Fifty Shades Fatter - A Sequel (Fifty Shades of Neigh Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  "How many times do I have to explain that I was drunk?" yells Jesús, but I hardly hear him. Oh my God. Pregnant. How can I be pregnant? How am I going to tell Crispian? I sit down heavily in a battered armchair and seek solace in literature. I'm opposite the romance section - the pink kind. Flame-haired girls swoon in the arms of pirates, vampires and cowboys. My life wasn't supposed to go like this.

  "Can I help you?" A shop assistant appears from behind a shelf. She has black-framed half-glasses and floppy blonde hair.

  "Um..." I say.

  Kate swoops in. "Hey," she said. "Excuse her. She's just had some bad news. We're here about the Fupacabra sighting?"

  "The who what now?" Blondie-flop pushes back her long bangs and giggles.

  "It's the new cryptid that's sweeping the Pacific Northwest."

  "Oh. Well. I guess the sasquatches were getting a little tired"

  "Totally. So there was an employee got freaked out by this thing, is that right?"

  "Imogen, yes. She's out back." She frowns down at me. "Are you okay? Can I get you a glass of water or something?"

  I shake my head. I don’t need her pity. Her blonde pity.

  “Sorry about her,” says Kate. “She’s not always so surly - she’s just got this thing about blondes.”

  “Oh,” says Blondie-flop. “Meyer-Swan Syndrome?”

  “Well fuck me sideways. Is that a thing now?”

  “It is round here,” says Blondie-flop, with a dark, mean look at me. “Since those stupid vampire books hit the shelves you can’t move for dumb brunettes with chips on their shoulders.”

  “I’m going outside,” I mutter, getting to my feet.

  As I storm out of the door I hear Blondie’s voice calling to me – “So you were never a cheerleader, Bella – get over it already!”

  Who the fuck is Bella?

  I look for Jesús but he’s nowhere to be seen. The car is locked. I peer into the adjoining store, one of those fancy artisan cupcake places, all swirls of pastel pretty icing and candied stars and hearts. They remind me of ponies and I start to weep softly, remembering my predicament. How am I going to tell Crispian? And worse, what if he wants to name it Pinkie Pie?

  Sometimes all a girl really wants are empty calories, so I go in and buy the biggest, frothiest, frilliest cake I can see, a great white chocolate and raspberry confection covered in vanilla buttercream, white chocolate curls and little pink crunchy candy sprinkles. I’ve never really had a craving for cakes before but it’s probably the baby who craves sugar.

  Still no sign of Jesús. I suspect him of lurking off to find somewhere he can smoke, so cake in hand I walk gingerly down the alley by the side of the bookstore. I find myself in a small, concrete yard that is mostly dominated by the smell of a big green flyblown dumpster. Opposite the dumpster is the back wall of the bookstore. There are three doors in it. Whoa. Deja vu. It's like my dream.

  I love how you can never resist stating the fucking obvious at least twice.

  - Where the hell have you been?

  The usual. I was freelancing for one of those Kindle porn types. My goodness, those ladies have vivid imaginations. I didn't even know tentacle monsters could become billionaires. Good to know the American dream is alive and well even for horny, mutant cephalopods, don't you think?

  - No. If you don't mind I'm trying to foreshadow the plot here.

  Right. Sorry. I shall stand here and wave the giant symbological Hammer of Foreshadowing above the clanging great fucking anvil of Subtlety. Carry on.

  - Thank you.

  It's just like my dream. Eerie. Uncanny. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as a hot breeze blows by me, silent as a plot-point, smelly as a dumpster. Something significant is going to happen, I can feel it.

  No, that's just bad writing.

  I sigh inwardly.

  How does one sigh inwardly? I've always wondered how that worked.

  - Will you please shut the fuck up?

  The dumpster behind me shivers on its wheels. A face peers out from the side.

  It looks like a girl - a round faced girl with short, scruffy black hair and round, staring blue eyes. She frowns, wrinkles her nose and hisses at me. It's then I realise that she's wearing a sort of alice band with a pair of pink felt cat ears attached. At least, I think they're pink - or used to be. Now they're more the kind of colour you would associate with someone who lives behind dumpsters - a kind of scrubby pinky grey. Also most of the sequins have fallen off.

  "Baka ne," she says, or something like it. Her eyes are fixed on my cake.

  "Are you hungry?" I ask.

  "Watashi neko-chan desu ne!"

  "Neigh?"

  "Baka ne gaijin! Baka baka!" She jumps out from behind the dumpster and I run, my heart pounding, back down the alley. There I collide with Jesús, who was predictably lurking at the mouth of the alley with an illegal cigarette in his hand.

  "Hanna, what the fuck?"

  "It's back there! It's in the dumpster!"

  "El Fupacabra?" Jesús runs to the back yard. I hear him sigh. "Where?"

  "It was hanging out next to the dumpster," I yell. "It's some kind of cat-girl-thing. It stared at my cupcake."

  He walks back towards me. "I'm so glad you're holding a cupcake right now," he says. "Or my mind would have gone all kind of nasty places. Did it say anything?"

  "Um...baka neigh? Watashi something. Isn't that like a sauce you get with sushi?"

  Kate comes tearing out of the bookstore. "Where is it? Did you see it? Did it attack you?"

  "It speaks fangirl Japanese, apparently," says Jesús.

  "No shit? It's some kind of feral weeb?"

  I sigh and hold out the cupcake. "Hold this," I say. This has been a long time coming but I feel I deserve it considering the day I'm having; I take a nineteenth century section break by falling to the ground in a dead faint.

  Chapter Seven

  Seriously. It's A Real Book

  The next nine days were rough on Kate and Jesús. Time (which was never very well represented in these books in the first place - let's face it) stretched to fit the size of Hanna's newest crisis and in reality those nine short days felt like the length of the Upper Triassic - albeit a really boring version of the Upper Triassic in which synapsids, early dinosaurs and huge leaps in plant evolution were replaced by a small, tiresome young girl crying quietly but conspicuously in the hopes of getting someone's attention.

  At first they tried using her as a pizza holder again, but she just made it soggy. Kate attempted to console her but Hanna rebuffed all attempts at cheer-uppage on the grounds that after waiting her entire life to experience some form of drama, she was finally having a genuine crisis. It was at this point that Jesús suggested they buy a dehumidifier to cope with the staggering amounts of water that Hanna kept crying into the apartment. While even Kate conceded that this was unkind of him, she had to admit that discovering that Abraham Lincoln, Fuck Lord of the Moon had already been 'taken' as a porn title had really knocked seven shades of shit out of Jesús' ego as a writer. Okay - he conceded that Fistlords of the Anal Planet had 'a kind of B-movie grandeur', but felt sure he could never live up to Abraham Lincoln, Fuck Lord of the Moon.

  It was a difficult time, although it didn't compare to day ten, the Monday before Crispian was due to get out of prison. On that day Jesús, Kate, Liz, Timothy Grope and even her own mother would have been cheerfully prepared to load Hanna into a nuclear powered cannon and fire her directly into the searing heart of the actual fucking sun.

  Let's watch, shall we?

  I stare at the pink and blue box in front of me. Why is this happening again? Why do I seem to spend so much time staring at things - my reflection, my shoes, my own hands? Am I simply unnaturally observant?

  "No, you're just really fucking weird," says Kate, hand on hip.

  I stare up at her, uncomprehending.

  "You were narrating out loud again," she says, and pushes the pregnancy testing kit towards me
again. "So, as I was saying, before the last time I suggested it and you started howling that your life is over and cried for the next four days, why don't you take another test in case the last one was wrong?"

  I blink back tears. No, I must be brave. "But you said the tests were so simple that even an idiot could use them."

  She sighs. "Yeah, I know, but...well. Anyway. There's always a chance it could have been a false positive."

  I shake my head. "No. There isn't."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I feel pregnant. I can feel it moving inside me."

  Kate frowns. "Dude, you don't feel them moving until like four, five months, I think. That's probably just gas."

  I place my hand protectively over my belly. We've been through a lot together, me and my little Growler. There have been times when I wondered if it was going to be just the two of us forever. What will Crispian say? Will he be happy? Will he be horrified? I haven't figured out how to tell him. "It stands to reason," I murmur. "That my child is going to be more advanced than most."

  She stares at me for a long moment. "Yeah, sure. Stands to reason. I'm just saying that if you think you're gonna gestate for like a month and then Crispian's gonna give you a c-section with his bare teeth, isn't it better to be sure? I mean, I'd want to be sure - especially if it turns out to be some telepathic CGI hellbaby named Tedia or Clauresa. I'd want to make sure that thing stays the fuck away from my boyfriend."

  "What would I want with a fucking baby?" mutters Jesús, from the depths of the couch.

  "I dunno, man. It's like that dingo and the baby thing, only even worse, if you can believe it."

  I glare at him. Why is he even here? Why can't he write pornography in his room? I'm tired of having people listening to my every move. He ignores me and carries on typing.

  "Look, just do the test," says Kate. "You're probably right. You probably are knocked up with your locked-up boo's baby, but let's just be absolutely sure, okay?"

  "One minute you say the test was wrong, next you say it was right - which is it?"

  "Well, pee on a fucking stick again and we'll find out, won't we? There's shit that can make the tests go wrong, like medication and stuff."

  "I'm not on any medication," I say. Jesús mutters something that sounds like 'You should be', and continued rattling the keys of his laptop. Was he always this passive aggressive or was I just not paying attention?

  "Okay, but what about booze?" says Kate. "Your body wasn't exactly a temple the day you did that test, Hanna - more like a toxic waste dump, what with the Jell-O shots and the tequila and your underwear ending up in the George Foreman grill. There's lots of chemicals that can fuck with the result of a pregnancy test."

  "What about toilet cleaner?" I murmur.

  Jesús stops typing and peers up over the back of the couch. "¡Ay caramba! You're drinking detergent now?"

  "No, I didn't drink it! I just...may have accidentally exposed to the test to toilet cleaner..."

  Now they're both staring at me. Great.

  "How do you 'accidentally expose' a pregnancy testing kit to toilet cleaner?" asks Kate. Jeez. She looks pissed.

  I stare down at my hands. "I kind of dropped the stick in the toilet."

  "What?"

  "I had my hands full, and I didn't want to put anything down in that dirty, scummy restroom because of germs...and it just...got away from me."

  "Let me get this straight," says Kate. "You dropped the stick into the toilet bowl?"

  "Yes."

  "How long was it in there?"

  "Um...I don't know. I had to scoop it out with the box because I don't think that toilet had been flushed for a very long time."

  Jesús groans. "You left the testing stick floating around in a toilet bowl full of God knows how many other women's piss?"

  "I think we have our false positive," says Kate, and pushes the box into my hands. "Let's try this again, huh?"

  I go to the bathroom and come out fifteen minutes later, somehow lighter and strangely bereft. There is only one line on the testing window. "Maybe I should do another one," I whisper. My Little Growler. You must be there. I felt you.

  "Do as many as you like," says Kate. "Just remember to use your own urine sample this time, okay?"

  I am adrift as I make my way to the office. In one short lunch break my whole world has fallen apart. I was so sure. I was so certain that I was having his baby. And now it's like a part of me has gone. I think I may need time. I need to mourn.

  Timothy Grope is no help. "Well, you're only twenty minutes late," he says. "That's gotta be a new record for you."

  "I'm..." I take a deep breath. "I'm really trying my best here. I am."

  "Aren't we all?" he says, and dumps a pile of papers on my desk before I can object. "Listen," he says. "I wanted to talk to you about your slush pile reading."

  "Is it...not good?"

  "It's...different," he says, and picks out a chapter marked with my pink Hello Kitty post-it notes. "Like here. You said this manuscript needed to be more like Tess of the D'Urbervilles."

  "Uh huh. I did."

  "Okay. And this next one you said was too much like Tess of the D'Urbervilles."

  I nod. "That's right. People will think it's copied."

  Timothy Grope nods again. "Okey-dokey, Goldilocks. And you know what you said about this one?" He waves another submission under my nose.

  "I don't know. I read a lot of manuscripts."

  He adjusts his black-frame glasses on his nose, clears his throat and quotes. "'Dry, pointless, full of cows'. Which is interesting, because that submission actually was Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Hanna, do you have any literary opinions that don't directly relate to Tess of the D'Urbervilles?"

  "Er...I have some thoughts on Jane Eyre?"

  "Okay. Good. And what are those?"

  "That she should have married him before he got all gimpy."

  Timothy Grope frowns. "Okay. Oh dear." He sighs and adjusts his ponytail. "You know - we're doing the best we can here, Hanna. I know your mother's name still holds some weight in certain circles and she's a great woman - I admire her a lot. Perhaps even more when I see what she's had to deal with."

  "I don't understand."

  "I know you don't, Hanna. Which is why I feel kind of bad for what I'm about to do..."

  "Holy fucking shit," says Liz, loudly, her voice carrying through the partitions.

  Timothy Grope looks up. She comes hurrying over, as fast as her pencil skirt will allow. "Beautiful Misery," she says. "Miserable Beauty. Gorgeous Mess. Oxymoronic Disaster. Whatever it was called. Remember that one?"

  "I do," I whisper, staring at my hands.

  "Huh?"

  "Exquisite Trauma. I read it last week. It was so moving - I couldn't get it out of my head."

  "The only thing that book moved was my fucking bowels," says Timothy Grope. "And to add insult to injury the author didn't even print the thing on absorbent paper. Wasn't that based on Twilight fanfiction?"

  "Based. More like Find/Replaced," snorts Liz. "But whatever. Doubleday bought it. Seven figures."

  "Really? Why?"

  She shrugs. "I guess they think it'll sell."

  "But it was terrible. Beyond terrible. The main characters were a couple of whiny, self-obsessed fucking assholes and the entire 'plot' - such as it was - revolved around them having long, never-ending circular conversations in which none of their imagined problems were ever resolved."

  "I liked it," I murmur.

  Timothy Grope snorts, but Liz holds up a hand. "Did you, Hanna? What exactly did you like about it?"

  "I liked the characters. I cared about them. And I wanted them to fix their problems."

  "Spoilers - they don't. There are four goddamn sequels planned," says Timothy Grope, scowling at my computer screen.

  “Huh,” says Liz. “Hanna, could you read something for me?”

  Timothy Grope glances up. “But I was just about...”

  Liz shakes her
head, cutting him off, then grabs a manuscript from her desk. “Take your time, Hanna,” she says, placing it beside my keyboard. “I really want to know what you think, okay?”

  “You don’t think...”

  She drags him away from my desk. I turn to the first page of the manuscript and begin to read. I'm still reading three hours later when it's time to go home. There's a new message on my phone - from Kate.

  hey shitlord. at neighs place - mr beige dropped off keys. can't believe i hit that.

  Why can't she speak English? After a while of frowning at the display I remember that Mr. Beige was Kate's nickname for Crispian's brother Bennett, with whom she had some kind of terrible pelvic collision on the night when Jesús sexually harassed me in the parking lot and Crispian came to rescue me after I drunk dialled him from the bathroom.

  It still makes no sense, so I call her back.

  "What?"

  "Um...hello?"

  "Oh, it's you," says Kate, in a breathless kind of way. "What up?"

  "I got your message."

  "Uh huh? And?"

  "I didn't quite...um...what did you mean when you said you were at Neigh's place?"

  She groans. "Uhh...like...umm...like what I said, dumbass. His brother dropped off the keys to his apartment for tomorrow."

  "And you're there? At Crispian's apartment?"

  "Ohh, I'm there baby," she says. Has she been running? "You never told me he had a pool table."

  He does?

  I put the manuscript in my satchel and head off. I try to picture Kate wandering around Crispian's palatial apartment, but it doesn't seem right. She doesn't belong there. On the way to his building I remind myself over and over again that had she been the one to interview him she would never have tried to seduce him, mostly because he's not a skinny Mexican transvestite and also because Crispian likes ladies, not gross slovenly drunks who wear daiquiri-stained t-shirts and show their breasts to convicts.