[Report This]Date: March 19 2024 11:09 PM Title: Chapter 12: The Heart Grows Fonder
I think the biggest thing that stuck out to me in the entire chapter was Trish comparing her game with Thomas with playing with a pet.
Now, at first glance (particularly in stories on this site) that might be looked at as a demeaning thing, like Trish thinks less of him or puts herself above him. And while I do think that Trish's view on humanity as a whole has been changing for a while now, I don't think that's what she means here (at least not entirely).
I think the comparison has more to do with the fact that her enjoyment from playing with Thomas came from knowing how much he loved what she was doing with him and what it made him feel for her. We don't play fetch with our dogs because we just love to throw a ball around; we do it because we love to see how happy it makes them to go fetch it. The same goes for petting a cat; it makes us happy when they purr because we know that means we're doing something that they enjoy.
Trish liked playing with Thomas more than she admitted to him (at least I felt as though her answer to him didn't match the enthusiasm she had for it in the narrative). She probably played it off because she didn't want to give him the wrong idea and make him think she got something sexual out of it, which she didn't. Her fun was based entirely on his pleasure, and once she figured out what he liked, she really got into it, to the point where she wasn't going to stop until he said the safe word (which we know because she wasn't the least bit worried that she had overdone it when he screamed "Jumbo! Jumbo!).
So I think that's what she meant when she compared getting him off to playing with a pet. She had fun because he had fun. If wasn't into it, she would have been bored and probably hated doing it.
Of course, having said all that, Trish's view on humanity has been changing for a while now, so I can't completely discount her starting to view her relationship with Thomas through that lens. She said a while ago that she wasn't really human anymore and even argued when Thomas tried to tell her that she was. She's also commented in the past about how cute everyone is getting as she gets bigger and bigger. What's interesting about this is that it has been viewed as a negative by Trish throughout most of the story (mainly her depression over thinking that everyone thinks she's a monster, even if they like it), but that's starting to change, with this chapter including a big step in that development.
Speaking of said development, I loved the back and forth Trish went through in the first half of this chapter, battling herself over dual feelings of embarrassment and sexiness over her size. The embarrassment has always been there, even with the help of Thomas's confidence building, but we saw her start to feel sexy over her size at the end of the previous chapter, when she compared it to getting her curves in before the other girls. This chapter both built on that and dealt with the head on collision it was bound to have with her natural discomfort over being big very well.
It makes sense that, with a lover who's into it, her wanting to be desired would win out over the awkwardness she feels about the size difference. And the way she went about trying to get more of that feeling, using stuff she read on the forum and slowly building confidence after some direction from Thomas, was as cute as it was erotic, all without her feeling like a different person. I'm really interested to see where this budding confidence in her size goes from here.
Thomas knowing what Trish is into, both when he embarrassed her (I like how she was embarrassed by him knowing about her bondage kink despite her knowing about his much less common and far more embarrassing one) and when he helped her get off. The latter, in particular, was pretty impressive, as he knew just what little things to do to make Trish's fantasy feel more real to her, which I think is why it turned out better than she had expected. Besides, your therapist is going to know about your bondage fetish. I mean, come on.
But I think Thomas's knowledge on how to get Trish going is yet another thing that shows that he loves her as a person and isn't just into her because of his own fetish. He knows her very well, and he uses that knowledge to do everything he can to make her feel as good as possible. Seeing Trish incorporate what he was doing into her fantasy really helped show that he knew what he was doing, too.
Jeb's acceptance of this situation was kind of funny to me, too. I mean, it makes perfect sense, but it's just funny that he had to go from "there's plenty of places to bury a body out here" to giving Thomas a place to stay is pretty funny, especially since he clearly still doesn't very much care for Thomas. He's a good dad, though, and he's just happy to see his daughter happy. We talk a lot about Thomas being the only one that doesn't see Trish as a monster, but I'm pretty sure Jeb still sees her as his little girl. He's just not much for those icky feelings that everyone else has, so it's harder for him to convey that
Looking forward to the next one!