Just One Selfie

The water had shut off ten minutes ago and she still hadn't moved, because moving was the whole problem.

The shower stall had never been built for something like her. The tiled corner held her the way a shot glass holds a fist — which is to say it didn't, not really. She was wedged into it, folded against the cold wall, and even folded she overflowed. Slabs of her spilled across the tile in glistening, bulbous tiers, mound stacked on mound stacked on mound, each one slick and steaming and so engorged it had lost any honest shape a muscle was supposed to have. Her shoulders alone filled the upper corner like two wet boulders shoved into a sink. Her thighs, crossed beneath her, were a small avalanche of their own. Even at total rest — not flexing, not even trying — she was a flood of meat that a single woman had no business carrying.

And the veins. God, the veins. The shower had left her shining from crown to toes, and that wet sheen turned the web crawling over every inch of her into something almost obscene to look at. They branched and re-branched across the dome of each muscle like roots over a hillside, fat blue rivers feeding fatter ones, throbbing slowly under skin pulled so thin and tight it had gone half-translucent — you could see them coiling down there, restless, even when she held still. A bead of leftover water traced one of them from her forearm all the way to the crook of her elbow and pooled, trembling, in a valley between two striations deep enough to lose a finger in.

The little blue strap of her swimsuit did what it could, which was nothing. It cut a thin diagonal line up across the foothills of her chest, vanished into a canyon of cleavage no fabric could ever hope to cross, and reappeared stretched to a glassy thread on the far side, sawing into the meat, one hard breath from giving up entirely. Against all of that, it looked less like clothing and more like a dare.

Her phone buzzed in her raised hand.

She almost dropped it. The hand holding it was, by some accident of proportion, still small — small and soft and tipped with a chipped pink nail — perched at the end of an arm thicker than her own waist used to be. She tilted the screen down into the shadow of her own shoulder so the steam wouldn't fog it, and peeked at it the way she peeked at everything now: from behind herself, one shy brown eye and a fall of red-brown bangs the only part of her face the rest of her body hadn't swallowed.

*Match — Tyler:* hey gorgeous 😏 you went quiet on me

*Tyler:* prove you're real. send me a selfie?

Heat crawled up the one stretch of her that still blushed. A selfie. Like it was a normal thing. Like she could just— point a camera at herself and have something a normal man on a normal app would understand.

Her thumb hovered. He'll run, the old voice said. They always run. But under that, lower, where the new her lived — the her that had stopped being able to fit through doorways months ago — something else stirred and pulsed, hungry and warm. Because there was a second voice now, and the second voice didn't say he'll run. It said: let him see.

She lifted the phone.

Bringing her arm up did it. The simple act of raising the camera flexed something — her bicep surged into the frame uninvited, a wet basketball of striated mass rolling up under her skin, and the motion sent a shiver of tension cascading outward through her whole front. The blue thread of her strap let out a tiny, audible creak. On the little glowing screen she watched her own reflection assemble: a monster of meat in a flooded corner, drips raining off her in the camera light, her shoulders heaving the frame full, and somewhere in the top of it all one cute, mortified face going pink.

She took it. Send.

The three dots came up immediately. Then:

*Tyler:* holy shit

*Tyler:* HOLY shit are those real?? flex for me. do it again

And there it was — flex for me — and her stomach dropped and soared at once, because nobody normal ever said that and she had spent so long praying somebody would.

She didn't decide to obey. Her body decided for her. She drew a slow breath and squeezed, and the shower corner became too small all over again, in real time, right in front of the lens. Every mound on her crammed-full frame swelled another inch and fought its neighbor for room. Pecs that were already monstrous ground together and rose until they brushed her chin and stole the bottom of her face from the picture entirely. The web of veins fattened — she could feel them filling, a hot pressure crawling up her neck — until they stood proud off her skin, hard ropes she could've hooked a thumb under. Water that had been clinging to her went flying as her back bunched and widened; somewhere down the slope of her a muscle she didn't have a name for surfaced through the others like something rising out of deep water, sharp and new.

The strap gave up. With a soft, wet snap it parted somewhere in the canyon and slithered away unnoticed into the puddle, and she didn't even reach for it, because the photo was already gone, already sent, a blurred avalanche of glistening, veiny, grotesque, beautiful *too-much* filling his screen wherever he was.

*Tyler:* ...

*Tyler:* you're not even real. this is insane. you're a freak

She read it twice. The old voice flinched. The new one purred.

Freak. She turned the word over and felt it land somewhere low and electric, felt her muscles answer it with one more involuntary throb, fuller than the throb before. That was the secret nobody told her she'd learn: the shock was the point. The disgust was the point. Every time a man's jaw dropped, every time the word came out, she got a little bigger, a little hungrier, a little less sorry.

She angled the phone again. Her reflection loomed back at her, dripping, enormous, shy eye glinting over a wall of her own beef — and she found, for once, that she liked what she saw. Her thumb found the keyboard, balanced on the end of an arm that could have bench-pressed his car.

*Her:* is that enough? 🥺

*Her:* or do you want to see me get bigger

The dots came back instantly. She didn't wait to read them. She was already setting her shoulders, already filling her lungs, already grinning behind the bangs as the corner of the shower groaned to make room — because one selfie was never going to be enough, not for him, and definitely, definitely not for her.