The West house was a rather modest-looking one. It was a three-bedroom, two-bath, and was one of the many additions during the degentrification of the Boiling Springs area. Tara had always sort of looked at it as the ideal living space for what her family had needed. If she ever got married and had kids, she would have liked to live in a house like this one.
But as someone who had been forced to move back home due to circumstances beyond her control, Tara had started looking at this place as something of a reminder that she couldn't cut it out on her own. Despite the fact that her mother had done everything in her power to make her feel at home and like she wasn't a total failure, Tara never really woke up feeling gung-ho and ready to go like she did when she was living in her Charleston apartment.
In fact, just the opposite.
The longer that Tara stayed at home, it felt like she was just getting more and more morose. Sluggish and slow. Not because she wanted to, just because it was hard to get up every morning and face the day as someone who had scored the corner office, now living back in the smallest of three bedrooms.
"How the fuck can Haley cut it out in Charleston, and I couldn't?"
Flipping through her sister's Instagram page wasn't something that Tara particularly enjoyed doing. It was actually something that she tried not to do, given the feelings that it stirred up inside of her. But sometimes, lying in bed in the morning on a day when she didn't have to go into work, she got a pinged alert that Haley had posted something and curiosity overtook her.
"Ugh, she's with a new boyfriend? What happened to the last one?"
Tara's hand ran over her squishy stomach self-consciously, only to dart away once she felt the telltale signs of chub. She hadn't had a boyfriend since college. She had lived in Charleston, and before Haley even! In fact, she had probably seen that guy before! What the fuck even was her sister's job, anyway? Where the hell did the last boyfriend go? The one that had convinced her to move in the first place?
"How does everything go right for her?"
Tara locked her phone with a soft 'click!' and tossed it to the side of her bed, accidentally landing it on Boots the cat who purred in response. Whenever his owner was awake in the mornings, it was anyone's guess as to whenever feeding time would be. Given Tara's newfound lethargy though, the only guaranteed sound that would get her up and moving was the sound of Mrs. West calling for her own sort of feeding time...
"Tara, honey!" her mother's voice rang out from downstairs, "Breakfast time!"
And with that, the little cat zoomed towards the open bedroom door.
"Silly boy." Tara shifted in her cozy cocoon of blankets, "Mom's got him trained too well."
Although she would never admit it, she was similarly trained by this point. To think that she used to get up at seven-thirty am every morning, even when she didn't have to go to work. But her mama calling her down for breakfast was a surefire way to get her up and moving on her days off, without a doubt.
Throwing the layer of blankets off of her, Tara exposed her soft and supple body to the conditioned air of her bedroom. Her sleep shirt (an XXL Big Daddy's shirt that she had snagged one day from work) had billowed and folded in such a way that her right love handle was exposed, as well as a portion of her soft smile of doughy belly button. Tara's legs, squishy and supple after lots of time spent on an increasingly soft butt, slowly dragged over the sheet and down to the hardwood floor.
"Tara, are you awake?"
"I'm up, I'm up!" Tara hollered back down before speaking more quietly to herself, "Let me just put on some pants..."
Mrs. West was something of a stickler about people not wearing their underwear to the dinner table. Pajamas were fine (Tara had spent more than a few days just lounging around in her jammies for each and every one of her mama's meals!) but she needed to put on something underneath that big billowing Big Daddy's shirt. Even if it did hang low enough to keep her decent, rules were still rules.
"Oh fuck, I forgot why I kicked these things off..."
In the middle of the night, Tara had gotten up to go to the bathroom. Over the course of the walk down to the hallway, she'd bent the wrong way and her pajama bottoms had finally given up the ghost—splitting right down the thigh in a big, ugly rip that made her leg look like a popped tube of biscuits.
"Goddammit, those were my last pair..."
Tara tossed the pajama pants aside in anger, desperately avoiding the full-length mirror that hung just within her field of vision and gave her a good look at what was happening to her figure now that she was six months deep into her life in Spartanburg, revisited. She'd never had much of a weight problem before, aside from a chubby phase when she was in grade school. But then again, her mama had never cooked this much either. And she didn't work at a burger joint with big serving sizes where she got to sneak stuff off of plates...
"Sure, blame it on mom." Tara rolled her eyes as she crossed her arms, "You worked at Big Daddy's when you were in high school and didn't pork out. You're just fucking lazy."
Giving in, Tara looked at the full-length mirror and tried to straighten herself out. Sucked in her tummy, puffed out her chest, pulled the front of her t-shirt so as to sort of smooth things out...
"Yeah, it's not so bad..." Tara's lips tugged to the side as she tried to find a good angle, "Wish I could suck in that double chin though..."
"Tara, is it okay if I feed Boots while you're up there?"
"Sure thing, mama!" Tara called back down, "I'm just... getting ready for breakfast!"
More like trying to find a pair of pajama pants that'll fit my fat ass...
There had to be something, right? Something that she could put on and wear around the house for the day? She didn't want to put on jeans to go to breakfast, that'd be weird... Not to mention, the pair that she had bought for work were already as snug as they could get.
Taking a quick jaunt over to what used to be Haley's room, she tried her luck in there. Where Tara had never had an apple bottom like her sister, and Haley had certainly never had a weight problem either, maybe the difference in sizes would make things a little more even? Haley liked to wear her sleep clothes baggy, right?
"Aha!" Tara announced triumphantly, holding out a pair of gray sweatpants whose elastic waistband stretched out far more than she thought it would have, "Jackpot!"
Squeezing into the cozy gray confines and slipping her feet through the gathered holes, Tara found them comfortable. They were big and loose. Haley really did like loose pajamas...
"Tara are you coming down any time today?"
"I'm comin', I'm comin'..." Tara grumbled under her breath, "Jeez, you would have thought I was late to work or somethin'..."
Tara's chubby cheeks swished up and down in the cottony confines of her sweatpants while her little belly bounced with every one of her steps. The added weight since her time at home began had crept up so slowly that she'd hardly noticed it before, but now that she'd been forced to confront it in the mirror, it was almost as if she could feel every pound.
"I need to diet." she frowned to herself as she descended the stairs, "Starting today, I'm on a diet."
"Tara West, you get your butt down here or I'm feeding these pancakes to the cat!"
The smells of her mother's expert southern cooking wafted up the stairwell and into Tara's expectant nose. That little belly gurgled excitedly at the thought of another big meal to greet the day, no matter how much her thighs shuddered at the thought of retaining any more maple syrup...
"Okay, starting tomorrow, I'm on a diet."
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