MetaMorph Ch. 03

Dan took a deep breath and pulled back the comment he was about to make regarding pretty boys and their tight asses and said, "Yes. I'll use my own group, thanks. You can just pay the bills."

Dan had spent the last two days checking out groups that specialized in tailing unfaithful spouses. It was a husband and wife team that had a further team of six working for them. He'd arranged for them to follow June once every three days, randomizing which day it was. They couldn't follow her full time for four months -- he'd never have the time to go through all the details. He was pretty sure she wouldn't mess around again; he was just doing this to be sure. While he'd been bitter and hurt, he was relatively sure that almost everything June had told him about her feelings and what had happened was the truth, or at least how she saw it. If the PI's found anything, well, he'd revise that feeling.

Back in the moment Greg said, "So, do you know why we are here?"

"So you can get your pretty ass a nice tight little set of chaps, so you can show it off to all the other little boys in class?"

Greg actually laughed and said, "Dan, I know you won't believe this, but I like your style. I wish we'd met under different circumstances. I hope you can keep that sense of humor going later today. No, we are here so I can have a suit made."

"I'm sure it'll highlight your cock adequately," replied Dan.

"It's not for me, idiot. It's for you. They are just using some of my dimensions. I need you to get up here in a moment so they can get your inside seam and all the rest of that stuff that tailors seem to need."

"Me? What the fuck are you talking about?" asked Dan, puzzled.

"Incentive," replied Greg. "The idea is that the suit will be made to a mixture of my dimensions and yours. My chest, your height, my arm size, your arm length. They make the suit, deliver it and when you can fit into it nicely, then we are done. This is a two thousand dollar suit by the way. Mr. Chang does not come cheap. He makes suits for Johnny Depp by the way."

Dan suddenly took an interest, and moments later was standing in front of the mirrors and trying not to look embarrassed as Mr. Chang moved his dick around in order to understand which side he dressed to.

An hour later, they were back at the gym and Greg looked at Dan and said, "Are you ready for this? What am I saying - I don't give a crap if you are. Go upstairs, put on a track suit and come back down and meet me in the last room at the end."

Dan did as he was bid, and it began. Greg started him by making him go to a zoomba class, with girls. Dan was at the back, huffing and puffing and looking like an idiot, and he caught Greg smirking at him through the door several times. By the time the class was done, Dan was covered in sweat and ready to die, both from the exercise and from the embarrassment. He couldn't breath and needed water on tap.

Greg smiled at him with a smile that didn't reach his eyes and said, "Good. Can you swim?"

Dan nodded, too out of breath to answer with words.

"Good," said Greg, "go get your swim suit on and meet me in the pool."

Once there, Dan was made to do lengths. Greg wasn't interested in speed, he was interested in endurance. Dan did ten lengths and was allowed to rest while Greg explained that he was just starting the warm up that he'd be doing himself.

After the swim, it was time for the rowing machine. After thirty minutes on that, Dan went to the bathroom to be sick, which Greg stood outside and laughed.

After that, it was lunch. Greg took Dan to the juice bar and got him a smoothie that was green and had grass of some kind in it and it tasted foul. Greg explained that Dan's intake of food was going to change radically, and he'd better get used to it.

Back at the gym, and they were in the boxing room. Dan was measured for gloves and boots and then taught how to wrap his hands. After that, it was punching time with the heavy bag -- a touch that Dan appreciated was that Greg had pasted a blown up photo of his face on the bar. That was all the encouragement he needed. Again Dan lasted about forty-five minutes before he had to run off and throw up, for the second time.

After recovering from that, it was in the ring for some sparring. Dan was fitted with protective headgear and a cup and pushed into the ring with one of the guys he recognized from the day he was abducted. The guy basically pushed his face in for three straight rounds, Dan not hitting him once.

By the end of the day, Dan had thrown up four times, had a go on almost all the machines in the gym, done free weights, drunk almost three gallons of water and was just lying on the bed in the apartment, begging to die. His body was on fire, his arms ached, and he really wanted to hit the hot tub, but couldn't figure out how to get his body off the bed without his arms coming off.

He was aware Greg was in the room -- he wasn't thrilled about that -- and he pulled up a stool and handed Dan a bottle of water.

"Right, that was hard. I know it was because it was meant to be," he said. "But you stuck it out and you didn't give up. These first couple of weeks are the hardest. If you think today was hard, you wait till tomorrow when we do it all again, only now you are sore from today."

Dan just groaned.

"It's necessary. What's happening right now is your body is going into toxic shock. It's suddenly realizing that it's needs muscle and it's going to try and build some. It's going to cannibalize some of your fat to do it, which is what we want. In a few days, your body will start to stabilize and your metabolism will increase. Usually we'd feed that by giving you more protein, but right now we are going to do it by starving you a bit, or at least not giving you as much as your body really wants.

See Dan, there is only one real way to loose weight and keep it off. Eat less carbs than your body burns. There are two ways to do that -- one is to stop eating and eat less than your body burns naturally -- in your case, something around sixteen hundred calories a day -- OR you can exercise and burn calories faster than you take them in. A balanced weight loss program does both -- it reduces the calories and food intake coming in, and amps up the exercise to burn more as well. Now we can jog that along -- the right intake and the right set of exercises -- even the right time of day matters.

You are going to be doing a mixture of cardio exercises and strength training. The cardio is good for initially burning fat, but once you've burned all the calories in your blood stream, it burns as much muscle as it does fat. So we use the cardio are muscle warmers and between the interval training where you really strain.

What I'm going to do with you is spend alternate days in the weights room and in the boxing room, and then every fifth day you have off, or at least not putting undue strain on your body. Just some swimming and yoga -- no running though. You weigh too much to put that strain on your knees, at least initially. We will vary the warm up cardio exercise so it doesn't get boring. But you'll initially see the weight come off fast, then it'll slow up as your body starts building muscle, which weighs a lot more than fat, and then once you've got the muscle tone to build on top of, the rest of the weight loss just happens naturally, as a result of your increased metabolism and exercise. You won't have to do specific things to lose the weight as long as you aren't chugging down cheeseburgers and fries and drinking a lot of beer.

So yeah, food wise, you'll eat with me three times a week and eat your own stuff the rest of the time. I'll be in here seeing what you are eating and if I don't like it, it goes. So be aware. Ignore grains -- no breads or pizza or cereals -- they are empty calories and go straight to fat, even though the roughage is good for you. You need proteins, milk, water, salads and meats. Try cutting out breakfast altogether and just having a smoothie instead. I will make sure the right stuff is in here to do this.

Now, get your lardy ass off the bed and go sit in the hot tub for twenty minutes. Then after that, get a massage -- that's room seven. And don't try anything with Julie in there. She'd kick your ass. She's our tebow instructor as well."

With that Dan levered himself off the bed and went to find the hot tub. Greg was right, he felt a lot better -- still very sore, but not as stiff -- afterwards, and even better after the nimble but steel fingers of Julie had finished with him.

A side effect of the whole experience was that he slept like the dead, although every time he turned over, he woke himself up through the pain of his sore muscles.

Day two was, as Greg had promised, worse than day one, having to do it all again but sore. This time he scored one minor victory by hitting his sparring partner -- the other guy this time -- once! He felt quite pleased. His head still hurt from the hitting he'd gotten back though.

By day five he was ready to die. The pain had gotten worse and his reaction time in the ring was down. Greg had started to actually train him now -- he was doing punching drills and starting to learn footwork, although he had started to realize how his weight would stop him being light on his feet and deft in the ring. What he did have was power, and he leveraged that, working on accuracy.

He'd started to learn how to do some of the exercises too. He hadn't thought much about how to do a pushup, but from Greg and the other instructors, he learned that there was a lot that mattered -- how wide your hands were, how fast you did them, how low you went, the straightness of the body, when to breath in and out -- all of this mattered.

Day five was a relief. It was mostly cardio -- they started out swimming. Greg had informed him that at his height, he'd do a hundred lengths without blinking. Right now he was at twenty and that was hard. Then the rowing machine, a rest, then the skiing machine, then lunch. Then a whole three hours of nothing, then back to the cardio.

During the three hours to himself, Dan pulled out his laptop and started to write. He actually started to write a treatment of his experiences, embellishing it slightly. Two hours later, he closed the laptop and looked through the PI report. They'd watched June twice and she'd done nothing out of the ordinary, apart from paying a visit to Stallones production company for a meeting. Somehow, Dan doubted that went that well. Other than that, she'd gone to the grocery store and mostly just stayed home. Nothing suspicious there -- long may it continue, he thought.

At the end of the first week, Greg made him weigh himself. Dan had no idea what to expect, but was very pleased to find himself almost ten pounds lighter. Greg explained that this was natural and was mostly water retention bleeding off. He couldn't expect that degree of loss every week, but it was a good start.

The next week was still very painful, but by the end of the day, Dan found he could actually cook himself something to eat before dying in bed. The boxing was stepping up, and Dan was finding it hard. Greg kept getting in his face when he slowed down on the fortieth repetition of punching the bag, yelling things like "She's NEVER going to fuck you again if you are a pussy, you lard ass." And "Man, I did like fucking her. Maybe I should carry on, so she has a real man." And lastly, he said, softly, "So you got her ass. You know she was going to give it to me. Maybe I should go take it." That last one really pushed Dan's buttons and he demanded Greg to come into the ring for sparring. He got his ass handed to him, but he also punched Greg hard in the face a few times too, and that was extremely satisfying.

One day, The Suit was delivered. Dan had gotten used to using capital letters to describe it. It was the journey and the destination all rolled into one. He put it up in the closet and tried not to look at it, since it was so small against his frame.

By the third week, Dan had gotten into the rhythm. He was writing during lunch times and after the evening work out -- he'd completed his treatment and was writing a screenplay version of it, and also he'd learned to cook better meals. He seriously missed pizza and beer and made a mistake one day by buying some diet beer.

He was on the recumbent bike when Greg came down and looked at his times and distances. Greg said, "Stay on there for an extra twenty minutes Dan. You need to do another ninety calories."

This was micromanagement of the type Greg didn't normally do, and Dan looked at him. "You can work off this EXTRA CAN OF BEER." Said Greg, his voice rising at the end as he waved a can taken from Dan's fridge at him. It was extra humiliating since he was in the general weights room, so all the other clients could hear.

"Ninety Calories Dan. That's one beer. Have fun," said Greg, throwing the unopened can in the trash.

The result of that little altercation was almost life altering for Dan. From then on, everything he ate was equated with how much exercise it would take to balance it out and remove it from his system. A pizza? Two hours swimming, or forty minutes with the heavy bag. A glass of wine? Thirty minutes on the epileptical. It made every meal a balance of whether he was prepared to pay the exercise price for what he had in front of him. Sometimes he was, mostly he wasn't. It made it easier to turn it down or miss a favorite when he looked at what he ate through that filter.

There were some other odd things that happened. He got to know some of the more frequent and regular visitors to the gym. Some of them he knew smiled out the side of their mouths as they saw his big ass flopping over the edges of the small bike seat, with him peddling furiously and sweating up a storm. But some were genuinely interested. One older lady was convinced he was 'doing something for charity', another that 'he had to loose the weight or die', still a third that he was making some kind of documentary.

For his part, Dan found most of the women who were prepared to talk to him either ditzy to the extreme, with nothing to say that someone else hadn't carefully prepared and poured into their brains first, OR the lack of anything in common was an obstacle. He wasn't a high-powered exec, like lots of these people were. They expected him to understand what they were talking about when they talked about boardroom filibusters or investment strategies. He just generally nodded and smiled and carried on running or pulling or just sitting and sweating, as he did a lot of that.

One morning he was using a particular weight machine -- he did a lot of that rather than free weights, since the machines forced his body into the right posture. Greg had been very clear that posture mattered greatly if you want to exercise the right muscle groups and also have them develop in the shape desired. Some tall guy with great grey hair was waiting impatiently to use the machine while Dan finished up his sets of repetitions. He was looking daggers at Dan till he got off the machine and fumed even more while Dan wiped down the seat and the arm grabs from his sweat. Dan looked at him and said, "Sorry dude," and walked away. As he did so he heard the man mutter, "Fucking butter ball."

Dan had heard a lot of that in his life and he stopped and stiffened, and almost turned around to challenge the guy, but after a second, just walked on. Life was too short for that.

At the end of the third week, Dan had lost another five pounds, making a total of twenty-one. He was on his way.

Despite what he had said to June, she was still texting him on occasion. She was using small one-line sentences, designed so that she knew he'd see the entire sentiment with just the text alert on his iPhone. Things like "Love you" and "Missing you" and "Thinking about you" came in at odd times, usually at least once a day. He also got emails that were longer, with details of what she was doing, where she was. He usually got at least two of those a week -- filled with the specifics of her day. For the most part they matched up with the PI reports he'd gotten, which was good.

As the days and weeks passed, several small events occurred. The first was a total embarrassment at the pool. After doing seventy lengths one morning, Dan heaved himself out of the water, only to find his swimsuit around his ankles. He realized he'd actually lost so much weight, they didn't fit any more. Not matter how he tightened them, they just slipped off. It was a moment's embarrassment but afterwards, he was on cloud nine. He found that most of his clothes didn't fit like they use to any more. On one of his belts he had to make a new notch just so it would tighten. He had to make a few trips to Target to get some newer clothes and when he did so, it gave him a pang. He never went cloth shopping without June before.

Another milestone was the realization that he'd replaced all the caffeine in his life. It wasn't something he'd even realized he'd done till he had a can of diet Mountain Dew and his heart rate had shot up and he'd been worried. It was only afterwards that he's realized that not only had he cut out caffeine completely, but soda in general. And he didn't miss it. That had been a shock.

His boxing was getting better. He still got a hit a lot in the ring but he was starting to both be able to see incoming attacks, and also get out of the way. He still wasn't landing a lot of hits, but he could also get out of the ring without being too sore or breathing too hard.

He noticed his game playing habits had changed too. He was still playing his old games that he'd brought from home, but he was playing them differently. Before, he'd had played Call of Duty and gone everywhere in a level to be sure that he'd gotten everything on offer. Now he went everywhere to ensure he killed everything. He was practicing headshots, and blowing people away. On the level where you have to play as a terrorist, before Junes incident, he would have just hung back and not shot innocent people. Now he got stuck in there, blowing away the Non Player Characters. In Grand Theft Auto, he would never have run over anyone or beaten up hookers -- now he did with gusto. He noticed this disturbing new trend when he had to go to a cheat sheet to figure out how to respray his car, because the cops where constantly on his tail. He reasoned he was just pissed off and bitter and it was coming out this way; better in a game than in life.

The reports from the PI's were reassuring. June had gone back to work; she was now working as a full producer for a new HBO show called War Moments, which were reenactments of the more poignant moments in the various world wars, all acted out with Oscar awarded or nominated actors. One of the executive producers was Tom Hanks. Apparently Stallone had liked her work but couldn't have her on his staff after the way she'd let him down in New Orleans, but he'd recommended her to HBO and now she had a regular full time gig in LA.

The rest of it was relatively mundane. She'd been asked out several times from what the PI's could see,- and they were on the case just a couple of times a week, which means there had been more,- and she'd turned them all down very firmly. They've even gotten audio of one, where she told the guy that when her husband got back, she'd be informing him of this mans attentions, and her husband was a LARGE guy and pretty unforgiving of things like that. And smiled sweetly at him while she said it.

There was one interesting conversation she'd had one lunchtime that Dan found very enlightening. She'd been in Santa Monica, at one of their favorite restaurants there. The agency's operative had, quite by chance, managed to get the next booth from where June was sitting, with her friend Megan. Dan knew Megan. He found her a strange duck. Megan had exactly two topics of conversation. One was how great she was at her job -- she was another freelance producer, specializing in animated movies - and the other was about how much cock she was getting. June and Dan had often talked about how Megan used sex to prop up her terrible self-image of work competence. She was well meaning, sweet in her own way, not bad looking but terribly dull conversationalist although she did swear like a sailor, which was very entertaining -- hearing those words come out of this little sweet looking young girl. June and Dan had their own short code for discussing Megan and Dan had even drawn up bingo cards for a Megan Chat. June hadn't stopped giggling about it for a week.