"You'll Want to Get Those Brakes Checked"

I only ended up on that bridge because the morning commute had crawled to a dead stop, the kind of jam where you put the car in park and resign yourself to studying the cables stretching up into a flawless blue sky. I had the radio on. I was, by every measure, having a completely ordinary Tuesday.

Then I heard the horn — long, panicked, getting louder — and looked in my mirror to see a delivery truck barreling down the far lane with absolutely no intention of slowing for the wall of stopped cars ahead of it.

What happened next, I still have trouble explaining to people.

A patrol officer stepped off the curb and into the truck's path.

She had platinum hair, almost silver in the sun, swept across her forehead in a long fringe with a thick braid spilling down over one shoulder, the tail of it bouncing as she planted herself in the lane. Freckles dusted across her nose and cheeks, scattered down onto the open collar of her uniform. Pale blue eyes, narrowed and locked on the truck. And then she did the last thing I expected — she raised one arm, leveled a single finger straight at the windshield of that runaway vehicle, and her face twisted into a grit-toothed snarl of pure, immovable refusal.

"Stop."

The truck did not stop. The truck could not stop. But she clearly hadn't asked for its opinion.

That extended arm — the one pointing — was not the arm of a traffic cop. The forearm alone was a braided rope of muscle, every cord standing out under skin pulled tight, a delta of veins fanning from the back of her hand up to an elbow that disappeared into a bicep the size of my head. Her uniform sleeve had given up somewhere above that, the seam split and the dark blue fabric bunched uselessly at her shoulder where a brass-and-enamel badge still clung to the cloth.

Her other arm she cocked back, fist clenched at her ear, and that bicep ballooned into a peak so high and round and savagely cut that the whole limb looked carved rather than grown. The muscle gleamed. She was already sweating in the morning heat, and every surface of her caught the light and threw it back.

She braced.

The truck hit her open palm.

I expected — everyone on that bridge expected — to watch a person get folded under three tons of momentum. Instead the front grille crumpled against her hand and the back end of the truck lifted, tires shrieking, and she drove her heels into the asphalt and held.

She held a runaway truck the way you'd catch a beach ball thrown a little too hard. With a grunt of effort, sure. With her teeth bared and the tendons leaping in her neck. But she held it.

And, God help me, I forgot all about the traffic.

Her uniform shirt had been straining from the start, buttoned only at the very bottom, and the strain of the catch finished what the morning had started. The remaining buttons surrendered one by one, and the shirt fell open down a chest that did not belong to anything I'd ever seen wearing a badge.

Her pecs were two enormous, shelf-like slabs of muscle, so thick they jutted out past the line of her chin, the deep canyon between them shadowed and beaded with sweat. There was nothing soft about them at all — every breath she took drove them into hard, striated relief, the surface breaking into feathered cuts that ran toward the center valley. Freckles peppered the upper swells of them, fading into skin pulled glassy and tight over all that mass. They flexed with the effort of bracing, bunching, the lower edges curling up under their own impossible weight, and the black tactical strap that ran across one of them only bit deeper as they swelled.

Below, where her shirt hung open, I could see the suggestion of her stomach — a ridged, blocky wall of abs cut so deep the shadows between them looked etched in. Her uniform trousers, regulation blue, were stretched obscenely tight over thighs that no tailor on earth had measured for, a black belt with a gold buckle straining at a waist that was somehow narrow and yet packed with muscle.

The truck's engine was still screaming. Its rear wheels were a foot off the ground. And she was just... standing there, holding it aloft on one straightened arm, the bridge cables soaring behind her into the blue, her braid swinging gently as the truck rocked.

"Turn it off," she called up to the driver, who was frozen white-knuckled behind the wheel. Her voice surprised me — soft, almost apologetic under the strain, the snarl on her face not quite matching the gentleness of it. "Please. Before you hurt your transmission."

He cut the engine. The screaming stopped. In the sudden quiet I could hear the little sounds of her — the creak of leather as her arm took the load, the hiss of breath through her teeth, the faint groan of seams giving way somewhere across her back.

She let the truck down slow. Lowered the cocked arm she'd kept braced behind her, the bicep deflating from its monstrous peak into merely huge as she relaxed. And as the rear tires touched back to the road, she rolled her shoulders, and the motion sent a ripple across her whole upper body — pecs bouncing, the wide spread of her back flaring against what was left of her shirt until the fabric tore the rest of the way down the spine.

The driver climbed out on shaking legs. "I — the brakes just — I couldn't —"

She wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of one enormous forearm, and to my complete astonishment a blush crept up across all those freckles. She suddenly looked very much like she'd rather be anywhere else than the center of a bridge full of staring commuters.

"It's okay," she said. "You're okay." Then, quieter, almost shy about it, glancing down at her own ruined shirt and the ridiculous expanse of chest spilling out of it: "Sorry about the — I don't usually catch them like that. I just sort of... reacted."

She bent to check the front of the truck where her hand had crushed the grille, and the simple act of crouching transformed her again. Her thighs swelled against the seams of her trousers until I genuinely thought the fabric would let go. The muscles of her back stacked into a topography of ridges and valleys, wide as a doorway, every group rolling under skin that had run out of slack a long time ago. When she pressed a palm flat against the bumper to test it, the triceps along the back of her arm flared into a horseshoe so deep and defined it looked like it had been poured from steel.

"Frame's fine," she announced, straightening. "It's just the brakes." She looked at the driver, then at the truck, then — with a small, almost embarrassed smile — at the dent her own hand had left in the metal. "You'll want to get those brakes checked. The grille too, I guess. That part's on me."

By now half the bridge was out of their cars. Phones were up everywhere. A teenager near me whispered "she stopped a truck" in a tone of pure reverence, and the officer's blush deepened, spreading down her neck and into the freckled swell of her chest.

"Everyone back in your vehicles, please," she said, raising her voice but not unkindly. And then, because old habits die hard, she raised that arm again and pointed down the lane to wave the line of traffic forward — the same gesture she'd used to command a runaway truck to stop, except now her bicep simply hung there, casual, the size of a bowling ball, the morning sun sliding over the peak of it.

I was, I will admit, the very last car to move. I'd stalled. Not the engine — me. I was staring like everyone else, and when my eyes caught hers across the lane she gave a tiny, sheepish shrug, as if to say I know, I know. Like she'd been caught being too much. Like the size of her was something she still hadn't quite made peace with, even after it had just saved a half-dozen cars from being flattened.

I rolled down my window. I don't know what I was planning to say. Something gracious, probably. Something dignified.

"How — " My voice cracked. I tried again. "How are you that strong?"

She walked over, and every step rolled the muscle of her thighs against the seams of those trousers, the wide flare of her lats forcing her arms out from her sides at an angle. She rested one forearm on my door, and the door dipped under it. Up close, the heat coming off her skin was a physical thing, and I could see the sweat tracking down between her pecs, could see the individual freckles, could see one stray vein still pulsing across the meat of her bicep from the exertion.

"Lots of gym time," she said, like that explained any of it. Then she bit her lip, and that fierce, truck-stopping snarl was nowhere to be found — what was left was a young woman, blue eyes flicking down and then back up, who clearly liked being looked at far more than her job description allowed for. "You're not scared of it," she said. Not a question. A little wondering. "Most people get scared."

"No," I said. "No, I'm — the opposite of scared."

That earned me a smile, slow and warm and a little bit thrilled, and she flexed the arm resting on my door — just barely, just enough that the bicep swelled up under my nose and the whole car listed toward her weight.

"Traffic's moving," she murmured, nodding down the lane. Then, quieter, almost to herself, with a glance back at the dented truck and a private little curl of pleasure at the corner of her mouth: "...I should warn you, though. That barely got me warm."

She pushed off my door — the chassis groaned in relief — and turned to wave the rest of the cars through, the braid swinging across the vast freckled expanse of her back, the bridge cables climbing into the blue behind her, her badge still clinging stubbornly to one ruined sleeve.

I have never, before or since, been so grateful for a bad commute.