'Oh fuzz,' Belinda thought; it was her boss, Gaia Guzman.
"You, uh, you miss your lunch?" the middle-manager asked distractedly as she rummaged in the breakroom cupboards.
"Y-yeah I was, ah, in a call..." Belinda said, squirming in her chair.
She knew that Gaia could check that easily, but the lie was out of her mouth faster than she could think it through.
"Good. Um, commendable. You seen the... ah shit, do we have ANY decent coffee or just that recyc swill?" Gaia swore.
Belinda felt slightly more at ease when it was clear from the ginger and muddled way that her boss was moving about that Gaia was suffering from her usual hangover. Ms. Guzman was twice divorced, perpetually 'Thirty-sumthin' and doomed for a lifetime in middle management. In all honesty, she was far from the worst boss Belinda ever had, and was even one of the nicer 'suits' among the glut of corporate professionals at the local branch. But it was clear that the struggles of Yancy Robotics would not turned around through any diligence or ingenuity on Gaia's part. At her best, she could steer the ship along its charted course through troubled water, and that was seldom enough.
"Fuh... fricking instacoffee crap..." Gaia grumbled, fiddling with the inevitably Yancy brand coffeemaker, crinkling her nose at the bitter stench of the brew as it gurgled into her paper cup.
She sighed and leaned against the counter, and Belinda, still frozen in her chair, couldn't help but glance at ALL of her boss as she slurped up another serving of caffeine. Life in 0b-City, far from the glamor and excitement of the bigger, richer cities, was drab and dull. Most of the pleasures available were cheap corporate products designed to build up addiction and turn casual customers into lifelong consumers. Gaia was a consumer in spades, dulling her sorrows with booze, tacky holovid programs and fast food and Belinda wondered if all of THAT was waiting for her somewhere in her future.
Gaia scratched her belly through her blouse, her brown fingers carelessly kneading into her fleshy middle and failing to note that she had buttoned her shirt wrong. She idly smoothed her wrinkled blazer to little effect, her chunky upper arms straining the seams of her sleeves, and those slight movements made her heavy, fulsome breasts wobble back in forth above her blubbery potbelly. She gave Belinda a good-natured if lopsided smile, her double chin wet with dribbles of the tepid 'coffee', her frizzy brown hair slowly escaping from her loose ponytail and threaded through with half a dozen pens and touchpad styluses; it was distressingly easy to tell how long between baths Guzman was by noting the movement of those items.
"So. You, uh, you just sit down?" Gaia managed after nearly choking on another gulp of the crappy caffy sludge.
"Oh. Um, yeah, I finished my lunch, and I'm just going to go to my desk..." Belinda replied, half standing from her chair.
"Ah, oh wait! There's a cake," Gaia said, looming over the guilty office drone and all but drooling at the cheap and half-demolished pile of chocolatey confectionary.
"I always forget when we uh, when I schedule these. Did I? Maybe HR wanted to boost morale with the ongoing crunch... well, I'm the boss, so I'm gonna have... oh, lets have three, hmm?"
Belinda bobbed her head slightly, unsure if her perpetually hungover boss was talking to her or not. Gaia clumsily hacked off three huge pieces of cake and plopped them onto a flimsy paper plate, somehow managing to juggle the pieces back to safety after the plate bent in the middle threatened to drop the lot onto the floor.
"Sh'good shiiiizzz..." Gaia mumbled around a bulging mouthful, chocolate smeared across her face.
"I'm, uh, gonna go..."
"Nonshensh! You uh, you dint havva piecsh yet! S'for erryone, not just my fatass," Gaia burbled amiably with her mouth full.
"Oh, I had a puh..." Belinda caught herself.
She couldn't say that she already had a piece; Gaia wasn't THAT dumb to miss that kind of inconsistency.
"I'm on a diet..." she managed to mutter out.
"Oh come on, a skinny thing like you can stand to indulge now and then, live a little. Otherwise I'll have to finish the damn thing myself," Gaia chortled; she certainly looked like she could with no difficulty.
"Well... maybe... just a piece..."
Belinda reached for the plastic knife to cut a sliver, but Gaia had already carved out a big piece.
"There, enjoy!"
Belinda glumly forced it down bit by bit as Gaia greedily cut herself another portion. The third piece was even less enjoyable than the other two already resting in the suffering pencil-pusher's middle on top of her lunch. By the time Belinda was finished, her belly was painfully swollen. She gingerly prodded her over-stuffed gut, beads of sweat standing on her forehead from the effort of keeping it all down and at the realization that a sliver of her pale stomach was showing as her skirt and shirt failed to meet over her bellybutton.
"Ah, that hit the spot," Gaia said, drumming her fingers on her own chubby middle.
She had made good on her promise; anybody thinking there would be pieces to take home after work would be sorely disappointed.
"Little sugar never hurt anybody TOO much," Gaia, clearly a health professional, yawned happily. "Better hurry up and eat my lunch before this drags out too long, got a lot of... stuff to get through."
Belinda couldn't help but blink in surprise; lunch, on top of all that cake? She hadn't eaten nearly as much as her portly supervisor, and she felt miserable. To think that someone could be so gluttonous to eat half a cake meant to feed a department and then want more...
"Hey. Linda. Um, that's your name right?" Gaia interrupted Belinda's thoughts.
"Oh! Um, yes?"
"I think I just had a good idea..."
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