"Nothing Fits, Kyle. Like, Nothing."

Sophie had been in the closet for twenty minutes.

Kyle sat on the edge of the bed, scrolling his phone, half-listening to the soft parade of hangers sliding across the metal rod. Slide. Pause. Slide. Pause. Then a groan. Then more sliding. He'd learned by now not to rush her, but twenty minutes was starting to push it.

"Soph, we're gonna miss the reservation."

"I know, I know, just... give me a second."

He sighed, locked his phone, and padded over to the closet doorway. He stopped there. He always stopped there lately.

Sophie stood facing the full-length mirror at the back of the walk-in, holding up a heather grey long-sleeve shirt by the shoulders, stretching it wide in front of her torso like she was trying to measure it against herself. The shirt, which Kyle distinctly remembered being oversized on her just two months ago, looked like something made for a child now. She held it out at arm's length, her fingers pinching the shoulder seams, and the soft cotton fabric hung there between her fists looking almost apologetic. Her reflection stared back with wide grey eyes, her lips parted in that expression she'd been wearing more and more often: genuine disbelief.

"Nothing fits, Kyle. Like, nothing."

He leaned against the doorframe. He tried to look sympathetic. He really did. But his eyes betrayed him the way they always did now, drifting down from her flushed face to everything below it.

Her shoulders had become something architectural. They were capped with delts that rounded out wide and full, each head of the muscle distinctly visible, the front delt sweeping into the side delt with a deep separation that caught the warm closet light and turned it into shadow. They sat high and heavy on her frame, making her upper body look impossibly broad for a girl who still had that same soft, slightly upturned nose and those same blonde curls pinned up in a messy little ponytail. Holding the shirt out like that only made the delts bunch harder, each cap swelling into a striated globe that dwarfed the drooping sleeve openings dangling below.

Her arms were the first thing that had outgrown everything. Even partially extended to hold the shirt, her biceps were enormous, the peaks thick and round, splitting into visible inner and outer heads. The muscle bellies were so full that they pressed outward even in this position, bunching against her forearms as her wrists angled inward to grip the fabric. Her triceps hung heavy on the underside, horseshoe shapes packed with dense tissue that shifted and rippled as she adjusted her hold. Veins wound across everything, tracing from her forearms up over the biceps and disappearing into the delts, fat and prominent. The shirt's sleeves wouldn't have made it past her forearms, let alone over those arms.

Her upper chest was a wall of striated muscle even above the shirt's neckline. Her traps rose on either side of her neck in thick, sloping ridges, meeting her delts in a seamless landscape of fiber and vascularity that made the collar opening look like it belonged on a doll. The grey fabric, dangling limply in her grip, looked like a dishcloth held in front of a monument.

"Look at this." She held the grey shirt a little higher, almost pleading. "This was my big shirt. This was the one I wore when I wanted to be comfy. Kyle, this wouldn't fit over one arm now."

"Okay," Kyle said slowly, his voice doing a bad job of sounding casual.

"Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like that." She shook the shirt at him like a piece of evidence. "You're doing the thing."

"There's no thing."

"There's absolutely a thing. Your ears get red."

Kyle touched his ear. It was, in fact, warm. He dropped his hand.

Sophie stared at the shirt for another second, then tossed it onto the shelf where it landed in a sad little heap. She turned to face him fully, arms dropping to her sides, and that was when the real scope of it hit him all over again the way it always did.

Without the shirt as a visual distraction, there was just... her.

Her pecs were staggering. Two enormous, striated masses that projected forward from her chest with a density that seemed to bend the light around them. They were so thick, so impossibly developed, that the individual muscle fibers were visible everywhere, fanning outward from the deep cleft at the center in sweeping lines that branched and split like the grain of old hardwood. Veins crawled across them in every direction, thick and winding, mapping the surface in a network so complex it looked almost decorative. Some traced along the upper shelf of each pec, running parallel to the collarbone before diving down into the mass. Others branched across the outer edges where the pecs met the front delts, feeding into muscle that looked perpetually pumped, swollen tight against the skin. The lower curves were heavy with sheer volume, each one so full of hard, dense tissue that they cast their own shadows onto the abs below. Even her breathing made them shift, the striations rippling subtly with every inhale, the cleft between them deepening and shallowing like a living thing.

Her arms hung slightly forward at her sides because there simply wasn't room for them to rest flat. Her lats, thick wings of muscle that flared wide from her back, pushed the arms outward. They gave her a V-taper that was almost comically dramatic for someone with her face, that round, soft, flushed face with the big grey eyes and the messy blonde ponytail. Her biceps, even completely unflexed, were round and heavy, the peaks visible, the veins persistent. Her forearms were corded and thick, each tendon standing in relief.

And her midsection. Eight blocks of abdominal muscle, bricked and deep-cut, separated by grooves that caught the overhead light in sharp lines. Her obliques framed them on either side, angled and hard, disappearing into the waistband of the navy skirt she'd defaulted to because skirts, at least, still fit. Her serratus fanned out along her ribs like fingers, interlocking with the obliques in a pattern that made her whole torso look carved from something harder than flesh.

She stood there, arms at her sides, looking down at herself with those wide, startled eyes, the little shock mark practically visible over her head. A bead of sweat tracked down the valley between her traps and her neck.

"I don't even know how this happened this fast," she said quietly. "I was doing the same program. Same food. Same sleep. And then last month everything just..." She looked at her own arms, at the mass hanging from her frame. "Exploded."

"We went shopping last month," she continued, her voice climbing slightly. "I already went up two sizes. What am I supposed to do, just keep buying new clothes every few weeks? I'm supposed to meet your mom on Saturday, Kyle. In what? A tarp?"

Kyle stepped into the closet. The space felt smaller than it used to, or maybe she was just bigger. Both, probably.

"We'll figure it out. We'll go tomorrow and find stuff that works."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

She let out a long breath. She crossed her arms, which only made things worse, because the act of crossing pushed her pecs together into a mountain of striated muscle and made her biceps swell into hard, veiny balls that looked twice the size of his. She caught herself in the mirror doing it and quickly uncrossed, but the damage was done. She'd seen it. He'd seen it. A new vein had surfaced across her right pec in just the past week.

"You're staring again."

"Sorry."

"Your ears."

"I know."

She shook her head, but the corner of her mouth twitched. Just barely. Kyle saw it.

"I'm serious," she said, fighting the twitch. "This is a real problem. I can't go to dinner topless."

"I agree that would cause issues."

"Kyle."

"I'm helping."

"You are absolutely not helping."

He took another step closer. They were almost touching now. He could feel the warmth radiating off her, that furnace heat her body put out constantly these days, burning through calories and building more of... this. He smelled cocoa butter and faintly iron, even though she hadn't been to the gym today.

"You look incredible," he said. Just like that. No joke attached, no redirect. Just the plain, stupid truth of it.

Sophie went quiet. She looked at him for a long moment, searching his face for the bit, the punchline. She didn't find one.

Something shifted. Her shoulders, which had been hiked up near her ears with tension, dropped a fraction. Her jaw unclenched. She tilted her head to one side, and that little reluctant smile finally broke through, soft and slightly crooked, her cheeks flushing a shade deeper than the exertion blush already there.

She put her hands on her hips.

It was a small gesture. Just her palms settling on the waistband of the navy skirt, fingers curling loosely against the fabric. But the posture change did something extraordinary to every muscle on her upper body. Her lats flared wider, pulling her silhouette into an even broader V. Her pecs lifted slightly, the striations shifting, the veins catching new light. Her abs tightened reflexively, every block and groove sharpening. Her biceps, pressed against the outer edges of her torso by her repositioned arms, bunched into dense, rounded shapes, the peaks pushing outward. Her forearms flexed as her fingers gripped her hips, every tendon and vein standing at attention.

And she smiled. Not a big smile. Not a confident one, exactly. It was small and warm and a little shy, her head still tilted, one eyebrow barely raised, as if to say: okay, fine, maybe this isn't the worst thing in the world.

Kyle's ears were on fire.

"Stop it," she said, but the smile didn't go anywhere.

"I literally didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to. Your whole face said it." She looked at herself in the mirror again, this time without the panic. Hands still on her hips. That little smile still holding. She turned slightly, watching the light move across the landscape of her torso, the way the striations in her pecs shifted with the rotation, the way her obliques caught shadow. "I guess I could wear that black halter. The one with the ties."

"The one from the beach trip?"

"It stretches."

"Then yeah. That could work."

She held the pose for one more second. Hands on hips. Head tilted. That quiet, almost-private smile aimed half at the mirror and half at something inside her that she wasn't quite ready to name. Then she turned away, reaching for the rack, and Kyle let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding since he walked in.

They were twenty minutes late for the reservation.

Neither of them cared even a little.