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Vaggie was starting to get worried.
Charlie had been standing in front of the gilded full-length oval mirror for what had been close to twenty minutes now. Such vanity was uncharacteristic of her. It was true that Charlie was meticulous about her appearance, bursting out into the cynical world like a glitter bomb in her bright suits and trailing plait.
Vaggie had assumed that she was changing for bed or dabbing on an overnight face mask. But there was no peppy humming of showtunes under her breath, no breathless chatter about tomorrow’s activity itinerary. In all that time, there hadn’t been one peep out of her, just a skin-crawling silence that made Vaggie want to exchange the hairbrush that she’d been dragging absently through her hair for her spear. It was as if Charlie had slipped out through a crack in reality, even though she was standing just a few feet away. She wanted to say something, but her own voice had left her, like they were stranded in the vacuum of space.
Since the hotel had been rebuilt, its doors had opened to an influx of sinners, much to Charlie’s delight. Her dream was coming true in ways she'd never imagined. But the boom in business had showered them in a bombardment of work. Charlie had thrown herself into it with so much vigor that Vaggie had become concerned about her health. On more than one occasion, she’d gently shaken Charlie awake after finding her sprawled out over her desk, face soaking in a small puddle of her own drool. Juggling Alastor and Angel Dust along with the host of new responsibilities, she was stunned that Charlie had managed to hold onto her sanity. As much as Vaggie admired her lover’s persistence, there were times where it bordered on insanity. She never asked for help, even when she was drowning. But Charlie’s stress had manifested in other ways that were becoming increasingly harder to ignore.
Charlie Morningstar was many things. To some, which happened to be most of the Hell’s embittered population, she was an out of touch dreamer with too much time on her hands and an impossible aspiration. To others, like Vaggie, she was a beacon of hope who had the boundless energy and drive to change everything. But she was also what could be called a nervous snacker. Whenever she became anxious, which was increasingly often, she sought unconscious comfort in food. Vaggie hypothesized that it was some kind of underlying oral fixation driven by a maternal void in Charlie’s life. But she didn’t have a degree in that field to substantiate such claims.
Charlie’s drained body restocked itself on sweets, lobbing a gumball between her jaws as she thought up ways to market the hotel further, set budgets and sales targets. Much like Eve, apples were her weakness. A childhood spent in the dizzying cavalcade of high-octane rides and lights that was Lucifer’s own private theme park Lu Lu Land had given her a taste for deep-fried carnival food that even Husk at his most hungover wouldn’t touch with a ten- foot pole. In a vexatious period, she could clear a whole plate of cinnamon apple fritters without even realizing it, until she groped out for more and her fingers scraped against sugar-crusted ceramic.
Vaggie had also been part of the problem, a fact that had played heavily on her conscience. Noticing how exhausted Charlie was becoming, she’d slipped into her office to surprise her with a candy bar or a carnelian candy apple she’d purchase from the least grimy stand she could find wheeling about in Hell. Seeing the sparkle return to her eyes replenished her own tired soul. She hadn’t even considered the excess calories until one day she'd noticed how the buttons on Charlie’s suit strained. The soft pooch, which could be easily flattened under a blazer at the start had swelled into a small potbelly. In the mother of all ironies, most of the weight she’d gained settled on her abdomen, giving her an apple-shaped figure. Her chest and bottom half had widened too, giving her gait a snaky sway that Vaggie couldn’t take her eyes off, even when she was supposed to be protecting the hotel.
Some superficial individuals would have viewed Charlie’s weight gain as akin to the apocalypse, something that Vaggie was violently opposed to. If anything, the weight had made her even more adorable than before. Her rounded cheeks were rosier than any cherub that Vaggie had ever seen in Heaven. Charlie’s new curves were downright Rubenesque, which combined with her long hair made her look like a coyly mythic muse of some old artist’s yellow ochre- slathered masterpiece. But Charlie was blind to it.
It wasn’t as if Vaggie didn’t know what it was like. After Charlie had bandaged up her bloodied eye socket, she’d plucked her off the grimy streets and taken her back to her lavish mansion, where among a of other luxuries that Vaggie could barely even fathom, a fully stocked kitchen bustling with professional chefs was waiting. Being presented with food that wasn’t puny military rations, the pounds had been quick to pack on. They’d adhered onto her hips and thighs, where no matter how much she exercised, they refused to budge. This had made her the literal butt of the jokes among the hotel’s rowdier occupants, namely Angel Dust. There hadn’t been a single day without a biting riposte about her posterior whenever she ordered him not to do drugs in the hotel lobby or bring back randoms to his room. Vaggie remedied these situations with a swift elbow to the ribs or a well-placed kick to the ankle. But it wasn’t Charlie at all.
She’d retreated into a shell of herself, pushed inwards by others’ less than kind words. Her colorful suits had become baggier and less colorful, like a parrot molting its feathers. With each passing day, more of Vaggie’s soulmate slipped through her clenching fingers. She hoped that Charlie would come to coexist with her own body as she had hers. She was stronger now than she'd been as an Exorcist. As her girlfriend’s ruthless inquisition of her own body deepened, Vaggie laid down the hairbrush on the dresser surface.
Charlie pinched a roll between her thumb and her index finger from the pooch that hung over her waistband, her faint smile cramping into a grimace as she did so. She was so absorbed in her troubled introspection that she didn’t see her girlfriend coming up behind her until Vaggie’s head rose over her shoulder like a cindery moon. She gave a light gasp, clutching her chest.
"Oh, wow, Vaggie. Don't sneak up on me like that. I swear, my heart stopped beating for a second."
“Sorry, love,” Vaggie’s sturdy arms folded around Charlie’s thicker waist, “but it looked like you had a lot on your mind."
The way that Charlie flinched away from her reopened old wounds across Vaggie’s battle-scarred yet beating heart. She reminded herself that it wasn’t because of her own wings, nestled within the pockets of her spine. Her girlfriend loved them as much as the rest of her body, something that Vaggie still had to pinch herself over. No, it was Charlie’s own self-perceived flaws that obfuscated her true beauty in the mirror. Vaggie wouldn’t stand for it. After everything she put herself through in an ordinary day, Charlie at the very least deserved to feel safe in her own skin.
Charlie inhaled.
“Do you think I’ve gained weight?” she asked.
Her plaintive question was the rallying blast of a starting gun. The moment it left Charlie’s mouth, Vaggie raced through an obstacle course of potential responses, leaping over hurdles that might be misinterpreted as something insulting until she crossed an epiphanic finishing line.
“You’ve been asking that a lot, even with your mouth closed. And I don’t like it.”
Charlie cringed, tugging harried handfuls of her long blonde hair.
“I’m so sorry, Vaggie, I know that my main priority should be the hotel. But I’ve been so stressed lately, and it really shows. This isn’t how a princess should look like-”
Vaggie balked. If that was an official decree that some idiot had stamped off on, then she vetoed it with all her heart.
“-I can’t believe that it took me this long to notice,” Charlie’s panicked voice slowed to a grim crawl, “I must look like an even bigger joke than before.”
She gave a sardonic laugh at her own self-deprecating pun. Charlie’s licorice black lower lip trembled.
“You still love me, right?”
Vaggie gaped at her, aghast and more than a little hurt that she really believed that the eternal torch inside her would fizzle out over a few extra pounds. It burned for only Charlie, and nothing would ever change that.
“Always,” she murmured, pressing a kiss into Charlie’s cheek, “you’re too good to feel so awful about yourself, 𝘮𝘪 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘻𝘰𝘯. Look at everything you've done. You achieve more in a week than some people do in their whole lives.”
The demon princess flushed a hellish red.
“What I mean is that I don’t like you being insecure. If you want to lose the weight, we can work out together. Whatever you choose, I’ll be with you all the way. The last thing I want you to be is in discomfort.”
Charlie’s ruby-red eyes were polished with emotion. Vaggie leaned over and brushed her tears away with her pursed lips.
“I have no idea what I did to deserve you, but I’m so glad that I committed to it.” She sniffled.
It was the exact same thing that Vaggie wondered every day. She buried her face into the back of Charlie’s skull, inhaling her strawberry shampoo-scented tresses. Charlie let out a jittery titter.
“This might sound weird, but I, uh, kind of like being chubby. There’s something satisfying about being so soft. Makes me feel more anchored you know?”
To emphasize her point, she sank her hand into her belly, meshing the soft flesh with a rising glee, like a cat with a new toy. Vaggie’s relief at seeing her examine her body with something other than a self-hating scowl was immeasurable. Charlie shook her head, breaking herself out of the temporary spell her new curves cast over her.
“I don’t want to go too extreme,” she quickly added, “maybe a little more cuddle fluff, but nothing beyond that. I’m fine with the way I am now.”
Vaggie nodded.
“Whatever makes you happy, honey.”
She relaxed into Vaggie’s touch, more content to let her girlfriend hold her uncovered this time around. Charlie’s previously downturned mouth parted into an impish grin.
“Besides,” she snickered, “I had a hunch that you had a thing for bigger girls, and it turns out I was right. Having to squeeze into my pants was well worth seeing you blush like that.”
“𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘦 𝘔𝘰𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳!” Vaggie squalled, half-mortified and half-laughing.
She instigated a vicious raspberry on her girlfriend’s collarbone, transforming Charlie into a giggly flail of limbs that tried to wriggle herself octopus-like out of Vaggie’s loving strong-arming. After a while, their giddy playfighting subsided into a quiet rocking, with both women latched onto each other as if despite their vastly different upbringings, they had been born to fit each other. Nothing about it made any sense. They should have lived out their lives oblivious of the other’s existences, but somehow fate had colluded with circumstance to bring them together. Vaggie couldn’t have been gladder it had. She would stand by Charlie through whatever life threw at them, through the thick and thin.
Night fell around them like a great mordant curtain, bringing with it a faint glimmer of the great beyond, something that eclipsed all else down here, including them both. The peace of the blotting stars was somewhat hampered by the bacchanalia screams of the damned that rang out across the discordant city. But Vaggie had her fill of cosmic nonsense. Her universe was right next to her.