in-person get together since I’d fallen asleep next to her the night I ‘got back.’ We’d decided on a quiet little bistro. In preparation for today I had my shirt pressed and everything. Work was flying by with minimal hiccups and intrusions. I’d told my assistant, an obsequious young man named Ian, to deflect and defend as much as possible. Since he loved to talk, almost everyone who dropped by gave up after a blizzard of verbiage.

My office door was closed and I had about 15 minutes more work to do before I could pop out when out of nowhere it began to happen. ‘It’ in this case being a transformation I thought had been a one-time deal. The opening salvo was a quick strike to my groin. By which I mean to say that one moment my business was all there, the next it was gone. And in its place I could feel the unmistakable sensation of young Meghan’s most intimate of areas. 

It all happened so fast it barely had time to register when my phone buzzed to life, 

“Garner, a Mr. Glendenning here to see you, he says it is important, can’t wait. May I send him in? I tried my best to…”

“No!” I said, my voice verging on hysteria. 

A particularly apt term in this case, since one of the roots of the word hysteria comes from the Latin for ‘womb’ and that was exactly what was forming in my lower abdomen as I sat there in a cold panic. Meghan was carving me from the inside out.

This wasn’t supposed to… this shouldn’t have been possible… the wall, I was nowhere near my apartment and the wall… why I hadn’t even passed through anything!

The phone in my hand appeared to grow, acquired a new heft, I watched it swell larger in my hand, my fingers slipping around its sides even as a voice continued to squeak from phone. Of course the object wasn’t actually growing, my hand was just contracting. I cradled the phone hard and flexed my shrinking fingers, willing them to remain longer, thicker. It was no use.

My waistline cinched thinner with audible scrunching sounds. These were awful, like meat and bones being poured into a vice. It didn’t hurt, surprisingly, but it sure sounded gross as hell. The bones of my hips itched from the inside out as they threaded thicker and wider. My belt sagged loose while the material of my slacks about my hips and ass stretched tighter. 

It was all happening at a stupefying pace, my mind literally felt incapable of processing what was going on. As such I could very nearly watch something happen to my body before I felt it. Meghan was radiating up and down my body from my midsection, a territory she had already made her own.

“No, no, no!” I muttered, sliding back in my deskchair. “Not now!”

I should note, the office I sat in stayed very much the same. I hadn’t passed through any invisible hole, nor was my workplace gradually fading away and altering into some other structure in Ohio. No, I was very clearly becoming Meghan, only this time I didn’t have the ‘comfort’ of moving out of my world and into hers.

I watched as the cuffs of my pants wiggled lower, swallowing my feet which clunked around in my increasingly too-big shoes. The hair on my legs vanished and I could just picture Meghan’s damn toenail polish straight through my socks and shoes. Why was this happening? Why now? And how could I stop and reverse it?

“This cannot be happening,” I said in a calm voice, even as my hair lengthened upon my head. My shirt grew baggier about the shoulders and arms and for the moment, my puny, sunken chest. 

Then flesh began to bud.

“No,” I said with less composure, feeling my breasts grow, as if the power of my words could halt whatever was happening. 

It was like someone had hooked up two invisible hoses to my chest, had opened the valve and begun to pump thick, warm pudding under my skin. Only it was heavier than pudding, these rich fat cells dividing and swelling and increasing in number exponentially.

“No,” I repeated with increasing desperation, watching my breasts enhance another cup size, irritated nipples poking out through my shirt. My breasts wobbled free without any bra for support and would not be denied. 

“No,” I said a third time as they shuddered in tiny fits and jiggles yet another cup size larger, getting close to the oversized mounds I’d ‘suffered’ with as Meghan just a few days ago.

By this point I heard footsteps just outside my office door. I had just enough time to duck under my desk when the knob began to turn. Cursing the fact that I never locked it in the first place, I crouched on my hands and knees, much shorter and smaller now, able to fit better in the confined space. 

“Garner, sir?” I heard Ian say with his trademark cloying sweetness, as he stepped into the office. 

At the same time the skin near my hip bones began to pinch. A steady pressure grew in my lower belly. Part two of my transformation was revving up. Something new was taking shape inside of me. It put on mass and very quickly took up more space than I had to give. My belly pushed out reluctantly, skin and muscle giving very slowly. My abdomen pouted forward, hanging from my body. It was the last step toward a complete transition into Meghan. I felt bloated at first, like I’d had too much to eat and drink.

“Has he stepped out? I thought you said he was in?” Glendenning said, while I fought to hold my breath. It was difficult with my body putting on another pound every few seconds. My belly grew and grew. As I advanced out of the first trimester the pace picked up. My heart rose up into my throat. I became deathly afraid that my belly expanding was audible, that I would be discovered because of it.

Ian and Glendenning took uneasy strides into my office. My coat hung on the wall, my briefcase was open on my desk, it was obvious I hadn’t left. I needed to escape, needed it desperately, but how? 

Reaching up to see how much room I still had under my desk I was stunned to find the ‘roof’ above my head was permeable, that my hand passed through it as if it wasn’t there at all. With my fingers wiggling in a void between worlds I smiled. Oh thank you God, I thought to myself. A way out of here!

My assistant and coworker approached my desk, they’d see me in just a few seconds.

I straightened my back, pushing up, arms outstretched above my head. My hands and arms passed up into… water? My head plunged through and I kept on holding my breath. I struggled to my feet, my large breasts suddenly submerged into cool water, and under them rose my belly, bigger all the time. Finally I stepped up completely off the floor and into ‘my desk.’ I found myself kicking upward until I surfaced in a backyard in-ground pool. 

My hair clung to my skull and I gasped a deep lungful of air. Wherever I was, it was better than hiding under my desk in my office.

“24 seconds, pitiful,” an apathetic voice said from the edge of the pool. I turned and saw a young woman approximately Meghan’s age in a lime green bikini, feet and calves dangling in the water. She had dirty blond hair and an underfed look about her, dark patches of sleep deprivation under her eyes and quite a few piercings. Whoever she was, she didn’t look like a very ‘good’ girl. But maybe I was just snapping to a superficial conclusion.

I tread water to the side before my belly bumped into the wall. It was hard to tell just how big I was, weightless in the pool. Knowing how time worked between these ‘reality jumps’ I wouldn’t have been surprised if a significant amount of time had passed for Meghan while I’d been gone. 

Something about 24 seconds. 

I realized my friend must have been timing me underwater. She had already begun to give an odd look, sitting there with her poor posture.

“Well excuse me, I kind of have a limited amount of lung space,” I replied, matching the young woman’s playful tone. This was a true statement. I was amazed by how cramped I felt on the inside.

I gazed about the backyard and saw it was my own, namely, the suburban Cafferty home. There was my father’s bird feeder hanging lazily from the porch. Judging from the sun it was midday. 

“Not my fault you can’t keep your legs closed,” she said, getting up and falling back into a lounge chair. 

“Hey, you’re hardly a saint,” I fired back, finding the ladder and hauling myself up. 

Water dripped from my body as I emerged from the pool. Gravity placed its claim upon me, and then just kept piling on. I was big, very very big. 

“Maybe, but at least I have the common sense to use protection,” she said.

Dianne. Her name was Dianne. As I toweled off and the sun’s rays warmed me a door in my mind creaked open and I began to remember things, or maybe just have access to things Meghan already knew. Dianne. She came from a very broken home. The poor girl, if just one person in her life had ever told her she was worth a damn. Maybe that was why she was hanging around Meghan. As hard as Dianne’s life was, at least she wasn’t knocked up.

Dry, I flopped into the lounge chair beside her. We couldn’t have presented a more dissimilar pair. Dianne was skinny to the point of being boney, her hips and elbows stuck out. Her string bikini was anemic, but fit her loosely, as if the swimwear itself were slightly put off and didn’t want to lay flush against her pale skin.

Meanwhile my body was doing everything in its power to swell its way straight out of my two-piece. My suit was fire engine red with white polka dots, the top of which felt several sizes too small. It offered little more to me than a scant bit of coverage. My belly, I estimated it at almost a month larger than when I last held this vantage point, completely obscured my bikini bottom. My belly button hadn’t yet popped out, but it was very shallow.

“Don’t look now but I think that little perv from down the street is peeping on us through the fence,” Dianne said. There was a small gap in between two posts and though I couldn’t be as sure, she might have been right.

“Want to mess with him?” Dianne asked. “Let’s mess with him,” she answered for me. “Oh, Meggie, you forgot to put your sunblock back on!” she said in an exaggerated sorority girl voice, much louder than her previous conspiratorial whispers.

I smiled, this would be fun. “Oh gosh, I don’t want to get burned!” I played along.

Dianne picked up the bottle and squirted a large white glob onto my belly. The stuff was actually very hot, having sat in the sun all morning. 

“Here, let me help you,” Dianne said, spreading the cream all over my big, tight belly. She made a real show of it, making sure that everything could be seen from the fence line. Her hand swept down dangerously close to my bikini bottom, an inch or so away from my crotch. I put a finger on my lower lip and cooed, really hamming things up. Soon my belly glistened in the sun.

A second splurt landed a few inches above my breasts. “Dianne!” I said, with honest shock.

“Now now!” she hushed, smoothing the lotion first over my collarbones and onto my shoulders, but then working it down into my cleavage. Her fingers, slick with cream, even crept under my top, exciting my nipples. I bit my lip, I hadn’t been ready for this.

“I’m going to slide you out, but don’t worry, I won’t take my hand off your nip,” Dianne whispered, tugging my engorged breast out of my top. I lolled heavy in her hand.

The next thing I knew Sarah was straddling me in my chair, her waif-body bending around my bump so that she could make-out with me. I was too stunned to fight back, and let her plant her mouth on me, our lips sticking together. My tongue darted into hers and when she could next speak she said,

“You kiss like a man.” Which I suppose I did. 

I grew aroused and overheated. Eventually I pushed her away from me, she lost her hand on my boob.

Dianne, flushed about the face, looked embarrassed by what she had done and all trace of the impishness in her eyes were gone. She sat back down and even though she hadn’t gone in the pool yet, her bikini bottom was now damp.

I fixed my top and pretended to be fine with what had happened. The hypothetical voyeur long forgotten.