Her dark hair waved back from her forehead and curled rebelliously at the base of her neck as she tried to understand the kinds of machines that were used for each exercise.

"Excuse me, I am new here, I want to flatten my tummy." Oto said calmly to the gym instructor.

"Have you paid?" The huge lanky gym man asked. She nodded. "Follow me." He said to her as he led her to another room.

Oto was at the gym for the first time, her mother had shamed her big belly again. She was on the second plate of her favorite food, Editan soup and Fufu, when she walked in and abused her.

"You eat too much, that is why you're not married up till now, look at your pot belly, which man marries a fat woman these days?" She lost appetite immediately she said those words to her.

Her mother Cecilia was bothered about her body size, but was unconcerned about how her second husband, Oto's Wealthy step father Uko would rape and molest her, and after few days he would buy her three cards of birth control pills.

Her mother had caught him trying to pull her panty twice, she'd returned back from church that evening. And when she opened the door and saw that he was almost tearing her nine year old daughter apart, she dragged him off her and slapped his face.

"You drunken bastard!" She yelled as she dragged him out of the room.

It was his fifteenth time of molesting her.

"If you don't let me touch you, I will not pay your school fees, and I will not buy you new clothes this Christmas." Uko would say to her, each time he wanted to touch her.

He would sneak into her room, while his wife Cecilia was asleep and run his fingers down her thighs to her panty, she'd woken up several times in shock to see him stand naked right before her. She would avert his gaze and he would hold up her face to his and say softly, "Look at me, look at my thing and touch it. If you tell your mother about this, I will kill you and kill your mother." He threatened her with these words all the time. And one day, as she became a teenager, and then grew into adulthood, she became aware of the abuse she'd gone through in the hands of her stepfather.

Oto had thought that her mother's marriage to Uko was going to end soon, but no, they were still together. And as Oto clocked twenty six, the hatred she had for her stepfather kept burning wilder.

"Why are you still married to this man Mama? He doesn't deserve you or I in his life." Oto said worriedly to her mother.

Cecilia shook her head and turned sadly to her, "Your biological father and I divorced because he was too poor to take care of you, too poor to feed us nor even buy you okirika clothes. And worst of all, he used to beat me up like I was his drum. I left him because I didn't want to die."

"No mama, that's not true. You left him because you were cheating on him with my stepfather who was spoiling you with money. You provoked my real father to beat you up, you used to insult him and called him abusive names right before our neighbors." Oto said boldly.

Her mother chuckled shyly. She allowed a small sigh to escape her. "You were just eight years old when I left your father, what did you know?"

"I can still recall mama. I was a child, but the memories of those moments is still in my head."

Oto knew that her mother would never leave Uko because of what people were going to say. "They will laugh at me. They will say I can't keep a home." She would say, each time Oto advised her to quit her marriage.

Oto, a chubby dark girl who was tall like her mother. She was beautifully endowed with long chubby legs and her beautiful shape that made anything she wore fittable.

She was an introvert human, who hardly talked. She wasn't sociable, and her mother was worried that her temperament had scared men away from her.

Being at the gym for the first time, she was determined to exercise more and burn all the fats are mother was worried about. They were lots of girls in the gym, slender tall girls who looked like models, Oto had wondered what they were doing in the gym. She was a size fourteen, working so hard to take a shape of size twelve, and these girls weren't up to a size eight and they were seriously jogging on a moving exercise machine. She became motivated as she kept putting her hands behind her head, and pushing her head over to her feet, just as the gym instructor was doing.

She glanced casually at the man who was beside her and found herself looking into his eyes that were hard, deep and rather fierce. He was a hunky man in his late thirties with a six pack body size that made her stare uncontrollably. He looked more like a model, the kind of men she saw only on foreign magazines.

"Why are you looking at me?" The man asked acidly.

She averted her gaze immediately.

"I am talking to you." He asked, his husky tone was a bit soft now.

"Me?" Oto asked, pretending to be confused. Her wide eyes fastened on his mouth, and she saw the firm, sensuous lips part in an unwilling, slightly rueful smile.

"Yes you, you've been staring at me." He said as he got up immediately and took his water can, gulping down the entire content down his throat. His body was all sweaty and wet. Oto looked startled. "I wasn't looking at you." She said shyly.

"Liar, you were admiring my body huh?" He said with a tricky smile.

She nodded gently.

"I know right." He said with a smile. She smiled back.

"You looked as though you've seen a vision, or been hit on the head by a falling fixture, a pink florescent one at that." He said.

Oto giggled and shrugged, tossing her long dark hair over her shoulder.

"You're beautiful." He said and winked at her as he walked away. He shook hands with the other people and Oto watched the other girls stare at him in admiration as he walked away.

Men like that were heart breakers, they never like chubby girls like her, she thought

Link: https://africanfictions.com/romance-comedy/otys-autopsy-chapter-1/