"Last One In Owes Me Smoothies"

The boardwalk creaked under each step Nora took, planks groaning in a way that had nothing to do with their age. She'd been told the cottage rental came with a private stretch of sand and a little outdoor calisthenics rig down by the dunes, and that was the whole reason she'd booked it. Sunglasses parked up in the messy blonde bun on top of her head, a beach bag swinging from one absurdly thick arm, a folded white towel tucked under the swell of the other shoulder, she came around the bend grinning like she already knew what the day was going to look like.

Her shoulders arrived at every place before the rest of her did. Two enormous, oil bright spheres of delts rolled and shifted with the tiny act of carrying a tote bag, each cap split visibly into front, side, and rear heads, every one of them swollen tight enough that the skin shone like wet ceramic. Below them her biceps hung in dense, twin headed peaks so heavy they pulled her arms slightly out from her ribs, unable to rest flush against her own torso because the lats wouldn't let them and the arms themselves were simply too thick to fold inward. The pink string of her bikini halter sat across the swell of her chest like a piece of dental floss laid across a roast, vanishing between two enormous shelves of pec meat that started high under her collarbone and sloped outward and downward into deep, shadowed cleavage of muscle. The lower line of each pec hung over the top row of her abs in a sharp, stacked overhang, and you could see the inner striations of each one, fine cords of fiber fanning toward the sternum in a pattern like a pressed flower.

Her stomach was a tight, blocky grid of eight bricks tiled cleanly down to her navel, every square so deeply etched that the shadows between them looked painted on. The little belly button divot sat in the middle of it all like a watermark, framed on either side by serratus that fanned out from under the edges of her lats like crab claws, rib by rib, every single finger of the muscle visible and twitching whenever she shifted her grip on the towel. Even folded over by the lean of her stride, those abs didn't soften, didn't compress, didn't blur. They just moved, plate by plate, the obliques on her flanks coiling and uncoiling beside them in dense ropes.

Cuffed denim shorts strained around quads that filled them past capacity. The seams along the outer sweep stretched almost transparent, and you could see the topography of the leg right through the denim, the long teardrop of the inner sweep, the high split between the outer head and the rectus running down the front, the dent of the diagonal line cutting across the thigh that only ever shows up on people who have no business carrying that much meat below the waist. Her calves, exposed below the cuff, flared out into upside down hearts so distinct that the inner and outer head looked like two different muscles arguing for space.

She caught a glimpse of the pull-up rig past the dune grass and her whole face lit up.

"Last one in owes me smoothies," she chirped over her shoulder, even though no one was racing her. Habit, maybe. Wishful thinking.

The bar was painted a cheerful navy blue and had clearly been bolted into the concrete pad by someone who assumed beachgoers would, at most, do a few half-hearted dead hangs. Nora set her bag down in the sand, kicked off the denim shorts, and stretched up onto her toes to grab the bar, and the moment her fingers wrapped around the steel, her whole back unfurled.

Lats exploded outward. There's no other word for it. From a standing rest they'd already been wide enough to make her waist look impossibly carved by comparison. Raised overhead, they bloomed into two enormous wings that all but blotted out the palm tree behind her, each one a topographic map of striations and feeding veins running like ivy down to the sharp inward dip at her hips. Each wing flared so far past the line of her ribs that you could have laid an open magazine across one and not seen the edges. Her triceps, hanging from those raised arms, drooped in three distinct, gourd sized heads, the long head, the lateral, and the medial all stacked one over the other like sandbags piled against a flood, the horseshoe of the lateral head so deeply cut into the back of her arm that it looked carved with a chisel. Forearms thicker than her own neck twisted as she found her grip, the brachioradialis bulging out along the top in a fat, knotted ridge, the flexors on the underside swelling into a separate lobed mass, tendons crawling beneath shiny tan skin like cables under a tarp.

She pulled.

The bar bowed. Just slightly. A barely there flex in the middle, a soft tink of protesting metal that made her giggle.

"Oops."

Her chin cleared the bar. Her collarbones cleared the bar. Her chest came up to meet it and her pecs, those obscene, oil slick shelves, pressed the underside of the steel with a soft, fleshy thud that was somehow louder than the metal complaining. She held it there a second too long, the eight panels of her stomach crunching into a deeper, even more brutal corrugation, the tiny belly button divot pulling tight between two rivers of inner ab definition that gleamed with sweat. Her serratus, fully exposed and fanned wide by the overhead position, looked like the keys of a small piano laid sideways along each side of her ribcage. Quads, dangling, somehow still looked like she was mid squat, the sweep of her outer thigh casting a shadow halfway down her shin, knees pinched tight by the meat of her inner thighs, calves diamond cut and twitching with every microadjustment of her grip. Even her glutes, which she wasn't doing anything with, were so fully developed that they sat shelved out behind her like a second platform, refusing to relax into the pink bikini bottom hooked between them.

She lowered herself slowly, savoring it, biceps swelling in protest as the eccentric stretched them. A second rep. A third. The little blonde wisps that had escaped her bun stuck to her temples in damp curls. By the fifth she was beaming at the ground, brown eyes scrunched up at the corners, teeth showing in a delighted little gritted smile that wasn't smug at all, just pleased with herself, like a kid who'd just figured out she could reach the top shelf.

"Hee, okay, okay, I'll stop before I bend it. Promise."

She didn't promise very convincingly.

By the time she made it down to the water the sun was halfway gone, painting the sky in that lavender and melted mango wash that only ever shows up for about eleven minutes a year. Nora stood at the tideline with her toes in the wet sand, one knuckle hooked in the side string of her pink bikini bottom because the elastic kept threatening to roll under the absolute cliff of her glute, and tilted her face into the last of the light.

Side on, the silhouette was almost cartoonish. Her traps rose from her shoulders like a small mountain range, the muscle climbing all the way up to her ear, swallowing the line of her neck so that her bun perched on top of what looked, from this angle, like a fortress of upper body muscle wearing a small girl's face on the front. The slope from earlobe to deltoid had no dip, no valley, just one long unbroken upward curve of trapezius meat. Her arm, hanging relaxed at her side, was wider than her head was tall. The bicep, even completely unflexed, peaked into a stubborn round dome with a ridge of cephalic vein winding down across the inner elbow and disappearing into the brachioradialis below. Her forearm flared into a bowling pin sweep before tapering to a wrist that looked almost dainty by comparison, almost ornamental, like someone had attached a small girl's hand to the end of a strongman's limb as a joke.

She turned slightly toward the camera of her own shadow on the sand and cocked one hip, and the whole side of her stomach rippled into a series of nesting curves. The serratus fanned outward in three distinct fingers along her ribcage. The oblique below it knotted into a long, twisting cord that ran from the bottom of her ribs all the way down to where the bikini string crossed her hipbone. Below that, the deep crease where the lat tied into the waist created a shadow so dramatic it looked like a thumbprint pressed into clay. Her pecs, in profile, jutted forward past the line of her chin, the lower border of each one a sharp, defined shelf that the pink triangle of her top barely managed to drape across before slipping into the cleavage between them.

She winked one warm brown eye at no one in particular, the smile small and a little shy at the edges, the kind of smile you give when you know you're being looked at and you've decided you don't entirely mind.

"It's a good sky," she murmured, mostly to herself. "Worth coming all the way out for."

The breeze pushed a few wisps of blonde across her cheek. A wave hissed in and washed cold over the calves that flared out from the back of her shins like two upside down hearts, the gastrocnemius split so cleanly into its two heads that even the seawater traced the dividing line. She exhaled through her nose and let the smile widen by a fraction. The motion alone made her diaphragm push her abs out into an even more aggressive grid, every block flexing forward like the keys of a music box winding open.

After dark, the rental's pool deck went all underwater blue and starlit, the kind of light that made every droplet on her skin look like it had been set there on purpose by a jeweler. She'd just hauled herself out. Nora never used the ladder. She just planted both palms on the coping and pressed her entire body up out of the water in one casual tricep extension, which had honestly probably been the loudest splash of the night.

She heard the patio door slide.

She turned, but only her head, glancing back over the gleaming brown curve of her own shoulder with one eye scrunched shut in a wink and the other lit up gold warm, white teeth flashing in a grin so big it pushed her cheek up into her temple. Her back, presented like that, was a landscape. The two hemispheres of her trapezius rose up on either side of her spine like a pair of round dinner rolls before merging into the ridge that ran down the back of her neck, each trap so swollen and full that the pink bow of the bikini halter at her nape looked like a ribbon tied to the top of a beach ball. Below them, the rear delts capped her shoulders in two more globes, their fibers fanning down into the upper portion of the back where the rhomboids stitched together in a dense, braided rope pattern between her shoulder blades. Below the rhomboids, the lower trapezius narrowed into a deep diamond, and on either side of it, her infraspinatus and teres muscles bulked out into individual, fist sized lobes so distinct that the underwater pool light cast a separate shadow under each one.

And the lats, the lats, swept out and down from her armpits in two enormous teardrops, so wide at their flare that even the bow of her pink bikini string at the small of her back looked like it had been tied around a different girl entirely, before someone ballooned the back muscles up to twice the size. The outer edge of each lat was a thick, ropy ridge that you could have hooked a finger over. The lower lat tapered down into a violent inward cinch at the waist, and right at the bottom of that taper, the spinal erectors rose up in two parallel columns flanking her lower back, each one as thick and round as a forearm, gleaming wet and disappearing into the small of her back where the bow of the bottom string sat helplessly across them.

The water she'd carried out of the pool ran down all of it in tiny crooked rivers, finding every shadow between every striation, pooling briefly in the deep cup at the center of her lower back before continuing on. Her glutes, round, high, separated from her hamstrings by a crease so deep you could rest a pencil in it, strained the back triangle of pink fabric outward in a way the manufacturer had absolutely not designed for. Each cheek flexed independently as she shifted her weight onto one leg, and the hamstrings below them split into three distinct cables that ran down into the back of each knee. The little side bows on her hips dangled cheerfully against quads that you couldn't have circled with both arms, the outer sweep of them so pronounced that even from behind you could see them flaring out past the line of her hips.

"Caught me," she said, in a stage whisper sort of voice, like she'd been doing something illegal instead of swimming a few laps. Her grin pushed up another notch. The wink held. A drop of pool water tracked down the channel between her traps and disappeared into the curve of her lower back. "Towel's right there. Bring it over?"

The way she asked, head tilted, smile bright, that one eye still scrunched cheerfully shut, wasn't an order. It was barely even a request. It was a girl on vacation, a little tired, a little proud, very wet, asking nicely for someone to come help dry off two acres of back muscle she could not, geometrically, reach the middle of by herself.

The pool lights flickered. Somewhere over the hedge, the ocean kept rolling. Nora waited, grinning, dripping, waiting to be tossed her towel.