Nico and Lissa

Nico series part three

By Anaiis

*****

Nico and Lissa

By Anaiis

Published by Anaiis at Smashwords Copyright 2012 Anaiis

Thank you for downloading this eBook.

Adult Reading Material

The following is a work of fiction; any resemblance of these characters to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

*****

I Lissa

“So what was it like, losing so much?”

The girl asking me this was a production assistant named Lissa. Her skin was such a light brown when I first met her I hadn’t realized she was actually black. “BAP,” she later explained—“Black American Princess. I was practically raised white and I think it leeched the color out of me.” The plaid skirt she wore today backed this up. “Though if my dad hears that he’ll whip me. Thinks he’s Martin Luther King except he wears tweed.”

That Lissa’s dad was Huxtable-like made sense—she was a virtual spit image for Lisa Bonet, except with this Somali cast to her looks, giving her a narrower face, a longer line. Thin, but not model thin, and pretty, but not quite model pretty. Still, she could walk into any party and she’d be the most striking girl there.

More than anything I liked her sharp tongue when she got on her family.

But now she wasn’t talking about her dad or her heritage. She was digging for dirt, details probably half the cast and crew wanted to know. The movie we’d been working on was about to wrap, and after weeks of working together this was the first time we’d ever actually sat down together.

The director had sent everyone to lunch while they dressed the set for the film’s final scene. Watching people eat upset me deeply. If I did it for very long or something looked particularly good, I’d actually start to drool; my stomach would make embarrassing noises. So before the lunch bags came out I’d slipped away and Lissa had tracked me to my hiding place.

Everyone knew I’d had to starve for this role, the lead in a short feature about an anorexic that was actually an ad for BCBG. As shooting reached its climax the film was morphing into a feature length PSA on EDs—but in reverse. We were shooting in an abandoned school in Queens. Lissa and I sat on the steps in an unused schoolroom, chalkboards marked with lessons from the last class ever.

We had at least an hour to kill.

Lissa rested her face in her hands, goggling at me with her big chocolate eyes in a way I admit I liked. I mean, I’m a model. Showing off comes with the territory. “I just can’t imagine how it must feel, restricting like that.”

Lissa had only ever known me at my current weight—87. But she was a total fashion hound so she knew my whole story. How I’d lit the world on fire at Bryant Park’s fall fashion week two years before as the skinniest model ever, the subject of a viral mini-documentary by a genius cinematographer/fashion hound—only to fall from grace a few months later, dropping to a weight people only uttered in hushed tones. After six months of loving care, I emerged from the hospital a new girl, ready to retake the fashion world by storm.

I relapsed within 24 hours.

If not for the underground world of anorexic modeling—and my new agency, InLine—the relapse would have spelled the end of my career. Basically, InLine needed what I had to offer: a five-ten frame that couldn’t hold onto much more than 93 pounds.

After a few shoots got my name and face around, Inline landed me this film gig for BCBG. Basically an anorexia-sploitation infotainment aimed at a very sick slice of the eastern European market. The contract has a rider that demanded I lose down to 41 kilos—about 90 pounds—then shed at least two kilos over the course of the shooting schedule. I play a girl who becomes more and more popular as her anorexia worsens—and she starts wearing BCBG.

Don’t ask.

So that’s why I’m sitting on the steps of an empty classroom in a tarted up schoolgirl uniform. Pretty black girl making eyes at my knobby knees.

“But seriously, Nico. It’s okay if I call you Nico? We’ve worked on this thing so long, but we’ve never, you know. Talked.” I nodded gravely. “You were so thin in that documentary. When I heard you’d lost all that weight I was like, fuck. You know?”

I gave the shrug, the rueful smile. “Imagine,” I said, recalling all stick I’d got for walking the runway at 98 pounds. “Nailed for modeling while skinny.” Lissa held her breath as she looked at me, clutching my bare knees at 87 pounds. “Everyone knows my career didn’t take off ‘til I got under a hundred.”

Lissa’s lips parted, displaying sugar-white incisors—the very image of a starving Somali woman, I realized, if only in her expression. “I used to Google you all the time. I thought you looked perfect even at 110, when you did American Apparel.” She licked her aubergine lips. “I don’t get it. What made you lose so much?”

I looked Lissa directly in the eyes. “I got addicted to starving.” Lissa stopped breathing. “To the feel of it. Waking up to that hit of hunger. I crave it, the pain. You see me smiling, on the set like everything’s fine but…” I pushed deeper into the hollow below my ribcage. “It’s like there’s a stream of molten steel pouring through my belly.”

“How did it start?” The intensity of Lissa’s stare, her low gravely voice, sparked another fire in me, down between my legs. Confessing my hunger lust was ecstasy to me. Lissa’s rapt attention better than any drug.

“The seed got planted early,” I said. “In junior high. This documentary came on PBS. About a ballet dancer in England, Darcy Hallam. She’s starving herself, but they let her dance anyway—her parents, the school. The BBC interviews her and it’s shocking, just dire. She’s living off fifty calories a day, right? Tic Tacs and Wheat Thins. I was riveted.”

Flicker in Lissa’s eyes. Tip of her tongue prized in her teeth, she nodded.

“They follow her through her day. All her classes, her training—showing what she eats. She’s so fucking thin her leotard. You think it can’t go on, but it’s like this for weeks and then months. Until finally this dancer’s emaciated, like a living skeleton. But her mum and dad are in complete denial.”

“Did they let her still dance?” Lissa asked, spellbound.

“Un huh. That’s what’s so creepy about it. Her legs are like wishbones, you know? You could fit a bowling ball between her legs. But she’s doing rend du jambs and plies and jetes in this little leotard, smiling so smugly. Like she owns the world.”

Lissa shifted closer to me on the step. I smelled her sweat. “You wanted that.”

“It fascinated me. I was fourteen; I’d just started doing ballet. But I couldn’t seem to get that dancer’s body some girls had. My mom put me on crazy diets but none of them worked. Darcy Hallam was everything I dreamed of.” My eyes kind of melded with Lissa’s. “This girl was literally starving, every day. Even now I can still see that anguish in her eyes. The way they lit up when people commented on her body, or asked how little she ate. I was so desperate to have that.”

“So what did you do?”

“I tried the Darcy Hallam diet. Fifty calories a day.” Lissa bit her lip nervously. “But I couldn’t keep it up. I got dizzy, and my tummy hurt so bad.” I swirled stiff fingers against the hollow of my belly, a jagged mouth that never stopped squalling.

Lissa’s breath smelt like cinnamon. “But you lost weight…”

“Actually, no. The pain was so horrible I gave up completely. I wanted so badly to be that skinny girl in the leotard, but I was no Darcy Hallam. She’d made it look easy, but the truth is, Lissa? I’m fasting right now, and it’s as exactly as hellish as it was in junior high.”

Lissa sighed at this, drinking in my hollowed cheeks, my tortured eyes. Knowing I was suffering right in front of her.

“Anyway, in high school I finally got serious, fought my way down to 110 and my mom got me into modeling. Which is when I learned the secret.”

Lissa’s irises got huge. “The secret?” Saying these things was making me hot, my inhibitions melting away. “I was on my first major shoot, in Paris. I was so naïve. All these skinny girls running around backstage, making starving look easy. For me even dieting was agony, I couldn’t dream of fasting.” I took a deep breath, remembering. Conjuring the image of Arianne. “Then I met this model. A French girl.”

“And she gave you the secret?”

I smiled. “She was so fucking thin, Lissa. When I met Arianne she was starving herself for a Pirelli calendar shoot. An inch taller than me and fifteen pounds less. She’d seen me struggling.

“Forget all that. You are not doing it right.’”

“So what’d she tell you, this girl?”

“She said make it sexy.” Without thinking about it, my fingers slipped under my shirt, moving in concentric circles in the pit of my stomach. “Like, caress the pain. Build hunger like a little fire in your belly. Tend it. Make love to it.”

“You’ve got it pretty bad now, don’t you?”

“Mark wants a hollow stomach for the anorexia scene. I’ve been on coffee and water for three days.”

Lissa looked skeptical. “So that’s it? You just fall in love with hunger?” Her lashes fluttered, eyes falling to where my hand moved in the hollow of my belly.

I nodded. “Right now, you watching me having a pang...” I was crossing some borderland with Lissa now. “It’s so hot. But sometimes the best is when someone doesn’t even know. There’s this red hot iron claw at your insides and this stranger just sees you smiling and acting like nothing’s up.”

“Does it ever scare you?”

I think my smile startled her. “At first I was, a bit. When I came back from the hospital, I’d only put on a few pounds, I was still under a hundred. But my agency loved it. They sent me to Milan.”

“I remember,” Lissa said. “Those shots were all over the Internet.” Lissa’s voice got breathy. “Walking the runway with your chest bones sticking out.”

“The way people reacted freaked me a little. Like suddenly I could do no wrong.” I smiled, genuinely happy, letting her believe hunger was a cinch for me. “Anyway, I love it. When a new loss starts to show.” I pinched my chest, through my shirt.

Lissa nodded. I could tell she was dying to see skin.

“It’s such a rush. Everyone gets it—it’s proof you can take anything.”

Lissa pulled her cashmere sweater down, exposing the upper quadrant of her chest—a protrusion of bronzed muscle. “Mine’s too big, isn’t it?” I felt a quiver in my groin as her slim hand cupped the curve of her pec.

“No way, Lissa.” I touched her knee. “Don’t even go there. Losing muscle, it’s the hardest thing to do.” I rubbed my upper chest, almost giddy at the needle-like tingle of ketosis, already setting in after just three days.

“But you did it.” She sounded almost aggrieved. “You lost, like, twenty pounds. More. From one ten.”

I moved my mouth closer, eyes wide so she’d understand completely. Starving eyes can’t lie.

“I’m an addict, Lissa. A hunger addict.” I let this sink in a second. “Every second of my life is hell.”

Lissa didn’t listen. “How’d you lose all that weight so fast?”

My thighs tingled as Lissa’s breathing slowed. “When I got back to the States? The apartment was empty. My parents were in Canada for the week, on a film shoot. So I decided to put Arianna’s theory to the test.”

I remembered it now. The cold thrill when I realized I’d actually do it. “I tossed out every scrap of food in the house and began a water fast. I found the Darcy Hallam doc on YouTube. Watched it over and over. Bought a leotard just like hers.” I remembered the shock of learning what hunger really was. How implacable. “After three days I got terrible pangs. Like this animal inside you, pleading with you to eat.”

“What did you do?”

A tingle of sweat started up inside my armpit. “We had a home gym, so I punished the pangs with exercise. The pain ate me alive, but pounds started coming off, fast. The more brutally I treated my stomach, the stronger I felt. Which is weird because after five days I was pathetically weak. My tummy was a bowl of fire.”

I saw myself again, jumping rope in front of the mirror in my Darcy Hallam leotard, so proud to be closing in on double digits.

“The more wasted I got, the better it was. I could do anything. Wherever I went I had this huge smile plastered on my face, and this invisible fire blazing away under my ribcage. My best friend was terrified for me. I’d told her about the fast. I wasn’t even drinking water. I wore really skimpy clothes, so she could see I wasn’t cheating.

“My parents extended their trip a few more days and I got worse—I barely slept. Worked out every night until I fainted. When they came home they found me out cold on the floor.” I licked my lips, thinking of how famished I’d been, thinking of roast lamb with new potatoes. “I was ninety-two pounds.”

Lissa’s voice dropped to nothing. “Fuck...”

I made my voice as low as Lissa’s, like telling a horror story. Which I basically was. “They put me in the hospital, paid a ton to keep it secret. I kept fighting, skipping meals, cheating. I had no reserves, only muscle. The hunger fed on it, it stung.”

Lissa watched as I scratched my side, casually, getting off on her stare. She was bewitched. Gulping little breaths through her lovely, pouted lips.

“The sting became a scraping. My stomach caved in and shrank, but I got hungrier than ever. This angry, nagging baby that wouldn’t shut up.” I rubbed my temple. “I stopped sleeping altogether.”

A knock on the door. Five minute warning.

I bit my lip “Anyway. You know the rest.”

Lissa shuffled her pretty feet. I could see she really didn’t want to end this. Her eyes got glassy. “Nico…Today, when we wrap the shoot. You can eat again.”

Dust motes twinkled in sunlight from the cracked windows. We had to go. The curve of Lissa’s cheek looked smooth and ripe, like a peach in June. Her cashmere clad breasts seemed pert, full of promise.

She moved closer. Sensing, I think, the meaning in my silence. “Nico…you’re so skinny.” Her eyes dipped to the notch at the base of my throat. “Tell me you’re going to eat.”

Head leaning forward, I got to my feet like a giraffe rising on tent-pole legs.

“Got to get to work,” I said. Voice tinged with that exact tone of regret and resignation I knew would light fires of worry in Lissa, as the cold truth sank in—that as we talked I’d formed a new and terrible resolution.

I needed to feel it again, the fire raging under my ribcage. The voice in my head demanded that I prove to this wide-eyed girl that I had no fear of pain, or the new bones that would push like buds through my pale skin.

I was going to explore the absolute limits of hunger.

II LIGHTS, CAMERA

As I walked on set, the acting coach, Elle, came and put her arm on my shoulder. “It’s not going to be as bad as you think,” she said. Meaning the nudity. This was the scene I’d starved for, where my character’s best friend first glimpses my anorexic body. “Just four people on set, no crew, like we talked about—the cameraman. You and Sylvie. Axel.” Axel was the director.

“And Lissa,” I said. I smiled at Lissa, then back at Elle. “Lissa’s cool. Lissa’s my lucky star.” Elle nodded, adding Lissa’s name to the call list.

Sylvie plays the friend, a sort of fashionista know-it-all. She’s found this BCBG bra she’s convinced will turn me into a boy magnet.

After make up I head back to the set. The bright banks of lights send shooting pains through my skull, my chest. Everyone knows I’m famished, so they’re going to try to limit the takes. I’m given a cup of coffee but my stomach hurts so bad I’d just puke it up. A flash of euphoria as I remember my resolution. How this pain will morph into glorious, aching need.

“Thanks,” I say. Sipping just enough coffee to taunt my stomach into a series of wicked pangs.

“Take your time, Nico,” Axel says. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” He uses this phrase a lot. As if we’re making something grander than an ad. It’s so silly. The script is crap; even Axel wants to be somewhere else. I think they all feel sorry for me. That I’ve dedicated so much to so little. And behind the pity is disdain—I’m no real actress, just a pretty anorexic. A BCBG mannequin. But I don’t care. I’m getting paid.

But more than anything, Lissa’s about to see my bare, wasted torso.

They’ve already seen me a million times in this outfit. Short tartan skirt. Hiked up. Lots of badges and shit on it like I’m in the military. My blouse fluffed out; my character’s been hiding what’s underneath, skipping meals, lying about food. Exercising on the sly.

The scene takes place in my best friend’s room.

Sylvia looks stressed. A bit of a wannabe, she’s not happy with any of this. She envies me without any idea what I have to go through. What it takes to suffer from second to the next, day after day.

“Just swan in,” Axel says. “Roll it.” The board clacks.

I walk into Sylvie’s room. She’s on the bed, fiddling with a package. I go to her dresser and pick up her brush. “Hey, check it out,” she says, all impish. She holds up a little black bra, a push up thing. “So what are you waiting for?”

She wants me to open my shirt. I hesitate. I’ve been hiding my bones so carefully. “I’ll try it later,” I say. All I care is that Lissa’s watching. I catch her eye where she’s standing, behind the camera. Sylvie gets adamant. So fuck it, I unbutton my white dress shirt, really fast. My heart’s pounding. Sylvie moves closer as I peel off the shirt and she sees my naked chest.

The raw emotions working in Sylvie’s face are genuine enough. I don’t think anyone expected this, how bad it is. They’d seen me in a bra at 90 pounds, but more than two kilos have made a pretty stunning difference. My breasts had shrunk to fit the shape of my ribcage; my whole chest had a kind of hunch to it. My wasted abdomen was this bowl of taut white skin, the hipbones finally sticking out for real. Axel had said he wanted the look of a genuine anorexic. “That’s we’re paying for,” he’d said, three days ago, as if he had to cajole me into dropping the weight the contract called for.

There was silence on the set. Not good silence.

But Sylvie soldiered on. They could cut it all together, make it seamless.

As Sylvie’s character launched into an angry tirade, I glanced over to where Lissa was standing. Perfectly mute. Her knuckles against her mouth.

Her eyes were dazzling, shining like stars.

“So where you headed,” Lissa asked, her voice betraying mad nerves. The crew was breaking down the set, the cast dispersing for drinks and dinner. The thought of going home alone to the probably empty model house—it was about 9PM on a Friday, exactly when they’d all be off on dates—was grim.

“Home I guess.” My voice as hollow as I looked. “I’m pretty beat.”

Lissa’s face softened in that near-teary way she’d had before. “So how are you going to break your fast? You must have been thinking about it, right?”

I kind of shrug. Smile. I’m wearing jeans that had fit like a second skin at 93 pounds. They gape at the waist now. My white, sleeveless tee is cropped, letting the hipbones rear up in all their ivory glory.

Lissa’s chest is so tight it squeezes her voice. “Let’s go out, Nico.” She managed a watery smile. “On me.”

I couldn’t resist. I didn’t want to. Her eyes on me were everything I needed in the world.

At the diner I got dizzy, my mind wandering. Lissa didn’t comment when I ordered only black coffee. She ordered a salad nicoise and a glass of wine, but I was desperate for something more substantial.

“Get a burger,” I said. “Rare. With fried onions.” Saliva pooled under my tongue. “And curly fries.”

Lissa seemed to understand what I was about, she ordered it all. As each dish arrived, the aromas sent waves of anticipation through my belly. Rubbing secretly at my tiny waist, I became almost dictatorial: “Put more mayonnaise on. Cut it in half.” I savored the deep crimson of the beef, glistening with fat. “Take a bite,” I said softly. Barely able to breathe as she did it. My tummy made a low growl as I pressed the heel of my hand into it, massaging the bare skin until it burned.

From the rapt look on her face, I could tell Lissa found the complicity thrilling, joining in this orgasmic and complicated food fuck. Grease shining on her chin nearly made me faint. “Eat another fry,” I gasped, my mouth chewing right along with hers.

Seeing my reaction, Lissa licked her fingers with all the showboat style of a New Orleans pole dancer. I couldn’t believe my thin waist could contain this much agony. My stomach rebelled. Realizing the food was vanishing, that it would get nothing. The scents were a ruse.

Lissa dabbed her chin. “My God, Nico. Your eyes.”

I was a throbbing nerve ending of want. Deep down, somewhere between my hipbones, I felt a rising chord of sex. Lissa had seen my bare chest, knew how famished I was. Saw how the white tee draped slackly from my shoulders.

The end of Lissa’s meal brought on a wave of despondency. I almost blacked out from the wicked pains streaking through my hollowed tummy, cramps like the bends. Near unconscious with dizziness, I rattled on. Griping about the model house. My mind completely focused on savoring the last, lingering scents.

Finally I got a grip. “ Jesus, Lissa. What have I been saying? I’m so out of it.”

“Nothing much.” She smiled. “So what’s your plan? That model house sounds hellish.”

I stared into my coffee. My pallor skipped a white moon across its dead surface. “Um.” I decided to let it out, the truth. “They’re not too excited about girls fasting. Tends to trigger other girls.” I let my eyes met Lissa’s. “Which, uh…that could be a problem.”

Lissa’s lips compressed, gears working behind her shiny eyes. “Why don’t you come live with me?”

My heart rocked against my ribcage. Was this possible?

“I heard you had a roommate.” This would ruin everything.

Lissa shook her head. “She’s with her boyfriend, in Amsterdam. She’s always saying she’ll be back but she never comes. She still pays her rent but all I’d have to do is let her know—she feels guilty for not using the place.”

I had to be honest; there was no way around it. “I’d love to, actually. But…” I lifted my coffee to my lips, sipping just enough not to get sick. Spoke as casually as I could. “You know what I’m going to do, right?”

Lissa almost whispered. “I think so.” I prayed she’s wouldn’t try to talk me out of it. Once I decide to fast, it becomes part of me, like a leg or an arm. She peered into my eyes.

“It can be hard to be around,” I said, feeling I owed her this. “To watch.” My ex-boyfriend had been unable to take it, my daily anguish. Conversation dries up. The one eating starts to feel guilty.

Somehow I felt this would not be a problem for Lissa.

“Actually,” she said, “I was thinking maybe I’d join you.”

I hadn’t dared dream this. Helping Lissa lose…already I can see those humps of muscle eroding. Crafting a diet for her, an exercise regimen…

For a moment, I got scared. There’d be no way out. I felt so delicate, so fragile-bony. But I knew myself. Those big brown eyes, trained on me day and night, would be pure heroin. The voice would revel in that gaze. All anorexics cheat, but with Lissa watching, I’d savage myself like never before.

Then I felt it, the glow down between my legs. A sexy, churning feel as lust mingled with hunger, a witch’s brew of desire. The vision of Lissa’s fine, brown body stretching and bending. Jumping to my tune as I led us both into hell.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

Sealing our fates with a coffee toast.

III HOME AWAY FROM HOME

Lissa fit an ancient looking key in the lock. “Classic brownstone,” she said over her shoulder. “Not renovated, but it’s cute.”

And it was—a long, skinny floor-through with a spiral staircase that led to a tiny bedroom. As Lissa showed me around I think we both felt the excitement building between us. It was just like I imagined, silks and Indian prints draping the chipped plaster walls, softening the glow of old bronze lamps.

We wound up in the kitchen.

I took off my long coat, my sweater. In just my sleeveless tee, the white sticks of my arms showed starkly in the darkened window.

Lissa saw the reflection, then turned to me, still in her wool toggle coat. “So you’re really going to starve?” Her tone said she was dying for me to say yes.

I nodded. “I think you should reconsider, though.” I undid the toggles on her coat. “It’s tougher than it seems.”

“I don’t mind tough,” she said, playfully.

This was one of those moments, like after a good date. All day we’d been flirting. Trading secrets. Because even if I did the talking, Lissa’s silent assent had been a kind of submission to all that I said, an acceptance that made her complicit. Brought us closer.

I pulled her coat off her shoulders.

By any objective standard, Lisa was slim—five foot seven and about 118. As she stood there, I couldn’t help imagining what lay beneath the smooth cashmere sweater, the tweed skirt. But at this moment, it was her lips that drew me.

She moved closer. Flashed those wondrous white teeth in a wide smile. This was her house, her kitchen, and yet I knew the first move belonged to me. In all things big and small, I would dominate her now. Pare her down. Make her mine.

Placing my hands on her waist, I pulled Lissa to me, like a man might do. Her plush chest felt good against mine; her cushioned lips. Quick as a whip crack, her tongue was between my teeth.

Lissa’s arms slid under mine, hands folding over my shoulder blades. “I want to starve with you,” she moaned. “I want to feel all those things. The way you looked in the diner.”

“It hurts,” I said. “Like fucking hell. There’s no escape.”

She nodded. Now I teared up. Because I felt such tenderness for her, but my desire was overwhelming: to see her suffer. To pare her down. Make her experience the hollowness that opened up beneath my ribs right now, as we hugged, the depression that washed over me as I realized I’d go to bed hungry for the fourth night in a row. From here on in, each day would become implacably worse.

Empty nights would stretched to the horizon in my mind. With a savagery that shocked even me, the voice in my head locked onto a number so low and terrifying I could barely think it: 68 pounds. Four stone twelve. Thirty-one kilos.

My BMI would be less than ten.

“What’s got you so tense?” Lissa asked, fingering my rigid shoulder with an almost childlike tenderness.

“Nothing. It’s just…you have to be sure, Lissa. No stopping and starting.”

Lissa’s frame trembled against me, a long shudder, like an orgasm.

“Make me skinny,” she moaned.

My legs began to give out. Lissa helped me into the living room. “I’ll sleep here tonight,” I said, looking down at the couch. “Tummy’s got some growling to do.”

“I don’t care.” Lissa bent to me; playfully nipped my ear lobe. She wanted the famous Nico in her bed. Smiling a wickedly, she peeled off my tee shirt. “My God,” she muttered, like she hadn’t seen this. I arched my chest for her. The look on her face was thrilling, Lissa gazing on hard the truth. She grazed the side of my breast with a long, purple nail. Smiling as my nipple rose in salute.

“Now you,” I said. Shifting my legs. They were played out, but standing burned calories. I could be frail for Lissa, but I couldn’t show weakness.

Lissa reached down and pulled off her cashmere sweater.

As I suspected, her waist was trim and tight, ribs barely ghosting through the cappuccino skin of her sides. Her breasts were impossibly lovely. Perfectly suspended in the fitted, lacy bra.

“Fuck the couch.” I bent to kiss the soft, golden curve of her breast. She was so lush, a garden of delights. My stomach grumbled loudly. Her flesh so ample compared to my pale, famished frame. A banquet.

We went to the bedroom. Back to me, Lissa dropped her skirt, revealing the idealized, heart-shaped ass I’d sported at 110…firm, ever so slightly rounded bottoms that longed for touch. I twisted the button on my waistband and my jeans the fell soundlessly to the floor. I slipped over to her, cupping her ass cheeks. They were cool to the touch. Lissa pulled off her shoes, giggling as she swayed first on one foot, then the other.

She turned to me.

A cloud passed over her face. In only panties, there was no hiding it—I had an extreme gap between my thighs.

“Christ, Nico.”

Another awkward moment. I glanced down. I desperately needed Lissa to find me beautiful.

With a boldness that surprised me, she slid her hand between my legs and squeezed, gently but firmly. Her lips parted, those two white teeth just visible, her eyes heavy-lidded. Like a beautiful Somali princess, drugged for some ritual.

I unclipped her bra, as she continued to squeeze my slit, shifting now and then to feel the hard tendons reaching up under the leg hole of my panties, the meager thigh muscles. “You’re going to starve,” Lissa crooned, eyes nearly closed. “So badly.”

“Yes,” I said, swirling my fingertips in my concave stomach. “Nothing in here.” Her breasts stood up proudly on her ribcage, dusky caramel tipped in cinnamon. My belly gurgled; I wanted to devour them.

Perhaps sensing that my legs were giving out, Lissa pushed me onto the bed, eyes shining as I lay back and my abdomen collapsed, a taut hollow of palest silk.

She climbed up and straddled me, breasts dangling inches from my mouth. Hunger drove me. I couldn’t help myself, I arched my neck and took as much of her softness into my mouth as I could, clenching down. Dreaming a lush, burnt-sugar taste, my mouth watering till I had to swallow hard. Lissa smiled, gripping the headboard tight as she lowered her chest again. Ready for anything, it seemed.

I gripped and squeezed. Sucking on the full, ripe fruits as my stomach realized I’d cheated it again, that no calories were on the way, no caramel or cinnamon—or even milk.

“Feed on me,” Lissa sighed. Clenching her teeth hard as I bit down, teasing her soft nipple between first my incisors, then my canines. Testing her endurance. My boyfriend had screamed when I did this. Lissa’s eyes rolled back, her beautiful lips parted, but no sound emerged but little ahs from the back of her throat

IV GROUND RULES

Next morning was frigid and rainy. I woke well before dawn, in the kind of pain that would have had most people phoning a doctor. But I faced this every morning. Careful not to wake Lissa, I slipped out of bed and padded into the kitchen. Barefoot in just panties and a tank top, I was freezing. I didn’t care.

I went straight for the fridge. My heart pounded in my chest as I opened the door. It was stuffed. Odds and ends of take out. Rotted vegetables, well-meaning purchases gone bad. The cupboards had tons of food, too. I felt the pangs reaching up from my lower belly as I got coffee sorted. Shaking with the anticipation. There was so much here, and I’d be alone with it for hours.

As the coffee brewed I started going through everything. When you’re starving, everything edible has its own unique smell. Even ordinary things like Quaker oats or graham crackers or saltines come alive under your quivering nostrils. It’s like poetry, so beautiful and intense. You want to capture every stanza, and go back to the most beautiful ones. Before I realized the counter was covered in boxes and tins and Tupperware.

I’d raped Lissa’s food supply.

It all had to go, of course. We’d already decided this.

I saw a ghost. A pale stick figure in the darkened window.

The word emaciation came to mind. One of those glorious words, like scrawny, elfin, waiflike. But I hadn’t earned it yet.

A hard spike stabbed my stomach; my temples throbbed. This was a dream. To be alone with all this food. I poured out a cup of coffee. Rubbing my tummy dreamily. Of course. I’d make Lissa breakfast. Why waste all this? This could be her last meal. The thought of watching her eat a meal I’d cooked made my belly warm, even as my stomach grumbled at the food thoughts.

I plucked the things I’d need from the food pile. Eggs, some bacon, onions that weren’t soft. Potatoes. Pancake mix. A loaf of not-too-stale bread. I found a big block of butter. My stomach rumbled loudly. Butter was heaven for me. And hell of course. I sliced of a chunk and tossed it in the frying pan. The scent wafted around me, thick as nectar. When I brought my buttered fingers near my lips, I nearly fainted. I licked my lips, felt its unctuous flavor on my tongue even though the butter hadn’t touched them. Steeling my heart, I wiped my finger on a dishtowel.

But the butter was still there, popping and snapping in the pan. My mouth watered till I had to swallow. Just a taste would be Godlike. Or better yet, I could toast up an English muffin. There was a whole pack. Who could fault me for having just one? After four days of nothing? I let the thought form, seeing the molten butter nestle in to the muffin’s golden toasted nooks and crannies, torturing my stomach into rumbles of agony.

A dark pleasure began to kick in.

I started some bacon frying, fast, building the symphony of scent to a crescendo. Gray dawn crept through the window. I threw five eggs in a bowl, a little milk, some seasoning. The smells were working on me, my insides all liquid desire. My arms and fingers and knees trembled with it. Again, teasing myself, I licked my lips at the thought of a piece of cheese, a tiny morsel, accidentally falling in my mouth. Yes, I thought, I’d have no guilt and it would melt between my cheek and teeth and I’d play with it until I swallowed, milking its creamy taste.

I pulled up my shirt, gazed fondly at my hollowed belly. So tiny and placid looking to hold all this sturm und drang. Surrounded by swirling scents, I began my ritual. Starting with the tiny hump at my navel and working slowly outward, I pressed deep into the pale skin, moving the pain around and around until my breaths came in little gasps. I could have it all, I thought. Feasting greedily while Lissa slept, blissfully unaware. No one could fault me. I’d wear loose things; Lissa wouldn’t notice the bulge in my belly.

Except I had to starve. The voice was clear on this. I wasn’t frail enough. Was holding onto fat and muscle out of fear.

I could gather the rosebuds of scent, though. Ogle and handle and fantasize to my heart’s content. Better than eating, really, because it had no calories.

I moved my hand further down my tummy near that other little mound. Bent low over the sautéing onions and butter, breathing deep until a trembling started between my hipbones, tears formed at the corners of my eyes. I could taste the savory crunch and tingle of butter-slimed onion, so satisfying…

“Yo, Nico. It’s like, dawn.”

Dropping my shirt, I turned to Lissa in a Turkish bathrobe, yawning.

“Guess you woke up and smelled the bacon.”

Lissa took the coffee I handed her and set it on the counter. Put her hands on my ribs. “Did I ever tell you you’re amazing?” Her sleepy eyes glistened as she fingered the crook of my arm. Devilish smile as she looked around, saw the feast on the stove. “So you’re actually going to eat, eh?”

I gave her a nasty look, shocked that she’d think that. “No silly, it’s for you. Your last meal.” The thought that she could think I’d actually eat rankled me. I teased myself. That was all. I took deep breaths. She hadn’t meant it. Gentled the Voice, which was about to assign an exercise punishment for Lissa thinking me a fat cow who eats. If the punishment formed in my mind I’d have to do it.

Lissa closed her arms around me, pressed her cheek against mine. “You sure? I mean, why don’t we both have a last meal? Together?”

“Already did.” Fuck. Just get off this, I thought. Do I look like someone who eats? But it was too late. The Voice punished me: henceforward, each morning before sunrise I must do a one-hour power walk.

Lissa’s hands slid under my tank, pinching the bare skin of my waist between her thumb and fingers. “You’re fucking freezing.”

“Burns calories,” I said. Stoic. Loving that look Lissa got when I was hard on myself, her heavy lidded eyes betraying the visceral thrill my starving gave her.

Lissa slipped her tawny leg between mine. I closed my thin legs around her hard-muscled thigh as she pressed it up into my snatch, clutching me tight to her breasts. “It’s so hot watching you starve, Nico.” Her voice was tinged with sadness, even as her fingers practically vibrated against my protruding ribs, checking the depth of the grooves. “This is going to be unbelievable. You’re so incredible.”

I just had to see her eat. I pushed her away. “Monkey business later. You have to eat this while it’s hot.”

Lissa turned her eyes to the stove, all that piping hot food. “Smell’s good. Why’d you cook so much?” Her hands slid from my sides; she went to get a plate.

“No. I mean please, let me do that.” I smiled, all conspiratorial. “Handling the food, that’s my breakfast.” From her look, despite all I’d said Lissa only dimly understood this, the joy I got watching her.

As she sat down I plated the meal, rejoicing in the textures—the viscous gooey eggs, the stick and slither of the pancakes, the crispy bacon. My stomach clenched tight, cramping up with longing. My flaring nostrils sorting the scents as my mouth watered all over again. I swallowed deeply.

When I’d got it all on the table I sat next to Lissa. “Eat the pancakes first. More butter. Now the maple syrup. A little bit more?”

The muscles of Lissa’s chewing jaw held me spellbound.

Lissa shook her head. “I can’t believe you can watch me do this.”

I braced my arms on the table—knuckles inches from Lissa’s luscious looking eggs. “Want to get skinny? This is the key.” I took a sip of black coffee relishing the burn, the torment as it hit my stomach lining. “Embrace the pain.”

I leaned back in my chair, pulling up my shirt. Lissa’s eyes widened as I pressed three fingers into my belly, rubbing in the ritual clockwise whorl. “Make hunger your lover, Lissa.” I nodded at the bacon. Perhaps getting it, Lissa picked up a slice, chewed it. I licked my lips as my taut, concave tummy quaked under my fingers. “Jump out of bed every morning. To kiss your lover.”

My eyes bulged as Lissa, watching me carefully—the hollow between my hipbones seemed to thrill her—did instinctively what I’d mentally commanded: put bacon and eggs on buttered toast and shoved it between her plush lips.

I made sounds from the back of my throat, reaching down into my panties, then back up into the hollow beneath my ribcage, hunger pangs swirling through my lower belly worse than menstrual cramps, saliva dripped from the roof of my mouth, filling it at the wonder of this sight, the girl freely eating…my jaw worked in tandem with hers.

“Teach me, Nico.” Lissa seemed moved, excited by my naked passion. She laid her hand on mine. “Fuck it. I want to have this. What you have. I’m ready to starve.”

Kneeling on the floor, Lissa shoved her fingers up under my panties and worked me to an orgasm, her other hand stretching up under my shirt, palming my breast, my nipple. My ribs.

All of it hit at once, the desire raised by my food taunting crashing into a wave of pure sex bliss from Lissa’s expert touch, bone joy ignited by every stroke of my ribby chest, my spidery arms and thighs. In the end my knobbed knees swung back and forth spasmodically and I gasped for her to stop before I blacked out.

Shaken, awake, worn with pleasure and pain, I sat up in the chair. Swept my hair out of my face, looking at her. Her glowing, supplicating eyes.

Lissa knelt at my feet. “Starve me, Nico. Please.”

Despite what she’d just done, raising this firestorm in my loins, feeding my food rapture, I let my voice be cold. “I’m not going to start you with a fast, Lissa.” This was my realm. She had to know I was in charge.

Lissa frowned, glancing over at the counter. “Hold on. That’s why we’re throwing out all the food, yes?” But there was more than this. “You said let hunger be my lover.”

I stroked her dark, tangled locks. “Trust me. You’ll be plenty hungry. But straight fasting is too risky. You could wind up bingeing, wrecking your morale. You want to lose, right? Big time?” Lissa nodded, puppy-like at my feet. “Okay then listen. I’m going to have you restrict. Severely.”

“Like, how severe?”

“You want to get model skinny, right? Maybe even make them a little, um, jealous?” Lissa nodded, eyes brightening. “So I think an English stone—fourteen pounds. You’re 118, right? So that would get you to 103. At five seven.” Enough to tighten everything up, I thought, make her facial bones do their work. Trim her thighs and ass, take the sway out of those breasts.

“I can go lower,” Lissa said shyly.

I smiled. This was a good sign. She was aspiring, anxious to please. “When you fall in love with hunger, amazing things happen.”

Lissa’s hand curled into the pit of my stomach, pressing its silky wall, savoring my thinness, I sensed, as I’d savored the butter: sensuously fantasizing, desiring for herself what she could only see and touch.

I was so proud at what I’d resisted, weathering this storm of scent and taste and touch, starving and alone in the kitchen. But this couldn’t be repeated. We’d discard the food, all of it. So I’d have to search out temptation elsewhere. Maybe on the forced march the Voice had commanded.

V MIDNIGHT CAFÉ

On Sunday morning, obedient to the voice, I rose at 4:30 AM. The fire in my belly flamed up the second my eyes opened, but that’s what I wanted. Lissa asleep at my side, I allowed myself a little session, feeling my belly button, first, then sliding my fingers over my smooth skin, toward the locus of the pain, the tiny pit of my belly. My mission was to build that budding pain into a tempest, so I’d feel the burn. I crawled nimbly over Lissa’s inert form—she’d sleep like lead until after eight.

I pulled on running shoes, jeans, some tees, and a hoodie. With the temperature in the teens I’d freeze today. But I had upset the voice and my shivering would pay for this, make up for Lissa’s questioning of my commitment, my thinness…imagining (the thought made me nauseous) that I’d eat.

When I hit the street I realized I had no idea where I was. I’d been so disoriented and dizzy on the way home in the cab, leaning against Lissa… But I knew I was in the Village, and new enough landmarks to orient myself; I saw Jefferson Library and headed east toward Washington Square Park. Teeth chattering in the icy wind as it pierced my cotton hoodie, my layers of tees. The wall over my heart felt so thin, as the chill settled in. My old boyfriend, who’d been premed, had told me my heart lay just millimeters beneath the skin—we could see the beats. I’d been 95 then, ten pounds heavier.

When the tooth chattering stopped after half an hour, I knew hypothermia was setting in, and I knew the freezing part my penance was done. I was allowed to look for a place of refuge.

Using the energy evolution gives us for a last ditch food hunt, I sought out the utter pleasures and sexy pains of the scent feast. The only part of the Darwinian equation I’d change would be the little matter of actual calorie consumption.

On Waverly Place I found an all-night place. The Midnight Café.

Rubbing my arms as I look through the window, I see they bake their own bread. I lick my lips. Go in.

Shaking almost out of control, I sit down and order an espresso. The place is empty; the waitress flirts with me. My hoodie is loose but she’s kind of skinny and I can see she knows how bad I am, underneath, and likes it. She also sees I’m literally stiff from cold, hands and cheeks white as chalk. Digs it when I unzip my hoodie, press the hot porcelain of the coffee cup against my bare belly and sigh.

The open hoodie shows my flat chest, that I’m wearing three skintight tees in 25 degrees. The waitress swallows, seeing this. Her teeth pinch her lip.

At 5:00 AM scones come out of the oven. The smell makes me shudder. Finds the cracks in my soul and starts to split me apart. The tip of my tongue swirls against the soft lining of my cheek, salvia forming. I swallow. Lick my lips. The scent is heavenly. The girl, watching, must see my eyes close like I’m remembering falling in love for the first time.

The girl piles hot, fresh scones on a plate. The windows are still dark. I see myself hanging in space: pale, narrow. My eyes coals stuck in my snow-white face. The girl plunks the plate of scones on my table and takes a seat. I smile at her, but it’s obvious what has my focus when my stomach growls, loud.

Eyes on my face, the girl takes a scone, nodding at the plate. Help yourself.

I shake this off. Watching her chew and swallow is epic thrilling. Her jaw muscles are leaner than Lissa’s, more fun to watch. I feel the water come up under my tongue, its pure silver washing down my throat as my nostrils flare to take in more of the smell: blueberry and butter and baking powder and a hint of citrus…

“Have another one,” I say quickly, before she’s even done with the first.

She drinks some of her coffee. I see her fingers automatically go to another scone, even as our eyes stare into each other. “You restricting?” she asks. For the first time I noticed the thin red thread on her wrist.

I shake my head. “I wish.” Come on, I thought. Get chewing.

“So what, you’re fasting?”

I nod. It’s the midnight café. Nothing to hide here. “I’m so freaking hungry. Try that one,” I say, pointing the cranberry. What a waste to have her eat another blueberry scone. I want her to release the scent; my stomach wants it. My fingers shake. I want to break one of the scones open and feel its hot, soft insides. I mean, she’d let me eat it so why not that? I’d pay just to touch that softness…

“Intense.” The waitress doesn’t take her eyes off my face as she bends to bite into a cranberry scone. Sugary citrus crunch. My stomach growls. “You look like that model, Nico? You know? I mean like, exact.”

I smile, pressing my fingers into the pit of my tummy, as if I could do anything to suppress the rumbling. “Everyone says that. Like that’s such a deal.”

The waitress sets the scone down. “You’re kidding, right? I’d effing kill to look like that bitch. In that short that artist made? After she did Bryant Park?” She wipes her mouth. “I mean. Dang. You’re so lucky. You’re even, like, skinnier than her.”

I think she sees the pain swirl in my eyes. The scones were delightful and now the counterbalance sets in, the constricting cramps as my stomach rebels against another fuckover. Flickers of fire creeping from the bottom of my stomach, searing tendrils. My eyes lower against it, like anything could stop it.

“So, you’re starving,” the girl says. Sounding admiring, a little envious.

I’m spacing out. Grooving on the pain, suffering in front of an actual fan.

“That’s hardcore.” The girl’s eyes soften and shine at the same time, the look like—true fascination. “How many days?”

“Today will be six,” I say.

“Shit. On just water?”

I nod. Glad that she seems to guess I’m not the type to mess with juice. I put both hands under my hoodie, feeling my smooth belly, marveling at how the pain swells even as my belly contracts.

“Mind telling me how much you’ve lost?”

About this I was scrupulous. When it came to fasting I never lied about weight or time. “I lost like a kilo in the first three days. Haven’t weighed since.”

“Wow. When I fast I weigh every ten minutes.”

I shrug. “I should get going. Have to get an hour in.” I grip the marble tabletop, pushing myself to my feet.

The waitress shifts in her chair. Her eyes look kind of wild, like I’m a vision out of some dreamscape of hers and she wants me to stay put until she can pin me down. Or maybe it’s just she likes looking at me. From the moment I’d come into the Midnight Café her eyes have been on me like glue.

“You have to come back,” she says. “Like, you know. Tell me how it’s going.” I put down money for the espresso, and a good tip. I want to see her eat again. The thought will help me keep going, when the pain flames up.

As I stand, the girl’s eyes make quick little movements, assessing my legs, my ass—my jeans, a child’s size six—cling tight to every curve.

“Sure.” I give her a look over, too. The uniform is silly. Ugly maroon polyester shirt, pleated black trousers. But under it I can see she has roughly the body type I have in mind for Lissa, a hundred and five or so, at five seven. And from the worship in her dark eyes I can guess she won’t be having any more scones today.

VI LOVE AND STARVATION

Walking out of the café was like forcing my stomach onto a dull bayonet. There’d been food there, and warmth; rest. Now my legs pumped, my heart pumped, and the pain in my tummy leaped into full-blown conflagration. As the sun gilded the windows along the West Village streets, I felt I was carrying a pan of coals back toward Lissa’s place. Red-hot lumps suspended between my hipbones.

When I finally climbed the stairs to the apartment I was freezing to the bone and my legs were shaking. But I made it the full hour, coasting on fumes, powered by scones I’d seen but not touched.

Shaking with cold, I stripped and gave myself a hot shower. All these things I’d found were like calories—heat after cold, smells, sex, checking bones. These I could have. Soaping up, I meditated on food. How we’re conditioned to think we need it. And to see the jutting bones and hollows I lathered now as signs of illness.

In concentration camps they did prodigious things on almost no food at all, for weeks and months, even years. But in African countries, in droughts, families walk for miles and miles and do incredible feats on just bugs and weeds. I saw video of a girl in North Korea gathering grass. The journalist asks her what she’s had to eat and she just stares at him. “Nothing,” she says. It’s sick, maybe. But it’s not amazing.

I step out of the shower, skin tingling. Pull the towel around me and hug my bones. The key, I realize, as if for the first time, is containing the anguish. Not just the physical pain, but depression, despair, emptiness. The larger the pain you can contain, the more beautiful you can become.

I pop my head into the bedroom. Lissa looks so sweet, her face composed and self-satisfied as a kitten’s, still coasting on the huge breakfast I’d made her, almost 24 hours before. A delectable, café au lait chocolate model of herself. I want to crawl in beside her. Shock her awake with my cold face.

Doing my exercises in the living room seemed like the best idea. The floor creaks, but if I went into the little loft at the top of the spiral staircase—where it was warmer—Lissa would surely hear it and wake up.

I start out with jumping jacks to warm up. I know it can be dangerous to push it and I’m already dizzy with hunger pains. But my dieting instructor at InLine made this point I’ll never forget—your body will certainly faint before you fuck it over too much. So even with my heart knocking against my ribs and my belly twisting and cramping I figure it’s okay to make myself workout.

There’s a half-full bowl of cold popcorn on the coffee table. Lissa and I watched an Ellen Page movie the night before, reveling in her tiny body, her whip smart cuteness. The buttery scent tortures my stomach lining all over again. I think of how butter on day-old popcorn comes back to life under your tongue as the kernel melts…

Soon I’m skipping rope like a maniac, smelling the fresh brew—I put coffee on while I was in the shower. I fantasize about Lissa, still lying in bed, the covers half off her. When she’s on her back Lissa has a six pack, defined to where you can feel it with your palm, each squared bump is perfect. But I don’t want that for me.

I don’t exercise to get pretty or look fit. It’s about savaging my body. And having people see what I’ve done. So I want no muscles on my belly, just skin taut and smooth as a drumhead and a waist so tiny it causes double takes. It’s about feeling bloody anguish in public spaces; smiling when knives are whirling in your hollow belly and chest. Smiling a fresh, genuine smile beneath dark-rimmed eyes that hold a Vietnam vet’s thousand-yard stare.

These two thoughts keep me upright: the number on the scale and the look on Lissa’s face when she sees it.

I’ll never tell her about my walks. Leave it a mystery, how I drop pounds so quick. Why my face and eyes look so tortured every morning.

Around seven AM I heard banging in the kitchen. A minute later Lissa appeared, coffee mug in hand.

“Morning,” I said, not skipping a beat with the jump rope.

“Morning.” I loved her smile, as she plopped onto the couch, draws her legs up under her, pretending to look at a magazine. It was so obvious she was thrilled to have this semi-famous model performing this intimate ritual in front of her. All I wanted was to show her that I’d hurt my body through fasting. She knew this, I think. Snatching glimpses. I could tell she was freaked by the gap—I was only wearing panties under my giant tee.

Feeling the embers in my belly fire into hot coals with every skip of the rope gave me a tingle down below, between my lips. A compressed ecstatic charge almost as powerful as the ugly scratching under my ribs, the groan my stomach made.

Lissa didn’t look up from her coffee at the sound. “You know when you’re done we have to weigh your ass.” She shaped the words with her lips, sensual in the context—her hearing my stomach howl its hunger.

These were the words I lusted for.

Legs wobbling hopelessly, I staggered over and scrunched onto the couch next to her. I leaned into her and she embraced me. It felt sweet. “How’d you sleep?” I asked, putting my hands around her coffee cup, for warmth. She let me sip it.

“Good.” Lissa took my face in her hands. “How long have you been up?”

“Awhile,” I said. Trembling, I couldn’t help it. For a second we both watched my thighs. The muscles spasming.

“My third cup,” I said, handing back the mug. Her chocolate coffee eyes were full to the brim. I wanted to devour her lips, her delicious, smooth humps of her cheeks.

I felt the first sharp spike of love.

Silently our lips came together. Our tongues united. Her hands felt my collarbones and then slipped down around my ribcage, through the thin tee. Lissa pulled the afghan around us and we slid back into the worn-out couch’s embrace. We fit so neatly and it felt like it would last forever.

It didn’t break the spell at all when Lissa got up and fetched the scale. I whipped off the tee shirt, my tiny tits standing straight up on my ribcage. I wondered if the molten metal swirling within my hollowed-out waist would weigh anything.

Lissa brushed against my side as we both looked at the number.

Eighty-two, the red numbers glow. I wasn’t unhappy. Five pounds in five-and-a-half days wasn’t awful.

“I love you,” Lissa said. Eyes popping, as if the words had stunned her as much as me. Something had happened. My loss, her need to learn, the yearning in my eyes for food, for sex?

My heart pounded. I pulled her to the couch. Sensing the rightness of this. “I love you, too,” I said. She was gorgeous. Her face wild, beautiful. “God I love you.” I hadn’t just met her, nor she me—we’d been eye-flirting on the set for the longest time. But the intimate thing we shared forced the iron doors of my heart. She saw and felt what I needed, for her to be my love, the object of my lust and adoration.

Lissa pressed her chest press against mine as we curled together. Her voice got so low I could barely hear it over the pounding of my heart. “I love how you torture your body, ” she said, rucking up her nightgown, moving her hand rhythmically between her legs. “The way your bones show.” She grazed my collarbone with her open mouth, tip of her tongue flicking against the bone as she touched herself. Eyes heavy-lidded, mouth half open in that famished Somali girl stare.

She put her lips to my ear. “Make this show more.” She touched my breastbone. Gasped out a few words as she began to shake: “Starve yourself, really bad.” Lissa sat up and straddled my hipbone, taking it deep into the nook between her legs and riding the sharp point. “No food for you.”

I nodded into her shoulder, my sharp chin on her collarbone. “Yes,” I gasped back, “Yes, I will.” Even as the agony in my stomach spun up into a tornado of pain, tugging at the delicate linings I’d abused with all that black coffee. “For you, I’ll starve for you.”

Still bucking on my hipbone, Lissa pulled the neck of my shirt down and pressed her thumb into my nipple, making of C clamp of her hand, grasping my ribcage back to front. Pressing the purple nail into me. “Starve, Bitch.”

Her wet, bare lips lubricated my hipbone to a slickness that made my stomach growl with hunger, raging at the sensual feel of it, the lust flaming in my heart that must have seemed like actual hunger about to be gratified.

But of course it wasn’t.

I pulled off my shirt and Lissa came and came, feeling my breasts and ribs and then finally clutching my teeny waist, which she was virtually fucking with her twat on the bone. Her heart charged up at this, how small my waist was—eighteen inches now. I felt her navigating her way to a huge, blow out orgasm, while I felt nearer and nearer a blackout.

“How much are you going to lose, Bitch,” she almost screamed.

I answered without hesitating, lungs working hard as Lissa lunged up and down. “An English stone, just like you.” Which was true. I never lie about weight. My goal was exactly 14 pounds away.

Lissa’s eyes lit and she collapsed over me, shuddering, her thighs clenching and unclenching over and over until the force of the orgasm waned, the wave dissipated.

Not a bad start at all, I thought, watching Lissa’s glorious ass cheeks flex as she strode to the bathroom. No apologies for the language, the harshness. My chest ached with the size of my love for her, for the understanding we’d cemented. Of course it lay under the surface of everything that I’d be expected to perform this service for her. Be just as brutal.

She hadn’t asked me to make her pretty, or even thin. Our first night together, Lissa had muttered and pled and prayed that I would teach her to suffer. Yesterday, after her last meal, she’d begged for this again. Today, the sixth day of my own fast, would be the first day of Lissa’s education.

VII WHIP CRACK

At first blush Lissa was purely excited at the regimen I laid out on Sunday morning. After steeling herself for a fast, 250 calories a day must have seemed like a lot. Or maybe that was just me. The number seemed so huge and flabby. In any case, she jumped into it with a vengeance. After the weigh-in—118 in her panties—she launched her two hours of calisthenics on an empty stomach without complaint.

Leaving her to workout, I shopped for the week, buying precise quantities of Greek yogurt, crunchy healthy granola, bananas, apples, cottage cheese, carrots, lettuce, and fruit strips at the local Gristedes. And, of course, coffee.

Other customers stared at me. I wore down jacket and leggings. After my freezing penance for the voice—in just the cotton hoodie—the down felt like heaven. But the puffiness made my legs look skinnier. Nothing like the mall girl in the YouTube though. That’s how it is with starving—someone’s always ahead of you. More piercingly thin, fasting more aggressively, pulling off a worse regimen.

But stares were stares. And comments were better. At the GNC where I went to get vitamins and supplements, I heard the word “anorexic.” When I turned two teen girls flitted out of the way.

When I got back Lissa was still exercising. So I stripped to my underwear and went to work cleaning the kitchen from top to bottom. The place was a sty. But I was glad. Scrubbing, cleaning, sorting out tasks and ticking them off the lists, I loved that. Only two things distract from hunger—hard work and pain.

I finished in time to make Lissa’s dinner. I was giving her most of the 250 calories in one go. I made a little salad, added a mound of cottage cheese, some chopped nuts--each portion weighed out on a gram scale. Volume measures can be fucked with. Things can be tamped down or fluffed up. Weight is weight. I even weighed her dessert—half a banana.

Because Lissa likes wine, I reserved 100 calories for a glass of cabernet later that night.

After a satisfying shower, Lissa enjoyed her meal almost as much as I enjoyed watching her eat it. Consuming slowly, as I’d suggested. Smiling at me, beaming actually, knowing she’d begun.

The next day was rocky, her first day of working on 250 calories. Less, actually, because I insisted she have at least 100 at dinner. A whole day on the equivalent of two large bananas is about as hard as it sounds. Her mind drifted, apparently, and caused some problems on the set she’d have handled fine on a full stomach. For some reason Lissa’s rage flew at me.

“It’s about self-discipline, Lissa,” I told her, stern. “You fucked up because you haven’t learned to stow all that and work as well hungry as full. You can’t be skinny if you don’t want it enough. You have to earn bones.”

This stuff only made her madder. But that was fine. I was stoking her energy, getting her ready for worse.

Tuesday, her third day, Lissa had a good weigh-in. Just 115. We both agreed the sacrifice had come from the ever so slight softness between her thigh and butt. This bucked her up. A bit. But I could sense a storm was brewing. My harsh language didn’t make her suffer any less, it just drove her complaints underground. She knew if she cheated at work I’d find out when she didn’t lose.

Then on the fourth day, Wednesday, Lissa’s weight actually went up to 116.

That night we had a huge fight. She felt I was accusing her of cheating. I just said you can’t gain without taking something on board. Unless it’s her period and it wasn’t. She said she worked so hard and it’s her Somali ancestry—thousands of years of holding onto every calorie in the desert. Which for all I knew was true, but I couldn’t have Lissa gaining and thinking it was okay.

The fact was, if 250 calories wasn’t enough to make her lose a pound a day—at the start, when she was a fleshy 118—then I’d have to cut it.

But in the end I didn’t have to. Lissa confessed.

She came into the living room where I was reading an Economist. Training myself to focus through hunger pangs. Lissa plucked the magazine from my hands. I looked up to see her eyes were bloodshot. She’d been crying.

“I’m sorry, Nico. It’s just. Four days. I thought I’d be over this, you know?” I asked what “this” meant. “I’m so hungry.” She curled up next to me on the couch. The antique lamp put a bronze glow on her bare legs. She wore little tap pants that showed off the little haunch we figured she’d whittled down.

I pulled up her tee shirt. She flinched as my cool palm touched her belly. But it warmed as I rubbed. “It’s hard at first,” I said. “Then it gets worse.”

Lissa almost spat at that. “Worse than this? You’re shitting me.”

This was so frustrating. I’d tell her these things, she’d get off on hearing them even, but when it came to her they didn’t apply. She had to believe hunger would wear away. Melt to nothing with the passage of time. Which is about as logical as imagining the more it snows, the thinner the accumulation will be. I thought of this because it was snowing outside. But when I used that analogy it didn’t help.

Lissa got up on her haunches, clutching her stomach. She saw me glance down at her splayed thighs. She wasn’t fat. In fact that night she’d gone back down to 115. But her days at work had been awful. “It’s like knives in my stomach. All day. And then at home. I mean right now I had a cramp. While you rubbed my tummy.”

I’d have told her I have cramps all the time but she knows this. Pain was twisting her head around.

“I watched them eating today, the movie crew. And I had this fucking banana and I didn’t want to eat it because...” Lissa teared up. Her chest heaved. A sob. She leaned against the couch, slid down on me. I cradled her head on my chest while she cried. “Because if I ate it wouldn’t have it anymore.”

Not to see the pathos in this would take a heart of stone. But even as her damp tears bled through my shirt, my stomach growled and gurgled, feisty with all this food talk. The things I’d gotten Nico to eat had no scent, just texture. I’d been starving for ten days. I was dying for the things I’d made her for breakfast, the full spectrum of food delight. Nonfat yogurt has no scent at all. Cottage cheese is great for texture, but gives off almost no smell. Forget lettuce.

“Are you listening, Nico?”

I nodded. Fixated on Lissa’s pretty face, her voluptuous lips. “You have to starve more, Lissa. Get used to it. Cry all you want. Nothing will ever change the feel of hunger.” The words weren’t easy ones. But this bothered me: Lissa wasn’t getting any closer to accepting hunger, much less cultivating the pangs, riding them like waves of affirmation. To me long, solid pangs were like applause and absolution from a stingy, beautiful God: the voice.

To Lissa they were just punishment for crimes she hadn’t committed.

One good thing, though, was Lissa’s frank pleasure in her losses. How she’d danced in the mirror when we figured out her ass was smaller. Also she’d changed her dressing habits in a good way. She covered up now. Clearly she felt fat at work, where before she’d been at least somewhat comfortable with her looks. Baggy clothes are a good sign because it’s the psychology of a self-starver: hide the present body, which is imperfect. Take it out later, wear the skimpy clothes when you’re thin. The third good thing was body envy.

Lissa had complained before about working with models, but now it was constant. “All those tight booties, those girly legs. Like they don’t know how they look, flailing those stick arms…” Her blood was up. I think she saw it wasn’t impossible, that should could get to that level. Even now, four days in at 115, her face looked just a hair narrower. A lovely effect because her plump lips and deep chocolate eyes grew in proportion.

Frailty became her, I realized. Late that fourth night, while we horsed around.

I’d lost a lot and Lissa was excited, feeling my bones, raising my derriere and mouthing my cunt, quivering with joy. She loved the hard line my tendon made, the shape of my box. “Carved by hunger,” Lissa said, fondling my hipbones.

She saw me panting. “So whip me. Whip the hunger.”

Lissa had a riding crop. She’d been raised a BAP. Tweeds and riding boots. The black velvet helmet and crop hung on her wall now, pure decoration. “Really?” She said, not hesitating a second.

As she got out of bed the light on the dresser shined between her legs, thinning them. Then her waist thinned in it, too, as she came back with the crop, and saw how her ribcage might look, with her sides nipped in: the very image of a starved Somali. Of course she’d stop at 103. But as she stood over me with the crop, and bared my tummy for her, showing her where to strike, her heavy-lidded, mouth-cocked open stare drove me crazy. Lissa’s face was an icon of famine, orgiastic, complete, the feeling that flowed in my legs, trickled now, down my throat, as I anticipated the whip.

“Hard, Lissa,” She flicked. I yelped, a sting near my navel. “Again.”

But I hadn’t needed to say a word. The whip came down anyway. Raising red patches on my bare, stretched white skin. The feel so right, so sexy—punishment for my filthy desires, for my need, so much worse every day, the wish to be gratified never diminishing. Even now, with each lash, I dreamed of cracking open nuts and frying mushrooms…and bread, hot and doughy, fresh from the oven. Somehow, the pain on the surface drew out the pain below, the lashes making it worse and better at once, distracting from the cramping ache with a sharp, stinging top note.

The whip cracks stopped. I looked up to see Lissa panting, massaging her arm. “It’s fun,” she said. Face cracked into a huge and evil grin.

The white skin of my belly glowed scarlet.

VIII HOT CROSSED BUNS

The waitress at the Midnight Café sees me shake as I pull the door shut behind against the wind. It takes both hands to do it. She asks how was my damn early morning and I say damn fine. Her name is Kat, I know that now.

She can see I’m losing. I know from her shoulders tensing. We see each other every day so I’m getting to know her tics. And she knows mine. Before I even take off my coat—it’s sleeting out, so I’m wearing Lissa’s expensive parka—Kat is at my table with fresh rolls.

The great thing about this hour is the place is always empty.

It’s Friday, a week since I moved in with Lissa. The twelfth day of my fast, and the sixth of Lissa’s diet. After Wednesday I stiffened her regimen, cutting her to 150 calories. She was upset but I can’t help that. Her rate of loss wasn’t what it should be—maybe it’s the Somali blood after all. Because when you start at that weight the first days should take off a lot. I need her pared down.

My food lust is getting worse. I watch Lissa eat, but the pleasure’s minimal because it’s so little and it’s not sensual. So I come here.

The rolls are divine, lusty and robust with a crunchy outside, as Kat reveals when she sits down and cracks one open. The scent of butter flares my nostrils. I lick my lips as my mouth fills ‘til I’m swallowing constantly, Kat smiling wickedly at my bulging eyes. We’re having sex. In public.

My belly sounds get her going, but we don’t know each other well enough yet for her to admit this. She pretends not to hear them even though her eyes light up.

I sigh deeply, my mouth open like a fish’s. “More butter.”

Kat watches my mouth move as she puts on a little more. I watch the molten gold pool in the crooks and hollows of the roll’s plush interior. I swallow air. Self-pity washes through me. The sting of a tear. I wink it away so Kat won’t see. Her hollow cheeks expand briefly as she takes in a mouthful, her beautifully lean jaws chewing like I dream of doing. I promise my stomach I’ll eat soon, in a few days, but it doesn’t believe me and grumbles like thunder.

I feel the marble tabletop with the edge of my hand. I pray the cramps will stop, but I don’t want the ecstasy to end, either, the feast of bread and butter smell. I breathe in the scents in quick doses so I’ll taste and smell anew each time. This makes my heart go into overdrive.

“Steady on, Ash.” I’ve told Kat my name is Ashley. She’s hearing my panting, watching my thin chest move in and out so fast. The parka’s open wide.

I nod my chin. Acknowledging but I can’t stop. I’m so fucking famished if she ate the whole plate of rolls a millimeter from my nose it wouldn’t be near enough. This morning, before sneaking out, I’d stepped on the digital scale. The number 79 glowed red in the pitch dark.

I love that number, the lowest I’ve ever been by far. But for the first time in awhile, I’m aware my heart beats in a more fragile cage. Not that seventy-nine’s so dire—but it’s a bit low for my height, only an 11.3 BMI. By comparison, the Nico Kat saw in the film was 95 pounds, a 13.6 BMI. Below the clinical standard for “emaciation,” but only a hair skinny for a model. Now I’m squarely in the chronic anorexic range. Where, from time to time, girls can die.

So weird that my goal’s so low then. If I’m frightened now, how will I feel when I drop under a 10 BMI? Suddenly it all disgusts me. That Kat thinks I’m thin, that’s bad enough. But how can I deserve the pleasure of these rolls if I think I’m fucking thin at such a fat, gross weight?

Suddenly I can’t take it anymore. The warmth, the coffee and bread smells, Kat’s totally “into me” gaze…I get to my feet.

I deserve none of this.

I have get back in the cold, leave the front of my coat open and let the cold air brush my flaming belly. Get it to churn and twist so by the time I’m home, Lissa will give me that look when she sees I’ve suffered freshly, or deeply—or both.

Kat spoke my fake name as I got up to leave. I remembered to turn around. Every time I come she’s dying to know if I’ve ended my fast yet. I never leave her hanging because it would kill me for anyone like her to think I’d quit before I had actually done it.

I pull on Lissa’s parka. “Got to get out there I guess.”

Kat rubs the side of her nose, looking away, as if maybe a customer has strayed in. “So how you doing?” She asks casual but I sense the weight behind the question. All the meanings it will have for her, that she might touch herself, later.

“Still fasting,” I say. Voice light and translucent as my skin. “Twelfth day.”

Kat’s eyes go to the gap in my coat. The deep notch at my throat, the washboard ripple of chestbone. The tight jeans aren’t tight now, either. My temples look more delicate, I know that.

“You lost some.”

“Ya,” I say. Like I know this but what can you do. I’m not on the list of people who get to eat. Best for me to listen to the voice and just watch, even if it means I drop a few pounds. Get a few pangs.

I’m so far from thin. Twelve days. Some people go forty, fifty days.

The smell of bread pulls at my tummy. My nostrils flare, insides tearing like one of those rolls as I step back from the door and the smell recedes. “See you tomorrow,” Kat says. Her eyes won’t even blink while I’m still there to look at.

I turn and walk away and my stomach punishes me for real. For the ordeal, for lusting after butter—the holiest thing there is. I zip the zipper all the way down and fumble open my shirt, feel the icy air scythe across bone.

This all combines into a full head of passionate rage.

I need to see results.

I need to break Lissa.

IX LISSA GOES DOWN

When I got home the place was a mess, just like she’d left it the night before. Lissa’s sloppiness is catastrophic. She cannot hang up her towels. Honestly. Her dirty laundry finds its way into the bathroom, even out into the hall. As the dawn light filtered into the apartment I also found evidence of a late night feast—or perhaps early morning, while I was on my walk. It wasn’t much. A fork in the sink with some sort of crust on it. A bowl in a different place. On the drain board instead of the shelf.

A compulsive neat freak, I did all the cleaning long before Lissa got up. But I kept notes. A list of everything she should have done and didn’t. My temples throbbed and I didn’t want to exercise but no one had told me to stand down. The voice was sick with loathing that I’d feared 79, even for a moment. BMI’s are a curse. They mean nothing, but you can’t not do the calculation.

Somewhere in the middle of my post-walk exercise regimen I heard Lissa cross the hall from her bedroom into the bathroom. I was doing some yoga when she came out, wearing a skimpy outfit—super short cutoffs and a lace-trimmed bra. I’d made this a rule: minimal clothes around the house. It was pure selfishness. I wanted to as much of that cappuccino skin as possible. Now here she was, her sleek limbs glowing.

“So what’s your problem?” I said, not breaking my rhythm, going smoothly from a sun salutation into Warrior Two.

“No problem…lost another pound.” Her voice was dreamy, almost possessed.

I glimpsed her in snatches as I moved. I could see her ribs were more visible. They’d always been slightly visible, like on most thinnish girls, but Lissa’s stuck out differently now. She’d clearly worn just the bra to show this off. That, too, seemed less full than it had been, the cups standing away from the smooth, sloping flesh.

I wrapped up my routine, palms pressed together over my heart. Namaste.

I met Lissa’s gaze. “No, there’s clearly a problem.” Lissa seemed taken aback. “Because I got up to another fucking mess. Stuff everywhere, wet towels on the floor. Your underwear everywhere.” I clutched my hips with my hands, seething. “Bowl in the drying rack. A fork.”

Lissa winced. “I was so hungry, Nico.” She walked up to me. Put a hand on my arm. “It’s like nothing, 150 cals.”

“You’ve had one day of it,” I said. Swords slashed at my innards. Strong emotion always did this, set pangs stabbing like little pins at the inside of my stomach. “Have you not listened to a word I’ve said?”

I’d been adamant with her: there’s no excuse for cheating.

She was still dreamy. Stroking my arm. “You’ve lost a bit yourself. A lot.”

I shook off her hand. “One fifty’s not one fifty if you cheat.”

That cracked through. Lissa looked wounded. “I’m sorry. I just had granola, some yogurt.” She rubbed her face. “I was so fucking hungry.”

I gave her an icy stare. “How much? Exactly?”

Lissa confessed. “The whole rest of the box.” Her eyes swell. Her voice cracks. “All the granola that was left and I don’t know, like a half cup of the Greek yogurt.”

Hunger drives my anger. I do a quick calculation. She ate in the middle of the night. Everyone thinks it matters when you eat but it doesn’t, cals are cals. Your body breaks them down the same rate sleeping as it does waking. But even so she’s had an extra 300 calories, maybe even 325. More than double a day’s ration.

Not acceptable.

“Lissa, you have to find out there are consequences when you screw up. We talked about this.”
She nodded, woeful. The bra, the short shorts, looked pathetic to me now. Even with her claim of another pound loss, Lissa was still 114 pounds. And now, guts twisting, I doubted the truth.

“I’m going to have to do something. I can’t just let this go.”

“I know, Nico.”

Her fear lifted my spirits, confirming that in her mind I was still in charge. But I needed to reinforce this in order to fully dominate her.

I had to make an example.

Her losses hadn’t exactly been spectacular. Just under a pound a day for the five days. Because she’d worked every day so far that week I had no real assurance she was sticking to the program.

Anger and necessity crystallized into a plan. Lissa had to learn.

My mind raced. “Stay here.” I climbed up to where my things were, in the loft at the top of the spiral stairs. Found what I was looking for.

As I came down the stairs Lissa saw the belt dangling from my hand.

“You brought this on yourself,” I said. “I mean really.”

“I said I’m sorry, Nico,” Lissa moaned, backing up. “I really really am.” Once you’re a couple, there are wiles to employ. Lissa did this now, rolling her shoulder forward, letting her eyes soften into huge, starving Somali orbs as she stood dejected in the center of the living room.

“You know this has to happen.” The dawn light caught something sitting on the windowsill, and I knew what I was going to do. How I’d make it crueler still. “This way you won’t slip up again, ever.” She nodded sheepishly. Acknowledging there had to be punishment, but hoping, I knew, that it wouldn’t be too awful.

But it would be.

“Take off your bra.”

About to speak, Lissa thought better of it. Unclipped her bra. Her gorgeous orbs spilled out, still so full. Yes, I’d feasted on them a few nights before…but how could she want this blatant statement, telling the world she had no control?

“Exhale,” I said. She complied. I slipped the belt around her chest, and nipple level. Hunger squirmed through my midsection. What right did he have? I felt the little claws tear at my stomach lining. I was hurting, too. Dammit.

I cinched the belt as tight, fitting the bar in the furthest hole my shaking arms could manage. “Exhale again.” I got it tighter. Tan flesh pressed out over the leather in muffin tops that set my belly stirring even worse, these fresh-baked muffins. Fuck.

Lissa could hardly breathe. Her arms stood out from her sides. Worry filled her big brown eyes.

I looked into her eyes. “This won’t last for long, okay?” She nodded. “But it’s going to hurt pretty bad.”

The sunny windowsill held a collection of natural detritus—a snail shell, a sand dollar, acorns. And this seed pod. Four fierce thorns bonded together so that no matter how you set the pod, one thorn sticks straight up. Hard, like polished wood, but light, the points are sharp to the touch. Pricking the thin skin under my wrist, I winced. I wasn’t sure I could do this.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what I’d was thinking. Lissa flinched away, retreating into the living room. Her eyes were scared, her chest heaving in and out as she covered her breasts. I’d never seen her more beautiful.

“Come back here.” My stomach growled, loud. I realized instinctively if I was going to thoroughly rule Lissa’s mind about eating, she’d have to follow orders. She was nowhere near where I needed her to be. The days to come would only be impossible if I didn’t establish who was boss.

At first she wavered, backing up toward the couch. But I stood my ground.

“You do want this, right? To be truly thin?”

The words were a tonic. I knew how jealous she was of the models she had to work with every day. That almost imperceptible level of lean they had and she didn’t. Lissa knew her breasts were the barrier to joining them in their smug realm. Her waist was trim enough. Her ass needed a teensy bit of work, but more than anything, the slight fullness of her bust was what cut her off from model glory.

She walked up to me. “Do it.”

My fingers trembled. I’d never done this to another human being before. “Stand still. You’re going to have to exhale again.” As she opened her mouth, expelling the remaining air from her lungs, I plunged my fingers beneath the bulge of her breast, worked in the little seed pod thorn down, exactly over her nipple.

I felt like a monster.

Lissa leaped back. Eyes spinning like black diamonds, arms flapping at her sides, like trying to cool a flame flaring at her breast.

I was profoundly moved. Lissa didn’t beg for release. But I didn’t care. Hunger licked at my hollowed tummy so why shouldn’t she feel pain? It made no sense. I’d fasted for ten fucking days and she’d had short commons for five. Even now, as she writhed in the living room, pain scisssored through my belly this spoiled little girl couldn’t even guess at.

I felt a surge of rage. “Give me a push up.”

Lissa shook her head.

I went to her. Put my hand on her back. “You can do it, Lissa. I know you can.” She kept shaking her head. From the feel of that little tine against my thin wrist skin I knew this was an incredible ask, but I needed this moment to drive home the point: I was in charge now, and fuck ups and secret eating would not be tolerated.

With all the moral force I could muster, I pressed Lissa to her knees.

“Please, please.” She looked up with childlike eyes. The twist, the ploy, the lover’s angle.

“No. You have to do this. One push up.”

Lissa gave me one last little look. My face, my whole being, changing for her in that instant. I was no longer the adored semi-celebrity model she’d touched herself to for god knew how long. I wasn’t little Nico, her pet anorexic. Tiny as I must have seemed to her, at my new weight, weak and shaky, my role had transformed.

Fingers flexing, Lissa, gave me one last pleading look, and lowered her weight onto her palms, nails scrabbling at the glossy hardwood. And then she did it. Pecs tautening beautifully as her arms took the strain and she lowered her bulging chest to the floor. Then raised herself up, so slowly I felt the pain in my own breast.

Her mouth stretched in a rictus of agony.

I was Lissa’s master.

X RECKONING

After her punishment, Lissa had to get ready for a gig that started at noon, in Brooklyn. For a while she raged silently, then hit me with a piece of truth in what must have been meant as revenge…but would work out very differently in the end.

When she weighed out her breakfast on our little gram scale, I noted she’d become fussier with the little gram scale we used for portion control, scanting herself just slightly where she used to add that little extra.

I wanted to go to her, nuzzle her neck. She was so unbelievably beautiful. Half ready for work, in a thin, ivory slip…as I sat down to watch her eat, the fit, solid muscles of her chest and arms seemed delicious to me, bronzed and supple as she worked the spoon. Pillow lips opening slowly for every bite.

My own jaw mimicked hers, pretending to crunch each almond cluster, filter the creamy yogurt between my lips. Lissa ate even slower when she saw this, deliberately torturing me in the only way she could.

It had been so hard to get the belt off. Lissa had danced in place, bucking away from every attempt I made to jerk loose the leather tongue. I’d tightened it in stages. My arms were too weak to get it undone in one pull. She said it felt like a red hot poker, with every tug. Finally I got her on her back on the couch, used all my weight as Lissa writhed, her mouth stretched wide as weird sounds came out.

I didn’t apologize then, and I wasn’t about to now. Her eyes met mine, briefly, as she indulged in a long, lascivious crunch. Revenge.

The phone rang.

I got up and checked the caller ID. Ignored it.

“You can’t dodge them forever, Nico.”

A cramp worked its way up from my lower belly, cresting under the arch of my ribs. Ten days fasting is one thing when you’ve got reserves. I had nothing, and had built a horrendous calorie deficit. The walks were murder. As Lissa watched, I bent at the waist, giving into the agony. I could almost feel another pound sliding off my frame, tiny, insatiable teeth gobbling a few more ounces of muscle.

Lissa was right of course. This was Friday. I couldn’t put it off another week. But they weren’t going to be happy. I’d sworn up and down I’d regain the weight I lost for the movie. Return to their stable of anorexic models at the BMI we’d agreed on when I started. But the voice was far too powerful, nothing else mattered in the world. Already I was steeling myself for tomorrow’s walk, glorying in the glowing red number before I’d even seen it.

“Just go,” Lissa said, getting up from the table. She came to me. Put her hand on my waist, pressing in, swirling the heel of her hand in the empty little pit. “What can they say? It’s your life. Maybe some crazy Asian wants private pictures. Or one of those Eastern European shows where the models are just bone.”

I turned to kiss her, then saw the adoration in her eyes. My chest filled with it. I could do anything with those eyes on me.

“You’re prettier than ever, you know.” Her hands curled around my jaw. “You’re still Nico. Your face hasn’t changed, you’re just…more ethereal.” She felt the spot where my clavicle fits into the ball of my shoulder, a deep divot now. Lissa worshipped my emaciation. She knew each emerging bone, each deepening hollow, with same intimacy I did.

I sighed, shuddering, as the spasm ended. “You better get ready. The shoot’s all the way in Brooklyn, right?”

Lissa glanced at the clock. “So what are you going to do?”

My plan had been to exercise, clean the apartment. To groove on my mad hunger and tear my body down yet another notch. But I had to do this. It was now or never. I couldn’t imagine not being a model, but the thought of eating a bite was as remote as Saturn.

“Guess I’ll see what’s doing at the agency.”

Lissa had just enough time to help me dress. I’d brought some outfits to her room. My first instinct was to hide under layers, but Lissa disagreed.

“That makes it worse,” she said. “Like you think they’re stupid.” She surveyed my body. Freshly showered, I wore a bra and panties that had fit like a dream at 87. At eight pounds less, the bra gaped away from my breasts.

“I broke eighty this morning, Lissa.”

Her eyes did a sort of swoon. Ready for work in a smart looking blouse and skirt, she suddenly seemed like the one in charge. She hugged me against her wonderful softness, her sweet mix of girlish scents. “You’re losing so fast, chicken.” Her hand gentled my shoulder blade. “ Just remember, you’re gorgeous. And Inline only does anorexics. So just act normal about it and they’ll love you.”

She pulled a black ribbed wool sweater out of her dresser. “This will do it all. Show you’re thin, hide the bones.” She smiled. “When they see skinny they orgasm. You know they do.”

This was true enough. I pulled it on. The top was super tight. The slim turtleneck helped with my stalk-thin neck, and as I turned in the mirror I was secretly pleased; I’d have looked board-flat in it before, but now, from the side, the effect was pure, dazzling thinness. The thin wool betrayed just the faintest outline of breast.”

“Pair it with your charcoal skirt and black tights,” Lissa said. “Trust me. Meatless thighs are in this season. Everywhere.”

Mine were as meatless as you could get and still look like legs.

Lissa checked her watch, reapplied her lipstick. “Think you should maybe eat something?” she said, super casual. “Just to be up for it?”

I gave a lame smile. She had to know I’d never do that. The hunger I held right now, building in my smooth, concave tummy, was my beloved. I fed it scraps, tending it like a bonfire. She was asking me to give up my child, and she knew it.

“Okay. Got to go.” Lissa kissed me lightly. Then, on a second thought, so passionately I nearly fainted. “I’ll be good,” she said. Voice breaking a little. Her lids lowered, lashes batting slightly. A look of utter submission.

Lissa knew I wanted to break her down fast. And she wanted it. Now there were consequences to failure that she wouldn’t soon forget.

I sprang for a cab. Over the sweater, skirt, and black leggings, I wore Lissa’s sheepskin coat. My gums were sore, my head hurt. My stomach twisted in knots from anxiety and hunger both. But I feel pretty great. I’d very nearly broke down and had a Lara bar, and now the thought of what it would be like if I’d really had it buoyed me. The toothy crunch of it, the sensuous feel of it going down my throat…I wondered if I should start chewing and spitting…

I went over my mental notes. Lissa had said to tell them the shooting schedule had messed with my metabolism or something, and I got the flu. Interesting she never suggested I offer to gain back.

The receptionist goggles a bit at my legs as I get out of the elevator. “It’s nasty out there,” I say, stomping snow off my Uggs, the fat boots making my legs into black spikes. The mirrored walls show the bitter cold has lit up my cheeks, making them falsely bright and alive. Feeling pretty, at least, I hang up my coat and the receptionist waves me back to Emily’s office. No waiting. That isn’t good.

One look at me is enough for Emily. Her jaw drops. “Oh, God, Nico.”

Lissa said not to look down. Not to acknowledge any kind of problem: “How you think about it is how they will, just act nonchalant.”

“I know, I know,” I say, as Emily takes in my diminished thighs. In my mind they really had been too much at 87. So much better now, with this “alluring gap” as Lissa calls it. “Listen, Em. Fasting for the shoot, then eating…it just ramped up my metabolism like a furnace.” Emily’s face remained impassive. “Then I got the flu. Can you believe it?”

Emily voice is stern, edged with the slightest tinge of compassion. “Sit down before you fall down, Nico.”

I make myself laugh as I take a chair. “I walked here, Emily. I’m fine.” I brush the dark fringe of hair from my face. “Honestly.” Thank God my complexion is clear, my eyes bright. I used concealer to lighten the bruised-looking shadows.

There’s a little pause while Emily takes this all in. Looking at me, assessing. “So how bad is it. How much did you lose, Nico?”

I shrug. “Five pounds, maybe.” Then I add, sheepishly, “From my after filming weight.”

Emily looks incredulous. “Don said you were at 85 when shooting wrapped. He said it made him nervous just looking at you.” Don was the BCBG guy.

“No way, I was eighty-two.” I scoff. “They weighed me in my Uggs, Emily. Can you believe it?” I’m playing poker now. If she buys this then when her staff weighs me it’ll seem like less of a lie—I’d only be a kilo off.

I see something give in Emily’s expression. Is she conceding? “Well, maybe we can work with those legs. Bulgaria’s going crazy for that. Can you take off your sweater, Nico? I need to see how bad it is.”

Emily’s making hard calculations. See, she deals in both worlds, regular modeling and the secret world of severely emaciated models—a select, very private industry. But even in that shady swamp there’s a downward limit—and Emily’s an expert in it.

I’d tried one of Lissa’s bras but it just crumpled over my chest and looked terrible under the tight sweater. We both agreed a loose top would just force her to look under the hood and see my ribs. I stand up, struggling not to let my camisole ride up as I strip off the sweater.

Emily bites her lip. Not good. “Turn for me, Nico,” Emily says. From her tone I can tell she’s upset all over again. I hadn’t thought she’d make me do this. My ribs show right through the thin silk, at the sides. My breasts hug my ribcage. Even with my shoulders back as far as they can go, my chest caves inward. My waist is spectacular—eighteen inches. Narrow as my hips are, the bones rear up.

Getting up and coming around the desk, Emily looks worried. Not for me—they never are—but for a valuable asset. She takes the hem of the camisole in her fingers and looks me in the eye. I nod. She’s looking under the hood. Emily peels the fabric up almost to my breast.

Her mouth opens. Shock.

She shakes her head, still looking down. I know what she sees: bare ribs with nothing between.

“Nico, I’m so sorry. We just can’t use you.”

“But….” I stammer.

“You’ve violated the terms of your contract, Nico. You’re clearly way more than ten pounds under the minimum we established.” She puts the sweater back. “I don’t need a scale to tell me you’re under eighty.” She leans back against the desk, but she’s not relaxed, she’s stiff as a board. “No one’s going to accept 36 kilos on your frame.” She lights a cigarette. “Not even the fucking Bulgarians.”

My eyes get hot and wet. “Please, Emily.” Lissa said to be animated, to seem alive and healthy as possible even if it meant getting upset. “I know I fucked up. But it’s not like it’s drugs, you know that. I’ll take a test anytime.”

She puts a hand on my shoulder; feeling my bones doesn’t help anyone. “It’s not that, we know you don’t use.” At modeling agencies the word “anorexia” is more forbidden than heroin or cocaine. Emily’s mouth is working. She wants to deploy the word but she can’t. “I know you’re very disciplined.” She squirms a little, that’s not it. Disciplined is good. “Hard on yourself. But I just don’t see that changing, do you? I mean, after starving on that shoot we expected you’d shoot back up in no time. It was only five pounds.”

Only five pounds. These people were so clueless. To someone at my weight, anorexic or not, five pounds is like twenty for her. I wanted to beg. Even say “give me a week.” But the voice overwhelms everything. The mirrored wall in reception had shown how I badly I need to lose. The eleven pounds between me and my goal.

Emily shook her head as she walked around me, tut tutting my wishbone legs and ass. “Nico. Be straight with me.” I could almost hear the gears click in her head. “You’re restricting, yes?”

I couldn’t lie about this. But I couldn’t tell her, either.

“Okay. You’re fasting.” I nod. She puffs on her cigarette. “Do you have a goal weight?”

I shuffle my feet. Look down. “Emily…”

She tips my chin up, so our eyes meet. “This could be good for you, Nico.”

My heart pounds. There’s hope. I speak in a clear voice. “I’m trying for sixty-eight pounds. Thirty one kilos.” In case she couldn’t do the math.

Turning her head to the side, Emily sighs, all the air in her petite lungs spilling out in a rush. “Right then. The fact is, Nico, here’s your gift.” She walks around me as she talks, checking out, I know, my ass. “You stay model pretty at a very low weight. Some girls have that, it’s rare. You have it. Your face is phenomenal.” She looks at me. “Honestly, right now? You make Audrey Hepburn look like a truck driver.”

It’s hard to smile, standing there nearly naked in a short skirt and leggings and Uggs, the cold air raising my nipples into turrets through the silk camisole. But the words are golden to me. If anyone is the acid test for looking good with anorexia it’s Emily. And she’s saying I look great.

She hands me my sweater. “Not just your face, your bones, too.” She smiles an almost horny smile. “They’re very pleasing. Symmetrical, not too thin. Narrow chest, narrow hips.”

Sitting down behind her desk, Emily stamps out her cigarette. “Nico, a consortium of individuals wishes to make a film. 3D.” Her voice gets serious. “This would not be a fashion shoot.”

My eyes kind of roll. “Porn, Emily? You want me to do porn?”

“Let’s call it performance art.” Lighting another cigarette, Emily describes the project. Which sounds rather amorphous at this point. But essentially, I’d be on an island with one or more other girls. Very thin already. With the aid of “handlers” we’d simply starve for the cameras. Every second, every interaction, would be filmed in full 3D. Whatever happened would be the film.

“But when would it even start? I’m already, um. Down a bit.” Even now it was hard to admit to myself I was thin at all.

“For this? The thinner you are, the better. The other girl, or girls will start at a higher weight—so they’ll have both.” Images of Lissa flitted through my mind, running on the beach, muscles shining, white teeth glittering in the sun. “These people are aficionados of thin, Nico. They like extremes. Whether the girl’s emaciated or just starting out, what they like is the same. They want to minutely observe hunger.” My stomach growls like a motherfucker.

Emily leans toward me on her elbows. “That’s what they want.”

“But why me? There must be tons of girls who already do this…”

Emily shakes her head. “When you did that art film with the Japanese director, after Bryant Park? There was discussion in some circles…” Emily’s eyes narrow. “Certain people wondering…how low you might go.”

She indicates a chair with her cigarette. I sit. “Circles?” I say.

Emily ignores this. “Nico, the numbers involved are astronomical. Any girl might do this, but I’m thinking…if you offered to do it, with your reputation? You would make a private fortune. As much as most models make in a whole career. For a few weeks of work.”

My mind races. The money is nice. But the situation…Emily has to know this would be overwhelming attractive to me. The pain in my chest and belly and head all unite in outrage, knifing through my middle so I have to bend forward, crush it down with my arms.

“So why didn’t you bring all this up before?”

Emily sets her butt in the tray, where it gutters smoke, and leans back in her leather chair. Hands folded like she’s doing Namaste. “Nico, I know I can come off as harsh. But we’re a family here. InLine cares for you, I care for you. What I’m proposing will make you unsuitable for us, in any of our divisions.”

She meant I’d be too thin for the anorexic model world.

“Risks?” I ask. Heart squirreling in my chest. I’m such a weird mix of fearless and timid. Sometimes I know I’m weak, just this frail thing that can break.

She looks down at her clenched hands. “There will be a doctor present at all times, of course. And precautions will be taken. But the consortium is very clear—they will expect an extreme low weight from every cast member.” The way she says extreme is music to me. “There’s no way to sugar coat this. These customers will want to witness emaciation more severe than I think you can imagine.”

I didn’t have to imagine it. Emily opens a drawer, flips through some files. She slides a glossy photo across the desk.

“Her name’s Sue Song. She modeled for us in 2010, mostly for Eastern European clients. We lent her to the film consortium, a one-time project in Spain.”

I almost stop breathing, Emily’s words washing over me, meaningless, as I examine the image.

An Asian girl stands in an examination room. They have removed her bra for the photo. Clad only in panties, she’s positioned before a wall grid, arms raised and extended like a prisoner coming out of the jungle. Thick black hair grazes wire-hanger shoulders. Every bone in her ribcage is visible; her abdomen falls so far inward you can count the vertebrae in her spine from the front. No articulation of bone or cartilage fails to appear through her silk-thin skin. Her dark eyes stare blankly.

“Fifty-five pounds,” Emily says, flicking an ash. “At five-eight.”

My mind reels. Looking at this girl, I know I’m a fat coward. And that a hunger deeper and wider than I’d ever dreamed looms ahead of me. Then, as the juices flow down between my legs, I realize I will not tread that path alone.

I jerk my eyes from the photo, squarely meeting my agent’s eyes. “Emily, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

XI WINNING LISSA

My knees jogged up and down on the subway. I’d tried to walk home but two walks in a day were too much for my legs. A boy was staring at me. More specifically, at my neck. Trying to guess, maybe, what was under my sheepskin coat. All I thought about was how my muscles would revive overnight, so I could put on my Uggs and head out into the predawn cold. The way my heart would pound against my ribs, hunger’s fingers scraping a still deeper whole in my middle, opening up new levels of anguish for the Waverly’s waitress to drink in with her skinny latte.

I lusted for suffering now, pined for it. In a deadly irony, hunger’s symptoms had become the only sustenance I was allowed. And now, as the boy watched me bounce my pointy knees, I began to imagine this for Lissa. Bits and pieces coming to me, images, scenes that would have to play out. Stripping Lissa to 103 was one thing. Now my mind filled with another vision entirely. Lissa striding toward me across some sun-blasted beach, pared to bone in a tiny tanga…

Obviously she’d never go for the direct pitch. I’d have to come at it sideways.

Invite her along to the island. Tell her I’d be putting on weight, maybe. Recovering. She’d be there to keep me company. All expenses paid. I figured she had some vacation coming. Bit by bit, I’d guide her into the truth. Stoke her desire to lose, open her eyes to the beauty of submission to hunger. For me it was so obvious this was already there, latent in her. The way she licked my breastbone, my tiny armpits, so her sensitive tongue could find and record every new protrusion of bone. Her orgasms when she felt my widening gap, stroking each new nook and angle as atrophy pulled muscle and tendon taut.

In the end, of course, she’d make more money than she could imagine. But that wouldn’t lure her now.

And yes, it was evil to do this. To even consider it. But I was in a world of pain all my own, a black cave with only one mission—to plunge deeper into the darkness. Seeing hunger flare in Lissa’s eyes thrilled me so deeply and utterly, feeling her suffering meld with mine was such ecstasy, I couldn’t imagine any other path. I knew this was what Lissa’s deeper self wanted, too.

I was a spirit guide from hell.

Lissa came home just after sunset. She was in a rage—fortunately, not at me. In fact I figured out the cause I was thrilled. She threw off her down coat, remembering at the last second to hang it on the hook.

“We shot outside, all day. Can you imagine?”

I crossed my bare arms, shivering against the chill that blew in with Lissa. I was in a leotard, doing some yoga. I’d been at if for three hours; my shaking was as much muscle spasms as cold. Hunger chipped away at my insides as I listened to Lissa’s rant.

It had been a fashion short, her usual kind of gig. As PA she’d had to ride heard on a half dozen leggy models from the Ukraine.

“None of them could have been older than twelve,” she hissed, making tea. I could have sat down but after seeing that photo of Sue Song, I was working on my legs. “Those girls shouldn’t even be wearing makeup and they’re shooting them half naked in public. In the snow.”

When I first met her, Lissa’s envy of these girls had been wistful. Now that she was dropping, feeling thinner at 113, their look must have seemed just enough within her grasp to be annoying.

The teakettle whistled. Lissa poured us each a cup, then rested her magnificent ass against the counter. Feasting her eyes. I’d thrown a tee on over my leotard. “You look so great in tee shirts. Like those girls.” She meant the despised models. “So tiny, in their extra small tees.” Lissa rubbed her own arms, her shoulders, as if discovering for the first time they were not extra small.

I couldn’t get warm but I wasn’t allowing myself more than this tee right now. Imagining Sue Song not afraid to drop under sixty. Probably so weak, so much hungrier than me. But opting for it anyway.

“You know how to fuck them over, right?”

Lissa gave me a shrewd look. Like I was about to propose some criminal act.

“I mean, first of all. Get to 103. For sure. That will rock their tiny worlds.” I sipped my tea. I knew Lissa had specific models in mind, ones she worked with all the time. A few were about Lissa’s goal weight but 5 foot 8 or even more. I grinned. “But what would slay them, totally, is you in double digits.”

I saw the light go out of Lissa’s eyes. I think she’d been hoping for some sort of prank. The fact is I knew she was having trouble with the diet. The 150 cal regimen didn’t feel like any food at all to her, and despite all my attempts to model the trick of embracing hunger, Lissa wasn’t getting it.

“Ya, right.”

“Lissa, you can’t seriously doubt you’re going to get to 103. It’s just ten pounds.”

Lissa practically smashed her tea down on the counter. I noticed where the spills flew. I’m anal, and cleanly. “Just ten pounds? I love how you fucking say that. Like excuse me if I’m not you, okay? If my experience is different that than the famous Nico’s.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. Warmed my chest with the tea mug. “Okay, I’m sorry. I know. I’m like, insensitive and I’m narcissistic.”

“Narci what?” Lissa stared at me. “No, I know what it means. But dang. Sister, I don’t think that’s your problem.”

I felt something rumble in my chest. Oh, my heart. What did she mean? “So what is my problem?”

Lissa laughed. Like someone who suddenly gets a joke. “You totally hate yourself, Nico. I mean, that ain’t Narcissus. I mean sure, you check out your bones, but that’s not the same as thinking your beautiful. You are beautiful, but you think you look like shit and you’re fat.”

Holy crap. She was right. On the other hand, this had nothing to do with her losing weight. “Lissa, okay. I hate my body. I’ll give you that, anyway. But I’m sorry it’s hard for you and I forget that. That I got good at this over years, starving. I told you. There was a time I didn’t love it.”

“Right, before that model, Arianne.” Lissa’s voice sounded brighter.

“Exactly. So it’s like, you won’t know, either. How it feels. Right away.”

Lissa shook her head slowly. “No way I’m doing what you did. A three-week fast? Nico, I’ve been on your restricted diet now for seven days.”

“Six,” I said. “It’s only six.”

“Well look—I’m still at 113. Six days and I lost five pounds.”

I wanted to say five pounds was good. I wanted to encourage her. But in the end I had to face the fact that I’d presold Lissa as a very thin girl—had even thrown that figure to Emily, that Lissa was 103, at five seven. Time was pressing. The consortium wouldn’t take her any fatter than that, and they wouldn’t wait forever.

If we were going to do the movie, Lissa had to fast.

That night we curled up together in the big warm bed. I spooned my body into Lissa’s. Massaged the ripe bulge of her breast, smelled the nape of her neck, her tangled locks. Her scent calmed me.

Even as she moaned in response, she began her nightly litany. After her sixth day of restricting her hunger was insatiable.

“It’s worse than my period, Nico.” She grabbed my hand and pushed it into her hollowed belly.

“These cramps.”

Pulling the ball of her shoulder like a lever, I turned Lissa’s face to mine. Put a finger to her plush lips. “Lissa, there’s something I need to tell you. Something good.” She stifled herself. I let the anticipation build.

“How good?” She gave me a lazy smile.

I told her about the movie. A torrent of golden words. She’d be my co-star, and we’d live on a Caribbean island. She’d make more money than Jesus and be able to flaunt it to the models—her movie star status. But because I needed her to do this, and she was already flagging, I couldn’t take any chances. I’d been hoping and praying she’d get the desire to lose even more, but when I’d mentioned double digits the doubt in her eyes had been all too obvious. At least for now, “a couple pounds under 110” was the summit of her ambition.

That would not do.

“This is for real. And there’s money in it. A lot.” Lissa’s mouth opened, but I charged ahead. “Listen to me. There’s a condition. And it may be a deal breaker.”

Lissa sat up on her elbows. “What condition?”

I swept aside the dangling, tangled strands that lay across her face. “Like I said, they need us skinny. When I told them about you…I knew you were prepared to get to 103 so that’s what I told them that’s what you were.” Her body stiffened against me. “Lissa, we only have a week. And your loss rate is so slow…I’m really not sure this is going to happen.” I let a pause develop in which Lissa could imagine the worst. “In which case…they may have to find another costar.”

Lissa’s face writhed through a series of emotions—defiance, even anger. “So why bring it up? If you think I can’t do it?”

“Because I wanted you to have the chance.”

For a moment I wasn’t sure what she’d say. The answer was so obvious—but would she find it? Lissa’s hard stare softened into the trusting gaze of a child. “Nico...I need you to help me. I want you to make me fast.”

I gave her my own hard look. “You serious, Lissa?” I didn’t elaborate. I let my eyes tell the story. That if she said yes, it would be a rugged road. And it truly would. To get ten pounds off her starvation-averse, Somali frame I’d have to use every trick in the book. Whips. Some kind of sauna. Even rent a treadmill.

Eyes tight on mine, Lissa slowly nodded. “Dead serious. Yes.”

XII GLASS SLIPPER

As I sat Lissa down and went over what would have to happen, she read the doubt in my eyes like a book.

“For this to work I’m going to have to control every aspect of your life from this Friday to next. I can’t lose the weekend—these guys are chafing at the leash as it is—so we’ll have to meet them sometime on that last day. I’ll push it as late as possible.”

“I can do it, Nico.” Lissa’s voice almost broke. “You have to believe me.”

This was her big chance and I knew it. Not just to shove it in the model’s faces, either. Or to make a wad of money. Lissa had told me from the beginning she was Daddy’s favorite. Raised a Black American Princess. But so far, she hadn’t delivered. She’d had a great education, even a semester at Oxford. And now all she was was a production assistant on some very dubious movies cum advertisements—for an industry her father apparently despised.

In other words, Lissa would do anything to fit the glass slipper. To become a princess for real.

“I trust that you can,” Lissa. I put my hand on the document. Lissa’s regimen. “But when you see this, I don’t want tears or yelling or gripes. I need just one thing from you: total commitment.” She stared at me so hard her eyes got watery. “You can blink, now. Seriously. It’s not just food. You’re metabolism’s so slow we’re going to have to keep you burning calories almost 24/7.”

Most people at Lissa’s weight restrict like Lissa did and in the first five days they lose way more than five pounds. Cut 250 cals to 150 and it’s ridiculous. That’s almost a fast in itself because your basal metabolic rate burns like a thousand calories a day anyway. Add a little exercise and there’s a serious deficit. But Lissa’s heritage of Somali famines left her with genes that have a death grip on every calorie. Her heart rate slows, her nails stop growing. Her energy wanes. And the pounds do not roulez.

Lissa’s fingers shook so much the paper wobbled in her hands.

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s a scary regimen.”

“Three thirty in the morning?” She was nearly crying. “For the first workout? And where are we going to get a treadmill?” She looked down at the page again, her vision getting blurred. “Sauna? Who’s got a sauna?”

I tossed my hair confidently. “Leave all that to me. Starting now I need you to get aerobic. So strip and give me jumping jacks while I sort out the equipment.”

Lissa paused briefly. I could feel the weight of her dread—her fingers shaking as she undid the buttons on her blouse, then rose slowly as if stuck in molasses. She gave me a look as she pulled off her skirt. Dimly aware something terrible had begun.

Hunger coiled in my belly, gathering itself for a fresh assault. I focused on Lissa’s strapping thighs, still too big and strong at 113. Her meaty shoulders and chest, the excess at her waist, the sheath of meat cloaking her ribs. All of it had to be stripped away. Saliva rose in my mouth, venom-like, as my sore eyes lasered hatred at Lissa’s sullen flesh—pounds I knew would have to be painstakingly flogged and hounded an ounce at a time from her bones with a daily effort that would suck up all the energy I could muster.

More energy than I even had, I realized, after two weeks of straight fasting.

I would have to eat. A sacrifice of anguish of guilt I’d willingly undergo to guarantee Lissa’s company on the island. Whatever I ate I’d make up for with a vengeance once I got there. The consortium was more than happy with me at 78. But they’d sneer at the fat body standing in front of me now, trembling on the brink of transformation. If she could only stick it.

“Remember, every jumping jack takes you closer to Hollywood.”

Lissa shoulders stiffened as she hugged herself, then went into the set.

After watching her first few leaps, noting and memorizing each jiggle of thigh and breast and biceps, I opened my laptop. Began surfing for the things we’d need. My heart froze into a ball of ice. I’d turn our bathroom into hell.

Lissa balked at the 3:30 workout. I literally had to whip her ass out of bed. She pled with me. She offered sex, clutching my hand to her breast. But I shook my head. To me she was ugly now. And she would be until the fat began to peel off her. It wasn’t a struggle to be this stony, I really felt it. Felt surging anger at her feeble protests—as if she knew jack all about hunger. She really wasn’t sexy to me at this weight, so her pleas weren’t poignant or even pathetic—just greedy.

True, I’d been entranced with her breasts from the first moment I’d seen her on set, her firm muscles, her gorgeous face. But her flesh was all too much now and I saw it. I’d been in love with the potential, not the reality: gross, excessive. Her belly at 113 still looked distended. The ribs barely grazed the skin at her sides. Her sternum still slumbered under a flat layer of flesh. Her breasts had more shape but had hardly dwindled; I remembered how the sight of my own shrinking breasts had thrilled me, fueled my need to fast. Why didn’t this work with her? As it was I could barely make out the points of her hipbones.

The rented treadmill was the first equipment to arrive. I’d expedited the shipping on everything—modeling had been good to me, I could afford it. Especially if this new level of intensity earned a payday for Lissa.

I locked Lissa in the kitchen. I’d chained the fridge door with a bicycle lock from the corner hardware store, heavy steel chain that jingled. “Crunches,” I told her. Lissa looked daggers at me. Rubbing her ass, still sore from the night before. Her eyes looked puffy. Lack of sleep? Tears? I didn’t care.

I went back out to manage things. I had the delivery guys position the treadmill facing the living room window. I’d picked a NordicTrac 2000 purely for durability, not fancy options.

We’d only be using one setting.

The sauna arrived an hour later. This I was buying, not renting. There were tons of cheap “portable saunas” online, but I’d opted instead to buy a killer heating unit—a DevilFire X10. I watched the installers with an eagle eye—a pair of beefy guys who clearly couldn’t wait to trade jokes about the skeleton girl in the baggy tracksuit. While one guy set about weather sealing the doorframe, the other fit an adjustable vent into the narrow window. Transforming our old-fashioned tile bathroom into a First Class sauna.

I went back into the kitchen while they worked, unlocking the fridge and taking out stuff for a little meal. Greek yogurt and granola, a banana, a wedge of cheddar. Even as she worked out, Lissa’s eyes followed my every move as I prepared my little meal. Shock and pleading had worn out in her face. What was left was the residue from the night before: Ugly puffiness and an impudent style to her jumping jacks that got my anger flaring like hunger pangs. I knew she was jealous. The way her jaws moved as I began to chew, how her eyes hung on each bite I took, each morsel of food I toyed with. I wanted to eat less than this, but tiny amounts would just make me insanely hungry. I couldn’t be weak now. This was Lissa’s time to suffer.

She began saying something but I ignored her, going to check on the work.

The sauna was nearly done.

I was stoked. I loved the lighting in there, the mirrors. I could do some serious work on Lissa. I looked at the shackles dangling from the sturdy shower rod. I’d offered the installers extra for putting these on. Not even blushing. I know they’d heard Lissa huffing and puffing in the kitchen—it must have sounded like sex to them. God knows what they’d imagined had gone on in there.

The guys did the shackles for no charge.

“Fuck the schedule,” I told Lissa, as heat pumped from the DevilFire. I kept checking the sauna like you’d check cookies in the oven. “You’ve lost one pound in 18 hours. That’s not going to cut it.”

She had to know this was true. It was 1 PM by the time the installers left, and the scale showed that since she’d begun her workout the night before Lissa was officially 112. At this pace she should have lost twice as much in those eighteen hours.

“Don’t want to go in there,” Lissa said. We both felt the heat waves coming off the bathroom door. Her mouth was open, pulling in as much as air she could. Sweat shined on her muscles, her forehead. I saw a twitch in her belly, one of her little ab squares. How I wanted to beat them flat, to starve the shape from her muscles. Melt them like pats of butter. I licked my lips. Butter.

“It’s not a question, Lissa. Just a matter of getting it hot enough.” Lissa had seen the shackles. She’s also seen me unwrap the package from Amazon that arrived by FedEx just before noon. The old riding crop had lost its spring. As her hunger and lethargy built Lissa had learned to shrug off the stings. She knew the fresh crop I’d bought would pack a wallop. “But since you’re so fat and sassy let’s get you on the treadmill.”

Weirdly, my mind went back to when I’d first begun dieting for real, memories I was so in love with they played out in my head almost daily. How my friends had talked, their eyes on me in the baggy tops that used to be tight. The child-size jeans that showed my slim hips, my dwindled thighs. I’d relished denying my hunger to them, professing to hardly notice an almost twenty-pound loss. It killed my best friend Lane, as my body returned to its junior high weight at my high school height.

My eyes puffy had been as Lissa’s were now, but my weight, in terms of BMI, so much lower—down where Lissa’s needed to go, around 16.

God how I wanted to fuck her at that BMI. I didn’t want to wait.

“The speed setting’s out of control,” Lissa groused, her ass cheeks and thighs flexing in her too-tight gym shorts, straining to keep up with the speeding treadmill. “You’ve got to turn it down.”

I gripped the crop dangling from wrist. “I’ve got to do what?” I flicked her ass, hard. “Who begged me to do this?”

“Me,” Lissa grunted, hoarse breaths rising from her throat. I’d opened the window so she could zone out on the falling snow. I wanted her to succeed. Needed her to. If she hated me that was fine. All that mattered were those pounds.

When the sauna got hot enough, I ordered Lissa off the Nordic 2000. And when her legs ceased wobbling I ordered her to strip.

“Please, Nico.” She didn’t want anything to do with the sauna.

She’d seen the shackles, the fresh new crop. Knew that it was my plan to strip four pounds off her in two days. At 108, I’d decided, Lissa might be fuckably lean. With my hunger pangs abated by the little meals, sex energy rose like sap in my veins. Watching Lissa’s hunger grow by the hour stoked my lust. As she pleaded her eyes drove me crazy, the dark, kohl-rimmed stare of the starving Somali. The whites of her eyes blazed whiter for those jet-black irises. The sloe-eyed lids almost wounding in their pathos, suggesting how the body clung to its calories through a metabolic slow down. One twelve had brought a hint of cheekbone…she was lovely now. Bare breasts rising and falling as she panted with fear.

I opened the door. I didn’t need to say a word. Forced into submission from that long ago belting of her breasts—Lissa stepped silently into the hellish wall of steam. The door closed behind me with a snick.

I wasted no time getting her wrists into the shackles. “Please, Nico, please.”

“This is going to be hard for both of us.” I could barely breathe in the stifling heat. Clouds of steam enveloped us. Obviously I couldn’t run this full on all the time. But I also realized I’d never let Lissa out. Watching her chest heave in and out, ribs springing out at her sides, all I wanted was to carve a gulf below her ribcage, take the wobble out of those café au lait breasts.

I focused on her glossy nipples. I wanted to mar their cinnamon perfection, shock Lissa back to her submissive state. With her arms stretched taut from the damp leather cuffs, her breasts were half-grapefruits riding her ribcage, the reddish brown tips sitting up impudently. I gave the new crop a few practice swipes at the edge of the tub as Lissa’s head turned side to side, her sloe eyes focused on supple patch of leather, the thwap it made on the enameled iron.

I lashed her chest first. Aiming for those impudent nipples. A sharp flat smack accompanied each blow. Then her belly bewitched me, sucking in so deep with every spasm of pain.

“Hungry?” I asked. Lissa nodded up and down. Fighting for breaths. “Suck in.”

Lissa took a huge inhalation as I brought the crop down on her concave tummy, again and again with a wet slap. As she sucked in with each successive wallop her skin stretched tighter until it became a drumhead, the smacks hollow, sweetly resonant. Only after awhile did I hear her groaning. See the redness of her belly, the skin that curved so tight over the nubs of hipbone. The strained skin shined white between the red patches.

At 1 PM I took a break for lunch. My legs and arms were wobbly. I checked Lissa’s heart with a stethoscope—she was barely conscious—and lowered the heat a bit. Stealing a kiss off her sloping, sweaty breast.

Returning with plenty of energy, my own hunger pangs held at bay by some slices of tuna on a toast points, a bunch of grapes and some white wine, I laid into Lissa freshly. The first stroke woke her. The next must have stung like nothing before because she cried out. No one could hear her, of course. And if they’d did, they’d think those girls in 4F were fucking again, the bunnies.

In the evening I opened the medicine cabinet, so Lissa could see how she looked. Down to 110.5. Her arms spread wide. The sweat drizzled down her ribs. She was glossy golden, basted, like some idealized barbecue of sex. Between her ribs the faint laddering of breastbone. I stroked its slickness with my index finger, stubby nail grooving the thin flesh in a pale, wavy line.

“Getting sexy,” I said.

Lissa muttered something. Weaker than I’d ever seen her. Such a battle for a pound and a half. And yet even if it was slow the change had come and it excited me. The heat was impossible, so I’d stripped, too. I tilted the mirror to show us both. I smiled. The fog made our faces beautiful, like a jelled camera lens—the tangled strands on my pale checks and her golden ones sweat testament to starved off weight. I’d forgotten how sharp my clavicles were…

Eyes opening and closing, Lissa nodded at her reflection. Her own collarbones bowed forward, thicker than mine, but beautifully proportioned. I liked how her pecs stretched just that little bit thinner. Slipped my fingers into her lean underarm, pinched the muscle tight. Then traced the arch of her ribcage. Eager to please, even after seven hours in this hellish chamber, Lissa pulled her stomach in.

“Please,” she muttered, looking at the warm bottle of Evian on the sink. She popped her mouth open and I gave her a squirt between those white, Chicklet teeth. No more. Then turned up the heat. Her eyes widened when she saw me twist the dial to 10. I stroked her torso, skating down her hard, wet sides to her belly, where it bent inward deepest, feeling her stomach’s new hollowness, pressing where I knew it hurt.

Lissa nodded and sighed. “Just milk,” she said. “A little milk’s okay.”

I shook my head. “Not it isn’t,” I said. Not harshly. I stroked her stomach more firmly. Swirling around the slight mound of her navel. Lissa swallowed deeply and nodded and I touched myself quickly as the caught her wave of hunger. So sweet, so delightful I could taste its bitterness. I rubbed her sweat-slick tummy and my own wet lips in perfect tandem, praying that I’d soon feel again the terrible horror of hunger I saw and felt in Lissa’s eyes now, her body English as her knees rose slightly with each pat of her stomach. Her whole world was in there. Rollicking, clawing, a hungry rat trying to eat its way out.

Another day and she’d begin to be truly sexy, I realized; already her thigh gap seemed to be expanding, a millimeter at a time. After ten days it would be inches. Her woman’s body with its shapes and curves and mysteries would become like mine had, a simpler thing—a girl’s form. Too small for her gorgeous head, those plush lips. A sight to see in jeans, or a short skirt. Tiny tops flaunting shrunken muscles, razor clavicles. A modest xylophone jutting between teacup breasts.

But this was in the future. There was no short cut.

Lissa’s eyes shut tight against the pain as I began to crop her hollowing belly. Thrashing the pain away, working off nervous energy, punishing Lissa for all I’d ever suffered and all the days I’d suffer still. Lashing to show her the truth.

That skinny took pain and gave you back beauty.

XIII MYSTERIES

As the second day drew to a close I gave Lissa a good long gulp of Evian, from a fresh bottle, icy cold. She’d earned it. Enduring all those hours in this little hell I’d built.

Lissa guzzled until I had to pull the bottle away. “Thank you,” she burbled. Her eyes said it all. At this moment she’d consume anything.

I brought the scale, easing the chains at her wrists so she could settle her feet it freely, wrists slack in the leather cuffs. The number read 108 even.

Mission accomplished.

Of course she still had five pounds to go, in five days. Four-and-a-half, really. And much of her loss had been water weight we’d have to fight like hell to keep off her. I didn’t care if she sprang back to 105 before the island—what I wanted was Lissa at the agreed upon weight on Friday, no matter how dehydrated she had to be. Any other girl would already be there, after all this. But still.

There was no girl like Lissa at 108. As she turned those full, dark eyes on me I nearly melted. She was officially twenty pounds down from her high and it showed. “Well done,” I said, stroking her ribs. You had to give props to keep control.

Lissa gave a thin smile.

“It’s going to get harder now. You know that.” She shook her head. I gripped her jaw. I meant to tell her water weight wasn’t real loss…but those black irises drew me in. I kissed her moistened lips, lightly at first, then passionately. Lissa bowed her collarbones out and I took them in my mouth, long, slick curves of pure bone. The speed she’d lost at was such a turn on. This transformation—I could see now how she’d look at 103. Felt the taut muscle at her armpits, little sounds coming from the back of her throat at my touch.

I put my hand deep into her groove, slick with sweat and passion juice; her thighs worked up and down, one at a time to take her weight on her toes, relieve the pressure on her wrists as she’d been doing for hours now, way more than a day.

“Let me down,” she muttered. Not really a command, more a request. I switched off the heat and opened the vent full on, to suck out the hot air. Then turned on the tap in the tub. Ice cold. Finally, with maximum gentleness, I unclipped her cuffs and eased Lissa down into the swilling water.

She let out a loud gasp, but I could see it felt good to her, even as her tummy sucked in hard with the shock. As the water rose I soaped her aching limbs. Massaging her thighs, her leaned-down breasts, her neck. Lissa froze into a contorted pose, sharp elbows resting painfully on the bottom of the tub, head back, stretching the gorgeous cords of her neck, knees parted to feel the cool water lap like a puppy at her softness.

“We’re going to starve you so badly,” I said, sponging her sternum, her hollowed out belly, feeling the flesh cringe away from the cold, sodden cloth. “Five days, you’ll get nothing at all. Not even much water.”

Her lips mouthed the words “I know.”

But even now I sensed she didn’t quite believe it. Wouldn’t let herself.

I wadded the cloth to scrub her armpits, the line of her jaw, the long groove of her throat. Her breasts quivered like jelly at the cloth’s icy touch. Just watching Lissa’s lips part, gasping for air, made me die to get starving again, to feel the hunger flame in my own belly like she had it in hers, press that torch to my stomach wall and wince in agony, carry my hunger child proudly to some place where others could witness it. Feast their eyes on my emaciated frame.

When I’d soaped her good and hard I stood, swooning with dizziness—the heat had gotten to me, too, carved off maybe a pound—I switched on the hot water and washed her clean, rinsing her tangled locks with a loving caress that ignited fires down below in both of us.

I helped her from the tub and out into the hall. The normal air revived her. But it also kicked in her hunger. Her belly growled fiercely and kept growling.

“Just a bite of your yogurt,” Lissa pleaded. “A teaspoon full, Nico…”

I pulled her into the bedroom. And she almost didn’t come. It struck me: I weighed thirty pounds less than Lissa did, at three inches taller. With all the cropping and the time in the sauna I was weaker than I’d been in ages. Lissa could overpower me. Find the key. Gorge herself.

I worked her over to the bed and she fell back on it gratefully. I got a towel and made her sit up as I toweled her hair, her shoulders, her chest. Then down between her legs. I had to think.

I cupped her chest muscle; it had truly shrunk. Her arm even looked straighter, simpler—but still twice as thick as mine, and far, far stronger. She groaned and laid her back on the bed. I kissed her trembling belly, where it lay taut below her rearing hipbone. Spread her knees where they dangled over the edge of the bed and slid my face down between her thighs, tonguing her dark slit, working her to an orgasm. Her hard mound bucked into me as the release came upon her in a flood, belly gurgling loud as the bathtub drain as hunger cut the cords of her resolve.

I swung her legs up on the bed, and before she knew it I had her right wrist tied with a silk tie to the bed post. She began to resist, but using all my weight I pinned the other one, lashed it tight. Then did her ankles. By then she had no force left, no power to fight me.

Much as I wanted to work her, get her aerobic and keep her that way, I knew she was too weak after the sauna. So kept her in bed the rest of that day and most of the next. She begged constantly for food. Not just yogurt, but little bits of every kind of thing. I no longer bothered to tell her no, it was just this mantra.

I didn’t let her sleep. When she drifted off I swatted her stomach with the crop, a pleasing hollow thwak that brought her to full consciousness. I barely slept. But then 250 cals a day kept me on the sharp edge of hunger. My metabolism was so fucked! I didn’t even gained back the pound of water loss. And yet the food didn’t fill me in the slightest, just provoked my stomach to fits of outrage.

But nothing like Lissa felt. Her tummy roared, asleep or awake.

On the evening of that fourth day of her fast, when Lissa seemed weaker than ever, I unbound her and brought in the scale.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s okay, you can get up.”

“No. Nico, I’m so fucking tired. Please, just a little cake.”

“You’re delusional.” I put my arms under hers and pulled her upright. Swung her legs off the bed. Slowly raising her head, she slid her weight onto the scale.

“Holy shit.”

I was stunned. The little numbers said 105.5.

Four days. I’d been bringing her warm tea, giving her sips of water. I must have over done it. I looked at her. The junk had evaporated from her armpits. The place some said was the hardest to lose from. Her breasts, swaying slightly in the little cammy I let her wear, were smaller, too. But what really excited me was the gap between her thighs. Her vee of her French cut panties fit neatly between her legs, emphasizing the fresh gap there. Easily a hand width of space had opened up. A kilo of loss, perfectly proportioned.

Lissa turned her eyes up to mine. “This scale’s for real, right?”

This was how I’d dreamed of her. So neat, so contained, everything tight. Lustiness bubbled up between my legs. Her body drew me like a magnet. I bent her over the bed. This couldn’t be real. I pressed my face into her hollowed belly, shamelessly jamming my ear into the pit of her stomach to hear the gurgling. Groove on Lissa’s ravenous hunger.

“So I can eat now, right?” she said, voice laden with hope.

I felt the ridge of her ribcage arch. The little protrusion at the base of her sternum. I licked it. “No, I said. “Can’t get cocky. It could come back.” I pushed her back onto the bed and crawled up between her legs. I tied first one ankle, then the other.

“No…” Lissa had no power to resist. “Please, just some fucking thing. I don’t care what you decide. If I have that I can make it, Nico. I drank, it’s not water weight.”

Tying her wrists, I shook my head. I pulled up her camisole. “You’ve lost a couple bra sizes.”

“Imam’s a 32 A,” she said, staring down at the diminished mounds. I saw a light go on in her eyes. I don’t think she’d realized how skinny she’d got until this moment. “And she got David Bowie.” Already Lissa was conjuring with her new body, her movie-star status. Good. I could use this.

“So you really want me to slack off? Risk everything over a couple croutons?”

Lissa’s stomach grumbled as she looked away. Honestly, I didn’t care then about her emotions. The slimness of her upper chest transfixed me like a sword. Her breastbone was utterly beautiful. Her BMI was nearly to where mine had been, when people started to ask questions, puzzle at my loose clothing, my new lean line. The dark rims under my eyes. I had to fuck her legless. Eat her alive.

So I did.

I shoved pillows under her back, stretching her belly absolutely taut. I smoothed the palm of my hand over its lean contours, stroking the faint groove on either side of the hard central bulge above her backbone. When Lissa did this to me, she could tickle my backbone from the front. On her the muscle hadn’t atrophied, of course, but it had fallen in, her belly, and I messed with it. Rubbing a swirl around her belly button. Feeling for the faint, tiny tom tom of hunger.

“Oranges,” I said, fingers soft on her tummy. “Crackling onions in butter. Steak sliced thick and rare, with a crisp of fat.” The gurgle became a rumble. Lissa moaned. “Sharp cheddar on crackers, red wine—earthy, dark. Chocolate. Big chunks, crumbly.” Her eyes got instantly wet. Lissa loved chocolate, dark as sin. “Buttery scones, crumpets leaking butter down your wrist…”

“Fuck fuck FUCK!” Lissa was shouting. “Stop! Nico, please…”

I had heard that word so many times now. I drew a nail along the curve of her rib arch. “This shows so nice now, Lissa.”

Her breathing got frantic. “I know, I know. I can do this.” But her belly kept rebelling, roiling, the images stacked up too many to sort through and I knew she was doing it—seeing each one I’d laid out, cooked and prepared to perfection, photographing it in her mind’s eye. Delecting it with all her senses keen and cocked. The skin of her stomach pit popped in and out. Amazing. Her whole belly flexed.

“Tomorrow, I’m going to belt you.” I squeezed her little waist in both hands, savoring its flatness. “No water for eight hours. No food.”

Lissa sighed. “Eat me,” she said, parting her legs, utterly resigned.

Listening carefully to the symphony of sounds from her belly, I chewed the lean muscle of her thigh, toothing her to ecstasy. Then I got the crop. The slaps were so hollow now, almost echoey. Each one bringing up a fresh pang. Exquisite torture, I saw it in her eyes, the pain the churned acids brought.

“No more, Nico…”

I tapped her cinnamon nipples, grazing slaps that brought them on point, unbelievably sharp and upcurved on the sandy brown half-grapefruits. On me there’d be nothing of course, arms stretched like that, just pale nipples in their bone hollows. I whipped her bare ribs hard, to see her arch. Then back to her tummy, playing the drumhead until it folded inward, consuming itself. Growling with distress, the emptiness I longed for. I ripped off my shirt.

Lissa’s hands went to my chest, clawing convulsively at my ribs, the flat pats of my breasts. Hands brace on either side of her head I lowered my nipples to meet hers, my own chest so much leaner, fleshless. “You know I’m going to stare, Lissa…worse than you.” She nodded. Gulping. I dragged my chest across hers, my sharper ribs grating against her hardness. “I swear I’m going to drop ten pounds. I’ll pay for this, all of it.”

Our lips met in a phenomenal kiss. I don’t know if it was hunger or desperation or just pure sex that lit her, but something did. I wrestled my frame against hers, sitting up on her hipbone, my sex splayed on either side, riding her.

“Yes, yes,” Lissa cried. “Fucking yes.”

We woke up the next morning just like that. Me piled on top of Lissa. Both of us limp as wet rags. I pinched the sensitive inside of her left thigh and her eyes opened wide.

“Weigh in,” I said. Not cruelly. But the idea was cruel enough. She did not want to get up. I untied her wrists and ankles.

“What time is it?”

I pointed my chin at the clock, 6:15 AM. “Late,” I said, as Lissa dutifully slid her feet onto the scale. She let her weight onto it gradually. This was the fifth day. The number said 105 even.

I went to the closet and came back with the belt.

Lissa knew the drill. She raised her arms, the cammy lying slack across her chest. I nodded and she pulled it off. I wanted to see everything. I settled the belt just under her navel, then pulled it taut. “Suck in.” She arched her ribcage and inhaled, as I cinched the belt tighter. Lissa reached down and felt the thin crease of flesh. Not too bad, but I didn’t tell her that. She looked up at me with mournful eyes.

“It’s so freaking tight, Nico. I can’t breathe.”

“There’s four notches. If you lose it won’t be so bad.”

“It hurts.”

“Look, Lissa, I know it’s killing you but those models you hate so much? They have that all the time. Want to live skinny, not just be a tourist? Suck it up.”

Lissa whimpered, so I put her on the treadmill.

When she slowed I flicked her butt, the backs of her thighs, glistening with sweat. “Think how you’ll look in swimsuits, your ass so high and tight.”

That night I screwed up. I didn’t tie Lissa down.

I woke up to the sound of tinkling chains. Thank God I’m a light sleeper. I found Lissa in the kitchen, trying one key after another from my ring. Her basketball jersey was clearly bigger on her, dangling from her heaving shoulders as she fumbled with the lock on the fridge.

I held up the key. “Forget it, Lissa.”

She slumped down the door of the fridge without even turning around. “It’s my house,” she moaned. Her face turned, eyes shining with rage and desperation. “All I want is a mouthful of food in my own house.”

“It’s our place,” I said, unmoved. “I pay half the rent.” Stepping over Lissa, I went to the fridge and put the key in the lock. “Look. I’m going open this. Then you’ll have two choices. You can binge like the wind. Or you can make me a midnight feast.” I opened the door, exposing the contents in a flood of light.

Lissa’s body contracted, her knees up to her chest, as her eyes glowed in the reflected light, those black irises dilating wide. Scents flowed out, from her quivering nostrils I knew she caught them all. Cheese, yogurt, onions, fresh greens—I’d picked up the ingredients for an Italian dinner at Gristedes the day before, while Lissa was tied up and sleeping. My energy had been waning and my own weight had dipped to seventy-seven again. I wanted a real meal. Now I’d have it.

Lissa got to her feet almost robotically. Her world was a white blaze of hunger. Food meant more to her this moment than anything. Silhouetted in the door, the gap between her thighs was delicious. Would she ruin it now?

Thin biceps shaking—almost stringy now—Lissa began transferring ingredients from fridge to the counter. Filled a huge pot with water and put it on to boil. Her shoulders tensed when I turned on the lights, but she kept going. Sniffling and wiping her face as she sliced an onion fine, she began preparing my feast. Mincing garlic and mushrooms, tossing them into the Extra Virgin she’d put on a low heat. My own nostrils flared at the scent. Divine.

When Lissa opened a can of crushed tomatoes, the homey vegetable smell filled the kitchen. She bent almost double, clutching at her hollowed belly. “It fucking hurts, Nico. Nothing’s worth this.”

I’d had it. Thievery was one thing, but I couldn’t stand her lack of conviction.

“Grip the counter.” Lissa bent automatically and clutched the counter edge, obedience ingrained. Woozy with hunger, I got to my feet and went to her. Bracing my legs, I cinched the belt in two terrible notches. Lissa shuddered. “Face down over the pan. Legs apart.” I plucked the crop from the kitchen table.

As Lissa breathed in the rich cooking smells, I whipped the soft insides of her thighs, where the flesh melded into her heart-shaped ass—devastating now, at 105, slim perfection. Lissa’s quick gasps sucked the swirling scents into her nostrils. Her stomach complained loudly. A glorious, almost trilling sound. Her head jerked back as her tears spattered in the hot oil.

Lissa sniffled to herself as she finished the preparation, then brought the heavy-laden plates to the table, each one a concerto of basil and rosemary, olive oil and garlic. It struck me she’d prepared this as she’d like it—over-spiced, and over-sauced, everything in succulent heaps, excessive.

I patted the chair next to me and Lissa sat, just as I’d done for her breakfast.

I twirled the al dente pasta on the tines of my fork, letting the starch glisten in the bright kitchen light. It seemed unfair, that she got to own this tremendous, savage hunger while looking merely slim—and I had to feel the dead weight grow my stomach, the horrible, grounded sensation. Like a chained falcon, all I wanted was to fly like Lissa was doing now, eyes wild, soaring on the anguish I created with each lip-smacking bite.

Lissa began salivating; her throat undulating every few seconds as she swallowed, fingers flying to the napkin holder to catch a stray dribble. Again and again I caught her fingers straying toward this or that morsel, a bit of semolina bread or an olive. The riding crop lay next to my plate like another utensil. I used it, on her arms or shoulders. Sharp flicks that worked for a minute or two, then she’d try again. When I cleaned the sauce from my plate with a handful of bread—I could barely eat another bite—Lissa’s whole head lunged toward me, like a shark, white teeth snapping. I jerked away.

She was nearly out of her mind.

“Clean up, Lissa. Now.” I raised the crop. “Get aerobic.”

As she followed my command, bending and stretching as she painfully scraped all that uneaten food into the garbage, I took in the new tightness of her muscles, the sharper point at the angle of her jaw, the whitish shine at the balls of her shoulders. Then I mentally stripped her down further. Imagined her emaciated. Her tummy falling inward even while standing, her sloping ribcage burnished into golden highlights at the apex of each curving bone like antique walnut, her bony frame denuded of excess…

I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Lissa’s suffering was so naked. Her pangs so special because she was so tender. She’d had no notion of any of this before. How hunger never left you alone. Hadn’t learned to bow to the Voice and welcome each twist of pain.

But then, Lissa didn’t have the Voice. She had me.

I didn’t let up, and I didn’t give in. I worked her out until dawn, lashing her more frequently than ever as her muscles became sullen and rubbery. As she plodded on the treadmill I knew the rumble in her belly was all consuming, growing into a more insistent sting than I could raise with the crop. Even as the pink light filtering through the windows gilded the scene outside, I kept her marching.

That sixth day—Thursday—passed in a blur of images for me. I kept her steadily aerobic. The belt loosened somewhere near midday and I grabbed the scale. We found she’d reached 104 even.

Lissa looked at me from the scale. Eyes pleading. Thin brown fingers straying to the belt. Clearly she’d gone down a notch; the little ridge of flesh above and below it had all but vanished. She had a full day to go and no more than a pound to lose. I could afford to be lenient, especially if it insured her cooperation for these last 24 hours.

But her pleas had been nonstop, a nagging post nasal drip of specific ideas that were truly all the same—different combinations of yogurt or milk or Saltines and anchovies that for this reason or that must be acceptable. Not real food at all. Lissa was like a child arguing illogically with a grown up, never acknowledging defeat because some combination of “But I want this” has to work.

But then her body had reverted, too. From woman to girl in twenty pounds. At 104, very part of her was smaller, tighter. Her chest now a simple affair, tight young muscles gripping at the ribcage; the keel of her breastbone just beginning to poke through for real, her hipbones rearing up to stretch the waistband of her panties into a taut bridge. Bending forward with a pang, her thigh rose from the sheets. So much slimmer now, the muscle reduced to that demure girlishness I knew Lissa lusted after. The look those models had sported with such seeming ease.

Now she knew the truth. Nothing came easy. Nor would that last pound.

And it didn’t.

Thursday evening the pain and stiffness from the belt made calisthenics impossible, and I refused to take it off. So I had her show me her model walk. Pacing the chilly hall in nothing but panties, from the kitchen—where I sat—to the living room and back again. Lissa had lost a mere half-pound, and the screen test was only ten hours away. As she swayed toward me up the hall I could hear her hunger bubbling up, an echoey rumble like distant thunder.

Reaching the kitchen, she gave me a saucy glare, brief hipshot pose, then turned on her heel. Bright hall light gilding the sinuous curve of her ass; she loped away like a penned cheetah. Exquisite. Muscles supple and lean, worked down to the beauty that had lurked for so long beneath Lissa’s smooth flesh.

The last day, Friday, became a grueling marathon. I flogged Lissa’s sweet ass, her freshly visible shoulder blades. Her emotions were all absolutes now—her childish stare full of hate. I didn’t care. We both wanted this and I was going to make it happen. I hovered over her, my bony body nearly naked in a g-string. Meals or not, the riding crop wobbled in my weak hands, my bony arms quaking nervously with the strain of every lick I delivered. By the afternoon we were both near tears, but when Lissa climbed onto the scale it gave up its treasure: 103. Even.

Lissa fit the glass slipper.

There was no time to think. It was after three o’clock. I’d laid out our clothes.

We hopped in the shower together.

I arched my ribcage under the hot stream, ribs popping up and out beneath Lissa’s bleak, hungry gaze. I envied her this. The cruel claws scraping at her insides, nonstop pain she hated just a little less than the lash. For the entire week guilt had surged in my chest. Now, the island looming for both of us, I knew my self-loathing would soon go into remission as the pangs swarmed back full force into my empty belly. I’d earned this—my own relentless fast.

XIV SCREEN TEST

Lissa and I arrived early at the appointed place, a public space in midtown, called the Atrium. Vaulted ceilings, fountains, a rainforest of shrubbery. Plenty of places to hide a film crew. Especially when the camera’s the size of a baseball. This would be their first glimpse of both of us.

Emily had said to dress super thin so I’d bought a pair of those jean things that fit like leggings. They made my tube legs look spectacular, almost alien—thighs that could never touch. The flared waist of the short military jacket I wore made no secret of this—my whisper thin ass cheeks, the astounding gap the knit jeans made plain. Somehow the tiny jeans detailing of patch pockets, rivets, and gold thread only underscored the drama of seventy-two pounds on a five-ten frame. The way people stared as I entered the Atrium I might as well have been the President of the United States, or on fire.

Lissa garnered looks, too. The midnight blue mini dress I’d picked out for her flaunted her model thighs. When she pulled off her puffy coat as we sat down, I was freshly delighted. The plunging top perfectly framed the faintly visible laddering of her breastbone, the elegant wires of her clavicles. The material clung tight to a girlish torso that practically screamed aloud the deprivation it had taken to acquire.

Suffering her smile did nothing to acknowledge.

Lissa had learned well. Just sell it, I’d told her, and she was. To the manner born, all the way, she shook off the waiter who approached us. I ordered a tea with lemon.

Let the games begin.

After half an hour, Emily sauntered in. Eyes huge and shining.

We both stood. I made the introductions. Normally a bit taciturn, Emily seemed close to bursting.

“They got the footage,” she said, words tripping out fast. “And they love you both. I mean they really, really love you.” My heart lurched. Lissa’s stomach gurgled. “It’s on for tomorrow morning.”

After that it was just logistics.

The pace was thrilling.

Contracts arrived for both of us the same day, by courier. I encouraged her to sign like I did, boldly, without looking at the scary details. “They have to include all this stuff,” I told her. “It’s just legal crap.”

The second she’d signed, Lissa called her boss and quit.

I dipped into savings to pay up the apartment for two months. Did the other little annoying things—stopped cable bills, mail, the newspaper.

Later that day we got emailed an itinerary. A car would arrive to take us to JFK the next morning, where a private jet would be waiting. The cameras would be rolling from that moment on, Emily told me. Our experience would be like that of the mythical North American bison at the hands of the Indian—no part would be allowed to waste.

The night was almost unbearable. We both sat up nibbling bits of things in the fridge, the last of my meager meals. But neither of us wanted a tummy bulge. I know Lissa was a little afraid. She couldn’t rule her hunger like I could. She was also new to the public stares, the immediate adulation of strangers. Lips parting like the Red Sea at the passage of her perfect ass, the display of her new, tight chest. Her slim thighs.

Lissa had had a woman’s body, full and gorgeous and lush. Now she had a girl’s—slim, heartbreaking, fresh. And more than anything, small. Her head even seemed a little larger. Fingers had to touch her skin, her hard, shining muscles. Stroke that hair.

As we rode in the car out to the airport, she slept a bit. I watched the dawn light on the planes of her face, the cords of her throat.

Lissa, I realized, could get very thin. I’d seen this for a while, but now that she was truly at a model weight, the fact was clear—she had the proportions, the ideal frame. Emily had said this, too, after seeing her for the first time in the Atrium. “She’s got the perfect bones,” Emily had breathed over my cell, in a dreamy voice, “Like Iman, like all those Somali models…there’s no limit with her.”

Gazing at Lissa’s still form as we neared the airport on that freezing February morning, all I could think was: I’ve changed the course of this girl’s life. Whether for better or worse who knew?

Either way, the path we were on would pass through a hell neither of us could ever have conceived.