Marzipan is feeling down on herself for being too heavy to fit into any of her favorite clothes. She takes a trip to the mall to find something that fits, but ends up leaving with much more than just an outfit.

A cute body-positivity story for  spottedtigress! Also the first story I wrote starring Marzie!

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"C'mon....C'mon, you can do it...Come....on...."

In the half-lit bedroom of her apartment, Marzipan stood in front of the full-length mirror she regretted buying while trying with all her might to force two halves of a zipper together. The pink tigress had managed to pull the shorts mostly up her thighs and thread her long, shaggy tail through the hole in the back, but the button was proving to be more difficult to work with.
"Hhhhhhhuuuuuhhhh..." Marzie sighed, a rumbling growl coming from her throat. Gripping the two halves between the zipper, she turned her back on the mirror and clenched her teeth before leaning back as far as she could without falling over. She could feel the two opposing flaps of fabric just barely touching one another, flopping limply like fish fins, but no amount of grunting, straining, or pulling could bridge the gap between the button and its hole.

"Please.....Pllleeeeeeeeeease..." Marzie panted, whipping her tail behind her in a wide arc that knocked an empty bottle off her desk across the room. She barely noticed. Stopping to take a breath, Marzie leaned back and tried again, hopping up and down on the floor and making the neighbors below her think the tigress was taking up dance lessons. "Hhhhnnnnnggghhhkkkhkhkhhkkkkkh!" she growled wordlessly while feeling the two halves of her shorts inch slightly closer.

Without letting go, Marzie flopped on her bed, her legs dangling off the end, and struggled on her back to button her shorts from that angle, kicking her paws in the air like a fussy baby and hissing spittle through her teeth. The tigress took a huge breath, sucking in her stomach as far as it could go, and held it. With one final, titanic effort, Marzipan arced her back and wiggled her toes in the air as she finally managed to fasten the button of her shorts.
"Yes!" Marzie gasped, flopping onto the bed and panting like she'd run a marathon. She reached down to her hips and patted her shorts, muttering a soft "Thank you." The zipper beneath the button was still uncooperative, but she managed to yank it closed with some coaxing. Finally, after twenty minutes of effort, her pants were finally on. They felt like someone had bound her legs in a tourniquet and she would probably lose all feeling in her paws after a few minutes, but they were still on.

“Now all I have to do,” Marzie said to herself as she rolled off the bed, “…is not breathe…for about eight hours…” When she stood upright and gravity took its cruel, cruel hold on her, the tigress’ weight was distributed downward. Marzie made the mistake of glancing at herself in the mirror and recoiled in horror at the muffin-top to end all muffin-tops. She was chubby, that much she couldn’t deny, but the shorts pinched her hips in a vice-like grip, making the rest of her body spill out of it from anywhere it could escape. On good days, the tigress considered her body to be a pleasant ‘pear’ shape, but the tight shorts gave her something closer to a mushroom.

“Oh gosh,” Marzie said under her breath, frowning as she pinched the white fur of her tummy that overflowed from her shorts. “Maybe…Maybe if I shaved my fur down, I could…” As she headed toward the bathroom, Marzie found herself barely able to walk without her thighs tingling from the slow constriction of blood. With a sigh, she realized that if the only way to comfortably wear the pants was to shave herself bald to do it, then maybe the problem was the pants. With a thumb, she unhooked the button on her shorts and instantly felt a wave of relief through her legs as their constricting grip was finally released.

It took nearly as much effort to get the shorts off as it did to pull them on, the holes nearly stuck around Marzie’s tubby thighs. After pulling them down, she shook them off onto one paw and kicked it into the corner of her bedroom, atop heap of other, too-tight pants that she referred to in her head as ‘The No Pile.’ The only reason she’d tried so hard with them was they were the last pair of shorts Marzie owned that still fit. Or, at least, that she thought still fit. Even when it came to her long pants, she could only think of two that still fit ‘comfortably,’ and both of them had steadily-growing holes in them. Their time was numbered.
Now wearing nothing but her bra and panties, Marzipan glanced at her reflection, sighed, then immediately turned away from it again. She slid her hands over her pudgy stomach, feeling every ugly lump and fold she wished she could just peel off for a day or two. She could barely stand to look at her reflection in the morning, with every inch of her chubby body another shameful reminder of her out-of-control weight. Even her name was a kind of sugar.

Marzipan sighed, averting her eyes from the mirror and letting her arms dangle limply from her sides as she shuffled back to her dresser. Her two options were to either hole up in her apartment like a hermit until she was skinny enough to wear her clothes again, or to go shopping for more appropriate outfits for the new ‘Chunky Marzie.’ Unfortunately, she only had enough peanut butter in the house for a couple weeks of survival, so she would have to go out and buy more clothes.

She took out her last remaining pair of pants that still fit comfortably, but hesitated, wringing them in her hands as she imagined the legs tearing or the buttons popping while she was out. Instead, she opted for a pair of gray pajama pants she only wore at home and silently referred to as her ‘Fart Pants.’ They looked like something she would’ve had to wear in prison, but at least they fit. Her shirts didn’t fare much better, as most of them could only barely fit over her boobs and didn’t do anything to hide her chubby belly underneath them. They would’ve been almost cute as crop-tops if it was at all on purpose. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Marzie found a t-shirt that covered her completely: a hideously ugly green and purple tie-dye shirt with the logo for ‘Uncle Ducky’s Shrimp Shack’ printed on it.

“Well…as long as nobody I know sees me…” Marzie sighed as she reluctantly picked up her keys and shuffled to the door with her tail dragging dejectedly across the carpet.
While keeping to the shadows, the horrendously-dressed tigress successfully made it to her car, a tiny mint-green two-seater with a horn like baby birds arguing, without being seen by any of the neighbors. Marzie quickly scurried into the driver’s seat and put on her biggest pair of sunglasses before zooming out of the parking lot. Of course, getting out of her apartment stealthily was only the first battle, and she was headed to where the real war would take place: the mall.

Marzie parked in the far back of the parking lot and waited for the coast to clear before she climbed out. She caught her reflection in the window and whimpered pitifully as she noticed her shirt riding up her stomach before trying in vain to tug it down. As she did, she pinched the folds of her stomach, frowning at the way she jiggled, and wondered if her best option was to crawl out of sight into a drainage ditch and live there forever. On the way inside the mall, she kept her sunglasses on and her face turned toward the floor, trying with all her might to make herself invisible.

It was late enough in the afternoon for most people to be off from work and school, but not so late that anyone was ready to go home. That left the mall packed end-to-end with people from all over town, enough that a line was trailing outside the Starbucks near the entrance and the food court was bustling. Marzipan already woke up a little hungry, which only made it worse as she passed her favorite mall-Chinese place and resisted the free samples practically shoved in her face. Her mouth watered at the delicious smell, but she couldn’t forget why she was there in the place as she wrapped her arms tightly around her stomach. Maybe the clothes would fit better if she didn’t eat.
Marzie only looked up from her paws when she reached one end of the mall, passing nearly a half-dozen other clothing stores either far outside her price range or totally outside her age group. That left only two options, but neither were very appealing. The first was ‘Eternal Youth,’ a pastel-covered, designer-centric, Faberge-egg of a store featuring soft lighting, faux-wood floors, and poster after poster of beautiful young women making strange faces and in strange poses that somehow evoked ‘fashion.’ The second was ‘Big Bertha’s Bulky Barn,’ an outlet store for ‘plus-sized’ customers that was so hideous, Marzie would sooner run into traffic than be caught inside by someone she knew. With a deep breath, the tigress sucked in her stomach and turned into Eternal Youth, half-expecting to be turned away at the door.

The store smelled faintly of lavender and had some kind strange Europop faintly playing over the speakers that made Marzie feel even more out-of-place than she already did. While trying to avert her eyes from the other, far younger customers, she picked a rack and random and began sifting through bright-colored tops at random, half afraid that the tissue-thin fabric would fall apart in her hands. She had to double-check the sizes over and over again to make sure she was reading them right, as every single top resembled something that would fit better on one of her childhood dolls than on a living person and probably wouldn’t be enough to stretch around one of her arms.
Discreetly, Marzie shuffled to another rack nearby, her heart pounding as she worried the group of young cat girls a few rows away might have been watching her. After shaking off the anxiety, she thumbed through the pants on the rack and found most of them to be a little more reasonably sized, if still a little too small. Curiously, she checked the sizes to get a better idea of what she was looking for and nearly fell over at the discovery that the slightly-to-small pants she held were marked as six sizes bigger than what she normally wore. Did the numbers run so small that she’d need to double her marked size just to get something that fit?

Instead of subjecting herself to more self-inflicted shame, Marzie glanced around the store and spotted a borozi girl across the store folding shirts, a white name tag dangling off her chest. The tigress hid behind a rack of discounted jackets and peeked between them to wait until all the nearby customers left, then waited another five minutes to finally work up the nerve to approach the employee. The girl was roughly a foot shorter than Marzipan and so skinny she could probably vanish from sight if she stood at the right angle. Her outfit seemed to hang limply off her body, with barely any shoulders or hips to cling to, but she somehow made it look good. Before Marzie could say anything, the girl noticed the shadow looming over her and glanced up at the tigress, revealing her name tag read ‘Candace.’

“Can I help you?” she asked, cocking her head to the side curiously, her chunky necklace rattling.
“Umm…hey…do you…um…uhh…” Marzie wrung her hands together, curling her tail around one of her legs like a snake. “I mean…do you have…uhh…cl-clothes?”
Candace blinked at Marzie, her mouth falling open slightly, before glancing around the store.
“…Yyyyyyes?”
“N-No, I mean…What I mean is…” Marzie swallowed and cleared her throat before finally spitting out, “Do you have any…bigger sizes?”
“Oh! Sure!” Candace chirped, brightly. “Is there anything specific you’re looking for?”
“Uh, no. Not really. I’m just…” Marzie swallowed and shuffled her paws. “I just need new clothes…”

“I can help you look, if you want to.” Candace flashed a toothy smile that looked practiced and led Marzipan across the store to a small corner of shelves. Aside from the dim lighting, they didn’t look any different than anything else on the surrounding racks. “This is our…plus size section,” Candace said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
Marzie stepped past her and pulled a shirt out of the rack at random, pinching the material between her fingers before holding it up so it would fold out to its full size. Only it didn’t. It was just that small. Candace blinked at the hesitant look on the tigress’ face and cleared her throat.
“Uhm…it…it stretches.”

“Does it?” Marzie gently tugged on the fabric, noting that it would have to have been made of warm rubber to be able to fit. Candace gently tugged the shirt out of her hand and tossed it out of sight onto a lower rack.
“That one might’ve been misplaced,” the dog laughed anxiously.
“These still seem pretty small…” Marzie said hesitantly as she removed an XL from a shelf. It seemed a few sizes smaller than the ‘Shrimp Shack’ t-shirt she’d managed to squeeze herself into, but when she compared it to the tiny Candace, it looked like something the dog could use as a parachute.
“You can try some stuff on if you want,” Candace said, gesturing to a hallway of changing rooms, each closed off with curtains. “It might not feel as small as it looks, y’know?”

“That’s true,” Marzie said, shifting with uncertainty on her paws. She wanted to give up and resign herself to the store across the hall, but the enthusiastic gleam in Candace’s eyes wasn’t easy to say ‘no’ to. Marzipan swallowed and turned back to the shelves, picking whichever caught her eye from the plus-size racks until she had a pile of vibrant-colored fabric in her arms, stacked higher than she could see over. Candace gingerly walked the blinded tigress down the hall to an empty changing room and gave her a slight nudge inside.
“Good luck!” she barked cheerily before hurrying back to finish the folding she’d started.

Marzie dropped the stack of clothes on a nearby chair and sighed into the full-body mirror in the back of the changing room. Even with the curtain pulled tight, she felt nervous about getting undressed in what, to her, was still public, but felt even more nervous at seeing her overweight body in new, even more unflattering lighting. Keeping her eyes averted from the mirror, she peeled her clothes off and set to work sorting out her favorite articles from the pile on the chair.
With an equal selection of shirts and pants, half of each were disqualified instantly when they wouldn’t fit over Marzie’s head or around her thighs. Trying to shove her chubby legs into the jeans she’d picked out was as hopeless and trying to push a basketball through a garden hose. With her options dwindling fast, the tigress picked out each top that would fit over her head and shoulders took the chance of trying to pull them tighter down. After finding what she thought was her first success, Marzie leaned her head out of the curtain and waved Candace over from across the store.

“Hey, could you tell me how this looks?” the tigress asked, all but her heard still hidden behind the curtain.
“Totally!” Candace said, folding her arms expectantly. Marzie took a deep breath, withdrew behind the curtain, then pulled it open with a loud clattering of the metal rungs. “Ooohhhh, is that one of our sports bras? I like it!”
“Wh-No, it’s…it’s an extra large…” Marzie tried to pull down the shirt, which she realized was only barely reaching past her ribs.
“Oh…well uh…it would make a really cute sports bra!”
“Nevermind,” Marzie huffed before tugging the curtain closed again.

Of the nearly twenty shirts that she picked out, Marzie only found three that even remotely fit, and each one of them hugged her body so tightly they looked more like they were painted directly on her fur and that only a slight turn would cause them to rip. Even worse, not a single pair of pants from the plus-size section fit over her chubby thighs and overly-wide hips, forcing Marzie to fight back angry tears as she tried in vain to yank the last pair up to her waist. Finally, it was too much. The tigress kicked the pants into a corner and glared at her body in the mirror, her arms trembling slightly as she balled up her fists.
After putting on the clothes she’d worn inside, Marzipan left everything on the floor and threw the curtain aside, marching through the store with her eyes turned down to keep from spotting any of the other clothes she knew wouldn’t fit her.

“Oh, hey!” said Candace as she spotted Marzie and quickly ran up to her. “Nothing you liked?”
“No…” Marzie sighed, not looking up from her paws.
“Oh…well maybe you can…we can order some special sizes in if you need-”
“It’s okay,” Marzie sighed, defeated. “I don’t know what I was thinking, anyway. This store isn’t for people like me.”

Candace stopped at the entrance as Marzipan shuffled out of Eternal Youth and reluctantly entered Big Bertha’s Bulky Barn across from it.
Compared to the other store, the Barn looked like it was made on a completely different planet. The wooden shelves and bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling sold the ‘barn’ theme, but it was otherwise far more straightforward than the fashionable, stylized Eternal Youth.
Good, Marzie sighed to herself. It’s not like I’d be able to fit into anything cute, anyway.
The closest rack to her was a circular fixture holding a collection of cheap, ugly mumus the size of circus tents. Marzie’s tail flopped heavily on the floor as she sighed again and spun the rack around, lazily thumbing through the dresses and trying to ignore how hideous they were.

It’s my own fault, anyway. I’m too fat to fit into anything else, so I might as well just settle on whatever fits.
Marzie’s eyes glazed over as she looked at the mumus, all of which looked like they’d been made out couch upholstery from a retirement home. She was too lost inside her own thoughts to hear the large figure approaching her from behind and didn’t notice the looming shadow as they watched her silently. After a few minutes, a hot breath sighed against the top of Marzipan’s neck.

“Honey, what are you doing?”

Marzie blinked as she snapped out of her trance and spun in a full circle before meeting eye-to-eye with the woman standing on her right. She was a dark-furred bear nearly a foot taller than Marzie and half a foot wider. She wore a pair of expensive, embroidered jeans that hugged her wide hips snugly, a fashionable purple top, and a collection of gold chains around her neck that jingled when she moved. She had to crouch to look Marzie in the eye, revealing the gold hoop earrings she wore and the vibrant green eyes below dark lashes.

“Don’t be telling me you’re looking to get one of these ugly things, are ya?”
“Are…are you Bertha?” Marzipan asked, dumbstruck.
“Wh- No, I’m not Bertha,” the bear said, blinking curiously. “My name’s Olympia. What’s yours?”
“Uh…Marzie. Marzipan.”
“Nice to meet you, Marzie,” Olympia smiled, her white teeth shining against her fur. “Now, I’m gonna ask you again: Honey. What are you doing?”
“Luh-Looking for clothes?” Marzie answered, glancing wide-eyed between Olympia and the clothing rack, trying to think if she’d done anything wrong.

“Uh-uh, not over here you’re not,” the bear said, clicking her tongue as she pulled one of the mumus out of Marzie’s grip. “Ain’t nobody buys these but old ladies. I ain’t gonna let you walk outta here in no mumu, okay honey?”
“B-But…I…” Marzie tried to respond as Olympia shooed her away from the rack.
“Let me help you, Marzie. Tell me what you’re really looking for.”
“I…I don’t know…I guess…uh…” The tigress swallowed and glanced aside, absentmindedly tugging her shirt down over her tummy. “Something that fits…”
“Let me take a guess here,” Olympia said, standing up to her full height and folding her arms with a frown. “You went to Eternal Youth first, didn’t you?”
“Uh-huh. How did you-”

“Because every time I see a cute young thing come in here with a frown on her face, she always just came from next door with her hopes crushed,” Olympia said, her voice rising as she talked animatedly with her hands. “I swear, that place doesn’t do a damn thing but make any girl bigger than a twig feel bad about herself.”
“Really?” Marzie’s eyes widened. “So…so it’s not just me?”
“No honey, every size in that store runs too small. There ain’t nothing wrong with you if you can’t fit into something with the wrong numbers on it.”
“But…I don’t know what I can wear anymore,” Marzie sighed, tugging down on her shirt to hide the little patch of tummy peeking through. “Everything that used to fit me is too small now…I’m too fa-”
“Uh-uh,” Olympia said as she shook her head and interrupted Marzie by touching one of her big fingers to her mouth. “That word is not allowed in here.”
“Buhs truh,” Marzie tried to say with the bear’s finger against her lips, but Olympia simply added her thumb into the mix to pinch her lips shut.

“Listen honey, if you don’t want my help, just say the word. But I want you to tell me the God’s-honest truth.” Olympia reached into the nearby rack and pulled away an ugly, triple extra-large mumu rimmed with lace like doily. “Do you really wanna walk out of here wearing this?”

Marzie stared silently at the mumu, frowning as best she could with the bear’s fingers pinching her lips closed. Her eyes slowly widened in what could’ve only been fear as she imagined herself going home with that monstrosity. She averted her gaze from it like she’d been staring at the sun and looked at Olympia instead. The woman was big, both in height and width, but she carried herself with such confidence that it seemed hardly noticeable. Her outfit fit her perfectly, not just in size and cut but in color as well, matching her dark fur and making her gold jewelry stand out even more. Marzipan took Olympia’s wrist and pulled her hand away from her mouth.

“Please help me.”
Olympia grinned, flashing her white teeth as she hung up the mumu and stood up to her full height.

“My pleasure, Marzie.” She gently guided the tigress by the shoulder toward the back of the store, taken up mostly by women’s clothes with a slightly smaller men’s section on the opposite side. They stopped at the mouth of an aisle and Marzie stumbled slightly as Olympia gave her a nudge forward.
“Take a walk, honey,” she instructed. “Give everything a once-over. I’m right behind you.”
“Aren’t you going to-” Marzie began to ask, but Olympia shook her head and folded her arms, tapping one of her huge paws on the carpet.
“This is my method. Trust me. Just look around.”

Marzie chewed on her lip and wrapped her tail around her leg, but dutifully turned her back on the bear and started browsing the racks of clothes. They’d started in the pants section first, which was where the tigress was most in need, and while there was plenty there that caught her eye, nothing really stood out at her. She could hear Olympia almost silently padding behind her and wondered what the woman was thinking, what exactly she was looking for.
“Stop,” Olympia commanded after they’d passed a rack of shorts Marzie’s gaze had lingered on. She slipped past her to the rack and removed a pair of tiny cut-off jean shorts so small the edges of the pockets descended below the legs. “You’re gonna try these on.”
“What?” Marzie said, shaking her head. “Those? They look like underwear, I was just…”
“But you like ‘em, don’t you?” Olympia answered confidently.
“I…well…I just…I can’t-”

“That’s an even worse word, honey,” Olympia said as she practically shoved the pants into Marzie’s arms. “Maybe you’ll like ‘em, maybe you won’t. But you can try ‘em. Show off those cute legs of yours.” The bear playfully ruffled Marzie’s fur and nudged her toward the changing rooms in the back. “You’ll never know until you take a chance.”
Marzipan gripped the shorts in her hands and checked the tag to stall for time. Miraculously, they were exactly her size. She glanced back nervously at Olympia, who gave her a friendly smile, before taking a deep breath and ducking through the curtains of the changing room.

Too nervous to look at her reflection again, Marzie kept her back to the mirror as she undressed. What surprised her was just how easily the shorts slid up her thighs and clung to her hips. She didn’t even have to struggle or suck in her stomach to button them, and while the waistband was securely tight around her hips, it didn’t tug against her waist and hardly felt like she were wearing anything at all. When Marzie finally worked up the nerve to turn toward the mirror, she openly gasped at her reflection.
“I like the sound of that,” came Olympia’s voice from right outside the changing room. “C’mon out, lemme see what you got.”

At first, the tigress didn’t want to leave the safety of the tiny three-walls-and-a-curtain changing room, but she found herself praying for Olympia’s approval as she slowly emerged into the light. The bear’s eyes lit up light stars at the sight of the shorts hugging Marzie’s legs and she clapped her hands together while hopping with enthusiasm.
“Damn. I knew those would look good on you, girl,” Olympia chuckled while grinning ear-to-ear. “Look at all that leg. Honey, I don’t know why you was trying to hide all that under a damn mumu.”
“You really like it?” Marzie asked, her head spinning as she glanced down at her shorts. It felt so strange to see her legs out in public, but it felt so good being able to move freely. When she rested her hands at her sides, she could feel her fingers brushing against the fur of her thighs.
“Sure, but that don’t matter too much, does it?” Olympia clasped her hands together and pointed at Marzipan with two fingers. “Do you like it?”

The tigress’ breath caught her her throat as she thought about it. She glanced through the curtain to look at her reflection again and slid her hand down her thigh, her brain trying to think if she was even allowed to wear something so revealing. Finally, with a deep breath, Marzie turned back to Olympia with a nervous smile and nodded.
“Good!” Olympia shouted, loud enough to make Marzie jump. “Go ahead and show ‘em what you got. I love it.” She strode forward and guided Marzie by the shoulder back to the rest of the store. “C’mon, take a walk to break those in. You can’t make an outfit with just one pair of shorts.”

With renewed confidence, Marzie was guided through the store by Olympia into picking out more pants, each one more bold and unique than the last. The tigress was amazed at not only the store for having so many varied and interesting styles, but also at how well they fit her. With every pair of pants she tried on, the more her confidence swelled until she was excitedly rifling through every rack they passed for something new to try on.

“I think you’re good on bottoms, honey,” Olympia said after Marzie tried to pile another pair of shorts on top of the stack she was already holding. “Maybe it’s time to move onto tops.”
“The only things I own are t-shirts,” Marzie said, frowning to herself. “I don’t even know what to look for other than that.”
“Well, we can start by working to accentuate your best features,” Olympia said, slyly. Marzie blinked up at her.
“My…my personality?” she asked.
“No honey, that’s not what I mean.” Olympia crouched and gestured her hands beneath the tigress’ breasts. “Your girls.”
“Wh-Hah-Whadduh-Bah?” Marzie stammered as she quickly cupped her hands to her boobs like they were about to fall off. She batted her tail behind her and shuffled her paws on the carpet. “A-are you se-serious?”

“Marzie, the good Lord above gave big girls like us an advantage,” Olympia said as she bounced her own sizable breasts in both hands. “But it’s up to us to let the world know that.”
Marzie recalled how few of the shirts in Eternal Youth even managed to fit over her chest and was baffled to think that might’ve been a good thing. On the other hand, if there was anything she liked about her body (even if it was the only thing), it was her healthy boobs. Maybe Olympia had a point.
“Okay,” Marzie nodded. “But…how do we do that?”
“Honey, that’s the easy part,” Olympia smiled as she led Marzipan to the shirts on the other side of the store.

As the two of them looked around the tops and shirts, which were even more varied than the pants, Marzie’s attention was immediately drawn to a loose-fitting top with open shoulders and the elaborate design of a nebula printed on it, blues and purples mingling with pinpricks of stars to give the illusion that the fabric was like a piece of the sky itself cut out and made into clothing.
“See, here’s something that’ll work,” Olympia said as she picked up something else from a nearby rack. “You can never really go wrong with a cute v-neck when you’re trying to…” She trailed off at the sight of Marzie holding the nebula shirt, her eyes lit up like stars themselves. The bear chuckled and added, “Well, maybe that one’s worth a shot first.”

The pair retreated back to the changing rooms, where Olympia waited patiently outside for Marzie to change. After a few minutes, the tigress walked backward out of the changing room, her hand over her mouth as she stared at her full reflection in the mirror. The nebula shirt had a wide neckline and hung low on her shoulders, but otherwise covered the rest of her body perfectly, matching well alongside the lace design on the legs of the jean shorts.
“I think she likes it,” Olympia smiled. Marzie glanced up at her, her eyes still wide in shock. She wrung her hands together in front of her stomach and turned back to the mirror.
“I…I didn’t know that…I could look like this,” Marzie muttered under her breath. “I thought I couldn’t…that I wasn’t allowed to. I thought that if you weren’t skinny, you weren’t supposed to be…pretty.”

Olympia, who almost always had something to say, didn’t speak. She let Marzipan have her moment in silence and remembered a similar thought crossing her mind just a few years ago. The tigress turned and looked at herself in the mirror and, for the first time, liked what she saw looking back at her.
“How do you feel?” Olympia asked after a short silence.
“I feel…good,” Marzie breathed. “I feel like…like I can finally look the way I want to instead of the way I think I’m supposed to.”
The instant before Marzie could say more, she was suddenly enveloped in a huge, thick mass of warm fur, her head buried somewhere between Olympia’s boobs as the bear wrapped her in a hug.
“Honey…honey you have no idea how happy it makes me to hear you say that,” she sighed, lifting Marzipan a little off the ground and rocking from side to side. The tigress’ arms were pinned to her sides and she could only breathe through one nostril, but she didn’t struggle and let Olympia express herself. “Hardly anybody wants to come in here their first time, but all I wanna do is help them leave happier than they felt coming inside.”

“Thunku,” Marzie tried to say while smooshed in between Olympia’s boobs. She wiggled her paws helplessly until the bear sighed and gently let her down to the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Olympia said as she wiped her eyes and flapped her hands in the air to calm herself, her bracelets jingling like loose change. “I’m sorry, I just…hooh. Making me all emotional.”
The two of them finished shopping after picking out a few more tops, though Marzie fully intended to wear the nebula shirt and jean shorts out of the store. Olympia rang everything up when they were finished. Despite the higher-than-expected price, Marzie paid for everything they’d picked out quickly, feeling lighter than air once everything was bagged for her.

“Alright honey, that’s everything,” Olympia said, passing the three bags of clothes to Marzipan. “Don’t forget the clothes you wore in here.”
“Throw them away,” Marzie said, defiantly.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Olympia laughed. She tore off the receipt and handed it to Marzie before rounding the corner and pulling the tigress in another one-armed hug.
“When do you work again?” Marzie asked. “I’ll be coming back in a few weeks.”
“Oh, I’m always here, don’t worry about that,” Olympia said. “But you don’t need me. Just remember, honey: you’re perfect just the way you are, but you have to believe that before anyone else will. You got that?”

“I’ll remember,” Marzie nodded. “It’s weird to finally feel good about wearing clothes.”
“Marzipan, it was never about the clothes,” Olympia said with a wink.

With a new skip in her step, Marzipan left Big Bertha’s Bulky Barn, with the knowledge that the only bad thing about it was the name. She carried three huge, heavy bags back to her car, but left far more baggage in her wake, never to look back on again.
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