Fun Tyme Balloon Company, Part 5: Melanie's Story
Melanie blew one last big breath into the colorful 36" balloon, climbed up her stepladder, and tied it to the string that ran the length of the booth, then climbed down to admire her work. The three-foot orb was black with yellow stripes and finely-detailed red stars, and it was the last of a dozen balloons with different patterns showing off Fun Tyme's new Lazer-Sharp Lettering technology. She was expecting them to be a big hit at the trade show.
The booth was a mad riot of color. The Lazer-Sharp 36s were the highlights, but there were bright balloon arches, big columns of 11" balloons, and each corner was guarded by one of the company's four-foot-tall rabbit balloons. (It was a good thing she had extras; Melanie thought they were the five-foot rabbits, and she accidentally blew the first one to bursting.) Round balloons of various sizes littered the floor, and the tables had bowls of uninflated balloons, both to give out as samples and to replace the orbs that invariably got stepped on. "FUN TYME BALLOONS" was spelled out in rainbow-colored latex balloon letters. They were not production items but were specially made for and had to be blown up very carefully. The E was the toughest, and Melanie always brought lots of extras. This time she had only popped two before getting one blown up fully, which she regarded as a victory.
"Excuse me," said a man who was standing at the booth. He must have been watching her inflate that last balloon, but when you have three feet of black latex swelling in front of your face, you can't exactly see.
"Yes, hello," Melanie said, with a pleasant smile that comes naturally to people who work in marketing departments.
"Did you just blow up that big balloon?" the man asked.
"I did," she said.
"Why?" he asked.
Melanie shot him a confused look. "Well, they don't blow themselves up."
"No, I mean why did you have to blow it up? You work for a balloon company. Don't you have a pump or something?"
"Oh!" Melanie laughed. Blowing up balloons now came so naturally to her that she didn't even think about it any more, but she remembered that most people weren't accustomed to seeing people inflate such big balloons by mouth.
"We don't use a pump," Melanie said. "Market research shows that 88% of balloon buyers blow up our products by mouth. They usually use a pump for the bigger balloons like the one you saw me inflating, but still. Mr. Globos, our CEO, likes us to remember that behind every balloon is a person, so we try to inflate our products the way our customers would."
"But... surely you didn't blow up all of these balloons by mouth. I mean, you must have dozens around this booth. Hundreds, maybe."
"About 400 if you include the ones in the Guess How Many Balloons tent," Melanie said with a smile. "But no, I didn't blow them all up, I have an assistant."
"He must have some set of lungs," the man said.
"She," Melanie said with a laugh. Melanie preferred to have women as her assistants at the trade shows, because they did a better job blowing up the balloons. Guys always seemed to want to show off, huffing and puffing and blowing the balloons up fast, but they quickly got winded and fell behind, and she wound up doing most of the inflating. Women paced themselves better. Her assistant Christy, who was off getting coffee, was a gem, a single mother who lived in a house with a pool. She had years of experience blowing up giant pool floats, so the balloons were no problem. Along with about half the balloons decorating the booth—including all, four rabbits, after Melanie blew the first one to bits—she had blown up everyone of of the balloons in the Guess How Many tent (231, but that number would not be revealed until the last day of the trade show, when they would be popped and counted) and hard hardly broken a sweat.
"Wow, two girls blowing up all these balloons! That's impressive!" the guy said. She had heard this comment dozens of times. The implied sexism used to bother her, but now she just smiled. A lot of guys were impressed by women who could blow up balloons, and some were, ahem, really impressed; she knew that all too well. It was too early to tell if this one had a special interest or not. She thought of telling him that all of the booth decorations would have to be popped and refreshed with freshly-blown balloons each morning, but why bother?
"Here," she said, picking one of the new Lazer Print balloons out of a drawer. "Give this a try, and if you can't manage, bring it back here and I'll blow it up for you."
"Thanks," the man laughed. "Well, I have to get back to my booth. Doors open in ten minutes. Bill Hedley, Hedley Stuffed Toys," he said, thrusting out a hand.
"Melanie Hager, Fun Tyme Balloon Company," Melanie said, shaking his hand and fishing a business card out of her pocket. The man looked at it.
"Marketing manager, eh?" Bill asked. "I'd love to hear how you got that job."
"It's a long story," Melanie said.
Actually, it was a story of revenge.
Melanie still kicked herself for falling in love with Tom, but she understood why it happened. She was what her father called "Rubenesque", but what the kids at school just called fat. She hated her face, she hated her glasses, she hated her oversized breasts, and she hated the discount-rack clothing her parents bought for her. While her college friends were mating like rabbits, Melanie went to bed alone night after night. She thought she was destined to be single for the rest of her life, so when Tom—handsome, popular, the kind of guy who she thought would never notice her—started paying attention, she felt head over heels.
"If you love me, you'll do it." That's how Tom got her to do everything. That's why she let him kiss her while he stuck his hand up her blouse and squeezed her tits. That's why she let him put his penis in her mouth and why she let him take her virginity.
And it was what he said about the balloons.
The first time he had her blow up a balloon seemed innocent enough. They were at his apartment making out (although Tom seemed to spend a lot more time kissing her dessert-plate-sized areolas than her mouth), when all of a sudden he noticed something on the table.
"Hey, a balloon," he had said. "I wonder where... oh, yeah, I stuck this in my pocket after that party at my neighbor's the other night. Hey, why don't you blow it up?"
Melanie shrugged. She'd do pretty much anything Tom asked, and besides, she was bored with him sucking on her nipples. She took a breath, put the little orange latex bulb in her mouth, and blew, swelling up the balloon. She blew another breath into the balloon, and then another, and another, and admired her handiwork.
"Blow it bigger," Tom said. There was a note she recognized in his voice, a slight huskiness that she usually heard just before he would try to push her head further down on his cock. She didn't like that, and she wondered what was going on. Was there something sexy about a balloon? But she blew another breath.
"Bigger," he said, and she blew again. "Go on, blow it more."
"Tom. I think it's getting full," Melanie said.
"No, it's not, I promise. You can blow it much bigger than that. Trust me."
