Breastfed
She wore a bra when he fucked her, or he didn’t fuck her at all.
‘Oh,’ he’d said, his face falling that first night when he’d unwrapped her with all the patience of a child ripping open an especially large Christmas gift.
‘What?’ she’d replied, but she’d already known from the familiar way his eye travelled the well-worn path from her collarbone down to where her heavy breasts sagged over her ribcage, covering the angry red welts left by her bra, down down down to where they rested against her belly. He wasn’t the first to be disappointed by their weight and shape. Indeed, she herself had felt that same pang of dismay whenever she’d observed her form in the mirror, drooping and grotesque and so unlike the perfect and perky-breasted women gracing her Instagram feed.
‘It’s just… that’s a very good bra, isn’t it? Pushup? Very…deceptive,’ he’d said, leveling the accusation at her offending breasts, his joking tone belied by a furrowed brow. ‘You don’t have any secret children you haven’t told me about, do you? Because it looks like you’ve been breastfeeding a kid or two.’ He’d cupped her breasts then, raised them and let them fall, as if illustrating the consequences of nature.
‘No,’ she’d replied truthfully, biting the inside of her burning cheek and casting a blurring eye around the room for her shirt. ‘I don’t have kids. They’ve just always been like this.’
‘Oh, well, I guess there’s always surgery,’ he’d said, replacing the red lace bra against her breasts and turning her around to do up the clasps. ‘Maybe I’ll buy you a new pair for Christmas.’
She’d smiled gratefully, her sinking heart lifted by the prospect of a Christmas shared. A week later he’d given her a drawer in his dresser.
‘Open it,’ he’d instructed with an indulgent smile.
Puzzled but excited to think of the pyjamas and toiletries she would no longer have to ferry between her apartment and his, she’d pulled open the drawer only to find that it was already occupied by a single black satin bra, a white price tag hanging from an expensive strap.
‘It’s for you,’ he’d said, coming up behind her. ‘Try it on.’
Over the months he’d filled the drawer with bras. Balconette bras of pale pink silk and midnight blue Florence net. Pushup bras of ebony lace and pastel polka dots. Bras that were too small, that squeezed and shaped, bruised and chafed. She wore them all without complaint, but with the pinch of each new band and strap she felt something seed and take root within her. A growing resentment. She nurtured it like a child in the womb.
It was still dark when she woke one night, the room lit by only by a stray moonbeam that silvered the skin of her breasts. The bra she’d worn to bed squeezed and cut more than usual. She felt claustrophobic and found that she couldn’t breathe, and so she twisted her arm behind her back and released the three little metal clasps that dug like fingernails into her skin.
She sighed a deep breath as the bra came away. Her breasts felt heavier than normal, and achingly, pleasantly full. She cupped them curiously, and her hands came away wet with milk that shone pearlescent in the moonlight. The milk dripped from her breasts and onto her belly, ran rivulets down her thighs; miraculous and fecund as the Tigris and Euphrates.
A rumbling snore shook her from her marvel. Next to her he slept, his face unguarded as a child’s in slumber. She covered her chest with her arms but his eyes remained closed, his mouth open. On her other side, the discarded bra taunted.
She pushed herself to seated and leaned over his sleeping form. Her breasts swung like twin pendulums over his head. She lowered them down down down until her nipple was in his mouth. In his sleep he began to suckle reflexively like a newborn at the teat. She felt the milk let down with each pull at her breast until its trickle became a torrent and he choked, drowned, stilled.
AMBER ERWIN currently spends her time looking after her six-month-old daughter with her husband and two cats. She is slowly renovating a Victorian terrace fixer-upper and works as a crisis and resilience manager. In stolen moments, she writes and edits her first WIP, a fantasy novel about secret covens and a modern-day witch hunt.
