A Whale(bone) of a Long Monterey Day

The daytime layover in Monterey, California was one of which Leigh Down chose to take off the ship, on Day 3 of her cruise voyage: she’d not spent much time in Monterey, and figured this was a good opportunity.

Disembarking onto an intermediary tender boat around 10 AM upon concluding her leisurely morning start, Leigh enjoyed the short ride on the little boat over to land disembarkation on Fisherman’s Wharf, where sea lions, seals, pelicans, and sea otters sounded off and otherwise entertained her, and everyone else watching. She looked forward to walking off much of the hearty breakfast she’d already enjoyed—not to mention remnants of her joyous consumption the preceding 2 days.

Walking the Path of History in historic downtown Monterey State Historic Park was an easy first choice: it was barely 250m from the wharf! The characteristic Monterey Colonial architecture of the Mexican-era historic buildings left a strong positive impression with her, especially their full-length second story porches, looking out onto Monterey Bay for several of the buildings.

Very nearby to the north and slightly west was the Old Whaling Station. She enjoyed walking on the whalebone sidewalk in front of it. {I’m a whale-tail wiggle walking on what might be one of the last whalebone sidewalks in the U.S.} she thought, exaggerating her hindquarter proportions somewhat.

The easy walk back over towards the bay swiftly put her on the Monterey Bay Coastal Trail, her pedestrian highway further northwest to famous Cannery Row. Frugal by nature and more into Experiences than Things, she eschewed the many shops and restaurants, the latter not only from having paid so much to eat grandly on the Sapphire Prince, but also to spend more time outdoors on land burning calories versus usually-indoors consuming them. For this same reason of frugality and wanting to remain outside, she took a pass on the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Continuing her northwesterly walk along the Monterey Bay Coastal Trail, she passed no fewer than 4 parks and into the adjacent town of Pacific Grove before reaching the park she sought: Lovers’ (or Lover’s or Lovers depending on the source. The apostrophe is dead, folks) Point Park, at the Point of the same name.

Leigh spent a good bit of time here, feeling the wind blowing across her as she took in the sights, including a pair of gamboling dolphins. Catching some migrating whales off in the distance was an especially pleasant surprise.

The Point’s (and park’s) name triggered brief moments of melancholy in her. Standing on her own enjoying the moment, she was a singular lover at Lover’s Point. Thinking about waiter Andrés, massage therapist Raphael, and maybe even vaguely about someone else momentarily made her wish she was sharing this moment with someone she loved, so they could be plural lovers at Lovers’ Point.

The roughly 2 mile one way walk she’d undertaken so far was about as much as Leigh was up to doing. Once she’d had her fill of her solo Lover’s Point, she headed inland to get a different view, walking along Central Avenue, becoming Lighthouse Avenue once she was back in Monterey, on her way back to Fisherman’s Wharf and the tender boat which would take her back out to her ship.

It was only mid afternoon by the time Leigh was back on board the Sapphire Prince, with the ship not set to sail until around 5 PM. All that walking plus the all-day foggy chill in the air motivated her to head back to her stateroom for a nice hot beverage and a nap.

The hot chocolate soothed more than wired her, conspiring with her cloud-comfort bed to ensure she remained restfully horizontal for quite some time.

{Mmmm, this is the life} she thought, resting (but not sleeping nor napping) atop her bed, gazing out the window at the bay view. {I wonder if it would ever get boring, living like this every day. Nnn, probably so. Might be an interesting experiment to find out how long that would take.}

Freshly rested and again ready to be out and about, Leigh enjoyed a nice hot shower and change into fresh clothes. Once again she needed to put out of her mind how she’d already expanded past the anticipated girth point for this early stage of the voyage. {Minor tightness. It’ll be fine, especially since I’ll make more of an effort to take stairs rather than escalators and elevators.}

Her currently-aimless meandering had Leigh taking the wide carpeted stairs from the Upper Promenade deck down onto the Grand Promenade deck. {View’s less openly expansive than from the escalator, though the tit bounce is a bonus. Too bad I have so little of that and so much else bouncing down below.}

Suddenly hearing a familiar voice close by yet out of sight interrupted Leigh’s mental musings.

“I had the fortune of the Beryl Beech experience last night. Took me to and into her stateroom and everything.”

She was on the generously-sized rectangular landing midway down (or up) the staircase, where it made a half circle turn. Adjacent (and attached) to one of the many structural cylindrical pillars holding the Sapphire Prince together, all she had to do was lean over the railing near the pillar and look down to find the source of the voice.

There, down below on the main lobby floor, seated in an overstuffed comfy chair in a lounge area was Clark, speaking with a younger middle-aged man she didn’t know, himself also seated in an overstuffed comfy chair nearby.

“How much ‘and everything’?” the other man asked.

“All the way.”

“You did Beryl Beech?!”

All Leigh had to do to successfully continue eavesdropping without their knowledge was to cease leaning over the railing and again stand upright, then pull out her handheld and feign looking at something on it as occasional other cruisers passed by on the stairs.

“Past tense, yes.”

“Why only past tense?”

“She had her sample of me, and that’s all she wants. Your mileage may vary.”

“Hopefully, if things go that way. How was she?”

“Epic. Everything I’ve ever dreamt about, for fatsex.”

“Specifics?”

“Be glad it’s noisy enough here that no one else can hear us! Heh heh heh heh.”

His compatriot joined in with his ending laugh.

“Succulent, pillowy boobs—easily the biggest I’ve ever had the pleasure of handling and/or getting my mouth on.”

Leigh scowled, unintentionally doing an excellent job appearing to passers-by like she was looking at something unpleasant on her device.

“Her upper arms are equally pillowy, and conveniently adjacent, of course. Beaucoup hips and ass to get lost in, especially the latter.”

At this point, Leigh’s ears were getting a touch hot.

“Thighs aren’t as soft as I’d imagined, though after no more than 5 seconds of thinking through the physics, I figuratively and virtually slapped my forehead over how obvious it is that carrying all that fat means she’ll have leg muscles for weeks to go with her fat for weeks.”

“Fat for months, it seems to me!”

“You said it, Per!”

Clink!

She didn’t know what was in the glasses she’d just heard clink, having failed to note that detail during her earlier look-over.

“Then there’s her legendary belly, where we’re getting into fat for years.”

“That’s what it felt like” Clark ended with a telling sigh, just barely audible from Leigh’s position.

“Hey, thanks man.”

“Gladly.”

“I appreciate the candor. It’s so hard for us in the FA community to begin with, very different from yet not entirely unlike the struggles our BBW lovers and hopefully-someday lovers endure.”

“Struggles maybe for both categories, but I don’t think it’s the same at all.”

“Why not? Seems to me other than this special moment—and I don’t mean that in a weird way!—that we’re sharing, we’re all lone wolves out here, more inclined to cutthroat competition than camaraderie.”

“I totally know what you mean. You’re the first male FA with whom I’ve ever personally had a face-to-face conversation on fatsex.”

“And again, I totally appreciate it.”

Clink.

“I just don’t see the point in being cutthroat, myself. In my field we work better on teams, for sure each doing our own thing yet in concert for a common goal. I’ve worked at cutthroat places where it was every man or woman for themselves. No real teamwork, throwing each other under the bus—all that. Stressful, shitty work environment, and the company’s deliverables sucked, in part because so many were larding the barely- or inscrutably-documented code with land mines to blow up each other’s careers, or backdoors for remote nefarious access if they got booted.”

“I don’t see how team building translates to sex, unless we’re getting into gang-bangs or other forms of orgies.”

“I’m playing for Team FA, Male Het division, building up the team by my individual efforts, or at least trying. When we’re cutthroat lone wolves attacking each other, I believe that vitriol all too easily spreads over to the women we’re supposed to be loving. Their humanity gets diluted in the heat of competition, which drives our lone wolf kind to need to treat the BBW we love more as property we aim on possessing than free-will humans gifting us their time, attention, bodies, and minds for whatever long or brief duration they deign, I assume based upon what they’re getting from us. You know the M&M bowl analogy, right?”

“Oh yeah.”

“The more cutthroat competitive dehumanizing lone wolves there are amongst us fighting what some apparently must believe is the good fight, the more bad M&Ms in the bowl. At least that’s what I imagine, trying to put myself in their place. Is it any surprise that so many choose to avoid the male FA bowl entirely, going for the safer and apparently awesome route of testosterone lite by loving another woman, often another BBW? I think not.”

“Deep… everything you’ve said these last few minutes. I still don’t understand why you’re not going back after Beryl, having tried and liked her, and why you’re so open to boosting my chances.”

“Those things are related. While not by my own definition cutthroat, I’d likely not be sharing so much with you if I intended to keep after her. I’m a pragmatist, striving to remain reality-based. She made it clear at the end of last night that she and I are done. To her credit she clue-by-4’d this to me in an entirely pleasant manner, not any sort of screaming yelling bitch-out rage rant. Nice and calm and clear, from her position of power knowing her awesomeness, and what she wants out of life.”

“So you just went back to your stateroom all happy, having lost her?”

“I wouldn’t say brimming with joy, but neither was I sad. She gifted me with a life-changing experience I might never otherwise have had, especially at my age and with the lifetime countdown clock ever-closer to Game Over.”

“Better level up and earn another life!” Per laughed.

“Oh yeah, if it worked that way I’d be all over that” Clark laughed in return. “You can’t lose something you never had. I never ‘had’ her—no one does… so far, and likely for all time as that seems to be her strong preference. I went back to my stateroom pleasantly drained, partly numb from the intensity and bliss. Yes with a sense of loss in terms of wanting to feel those kinds of feelings over and over and over, not knowing how to make that happen or if it’s even possible.

“So anyway back to the point. I’m out, there’s no question, no debate, no argument, and most of all no effort on my part to get back in where for me there’s no in to get back into. I therefore have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making this minuscule contribution to your forthcoming efforts as part of both of us being on Team FA, Male Het division. To the degree you succeed, or at least don’t piss her off or worse, the M&M bowl gets a little cleaner. Someday, even if not in my lifetime, maybe it’ll be clean enough for more BBW to dip their delightfully soft, squishy, fat hands in for a heaping helping of prongy man meat or whatever else they’re most into, without getting poisoned. My actions are as trivial as a single grain of sand on the beach near this harbor we should now be in the process of leaving. Yet like one ant amongst a colony, if we all work together as a team, we can change and move things far, far bigger than any of us individually. Good luck, Per” Clink! “You may be the one to level us all up. If not that, here’s hoping your time with Beryl is at least as memorably epic as mine.”

Clink!

“Everything good, Ms. Down?”

The sudden unexpected voice of concierge Akom (per his name tag) speaking to her nearly made Leigh drop her handheld when she sharply jump-jerked. “Yes, I just… like standing here. The airflow’s nice” she replied on the soft side, hoping not to be overheard down below as easily as she’d been eavesdropping up above.

“Very good. Let me or anyone on the staff know if there’s anything we can do to make your cruise better.”

“I shall. Thank you.”

The next time she looked over the railing (once Akom departed), the overstuffed comfy chairs were empty, all glasses, cocktail napkins, and everything else gone, almost as if no one had been sitting there. Looking around the Main Lobby as she could from her vantage point, Clark was nowhere in sight. Given her need to mentally process all she’d overheard, she was glad. She continued the rest of the way down the stairs, onward with her meandering adventure.

{A chocolate mousse flight with triple-shot espresso at 7:30 at night is not a good idea if one wants to sleep} thought Leigh, wired and wide awake around 9 PM with nothing on her agenda. She decided she might as well change into suitable evening wear and survey all the ship had to offer in the way of nighttime entertainment.

Neither dressed for a hoedown nor truly in the mood to be part of one, Leigh’s time in the dance venue currently running under the name Hootenanny Hall was comparatively brief, at a little over 7 minutes. She did enjoy watching, and the friendly people already on the floor encouraged her to join in despite her other-realm attire.

The pool table at nearby Card Shark’s Card and Game Room did entice her, were there anyone else with whom to play who looked less competitive shark-like. Deeper into the venue in a lighter, brighter area the unoccupied ping pong table called her even harder: she’d once been quite decently skilled at table tennis. {Gosh that was a long time ago} she sighed, lamenting both the passage of so much life time and the lack of a suitable playmate.

Video games had never floated Leigh’s boat, whether vintage arcade-style or more modern (and Card Shark’s had quite a range of generations and types).

“BAAHaah! Dingy Dinghy!” she laughed aloud, seeing the very clean, well-maintained, brightly lit apparently-vintage pinball machine near the far end of the line of the video arcade games, tucked into a quiet corner. For clarification, its back glass presented its title thus:

🔔 Dingy Dinghy ⛵️

All about ringing bells, not drab gloominess. She gave the machine a go, scoring well and filling that area of Card Shark’s Card and Game Room with plentiful actual mechanical bell ringing (no electronic synthesis/sampling).

Two long rounds being a pinball wizard off on her own in this secluded corner was enough for Leigh; she was ready to move on.

She gave both the stage and big screen theaters a pass, somewhat surprised how many people were gathered in the latter.

The painfully bad and loud singing of “DAAAAY-oh!, DAY-ay-ay-ay-Ohh!” let her know she was passing the karaoke venue, whose name she didn’t even bother checking in her rush to get away from it.

One particular conversation between a pair of what appeared to be young-ish (or at least far younger than her) mothers caught her ear:

“Are you sure hampster doesn’t have a P in it?”

“No, you’re thinking of that animated Hampster Dance meme, with the sped-up sample of Roger Miller. The name of the animal has no P in it. The animal itself, that’s another matter: my son’s hamster has all kinds of pee in it!”

Her long, meandering path led her back to the happening scene up on the Sky deck at Club Troposphere. Tonight’s DJ Alien Groove looked weird in their scaled-too-large alien head, complete with slanty alien eyes. Looks aside, Alien Groove’s ungrooved grooves were as solid as Swash Buckle’s the night before, even if far more tightly focused on EDM than spanning the decades of recorded musical history.

With slight difficulty, she pushed herself out of her wary, aloof comfort zone, easing onto the dance floor and letting her body move to Groove’s current groove. Once she let her mind and its {Why must I be so rhythm-challenged?} nagging go, her in-the-present-moment instincts did her well.

It came as less of a surprise to her having surveyed the other nighttime entertainment alternatives to again see Clark in the distance on the Club Troposphere under-the-stars open-air dance floor, where in some ways the sky truly did seem to be the limit, given what she’d seen of the other venue options. Completely not understanding why she cared even slightly, she felt a very brief surge of upset course through her upon seeing him dancing with the doe-eyed huge-boobed blonde BBW with the oversized rounded nose. After that momentary feels surge, her focused attention on them returned to her usual analytical self, even if not wholly detached.

The music did not lend itself to contact dancing, and indeed she saw no contact between them. The glittery, affectionate smiles they were sharing—obvious to her over the distance—triggered feelings of jealousy.

A generously wrinkly man of limited head hair who had been and continued to dance right in front of her caught Leigh’s attention the moment she looked away from her voyeuristic targets. His friendly, urbane smile drew out her own friendly smile, as well as giving her a much nicer, nearby, and immediate visual focus. She’d not likely want to date him and would never bed him, but in this moment he did make an excellent, friendly non-contact dance partner.

The only further notice Leigh took of Clark was about 1/3 hour later when he and Boobacious Bulb-Nose exited the dance floor together, holding hands. {Looks like he’s laid out his lay for the night} she briefly thought with a sigh wholly inaudible even to her over the beat-heavy dance music. She returned her attention to her dance partner, who was in the process of easing away so another younger and less wrinkled gent could ease in.

This one didn’t stay dancing with her all that long, but long enough for her to completely forget about Clark.

“Fun as it is, Club Troposphere doesn’t lend itself to even brief conversation” Clark smiled towards the lovely busty BBW/edge of SSBBW with whom he was currently walking, still holding hands.

“No it does not. I didn’t even clearly get your name.”

“Clark Barr. B-A-R-R.”

“Thanks for the clarification. Otherwise I would’ve been expecting a peanut butter and spun taffy core, ideally with caramel, coated in milk chocolate, if I ever wound up eating you.”

“Daah! Woah ho ho!” he laughed, her to-him heavily flirty comment taking him by surprise.

“Hee hee!” she laughed along with him at the same time. “I’m Rebecca Davidson, eyeing the couch seating in that lounge area over there as being a good place to sit and continue the introductions we couldn’t make to each other earlier.”

“Delighted to officially meet you, Rebecca, and I concur on your peaceful sitting and resting thoughts.

There was sufficient space on the 2m long mustard gold velour fabric couch for Clark and Rebecca to sit angled facing near one another without being in contact, a comfortably socially-polite distance between them.

{Eyes up eyes up eyes up to mine or I’m leaving. There ya go, just in time.} “How far are you on the cruise loop?” she asked.

“Just starting. I got on yesterday in L.A. You?”

“Me too.”

“You live in metropolitan Los Angeles?!”

“Yes. That surprises you for some reason?”

“Hopefully no offense, but you sound like you’re from the east. Maybe New York?”

“Yeaaaah, I guess my accent’s still that obvious. Nice Jewish girl originally from Bed-Stuy.”

“Sorry, where?”

“You don’t know New York City, do you?”

“Hardly. Whenever I get into a book or movie or whatever where they’re name-dropping 42nd. Street or Hell’s Kitchen or whatever like everyone on the planet’s supposed to know what those are and what they’re all about, I tend to lose interest. With all due respect to NYC as a vibrant place able to produce amazing people such as yourself and more, it’s not the center of the universe.”

Her eyebrows went up.

“At least not to a California native such as myself.”

“Huh! There are actual natives here? I mean, other than the indigenous actual natives.”

“Second-generation metro Angeleno here, meaning second generation born in the county and region, not necessarily the City of Los Angeles, which neither of my parents nor myself were. Which isn’t even on the same scale as descendants of the Tongva, nor those whose Mexican ancestry hails to the pre-U.S. statehood rancho era, possibly earlier. Still, in comparison to so many who came later and continue to move into the area, grandparents who immigrated to California in the early 20th. century is a comparatively long history.”

“Yeah” she slightly sighed. “And here I thought my 20 years in L.A. made me a de-facto Cali girl. What’s the statute of limitations on that?”

“There is none. Welcome” he smiled, easing into her for a brief sitting hug she seemed eager to end.

“Thanks. So whereabouts in or around L.A. do you live?”

“I don’t, in any recent years. My mother still does in the South Bay where I grew up. Knew I wanted to do this cruise and would be visiting her anyway, so ticketed to board there and get back off in SuhFrisco on the way back south.”

“Where?”

“SuhFrisco is my weak attempt to abbreviate San Francisco in a manner possibly less annoying to those who live there who chafe at Frisco, which is a city or town in Texas anyway. Closest port to where I’ve been living and working in recent years, in Silicon Valley.”

“You’re in tech?”

“Yeah. Engineer at a small package design slash fabrication firm, which operates on a consulting and/or prototype outsourcing basis, mostly.”

“Mechanical?”

“That’s my degree, though almost everything in modern times seems to lead to virtualization and coding, so I sometimes do bits of that. More coding for production line fabrication systems, not anything an end-user would ever encounter.”

“OK, so I won’t bug you about the latest annoyance I’m having with iOS.”

“Oh don’t get me started on that! Apple torques me, Microsoft torques me, Google torques me.”

“What do you run?”

“At work, whatever I have to run, which all too often is Winblows. At least XP SP 3 is decent and stable, as long as it’s nowhere near the public Internet, which the manufacturing and design systems I have to use are not. Officially getting near the grampy generation by chronological age, I’m acting that way in terms of my tech: I prefer keeping my venerable Dells going with Slackware Linux and spending my quality time there. Much as I hate the whole handtech realm, Apple sucks less than Google, so I carry an iPhone of necessity.”

“Now you’re talking a language I understand.” She briefly pulled her iPhone 11 Pro Max out of her bra enough for him to see it before putting it back, unknowingly over-exciting him as she did so. “I don’t even know of Linux—too geeky for this girl! All those different kinds with the different names, like yours and, what?, Cinnamon Swirl?”

“Mint Cinnamon.”

“See?” she laughed. “Much as Apple ruins my day far too often, this girl needs someone looking out for my security, making things I can turn on and use without getting my geek-I-don’t-have on.”

“What do you choose to do in life, for work, pleasure, or otherwise?”

“Script writer, on shows you’ve never heard of and get cancelled” she replied with an obvious tone of bitterness “is what I do for work.”

He nodded, interested.

“Occasional costume work, leveraging off years of sewing my own clothes, so I have decent things to wear which actually fit and flatter rather than flummox.”

He couldn’t help momentarily snickering at her flummox comment. “What you’ve got on now is dazzling, as well as you yourself inside it of course.”

{Eyes off the orbs. Back up here, back up here} her mind attempted to telepath to him as he continued speaking.

Fortunately he did resume direct eye contact as he finished, “Did you make it?”

“Not this one. This is from a small-output designer named Minerva Pyle, who’s a big girl herself and focuses on the underserved market of large sizes. She custom-tailors, which is why it shows off all my curves so well.”

“Ohhh yeah!” he lecherously agreed with a knowing nod. “So” he clapped his hands loudly, “What next? Your stateroom or mine, perhaps?”

The waves of rage rapidly emanating from Rebecca as she stiffened, sat more upright, and pulled back were palpable. “I don’t know what the hell you’re about, dude, but I am a woman of worth who is not desperate and is not an easy lay!” she rebuked him in no uncertain terms as she stood up.

“Rebecca–”

Too late: she was already walking away at a decent tight-dress-induced short-stride clip, not looking back.

Staring at her ever-more-distant wobbly ass as he remained seated he thought, {At least you can’t keep me from getting off to visualizing you in the privacy of my stateroom}.

All of Rebecca, Clark, and Leigh turned in to their individual staterooms alone for the night, 2 of the 3 of them being wholly good with this situation, the other passably good with it.