"You Weren't Supposed to Find Me Up Here"

The trail ended where the snow started, and the snow started where most hikers turned around. Jill had counted on that. She'd counted on the bite of the wind, the fading orange of the late sun, the way the peaks up here stayed empty even on the clearest evenings. She'd come to this ridge because nobody came to this ridge.

And yet.

She heard the footsteps crunching through the crust of snow behind her and felt her tail, a small twitchy puff of white fur, flick up against her lower back in surprise. Her ears, long and drooping with soft tufts, gave the faintest tremble. She didn't turn around. Not right away. She let the last of the sun do what it was doing, painting the mountains in that molten copper that made the snow look like it was burning from underneath.

Then, slowly, she planted her bare feet. One on a flat black stone still warm from the afternoon, the other balanced on a lower outcrop. She shifted her weight.

The muscles did the rest.

From behind, her back was a geography all its own. Two slabs of trap meat piled up at her neck like the foothills of her own shoulders, climbing so high they almost brushed the undersides of her pale hair. Her lats flared out from beneath that black racerback bra in two enormous fan-shaped wings, so wide they made her waist look carved. A thick, hard waist, but narrow only by comparison, every oblique visible and ridged like tree bark. Her delts were boulders. Round, capped, split into three clean heads that caught the sunset light in three different directions. Her triceps hung heavy at her sides in that unmistakable horseshoe shape, and when she curled her fingers against the rock her biceps answered, each one a dense hill of meat with a vein running over the peak like a lazy river.

Her horns, dark and curled and ridged along their length, cast a long striped shadow across the snow.

But that wasn't what the footsteps had stopped to look at. She knew it wasn't. She could feel the quiet behind her go a certain kind of quiet.

She glanced back over her shoulder, golden eyes catching the sun, a small sheepish smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. The kind of smile that said caught. The kind that said I don't know what to do with you looking.

"You weren't supposed to find me up here," she said, soft, almost laughing at herself.

Then, because the wind was at her back and because she'd hiked up here for a reason, she turned her body just slightly, just enough, and let the last of the daylight do its work on her.

Her glutes.

Gods.

The denim of her cut-off shorts had long since given up. The frayed hems rode high on the undersides of two colossal, perfectly round hemispheres of muscle that looked less like a part of her body and more like they'd been quarried somewhere and set into place by hand. Each cheek was a separate mountain. Deep, deep striations fanned out across them in overlapping ribbons, thick cables of flexed tissue that ran from the high peak at her hip down to the underside where quad met glute in a shelf so pronounced you could've set a teacup on it. The upper swell, where glute met lower back, was dense and hard and dimpled where the muscle pulled taut against itself. The outer sweep, the part nobody ever works hard enough, bulged out to either side past the line of her hips in two fat cantaloupe-sized lobes of meat, the kind of development that only came from ten thousand squats on a ten-thousand-foot mountain.

And they moved. That was the thing. Every small adjustment of her weight sent a slow, heavy ripple across them. A shift of her left foot and the left cheek tightened, striations deepening into visible cords. A small squeeze of her thighs and both of them hardened at once, the seam between them darkening in the sunset light. Sweat, faint, from the climb, from the cold air turning her skin pink, beaded on the upper slope and caught the orange like tiny embers before rolling downward and getting lost in the curve.

Below, her quads were their own argument. Teardrops the size of actual teardrops on something too big to cry. Her hamstrings, viewed from this angle, hung in three distinct ropes that twisted together at the back of her knee. Her calves were diamonds. Her feet, bare and planted on cold stone, were still somehow dainty. Small, almost delicate toes, a little pink from the chill.

She let out a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding. The puff of her tail flicked once, twice.

"I come up here," she said, quieter now, as if confessing something, "because the rocks don't stare."

She laughed at herself, a small warm sound.

"And then they stare."

Her shoulder rolled, and her entire back answered. Every fiber, every line. She wasn't flexing. She wasn't even trying. This was her standing. This was her standing still.

The sun dropped another inch. The orange went deeper, bleeding into the snow on the far peaks. She turned her face back toward it, and the light caught on the side of her jaw, on one golden eye, on the faint pink dusting her cheeks.

"You can stay," she said, not looking back this time. "Just don't make a big thing of it."

The wind moved through her hair. Her tail twitched again. Somewhere far below, the last of the day slipped behind the range, and Jill the ram stood on her ridge, carved and quiet and glowing, letting herself be seen.