Chapter 15
Unable to resist weighing in daily, though the trial protocol recommended only twice a week, Emmett despaired that he still hadn’t lost any weight after the first six days.
He remembered reading that some of the participants would be given placebos, and he began to worry he was one of them.
It’s not like they would tell him, right?
It was just his luck to be admitted to a trial like this and then get stuck in the control group, so much time, energy, and hope wasted on nothing.
But what about the procedure? Surely they wouldn’t have put him through all that if they were just going to give him a weekly saline injection?
Jesus fucking Christ.
It was bad enough that the guy looked damn good, bearded and swole and tatted to hell and back. Worse was what (hadn’t) happened last time they were in the same room together. Emmett could barely think about the late-night encounter without blushing.
After years on Grindr, it was twenty-three-year-old Emmett’s first time meeting someone from the app.
The thirty-one-year-old man, whose username was simply J, had agreed to host at his apartment around the corner from the gym.
From the moment he arrived, Emmett was awkward, nervous.
They kept their voices down to avoid waking J’s roommate.
He escorted Emmett into his bedroom, put on Donnie Darko, and they sat watching it on the bed.
“Nooo,” J reprimanded, moving Emmett’s hand from his crotch to his thigh ninety seconds into the movie. Emmett apologized, mortified. He didn’t know the proper etiquette, was just doing what he thought J wanted.
Afraid of messing up again, he focused on the movie and let J make the first move.
Things progressed—he allowed Emmett to touch him, unbutton his jeans, roll his dick around in his mouth for a minute or two—but nothing seemed to do it for J.
Not even hard, he finally pushed Emmett’s face away and dragged his underwear back up.
“I thought I could make this work, but I’m just not—” His eyes flicked over Emmett’s body. “I’m tired.”
Emmett was so na?ve he might have believed it, were J not back on Grindr in seconds, his phone pinging with the app’s distinctive notification. Brrrrup! Brrrrup! Brrrrup!
These days Emmett remained on the app only as a lurker: no profile pic, no name, just a green dot showing he was online.
It turned out, he got more messages with a blank profile than he did with a face pic.
Gay men—the kind he was typically attracted to, anyway—could be ruthless, blocking him as soon as they saw his message.
Lizette encouraged him to get on GROWLR and Grommr, sites geared toward bears and “chubby chasers,” but ninety percent of the messages he received were from men thousands of miles away wanting to exchange photos, or locals some thirty or forty years older than him.
The whole thing made him uncomfortable; somehow, being fetishized for a body he hated was worse than being rejected.
As he entered the cardio area where J was stepping off a treadmill, Emmett’s weight gain for once seemed to work in his favor. Mopping sweat off his forehead, J walked past him. A flicker of recognition behind his eyes, and then it was gone. Emmett had gotten away with it.
Thank fuck for that.
The cardio section was as busy as ever, a dozen ellipticals and treadmills facing a floor-to-ceiling glass window.
Mounted TVs played mute subtitled sports and soap operas.
Emmett climbed onto his favorite elliptical, whose position beside the wall meant he could be perceived only from one side.
His phone piped high-energy dance pop to his earbuds as he churned his legs against the foot pedals, hands driving the handlebars.
He ratcheted up the resistance. The music flowed through him, fueled him, set his pace.
He’d forgotten how good this felt—the unleashing of his pent-up energy, getting out of his head and into his body. The way he moved with and responded to the music was the closest he’d ever get to dancing in public.
A woman stepped onto the machine beside him, blond, tiny waist, peach-emoji perfect.
Emmett withdrew into himself instinctively, like an anemone prodded with a stick. Suddenly he was hyperaware of his breathing, concerned about odor. Could she smell him through his body-hiding hoodie? Did he disgust her?
The woman had done nothing to warrant this reaction, barely even looked his way—but it wasn’t about that.
Enough had been done and said over Emmett’s lifetime, both to him and about others like him, that the response was automatic.
The cruelty of others tattooed into his psyche by years of tiny, needling pricks.
Being here only amplified the voice in his head.
The further he pushed himself out of his comfort zone, the more loudly his self-loathing urged him back into the safety of home.
Home, where he couldn’t impose his abnormality on others.
The one place he could exist totally free from judgment.
When he could take no more, he dismounted the elliptical and took the stairs down to the lower level, a crowded sweatbox of weight machines and grunting glistening men, pushing, curling, bending over each other, spotting one another’s reps.
The chest press was free; he hesitated, then started over.
It was one of six or seven machines he’d learned how to use with Chad, his former personal trainer.
Straight and toned with tanned hairy legs, Chad had slotted right into this world and couldn’t seem to fathom that Emmett, being a man, could feel any different.
“What do you mean you’re not gonna do burpees?
” Chad said a few minutes into their first session.
Emmett’s explanation seemed to go over his head—that it had nothing to do with the intensity or physical discomfort of the exercise, but the discomfort of making a spectacle of his body, of his shirt riding up and his crack showing, of drawing attention to his fatness in a place where he already felt like a sideshow freak.
Chad had relented, then worked him so hard and with so little regard for his requests to slow down that Emmett had wondered if he was being punished.
Less than twenty minutes in, he became lightheaded and nearly passed out.
Sitting him down on the mat, Chad called an early end to their session but still counted it against the package of ten that had cost Emmett two weeks’ pay.
At least he’d come away with some basic knowledge about sets, reps, and how to operate the machines.
Emmett adjusted the seat of the chest press, tested the weight, and lowered it by half.
Four pumps into his first set, a guy in a skimpy tank top forced him to stop and pull out an earbud. “Sorry?”
“Just wanted you to know you’re doing great, bud,” the gym bro said.
“It’s dope you’re here.” Disjointed black tattoos like Harry Styles’s showed above the collar of his tank top and staggered down his arms. An angel-winged cross, the 619 area code in Gothic lettering, the words EAT ME stamped into the gym bro’s forearm. “Keep it up.”
Emmett’s polite response belied the tight feeling constricting his chest, the sudden itch to grab his stuff and bolt.
Men thought they were being kind saying shit like that, lifting someone up who “so obviously needed it,” but for Emmett, being singled out for his weight only reminded him how much he didn’t fit in.
The gym bro was talking again. Emmett yanked his earbud out once more, struggling now to hide his irritation. “Sorry?”
“How many more reps you got?”
“I just started.”
The man’s smile flattened. “Alright,” he muttered.
How quickly It’s awesome you’re here became Now hurry up and leave the second Emmett insisted on taking up space.
The gym bro milled around, playing on his phone, putting pressure on Emmett to finish quickly. Making him feel that he was being watched, his form being critiqued behind a derisive smirk.
Despite his insecurity, Emmett couldn’t keep his eyes off the deep armholes in the gym bro’s tank, the muscled body exposed almost down to the waist: the inked pecs, the ripple of ribs, the chiseled V pointing down toward his dick.
Emmett resented how badly he craved the taste of him, how badly he hungered for his meat.
He let the weights drop and snatched up his water. “All yours, bro.”
“Hey, you gonna wipe that down?”
Emmett looked back at the machine, the seat shining with sweat.
“Sorry.” Embarrassed, he grabbed some paper towels and disinfectant from the dispenser on the wall.
“Guess you don’t come here often.” That smirk again.
A prickling shame rose to Emmett’s cheeks. He scoured the seat and grips, tossed the paper towels into the trash, and hurried back upstairs. Looking back, he saw the gym bro giving the seat an extra wipe, making sure nothing of Emmett was left.
As he walked out into the parking lot and climbed into his car, his phone buzzed in his pocket. Brrrrup! He unlocked it to find new messages from a profile named 4Now. He could see from the profile picture it was the man he had once known as J.
With a low murmur of dread through his gut, Emmett opened the chat log and read.
I thought you looked familiar (sort of)
Fuck, what happened to you?
Good thing you’re at the gym
Emmett froze. Tears needled the backs of his eyes as he pocketed the phone and fumbled the key into the ignition. Wind buffeted through the open windows as the car peeled through the lot and turned onto the street.
The signs of half a dozen taco shops and fast-food restaurants guided him home; he barely beat the lure of one before another came at him, whispering its promise of fleeting comfort.
White-knuckling the thought of all the calories he’d just burned, all the good he mustn’t let go to waste (Feel the burn), he made it back to the apartment without stopping, before realizing Lizette was staying at Armando’s.
Fuck. He was counting on her presence to keep him in check.
He searched the kitchen. There was pretty much nothing: a few slices of provolone, last week’s bread, peanut butter, the last bag of microwave popcorn. When Emmett was ravenous like this, it didn’t make any difference. However little there was, it was always enough to binge.
He ate rolled-up cheese slices while the popcorn popped, chased it with a peanut butter sandwich. Craving sweetness, he toasted the heels of the loaf. Tore them up trying to smear hard chunks of butter over them. A generous sprinkle of sugar and cinnamon, and he had his dessert.
He barely chewed, swallowed painfully. A good pain, though. A pain of pleasure, stretching his stomach and dampening the burn. Now he was glad he was alone. It meant he could relax, didn’t have to hide. He couldn’t help it, even when it was just Lizette.
After all these years, Emmett was still afraid of what might happen if he was caught.