Cruise Control

She asked for the bigger dose three times before you gave it to her.

The first time was Tuesday, in the kitchen, in the middle of talking about something else entirely. The second time was Wednesday night with her chin on your shoulder and her voice gone small. The third time was this morning in the driveway with the car already running, both hands wrapped around the little bottle, and she said please, and she said she had thought about it all week, and she said she wanted to know what the top of it felt like.

So you said yes. She drank it standing on the gravel with the door open and the engine ticking, made the face she always makes, handed you the empty, and got in behind the wheel with her ears already pink.

"Two hours," she said. "It's fine. It's a straight road."

---

Forty minutes of highway, and nothing.

She drove the way she always drives, one hand low on the wheel, the other elbow resting on the door, her playlist going at a volume where you could still talk over it. Light denim tube top, light denim jeans, brown ponytail pulled up in the blue scrunchie with the bangs falling loose either side of her face. Every few miles she checked herself in the rearview, not her hair, her shoulders, the way she has done before every single dose since the first one.

At minute forty-three she stopped checking the mirror and started checking her own forearm instead.

"It's starting," she said.

It was. You could see it in the arm nearest you, the one down on the wheel, where the whole braid of muscle running from her wrist to her elbow had begun to lift and separate. The long flexors along the top of it stood up one after another, each one its own rope under the skin, and the grooves between them deepened, and a vein that had not been there in the driveway surfaced across the back of her hand, ran the length of the forearm, and climbed out of sight into the crook of her arm.

"Is it bad?" She glanced down at it and back at the road, fast. "It doesn't feel bad. It feels warm. It feels like the start of a really good set."

Two miles later her whole hand shifted on the wheel because her grip had changed, because her fingers had changed, and she said, in a completely different voice, "Okay. Okay, that was a big one."

"Pull over."

"I'm fine, I can make the next junction, it's only about."

"Pull over now."

She did not argue. That is the thing about her. She indicated, checked her mirror, came down through the gears, and put the car onto the gravel strip under the line of trees at the side of the road, and she did it neatly, and she had the handbrake on and the engine off inside twenty seconds.

Then she sat there with both hands still on the wheel at ten and two, looking straight out through the windshield, breathing carefully, not moving at all.

You reached across and put your hand on her arm.

It was hot. Not warm. Hot, the way a car hood is hot, radiating through the skin into your palm, and under that skin the muscle was moving. Not twitching. Sliding, thickening, repacking itself in slow continuous increments while you held it, so that the shape under your hand at the end of ten seconds was not the shape that had been there at the start.

She made a sound with her mouth closed.

"Don't let go," she said. "Please don't let go, it goes faster when you."

She stopped. She had felt herself say it. Her ears went scarlet.

---

The deltoid was first, and the deltoid took ten minutes, and you watched every second of it from two feet away.

It had been a smooth round cap on the top of her arm, the shoulder of a woman who lifts. It began to fill. The front head rose and pushed forward until it stood out past the line of her collarbone. The middle head swelled sideways and upward, and it kept going sideways and upward, and it went from the size of an orange to something you could not have closed both hands around, and it went from a curve to a landscape. The three heads separated and stood distinctly apart with grooves running between them, and across the top of the whole assembly the striations came up through skin gone tight and glassy in a raked fan, dozens of lines, and where those lines crossed there were finer lines splitting off them, subdividing all the way down until the surface of her shoulder read like a chart of itself.

It swelled toward the door and she moved away from the door.

That is what she did. She pulled her elbow in and lifted her arm off the armrest and held it there, unsupported, taking the weight herself, keeping half an inch of air between all that new muscle and the plastic trim.

"What are you doing?"

"It's a new car," she said tightly.

"It's a car."

"It's a new car and I'm not going to be the reason it isn't." She adjusted her grip on the wheel and the shoulder rose another fraction and she moved with it, angling herself, keeping the gap. "I can hold it. It's fine. I just have to sit properly."

So that was how the next hour went. Everything on her got bigger and none of it touched anything, because she would not let it. She sat in the middle of her own seat with her spine straight and her arms held in and every part of her carefully accounted for, growing into a space that was running out, and refusing to spend a single inch of that space carelessly.

You have seen her deadlift a number that made a man across the gym put his phone down. This was harder for her than that.

---

At minute seventy she took her hands off the wheel and turned toward you, and turning was suddenly a whole operation.

She had to lift her right arm up and over the top of the wheel to get it out of the way, and then she had to rotate at the waist, and the rotation stopped early because her own back met the seat. She ended up half-turned, one shoulder against the seatback, the other arm draped along the top of the steering wheel because there was nowhere else in the car to put an arm that size, looking at you sideways down the slope of her own delt.

"Okay," she said. "I want you to tell me if it looks as big as it feels."

She lifted her right arm, tucked her elbow in tight against her side to keep it clear of the roof and the glass, made a fist beside her jaw, and flexed it.

The bicep came up like something surfacing.

It rose out of the arm in a long smooth climb and it did not stop where an arm stops. It crested past the line of her shoulder. It crested past her jaw. The crown of it split into two heads, the inner one riding up higher than the outer, one dome stacked on another dome, and as the squeeze tightened the front of it crowded forward against the meat of her own forearm and had nowhere left to go, and it went anyway. The two heads shoved apart to make space that was not available, and the valley between them sank until it could have taken three fingers laid flat.

The skin over the top of it had stopped being an ordinary surface. It was thin and shining and pulled so tight that everything underneath came through: every fiber printing up out of the crook of her elbow in bright hard cords, fanning over the dome, and inside those cords, finer ones, and inside those, finer ones again. A vein came up out of the forearm, crossed the elbow, forked at the base of the peak, and ran up both walls of that valley in two ropes standing a clear finger's width off her.

It was larger than her own head. Her face was right there beside it for scale, small and pretty and pink with the ponytail crushed against the headrest, and there was no argument to be had about it.

And it made a noise. A low creak from somewhere deep inside the arm, the sound of a rope taking weight, clearly audible in a silent car.

She heard it too. Her eyes went wide.

"Did you hear that?"

"Yes."

"That came from inside me." She turned the arm slightly, examining the peak from underneath, and the whole dome rolled and reset with the movement. "That's never happened before. Baby, that's never happened before."

Then she did the thing she does. She could not point with the flexing hand, so she brought her left index finger up and aimed it at her own bicep, just the one finger, and looked across at you with her eyebrows up.

"Look at it," she said. Barely a whisper. "Look what it did."

---

You put your hand on the crown of it and it grew.

Your palm covered maybe a third of the top. There was no give in it anywhere, not the smallest amount, no yield at all under the heel of your hand, and it was so hot you could feel it through your whole hand. And while you were pressing down on it, the mass underneath came up and lifted your fingers, and the skin drew tighter beneath your palm, and something inside the arm creaked and made room that did not exist.

"It did it again," she breathed. "Tell me it did it again."

"It got bigger while I was holding it."

She shut her eyes and her whole body reacted, and every part of her that was near something moved carefully away from it before it swelled.

---

By minute ninety there was very little car left around her, and she still had not marked a single surface.

Her traps had come up. That was the change that altered her outline completely, two long ramps of muscle rising off the top of each shoulder and running all the way up to the base of her skull, thick and rounded, climbing until they crowded the sides of her neck and then until there was no line where her neck ended at all. Her head sat down into the middle of them. Her ponytail lay across the top of the near one instead of hanging behind her, and when she turned to look at you she could no longer turn very far, because the muscle at the side of her neck had run out of room to compress.

Her chest was doing what her chest does. Two slabs sat packed across the front of her ribs, each one deeper than her head was long, meeting in a canyon down the middle that had its own darkness in it, and the light denim of the tube top was strained flat across them and had been pushed steadily higher up her chest by the volume swelling underneath. It was holding. It was doing better than the car was.

Her thighs had filled the footwell. The near one lay along the seat cushion so thick through the middle that the denim over it had gone completely smooth, no folds left anywhere, and the outer sweep of it hung out over the edge of the cushion. Her knees were apart because they had no choice.

And she sat in the middle of all of it, arms in, elbows tucked, shoulders squared, breathing carefully, holding herself in a shape that kept every part of her clear of every part of the car.

"How much room have you got?" you asked.

"Not loads," she admitted.

"Show me."

She hesitated. Then she lifted her right arm one more time, slowly, and this time she let the peak rise toward the roof until it was almost touching the headliner, and stopped it there, half an inch short, and held it, trembling slightly with the effort of holding it exactly there.

"That's the ceiling," she said. "That's where it is now."

She lowered the arm and folded both of them across her front, and her forearms did not lie flat against each other. They stacked. The top one rode up on the bottom one, and as you watched, it rode higher, and then higher again.

"It's still going," she said. "It hasn't slowed down. It hasn't slowed down once in fifty minutes. The last one had stopped by now."

"The last one was half this."

"I know." Her voice cracked a little. "I know. I asked for it. I asked you three times."

"You did."

She looked at you sideways over the top of her own shoulder, and she was flushed all the way down into the denim, and her eyes were bright and enormous, and every few seconds some part of her shifted and settled as it packed on another fraction of an inch.

"Was it a lot to ask for?"

"Yes."

"Good," she said, so quietly you nearly missed it.

---

The trees moved outside. A truck went past on the road and the car rocked slightly on its springs and settled again. Her breathing filled the whole cabin.

"We're an hour from home," she said eventually.

"About that."

"It's going to be still going when we get there." She said it slowly, working it out as she went. "It's going to be still going tonight. It might be still going tomorrow morning. Baby, I don't actually know where the end of this one is."

"No."

She thought about that for a long time. You watched the fear cross her face and you watched something else come in and sit down where the fear had been.

"I can't drive us home," she said.

"I know."

"I genuinely can't. I can't turn my head far enough to check a blind spot and I don't think I can get my arms round the wheel properly anymore, and I'm not going to try, because I'd rather sit here than do something stupid." She looked at you. "So you're going to have to drive."

You said you would.

"Which means I have to get out of this seat and go round and get in that one." Her chin came down and her eyes came up. "And I have to do it out there, on the side of the road, where anyone can see, and I'm going to have to stand all the way up first."

Neither of you said anything.

"I've been sitting down for the whole thing," she said. "I haven't stood up once. I don't actually know how big I am. I only know how big I am in a chair."

She put her hand on the door release and did not pull it.

"Would you come round and open it for me," she said. "And then just stand there. Not to help. I don't need helping. I just want you looking at me when I find out."

She waited, with her hand on the handle, in a car that had not got a mark on it.

"And then when we're back on the road, keep your hand on my arm the whole way home," she said. "I've decided I want to find the top of this. I want to know what happens if it never gets told to stop."