by Lisa Ferrari
And we take a lot of showers. Sometimes alone, often together. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time bathing and washing my hair and putting conditioner on it and combing it and drying it and slathering lotion all over myself because my skin starts to get dry.
During morning cardio, Kellan is now reading Goblet. He really likes it. He continuously asks me who put Harry’s name in. I refuse to say a word. I tell him we’ll discuss it once he’s done reading it.
I begin to notice that my crappy men’s work pants are constantly falling down while I’m carrying trays at work. I finally stop at Target one afternoon on my way to work and buy a new belt because all of mine are simply too large, and poking a new hole in your belt with a steak knife is rather trashy. Plus, I’ve already done that twice and I’m tired of having six feet worth of belt wrapped around me two times.
A week later, despite the new belt, the pants are simply too big. I decide to get something less dreadful. I go to Macy’s and find some black Donna Karen slacks on the Clearance rack. They were $109, but they’re marked down to $27. And then again to $17. Yay! I try them on and they actually fit. The slacks hug my butt and thighs; Kellan calls them quads. The pants might be a little too snug, but they’re a lot better than those damn Walmart pants I’ve been clomping around in for two years. I’ve fantasized more than once about burning them.
When I get to work, everyone goes crazy over my new pants. Like, really crazy. They keep looking at my ass. I start to think it was a mistake buying them, or at least wearing them to work.
Chris compliments me when he sees me in the kitchen as I’m literally making the proverbial lemonade. He starts chatting me up, going on and on about how he is almost definitely getting the Head Chef job and how he’s already started looking for a house to buy, and how he went online last night to start looking for lenders so he could pre-qualify for a mortgage, and now his phone won’t stop ringing because a zillion mortgage brokers are begging him to take their money.
For the rest of the shift, every time I bring a tray of dirty dishes into the kitchen, Chris smiles at me and watches me as I unload them and then return to the ballroom. I can feel his eyes on me.
A few days later, I’m at Whole Foods grabbing some sugar-free energy drinks Kellan likes, and some different flavors of Kombucha, a weird fermented drink he introduced me to. I find myself wandering down the aisle where all the protein bars and shakes and powders are. I see Kellan’s Signature products on the shelf. There’s a lot of them. Bars and shakes in a multitude of flavors. Kellan has boxes and boxes of these in his house and we eat them almost every day. But it’s super cool to see them for sale in a real store.
A guy in a red hoodie walks past me three times. I’m waiting for him to rob me or mug me or grab my purse. I move it higher up on my shoulder and squeeze the handles tightly.
He then stops and asks me if the Signature bars are any good.
I tell him they are. Very good.
I’m wishing I had pepper spray.
He grabs one and reads the label, but he keeps glancing at me. He asks if I’d like to get coffee some time.
At first I don’t understand.
But I then realize what’s happening: he’s asking me out.
I stammer something about me being unavailable because I’m seeing someone. He smiles and says okay and leaves. He doesn’t buy the Signature protein bar. Nor does he steal my purse. I text Denise about the whole thing later. She says he wanted to steal my pussy, and maybe my heart, because I’m hot now.
Half of me wonders why Denise is such a potty mouth. The other half wonders if she’s right.
ABOUT A WEEK later, I go to Denise’s office one afternoon so we can go to lunch. It’s my day off and Kellan is busy with Skype clients, so when Denise calls and suggests we go eat big salads somewhere, I agree.
I’m sitting in one of the plush leather chairs facing her mammoth desk when a really cute guy walks in. He’s wearing black pants and a white shirt with a shiny pink tie. His clothes look expensive.
He hands Denise a file folder, smiles at me, and leaves.
Thirty minutes later, while Denise and I are eating our big salads, she asks me what I thought of Harper, the guy who smiled at me.
I agree that he is cute.
Denise informs me that Harper is a new junior partner and is THE office stud, and he asked her about me as we were leaving while I was in the bathroom. All the girls in the office, attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, 70-year-old cleaning ladies, they all want Harper.
Denise asks if she can give him my number.
“No you can’t give him my number. I’m with Kellan.”
“Oh come on, Claire bear. I know Kellan is your main wiener man but you’re hot now. You’ve lost a bunch of weight and it shows. You have to play the field before you settle down and start pumping out his little muscle babies. He did it when he got popular. He got it out of his system and now he wants to focus on you. Which is sweet. But if you don’t do the same thing, you will always regret it. You will always wonder if you should’ve played the field a bit more.”
I tell Denise to forget it and I quickly change the subject by asking her about her case load. She always gets fired up when talking about her case load. Within a few minutes, she’s forgotten all about me sowing my wild oats.
But a little while later, as I’m on my way to Kellan’s, I’m sitting at a red light, wondering if Denise is right.
Is the sowing of oats, wild, domestic, or otherwise, something everyone needs to go through in order to be ready to settle down once the settling commences?
Should I have a fling with Chris?
Should I have let the guy at Whole Foods have my number?
And why do they call it settling? Because you’re settling? Accepting something that is less than ideal? Because Kellan is so far above and beyond my ideal…. If anything, it’s the other way around: he’s settling for me.
That notion doesn’t make me feel good.
Grace VanderWaal comes on the radio and I turn it up, determined to forget all about oats and settling down.
I GET SEVERAL unexpected phone calls from my mother over the days and weeks as well.
Several times, she stops by unannounced when I happen to be home. I’m never home anymore; I’m always at Kellan’s (and she doesn’t know where he lives; and it’s going to stay that way!). But I stop by every few days to empty out my mail box, pay my stupid credit card bills online, pay my utilities and my cell phone and throw away any rotting produce lingering in my refrigerator.
My loving but monumentally misguided mother keeps bringing me cheesecake and plates of brownies and whole pies, all of which she informs me she baked from scratch, thereby ratcheting up the guilt. The passive aggressive sabotage continues.
Every time she stops by, she says the same things: she’s worried because I’m getting too thin; she’s worried because I’m always with ‘that bodybuilder’; she’s worried because Beth says I’m always at the gym ‘lifting those weights.’
The reality is that I am finally, finally, FINALLY getting healthy. I’m getting closer to my ideal, healthy weight and body composition. The Donna Karen slacks are looser now than when I bought them. I keep washing them and putting them in the dryer to shrink them, but they’re still a bit baggy.
But my mom is relentless. She says it isn’t healthy. “Look at that Meghan Trainor girl. You don’t see her sticking her finger down her throat and spending every waking minute in some gym, being ogled by men.”
I am shocked and dumbfounded. I can’t believe my own mother has just insinuated that I’m bulimic AND a slut.
My mom insists that there is no other plausible explanation, because we both know how I am. I like my sweets. It’s in my genes and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. The world is full of people of all shapes and sizes. The Lord made me to be a big girl and I should stop trying to change what the Lord hath wrought.
The first couple times she starts this crap, I prote
st; I argue. But I soon lose patience for it and stop trying. I divert her attention by asking her about dad, golf, Beth, or about her postcard arbitrage business.
I don’t eat the desserts. I take them to work and share them with my coworkers. They all go nuts over them. But for me, the taste of cheesecake or a brownie or a slice of pie is not as good as the feeling of knowing I’m making progress toward uncovering the real me. Whenever I get into my car, I can actually feel that there is less gross fat on my stomach getting all squished up under my boobs. I can feel it. Kellan is always saying that every single person has a sports car inside them, but it’s lurking under a car cover. And it’s simply a matter of working hard and eating right in order to take that cover off.
I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of sports car I am.
ONE SATURDAY MORNING, Kellan and I take the Mister Beaumont to a car show. I don’t have to work until four, so we drive to the weekly cars-and-coffee gathering at a local dealership.
The parking lot is full of neat cars. Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis, Jags, Corvettes… Kellan is excited and points out each one as we drive slowly in. We park between a sparkly silver Porsche that Kellan says is a very rare and expensive 918 Spyder and a shiny black McLaren MP4-12C. Kellan says these two cars have been epic rivals. The Porsche is silver and green. The sleek black McClaren reminds me of something Bruce Wayne would drive. They’re both gorgeous.
But I like the Mr. Beaumont more.
As we park and get out, several people make their way toward us to say hello and get a look at the Mister Beaumont. It’s the only Aventador in Azzuro Thetis present.
I see Debbie Diamond, whom I recognize from the race track. She gives me a big hug and asks how I’m doing. She then takes a step back and eyes me up and down. She leans close and says, “You have lost so much weight. You look amazing.”
I can’t suppress a huge grin.
“Whatever you’re doing,” Debbie says, “keep it up.”
“My mom says I’m bulimic. She keeps bringing me brownies and pies.”
“Don’t listen to her. Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s your life.”
Hearing this from a third party drives home the fact.
It is my life.
And Debbie noticed immediately that I’ve lost weight. It feels good. And I feel good. I feel…lighter. I am, obviously, in that I weigh less. But I find that it’s easier for me to move around, to get in and out of my car, to climb up and down stairs. I like it.
I think Kellan likes it, too. We make our way to the big table where they have coffee and treats set up for everyone to enjoy. Kellan and I each make a mug of coffee (not merely paper cups; they have actual mugs with the dealership’s Valley Exotics logo on it, which we’re told to take home as a gift). There is also an array of donuts, muffins, bagels, and even chafing dishes of scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, and a platter of fresh fruit. Kellan loads up a plate of eggs, so I do, too. We each grab a handful of strawberries and some fresh pineapple. We join Debbie and her husband Ray at a table and eat. We then make a round of the parking lot, checking out all the cars and meeting everyone. Everybody is super nice and happy to talk about their car and ask us about ours.
Kellan holds my hand the whole time. It’s actually a lot of fun. I thought people would be snobby or that they would somehow suss out the fact that Kellan is the one with the Aventador and I’m the one with a buttload of student loan debt and a tiny little apartment and a dirty Toyota with a dubiously-squeaky engine. But whenever someone asks about the Aventador, Kellan prompts me to tell the story about our trip down south and how we rented that beautiful red Ferrari 458 Spyder and drove it to the Lamborghini dealership to make them sweeten the deal, and how we went 120 miles per hour during the test drive and a motorcycle cop at Starbucks was about to cite us when he realized who Kellan was and subsequently asked for a selfie before warning us to slow down.
Everyone ooh’s and ahh’s and laughs at the story.
I certainly enjoy telling it. It was one of the best weekends of my life.
Three different women ask us how long we’ve been married. When we tell them we’re not married, they’re surprised, saying they would’ve guessed that we were newlyweds.
I blush each time.
Kellan holds fast to my hand.
That night, when I get home from work, we work out together in the home gym, chest and back. We take a shower together and wash each other, get into bed and make love. Kellan is on top of me, inside me, filling my body, my mind, my heart, my soul. I wonder what it would be like to make love as newlyweds.
Chapter 8
A FEW WEEKS later, Denise invites us out to the lake for Mark’s annual Labor Day party. I’m instantly mortified, as the idea of my bikini-clad self brings panic. But I acquiesce to Denise’s insistence that Kellan and I need to be a part of her life and social circles. Especially the great Kellan Kearns.
Plus, Denise guilt trips me by illustrating how she hasn’t seen me much lately, which is true, and that Kellan and I are always training and hanging out at his place.
I counter that Denise could always join the gym and come train with us. Denise says she hates working out, and 40 minutes on her stair master every morning are enough.
Kellan and I have been doing cardio six and sometimes seven days a week and lifting weights most afternoons or evenings, depending upon my schedule. Kellan is so considerate when it comes to accommodating my catering shifts.
I continue to eat the food Kellan tells me to eat, pretty much everything he eats, but less of it. It’s a combination of slight caloric restriction and low-glycemic index foods. A lot of eggs and low-fat cottage cheese and sugar-free yogurt, and lots and lots of salads. We don’t eat sugar or refined carbohydrates. No bread, no pasta, no donuts, no pies, no cheesecakes, all the same yummy sweets my mom has been bringing me.
I decide not to tell her to stop bringing them to me. It’s actually more fun to see the consternation on her face each time she sees me and I’m thinner than I was the last time she saw me. It reminds me of the Stephen King story “Thinner” about a guy who has a curse put on him by a gypsy, and he continuously loses weight no matter how much he eats.
Kellan has a scale and my weight drops steadily. He weighs me every morning on an empty stomach and charts my weight on an app in his phone. I lose about a quarter of a pound per day, and an average of nearly two pounds per week, which he says is stellar progress, but I shouldn’t expect it to continue forever. But for now, it shows how diligently I’ve been working.
The mirror shows it, too. It’s gradual, so it’s easy to forget what I looked like a month ago. But all my clothes are getting to be too big. I’ll have to go shopping very soon.
Labor Day weekend arrives, along with the big party at the lake. Kellan and I go to a local skate shop to find a bikini for me. We settle on a bright red one that he really likes. It’s cut high on the hip and Kellan says it makes my legs look even longer and shapelier. He opens the door to the Huracan for me once we’re out in the parking lot and kisses me, with some tongue, and tells me he’s looking forward to making love to me while I’m wearing the new bikini. The guys from the skate shop are crowding the door, getting a look at the green Lamborghini.
I’m not completely comfortable parading myself all over Folsom Lake in a bikini, but I also don’t want to be the despondent chubby girl who refuses to take off her tee shirt and baggy cargo shorts.
The night before the party, after I get home from work at almost 1:00 a.m., Kellan shows me how to apply the self-tanner he uses before a show. He has a little foam roller on a handle that looks exactly like a roller used to paint a wall, only smaller. He pours the tanner into a tray, rolls the applicator in it, and then proceeds to paint my entire body while I stand naked in the shower.
It’s cold, but it also feels good. It tickles.
He says air brushing is better, but it requires a booth and is a whole big thing. So we’re doing it this way.
; When he’s done doing me, I do him.
We wait a little while and then take a shower, washing off the excess.
In the morning, we both look like we’ve been out in the sun. I actually look fairly decent. I put on the bikini, pull my shorts and Iron Born tee shirt on over it, and Kellan and I drive out to the lake.
We join everyone on the boat, as there are about 20 people. Mostly Mark’s friends, some guys I recognize from the dealership, but mostly new people. Mark has a big pontoon party boat and a jet ski.
Once we’re out on the water, everyone starts peeling off their clothes and slathering sunblock everywhere.
Everyone is of course in awe of Kellan’s physique. Especially a lot of the other women, who stare openly. One of them offers Kellan sunscreen.
But Kellan simply smiles and makes a show of handing me the tube of lotion as he kisses me and tells me to put some on his back for him.
I’m not sure if he’s making it obvious that he’s taken, or that I am. Either way, it feels nice.
I take a deep breath and quickly undress.
“Wow,” exclaims Denise, immediately drawing everyone’s attention to me, which is exactly what I didn’t want. “You look great. How much weight have you lost?”
“About 25 pounds.”
“Seriously? Wow.”
“Kellan thinks it’s more, though, because I’ve built muscle, too, which is the most important thing, since muscle is anabolic and burns calories whereas fat makes you fatter.”
“Well, you look great, Claire. Good job.”
Mark puts on some music and starts grilling food.
We eat and enjoy the scenery until we get out to the floating bungee platform.
Everyone discusses who’s been bungee jumping before and who hasn’t and who wants to go first.
Kellan says he hasn’t. I haven’t, either. Kellan says he’s always wanted to do it, but never found a good spot. He almost did it in Santa Cruz once when he was younger, but it was in a parking lot, suspended from a crane. The thought of hitting concrete was enough to turn him away.