Working Out Work
Tara immersed her just-awoken lover in a gentle, wide-fat-flowing morning horizontal hug. “How are ya feelin’, Love?”
“Saved (kiss).”
She chuckled, kissing him back. “Think you’re up for going back to work today?” She could feel her question weighing him down as soon as she asked it.
“Nan wasn’t the only one who got a letter of that nature.”
“I sure didn’t!”
“Yes you did. You just haven’t found it yet.”
“How many of those did you pass out at work?”
He palmed his face, “Twelve.”
“Let’s please hold a company-wide meeting this morning, or at least by noon, maybe with some nice sandwiches instead of just pizza as usual.”
“I can’t just stand there before everyone. I’ll crumple!”
“We will stand there together, since I’m the reason you’re still here. While we probably don’t want to rub our love for one another in people’s faces, standing together holding hands or arms around each other should let everyone know what they need to know, with the two of us together explaining what we feel we need to explain, which should be our primary task this morning after setting up the meeting and ensuring everyone possible is there.”
At the office, Tara and John worked together to get word of the meeting out to employees who were confused and hadn’t shown up for work, as well as those who were at work.
Once everything was in place for invitations and refreshments for the meeting and agreement on what they were going to say to explain what happened, Tara moved on to two other issues on her mind.
“May we please widen this doorway when it gets repaired?” she asked as she carefully squeezed her bounteous blubber through the still-broken door frame between the outer office and his private inner office.
“Yes.”
“With two automatic sliding Star Trek-style doors?”
“That won’t exactly match the style of the rest of this century-old building.”
“They can make them with woodgrain paneling like the old door, I’m quite sure. They might even be able to use this old door for one half of the new one.”
“Go ahead and research it and get us some bids” he weakly smiled, squeezing her hand when it was within his reach, turning back to his notes.
She gently cuddled into his left side, softly urging, “Don’t stress over what you’re going to say. All anyone really needs to know is that you’d reached your wit’s end and were going to kill yourself, I intervened, things are better now, and we’re back to a going concern and working to get all the way back on track.” She caressed his shoulder, then moved behind him to massage both of them. “I still haven’t found my letter.”
“My estimate of how much toilet paper you go through in a given amount of time must be faulty.”
She charged off to go look.
Indeed, in her private restroom, she found a sealed envelope under the stack of toilet paper rolls. It struck her as unusually puffy for a one-page letter which might have a little cash in it.
“Hhhhhh!” she softly gasped when she opened it up.
Instead of cash, it was a collection of legal documents related to John Mercer’s sole ownership of the business, fronted by a shaky hand-written document signing over the business to her.
She trembled as she approached him, finding him standing in the doorway using a lot of package sealing tape to attach the cardboard shims she used to slide through without ripping her clothes and herself up in place semi-permanently on the door frame.
“They’re going to have to re-stain the wood around the door frame anyway, so I figured why not make things easier in the interim?”
Tara held the papers up with her shaky right hand. “Why?! We weren’t– we didn’t have anything going then!”
“Who else, Tara? I’ve tried to run this company as hierarchically flat as possible. All our groups are equally important, and report directly to me. Was I supposed to ask Steve, Joni, Allison, and Humberto to draw straws? Like everything else, the decision overwhelmed me, so I left it to the only other person here who sees the organization from nearly the same perspective I do. I knew you were plenty smart enough to select someone else if you didn’t want to take the company over yourself, and that you could make that decision when I could not.”
“Could have made.”
They stared at each other defiantly, each holding ground on their own interpretation of the wording of that part of that sentence.
She eventually broke the silence, “We’ll discuss orderly, planned succession some other day. Am I correct that if I destroy your handwritten letter of assignation, the rest of the documents remain in effect with you as the owner of Model Magicians?”
“Correct.”
She handed him everything but his handwritten letter, making a beeline to the shredder out by her desk and shredding it to oblivion.
The opening of the company-wide special lunch (it turned out) meeting was intense, and founder/owner/president John Mercer might well have crumpled had he not been immersed in the supportive force field of office manager Tara Pelvig, which field expanded well beyond her physical body to his right, enveloping him with invisible protective supportive love.
Those in the room able to sense and read these sorts of feelings needed far less explanation than those who could not, and even this latter group could get a pretty good idea that the president and the office manager were now an item.
Once the very brief explanation was over, they opened the meeting to questions and comments.
“When will the A/C duct in the far corner of the materials shop be repaired, if we’re staying in business and in this building?” one worker asked.
“What’s the nature of the failure?” asked John.
“Almost no airflow.”
“I’ll look into it this afternoon. Wendy?”
“We’re going to need a new laser diode for the cutaway system.”
“No spares in stock?”
“Not any more.”
“I’ll order at least one after this meeting. Gemma?”
“We’re still waiting on you to finish the lower right quadrant of the Boone Estates historical re-creation model, and the client has a deadline in under 3 days. How do you want to handle that?”
Tara could feel John starting to collapse from being overwhelmed, and decided to speak up, “We’ll revisit the status of that quadrant within the next hour or so and get back to you.”
The looks she and John shared with each other made it clear there was now someone else in the front office willing to take the lead and keep things moving if Mr. Mercer failed to come through.
The mood in the room at the end of the meeting as everyone prepared to get back to work was positive, albeit guarded. Words were one thing; what the employees needed to experience to restore their confidence was action.
Action is what they got.
Soon as they were back in his inner office, John and Tara divvied up ordering tasks, with John handling the laser diode order and another couple of orders of technical consumables requiring precise knowledge, and Tara taking other orders which John had let slide too long for other supplies, also requiring technical knowledge though less rigorous.
Tara was starting to become so attuned to John, she could feel him starting to get overwhelmed all the way from her desk in the outer office. She squeezed her 678 pounds on 3 legs back through the doorway between their offices, smiling proudly as he watched her, then swayed, wobbled, and bounced (as she always did when walking anywhere) over to his desk, easing softly into his side. He had the lower right quadrant topo model on his desk.
“Looks finished to me, other than a little bit over here. Show me and tell me what it needs.”
As he explained, she sensed the pattern: it was like all the stuff not done at his house, a pyramid or domino chain, all leading back to a point where he got stuck.
“Have you checked with Gemma regarding whether she might have received the information regarding the gunpowder shack that’s holding you up?”
“Why would she have it? It’s not in any of her quadrants.”
“No, but the Boone Historical Society almost certainly doesn’t think of the property in terms of quadrants the way we do, so the information may be in with the package Gemma has.”
It was. John now had what he needed to model the gunpowder shack, which was holding up everything else on the rest of his quadrant. He resumed work immediately, finishing the entire quadrant in just over 2 1/2 hours, including delivering it to Gemma in the topo room. It might not have been finished so soon had Tara not dropped into his office on a few occasions where she could sense him bogging down to cuddle up to him, let him caress her nearest butt through her skirt, and share a kiss. These things and occasionally a moment of discussion of where things were and what was currently vexing him were all he needed to keep going.
Any sort of unusual sounds from John’s office immediately got Tara’s attention, usually with a shot of adrenalin for fear of it being something bad. She got back up from her desk and squeezed back through the doorway to find out what was going on.
She smiled when she discovered he was changing out of his usual work clothes. “I didn’t know you kept a set of get-dirty work clothes here.”
“I haven’t been getting into them as often as necessary in recent years to keep this place maintained.”
“What exactly do you have in mind?”
“Climbing and crawling through the crawl spaces to ascertain the failure of the materials shop HVAC duct.”
Tara was shocked. “That’s an entire different field of endeavor, with all sorts of licensed contractors available in our area!”
“Yes, and one of us may be calling the one we’ve used in the past, if what I find is beyond the means of myself.”
She wrapped her arms around him the moment he finished fastening his heavy-duty work pants. “Better not get hurt! Or you’ll have one pissed-off girlfriend sitting her two fat asses on you!”
“Girlfriend?!”
“I’m not?! Or do you prefer ‘ladyfriend’ or woman friend’?”
“I’m honored beyond belief!” he weakly gasped out.
She moved her face nose-to-nose with his. “I love you, John! And I don’t want our love to stop! (kiss)”
“Neither do I (kiss).”
“So unless you prefer different terms, you’re my boyfriend and I’m your girlfriend, OK? (kiss)”
“This is a dream come true!”
“Stay in the present, and stay safe, boyfriend (kiss).”
“I’ll be careful, girlfriend (kiss).”
She let go so he could get into his work socks and non-slip steel-toed shoes. “May I tie the laces for you?”
“It would be kind of you not to bend over deeply facing me in any direction, if we’re to have an answer to this HVAC problem today. These pants have a sturdy button fly as you saw, though I doubt their manufacturer would want to warrant them keeping a certain part of me inside should you arouse me more than you do with your mere presence.”
One thing Tara Pelvig did not at all enjoy about being exceedingly fat and innately double-wide beyond that was being excluded from places she wanted to go and could not fit. The old building’s maintenance and internal structure access passageways were very much in this category. Indeed, it’s likely she would not have been able to fit very far into them even back in her childhood soccer star days, before she was even plump.
She made John wear a wireless camera on his head, so she could at least get a vicarious sense of what all was in there. She didn’t know which she found more fascinating: the building infrastructure itself, or how much John seemed to know about it, given how he interacted with it, testing and checking many things while he was in there.
The camera had one-way sound, over which he asked her to please go down to the materials shop (the heavy-duty “dirty” work shop with saws and drill presses and the like for wood and metalworking not requiring laser precision) and stand beneath the duct.
Once she was there, they were able to speak to each other.
“A fallen chunk of plaster knocked a section of the duct work apart” he explained, his voice given a metallic ring as it passed through this self-same duct, still apart. “If someone will remove the grille and pass a cordless screwdriver and some #8 by half inch self-tap sheet metal screws up through the duct to me, I should be able to have this back together in short order.”
Tara relayed the request to Graham, the fellow employee currently standing with her in the room. As Graham went to fetch the tool and fasteners she asked, “Why did the chunk of plaster fall?”
“That’s what I need to find out next, once this is done.”
Rather than a typical ladder as Tara expected, Graham returned with a big, wide, rolling set of steel stairs with handrails, as often seen in big-box home improvement stores for access to stock items on the higher shelves above the retail ground level shelves.
“That looks big and strong enough to hold me!”
He studied her, then studied the rolling staircase, replying “Probably” and holding out the drill-driver and box of screws to her.
She lit up, all excited to be actually hands-on helping!
The steel rolling staircase did indeed hold her prodigious weight and was wide enough for her safe usage, despite her fat outer hips rubbing both handrails at the same time. John explained how to adjust the clutch of the drill-driver to a low setting and unscrew the screws holding the grille.
“I see you!” she giggled excitedly, once she had the grille removed and set aside.
“Hand me the screws first, please Sweetie.”
It was a long stretch between where she was and where he was, requiring each of them to reach into the end duct as far as possible. {Barb couldn’t do this} she thought to herself as she did it with no problem, thanks to small boobs and comparatively (to Barb) slender arms.
The extra length of the drill-driver made it easier to pass through, despite being heavier.
“How are you going to get the drill-driver and extra screws back out once the duct is put back together?” she wondered.
“Carry them out with me, screw box in my pocket and drill-driver in my hand.”
“D’oh! That was too obvious for me!”
He chuckled briefly. “Thanks for the supplies. You might as well go back to watching the live feed from up here whilst I put this back together. Have Graham pass you a hand screwdriver to put the grille back on, which I’ll ask you to wait to do upon my mentioning it over the cam.”
“Got it.”
The duct work went back together without a great deal of difficulty, now held by the sheet metal screws rather than some old duct tape whose adhesive had long ago failed. He made a note to wrap the joint with metallic tape to seal it better the next time he was in this space. There wasn’t much leakage, and full airflow had been restored to this section of the materials shop.
“Yayyy!” Tara cheered. Graham handed her the grille, which he’d taken and vacuumed/wiped to remove dust and dirt. She very happily refastened it with the hand driver, not at all bothered to be immersed in the blast of cold air blowing out of it.
Tara grew impatient, waiting for John to re-emerge from the maintenance access door where he’d entered. He was taking a long time to finish up, making frequent stops and not saying anything over the cam mic regarding what he was doing. She decided to yell into the doorway, “You’re not hiding from me, are you?”
“Not at all” he replied over the cam mic. “Just typing in some notes about other things which need to be done or further investigated, before I forget.”
“It’s 6 o’clock, and it seems to me that you’re getting overwhelmed.”
“Yes it is, and probably so. Think about what you want for dinner and where, and I’ll wrap up in here as soon as I can.”
Redressed in his usual dressy work clothes with her still in hers, John drove them to Bisco’s, an upscale restaurant going back decades, with a refreshed menu thanks to a new semi-celebrity chef wanting to make a bigger name for herself, and more than that provide unforgettable meals from locally-grown organic produce and other locally-sourced fresh ingredients.
In its past through the present, Bisco’s was the sort of place one would go on a significant date night, or for a business meeting, or to celebrate with special friends and/or relatives. People tended to dress up or already be well-dressed from work, as Tara and John were.
The hostess nervously bit her lip, seeing Tara and John approach and sizing Tara up. “Is a 5 minute wait OK?”
John looked over towards his Love, seeing her nod slightly. “Sure.”
As with other people of visually very obviously unusual bodies, Tara Pelvig was known around her community by sight, if not by name. Many had seen the very fat three-legged woman with two adjoined lower bodies, whether they’d grown up in the area with her or had moved to town more recently. Others knew of her, but had never seen her. Whether or not she felt up to dealing with responses from members of the public varied day to day. Sometimes she paid it little to no mind, and it didn’t bother her. Other days the staring and often shock were a drag, leading her to stay in the realm of her private world.
People were more likely to look at one another at Bisco’s than many other places, checking out other well-dressed people. For whatever reason on this evening, many more eyes were upon her than usual, and remained upon her longer. John wasn’t even aware of the invisible protective force field he was projecting, enovaling (like encircling, but an oval) them both. Especially as they walked together to the corner booth once it became available, Tara was very aware of it, at least subconsciously. She hadn’t felt this protected and cared-for since being with her father as a young girl. As an adult, independent woman, she didn’t need this sort of protection, but suddenly finding herself immersed in it, it was so nice to be able to relax and not worry about defending herself from the endless invasive stares of the curious and those overwhelmed by rare body diversity.
The round corner booth was both a large party accommodation and internally known as “the fat people’s booth”, given its ample spaciousness and movable, stable table.
“It’s OK, you don’t have to pull the table so far away” Tara told the hostess. “Most of my fat should fit underneath.”
Already somewhat queasy from wrapping her head around this woman having three legs and her huge size, her forthright comments about her own fat at entirely normal speaking volume easily able to be heard nearby made the hostess turn green with nausea. She herself was a plumpette, not at all wanting to be one and with serious issues around it. “Just trying to make it easier to get in” she wanly smiled.
John helped the hostess move the table back towards Tara (and closer to its normal position) once she was seated, then readily scooted himself in and around to be next to her.
“Wine tonight?” Tara asked.
“If you wish. Are we celebrating something?”
She picked up her spoon, using it to playfully touch his nose as she spoke, given how her width spaced them apart and things seemed too cramped for her to be able to sit her left butt on his lap and still have her fat belly fit under the edge of the table. “You’re still here and alive, first and foremost. We got a lot done today, and that’s worth celebrating. Then there’s celebrating our new, blossoming love, and how good we are for each other.”
“Am I truly good for you, Tara?”
“You have no idea how good you are for me, sir! Neither did I, until it started happening that fateful day two days ago, growing stronger since that moment, through this one.”
Tara’s Braised Piccadilly Squash meal had her eyes rolling and her nearly moaning from its manifold subtle tantalizing sensual delights. John had nowhere near the culinary sensual dynamic range of Tara or Barb or many other foodies, yet still found plenty to enjoy in his Smoky Three Cheese Linguini with Béchamel Sauce. The bottle of Shaggy Sheepdog Chardonnay Tara chose for them to share complemented all courses (so far) of each of their meals well.
Normally at most restaurants including Bisco’s, under-table areas tended not to be lit other than by general room lighting at their entry edges. Light from the perpendicular main walkways which intersected at this corner booth managed to light up the corner booth’s under-table area just above carpet level at least halfway back, putting Tara’s three calves and dress shoed feet on display.
A man visiting the area sitting in a standard rectangular booth across from them became absolutely mesmerized. He’d never heard of a living 3-legged woman, and at first wasn’t at all sure he was seeing one. Not on any drugs including alcohol, he kept staring, then looking away to ensure he was visually perceiving known objects accurately (including the number of other people’s legs), then looking back.
Safe within the enveloping loving protective invisible force field of John and focused on all the fun she was having sharing this fine meal and their conversations with him, Tara didn’t notice the staring at all.
Tara tended to move her 3 legs the way most people moved their 2, sometimes crossing them, folding them, and so on. One of her favorite, most comfortable positions was crossing her middle leg far up atop the thigh of either of her outer legs. She often slowly wiggled her toes as she did so. Without thinking about it, she did so here at Bisco’s, crossing her middle leg over her right leg, making her middle foot highly visible to anyone looking her direction.
The visitor across the way became even more fascinated. He and everyone else looking mostly saw the sole of Tara’s middle shoe, not her wiggling toes and certainly not her bare foot. Even so, it was obvious that this was not a normal left- or right-footed shoe, with its perfect bilateral symmetry.
He kept watching in amazement as the shadowy view of her left foot pulled out of her shoe and playing with John’s feet accompanied some wine-enhanced playful giggling. Soon her middle leg went back down, that shoe came off, and he could see her two big toes on her middle foot, right before it moved into the darker area for what apparently was some escalating foot play. It wasn’t a lot longer before she slipped out of her right shoe and that foot joined the hijinx.
“Uncle! Uncle!” John giggled.
Tara was still giggling as well. “I always win at footsie! You should know that. Should’ve known it before even trying!”
“Is there anything you don’t win at?”
“Light eating. Being petite. Wearing pants. Finding off-the-shelf triples of shoes. Bodacious boobs.” Her mind flashed briefly to Barb, not wanting to stay there lest she start feeling conflicted between her love of Barb and this new searing-hot love which was so different from what she’d known before.
The visitor had good hearing and Tara and John weren’t being especially quiet, allowing him to hear nearly all of their footsie conversation. Everything he heard reaffirmed what he was seeing.
The sudden appearance of his waitress broke him out of his contemplation, “Anything for dessert tonight?”
“Uhhh… yes, please.” Normally he didn’t eat dessert. Tonight it was worth it to stall for time to further study likely the most physically unusual person he’d ever seen. He quickly scanned the dessert menu. “How aboooouut… hot chocolate?”
“Excellent choice” the waitress smiled. “Back with it in a minute or so.”
The shape of this particular set of shoes made them easier to slip out of than into. Tara needed to lift each foot in turn for hand assistance getting each shoe back on, giving the out-of-town visitor even more definitive confirmation that she had three shoes, three feet, and three legs.
Tara and John enjoyed the long meal and their own desserts (with coffee for her and tea for him), allowing sufficient time for him to drive them home sober.
The visitor was still nursing his hot chocolate when the time came for the new lovers to depart. Tara captured his full attention from the moment she started bounce-sliding out of the booth once John was out and standing, having moved the table away to make more space. Now in addition to wrapping his mind around her three legs, he struggled to process how profoundly fat she was, and how wide. Indeed, her left hip was nearly in his face for a second or so, or would have been had he been seated at the walkway edge of his booth’s bench seat.
“Whew!” she shared with John (and the restaurant) as they started forward motion, “I’m gonna give your bed a real good workout tonight, after that meal!”
Seeing her three buns bouncing and wobbling away from him dazzled the visitor, getting his mind to think through some of the many implications of what he had been and still was seeing.
Tara remained contentedly within John’s force field, all the way to the car. She never noticed how many eyes joined the visitor’s staring at her during their departure.
John let out a deep sigh on the drive home.
“What, Lover?”
“Tomorrow’s only Thursday. Already feeling tired and overwhelmed, unlikely to help give the bed a workout tonight.”
She reached over and caressed his thigh, “That’s why we’re sleeping tonight, which honestly is what I had in mind when I made my statement. The bed will get a workout solely from me moving all my weight around in it.”
“I haven’t heard it creaking nor cracking yet, have you?”
“No, and I don’t expect that tonight. Honestly, it was really more of a way for me to say ‘Thank you for a great dinner, where I ate like a starved elephant and have no regrets!’. If we didn’t need to keep the momentum going at work to keep morale high and get our deliverables back on schedule, I’d suggest we take tomorrow off. But the weekend will be here soon enough, and we’ll have two full guilt-free days to relax and rest together or play together or whatever else.”
“Will you still be here by then?”
She turned and looked at him in wide-eyed shock, “Why wouldn’t I be?!”
“Your house. Barb. Likely other friends and so on I don’t know.”
“Don’t yet know. What about you and your friends and so on?”
He glanced over momentarily to make eye contact before snapping his eyes back to the road, “There aren’t any of those, other than you. Few people enjoy being around a sad, depressed, hopeless person.”
“Unless you aspire to that, that’s not what you’re going to be going forward, Boyfriend.”
“I’m yours as long as you’ll have me.”
“Then the current forecast is that I’m going to be with you every weekday and weekend day as far out as one wishes to count.”
“How does that comport with your life before the day before yesterday afternoon?”
“Let’s not talk about that tonight, please. I have things that overwhelm me too, and that’s one of them. Let’s work on yours and getting Model Magicians back on track and on schedule with rep as a thriving rather than failing concern, then maybe some later week you can help me not get overwhelmed working through my dilemmas.”
Both of them had a lot to think about, and now was not the time to do it, given the deep sleep they both also needed. Restful sensual cuddling with very light making out eased them both into the start of that deep sleep, where they needed to be: in each other’s arms.