"They're Talking About Someone Else... Right?"

The hallway always felt too narrow for Cindy. Not because of the walls — those pink-washed corridor walls with their evenly spaced doors had plenty of room for a normal person. The problem was Cindy herself. At some point over the last couple of years, she had simply stopped fitting through the world at the size the world expected.

She moved down the corridor with her usual careful gait, shoulders rolled slightly inward in the futile hope of looking smaller. It never worked. A girl with silver hair cut into a soft, sweat-dampened bob, big green eyes, and a face that belonged on something delicate did not get to look smaller, not when that face sat perched on top of the single most overbuilt body anyone in this building had ever seen.

She was wearing the white sundress again — the thin-strapped one she kept for days she wanted to feel like a normal girl. It was a mistake every time. The soft cotton hugged a torso that no soft cotton was ever engineered to hold. Her chest filled the front of it completely, a pair of pecs so thick and square and high that they sat like two slabs of warm stone shelved beneath the fabric, the cleft between them deep enough to lose a hand in. There wasn't an ounce of give to them. When she breathed, they shifted as solid masses, the dress straining over their lower swell where the cotton finally gave up and clung.

Her arms were what stopped people, though. They always were.

Right now one of them was raised, her hand pressed self-consciously up against the side of her head, fingers in her hair — and that single relaxed gesture turned her whole upper body into a sculpture. The bicep balled up into a peak the size of a grapefruit, split down the belly by a groove deep enough to cast its own shadow. Over the top of it, snaking from her forearm up across the peak and vanishing into the meat of her delt, ran veins as thick as cords of rope, fat and blue-green under deeply tanned skin. Her forearm was a braid of separate muscles, each one defined, each one wrapped in its own network of vascularity that pulsed faintly with every small motion of her fingers. Her shoulder capped it all off — a delt like a boulder, striated into visible bands, so wide it threw the line of her neck completely out of proportion.

And her traps. God, her traps. They climbed from her shoulders up toward her ears in two enormous slopes, so developed that her pretty face seemed to sit in a little valley between them. Even at rest, even doing nothing more strenuous than pushing hair out of her eyes, Cindy looked like something that should not have been possible.

She kept her eyes down. She had learned that the eyes-down walk got her through faster.

It didn't work today.

"Fuck man... Look at that one!"

The voice came from a doorway up ahead, two guys lounging in the frame of an open apartment. Cindy felt her stomach drop. She kept walking. Eyes down. Almost past.

"Geez bro, are those veins on her face?!"

She felt the blush hit her cheeks before she could stop it, a hot pink flush spreading under her eyes. They weren't wrong, was the awful part. When she got pumped — and she was always a little pumped, her body never fully relaxed anymore — fine vascularity rose even across her temples and her jaw, faint tributaries running up beside her ears. She'd seen it in the mirror a thousand times. She'd cried about it more than once. On her arms it looked powerful. On her face it looked like something the world wasn't ready to forgive.

A small voice rose up inside her, the one she used when she needed to keep her feet moving.

"It's ok Cindy... They're talking about someone else... Right?"

There was nobody else in the hallway. She knew that. The reassurance was a lie she told herself the way you tell a scared kid the thunder is just clouds bumping. She held it anyway. She held it like a railing.

She didn't make it three more steps.

"That's fucking nasty, imagine kissing a face like that!"

"Brooo, stop it! I don't wanna be thinking bout all that!"

Cindy stopped walking.

Her arm came up higher, almost on instinct, the back of her hand pressing against the side of her face as if she could physically hide behind the very muscle they were laughing at. Up close, that arm beside her cheek was overwhelming — the forearm alone was wider than her head, the vein along its inner edge bulging out so far you could've hooked a finger under it. The bicep crowded up against her jaw, dense and warm and trembling very slightly from the tension of how hard she'd clenched it without meaning to. Her whole body had locked up, every fiber drawing tight, her chest swelling and hardening, her shoulders flaring even wider — the way it always did when she got upset, her body answering emotional pain the only way it knew how. By bracing. By getting bigger.

Even with a shell harder than granite, poor Cindy was crushed.

That was the cruel joke of her. She could deadlift a small car. She had pecs that could crack a walnut and a back that filled a doorway corner to corner. There was not a person in this building who could lay a hand on her and live to brag about it. And none of that armor meant a single thing right now, because the part of her that the boys' words actually reached was the soft green-eyed girl living underneath all of it, the one who just wanted, for one walk down one hallway, to be looked at like she was pretty instead of like she was a monster.

Her vision blurred. She blinked and felt the first hot tear spill over and track down through the flush on her cheek, catching for a second on the swell of the muscle pressed against her face before it dripped free. Her hair fell forward. Her shoulders, broad as a beam, curled in around themselves. She turned her face down and away, trying to fold a body the size of a refrigerator into something that could disappear, and of course it couldn't, and that only made it worse, and the tears came faster.

She didn't hear footsteps. She was too far inside her own head, too busy trying to keep the sob behind her teeth where the boys couldn't hear it.

Out of nowhere a hand reached in, cupping her face, tilting her face upwards.

Cindy froze.

It was a normal hand — that was the thing that broke through. A normal-sized hand, smaller than her own, smaller than the bicep it had reached past to find her cheek. The fingers were warm and gentle and they spread along her jaw with a tenderness she had absolutely no defense against. They didn't grab. They didn't poke at her like the others poked, that what-even-is-this curiosity she'd felt a hundred times. They just held. Carefully. The thumb brushed once under her eye, wiping away the wet there, and then with the lightest pressure in the world they tipped her chin up until she had nowhere left to look but forward.

Her huge body went still and pliant in a way that nothing about it should have allowed. All that mass, all that force, all that armor — and one soft hand under her jaw had turned her docile in a heartbeat, her eyes going wide and wet and uncertain, her lips parting on a breath she'd been holding. Her pecs heaved once under the white cotton. Her traps, still pumped up tense from her hurt, slowly let some of their tension go.

She found herself looking into a face that wasn't laughing.

"Hey... Don't hide.. Your eyes are too beautiful~"

The blush came back all at once, redder than before, but it was a different heat entirely. The kind that climbed up from somewhere in her chest and made her feel small in the good way — the way she had honestly stopped believing she'd ever get to feel. Her eyes flicked away, then back, that big green gaze unable to decide whether it was safe to keep looking. The hand under her face stayed exactly where it was, patient, the thumb stroking a slow line across her cheekbone right over the very vein the boys had been so disgusted by — touching it like it was the most natural thing in the world, like it wasn't anything to be ashamed of at all.

"I—" Her voice came out tiny, wobbling, completely at odds with everything about her frame. "They were—" She swallowed. The arm she'd been hiding behind sank down slowly, lowering away from her face, finally letting herself be seen. "...You really think so?"

"I know so," they said, and brushed away the last of the tears clinging to her lashes. "Let them talk. They don't have the first clue what they're looking at."

Cindy's chest pulled in a long, shaky breath, and as it filled, her pecs rose and broadened and the thin straps of the white dress drew taut over her shoulders — and for the first time in a very long time, she didn't try to make herself smaller about it. She let herself fill the hallway. She let the muscle be what it was. Held there in one warm palm, tipped gently up toward the only person who'd looked at her without flinching, she felt the granite shell go quiet, and the soft girl inside it finally, finally exhale.

"...Okay," she whispered, and leaned the tiniest bit into the hand. "Okay."