Chapter 9: The Gym Rat's Temptation
The silence in Marcus’s childhood bedroom was a physical weight. It pressed down on him, heavy with the ghost of his own voice echoing off the Optimus Prime poster. Plenty of my gym bros would. The words tasted like ash in his memory, bitter and stupid.
He hated the pathetic curl of his spine on the bed. He hated the tears that had dried tacky on his cheeks. Most of all, he hated the hollow, yawning truth Lara had carved out of him: he was trying to convince himself. And he was failing.
A restless, itching energy began to replace the numbness. It crawled under his skin, a need to prove his own fiction true, to make the lie real through sheer, defiant action. He couldn’t sit here. He couldn’t face Leo. He couldn’t apologize—the very concept felt like swallowing broken glass.
His phone was a cold, black rectangle on the nightstand. He picked it up. His thumb hovered over Leo’s contact. He swiped away, the motion violent.
His finger scrolled instead through old contacts, names from a dead life. Mike.Derek.Chad.
Chad.
The image was immediate: a square jaw, perpetually tanned skin, eyes the color of a shallow swimming pool. Chad was a monument to diligent, uncomplicated vanity. He lifted heavy things and put them down. He talked about macros. He was, as Leo had once succinctly put it, dumber than a box of rocks, but he was loyal in a simple, pack-mentality way. He’d been Marcus’s spotting partner for two years.
He was also, Marcus thought with a grimace, exactly the kind of guy who would fall for this.
The plan formed not as a plan, but as a compulsion.A test. If he could do this, then the persona wasn’t a lie. He could be Lexi. He could be the bad bitch. He could erase the tremble in his own hands.
He didn’t think. He tapped the call button.It rang twice. “Yo.” Chad’s voice was a familiar bark, slightly tinny through the speaker.
Marcus opened his mouth, and his old gym-bro greeting—“Chad, you magnificent bastard!”—died unborn. He forced his throat to relax, let the new default setting take over. The voice that came out was light, melodic, a little breathy. “Hey, is this Chad? Marcus’s friend?”
A pause. “Yeah. Who’s this?”
“I’m Lexi. Marcus’s cousin? He, uh, he gave me your number.” The lie flowed easily, fueled by adrenaline. “He said if I was ever in town and needed a… a guide to the local gym scene, you were the guy.”
Another pause. He could practically hear the gears turning, slow and deliberate. “Marcus’s cousin? He never mentioned a cousin.”
“Distant cousin,” Marcus pressed, layering in a conspiratorial laugh. It sounded like wind chimes. “Look, I’m gonna level with you. I’m staying at his sister’s place and I am bored.He said you were fun. Was he lying?”
The challenge did it. “Nah. Marcus doesn’t lie. Fun is my middle name.” Confidence flooded back into Chad’s voice. “Where you at?”
Twenty minutes later, headlights swept across the faded living room walls. Lara was in her room, door shut. Leo’s door was also closed, a silent, accusing slab of wood. Marcus had changed into the black leggings and a loose, soft sweatshirt he’d stolen from Lara’s closet. It swallowed his frame, hiding the curves. A last-minute cowardice.
He opened the front door before Chad could knock.
Chad stood on the porch, backlit by the streetlight. He was bigger than Marcus remembered, or maybe Marcus was just smaller. His shoulders strained against a tight grey henley. He looked past Marcus into the dim hallway. “Lexi?”
“The one and only.” Marcus stepped back, gesturing him in. The scent of Chad’s body spray—something aggressively aquatic—filled the space.
Chad’s eyes did a quick, appraising sweep. The oversize sweatshirt, the leggings, the face. His smile widened, uncomplicated and sure. “Marcus didn’t tell me you were… visiting.”
“He likes surprises.” Marcus led him into the living room, the sagging couch a silent witness. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird. This was it. The point of no return. He could offer him a beer. Talk about old times. Spill the whole insane story.
He turned to face Chad, whose gaze kept dropping to the hem of the sweatshirt, to where it ended high on his thighs. There was a blank, hungry anticipation in his eyes. It was the same look Marcus had seen Chad give a new protein shaker. Simple desire for a shiny object.
Disgust coiled in his gut, cold and sharp.Good. He wanted to be disgusted. He wanted to feel something that wasn’t fear or loss.
“You know,” Marcus said, letting his voice drop to a purr he’d practiced in the mirror, “Marcus also said you were the strongest guy he knew.”
Chad puffed his chest out, a reflexive action. “Well, he wasn’t wrong.”
“Prove it.” Marcus took a step forward, then another, closing the distance. He placed his hands on Chad’s chest. The muscle underneath was solid, familiar in a way that ached. He leaned in, tilting his head up. “Prove you’re the strongest guy in this room.”
Chad’s hands came up, clumsy and huge, settling on Marcus’s waist. They spanned almost the entire narrow curve. He laughed, a low, thick sound. “You’re a lot more fun than Marcus.”
The words were a dagger, perfectly aimed. Marcus flinched, but covered it by pressing his body forward, eliminating the last inch between them. He was playing a part, but the body was playing its own game. The contact triggered a cascade of sensory feedback—the hard plane of Chad’ with his scent, the sheer size of him—that his new nervous system interpreted in a way that made his breath hitch. It wasn’t pleasure. It was a system overload, terrifying and visceral.
It was a system overload, terrifying and visceral. His own thoughts fragmented, racing alongside the alien signals from his skin.
Was Chad always this hot? The question surfaced, unbidden and hysterical. Was he always this huge? In his old life, Chad had been a peer, a fellow sculpture. Now, standing against him, Marcus felt dwarfed, comprehending that muscular architecture from a completely new and unsettling angle. The sheer scale of him was intimidating.
He had to move. Staying still meant thinking, and thinking meant crumbling.
“You know,” Marcus breathed, tilting his head and deploying the high, lilting tone he’d learned to hate. It felt like throwing a weapon he couldn’t control. “I was doing some yoga earlier and I totally pulled something. You’re so strong, do you think you could come upstairs and help me stretch it out?”
Chad’s grin was instantaneous, a white slash in the dim room. “Yeah. Yeah, I know a thing or two about flexibility.”
“Show me your big muscles first,” Marcus pouted, plucking at the fabric of Chad’s henley. The request was absurd, a line from a bad video, but it worked. Chad obliged without a word, grabbing the hem and pulling the shirt off in one smooth motion.
The fluorescent light from the kitchen hallway fell across his chest and abdomen. The definition was meticulous, each ab a hard-defined block, the pecs full and round. It was the body Marcus had lost, the ideal he’d worshipped, now rendered as an external object for his appraisal. A wave of nausea, sharp and sour, rose in his throat. It was admiration and revulsion twisted into a single knot.
“Satisfied?” Chad asked, his voice thick.
“For now.” Marcus took his hand, the gesture feeling theatrical and small. He led him toward the stairs, each step a conscious rebellion against the silent, judgemental doors of Lara and Leo. This was the proof. This was the action that would make the words real.
He pushed open the door to his borrowed room, the twin bed with its childish sheets suddenly looking like a pathetic stage. Chad didn’t seem to notice. He was already moving, his hands back on Marcus’s waist, turning him, pressing him against the door as it clicked shut. The kiss was wet, aggressive, all pressure and no rhythm.
Marcus let it happen. He performed. He made a sound that was supposed to be eager and felt his mind float somewhere near the ceiling, watching the scene below: a blonde stranger being mauled by his former friend in a room that smelled of childhood and poor decisions. He was a ghost haunting his own cheap fantasy.
Chad’s hands slid under the sweatshirt, his calloused palms rough against the soft skin of Marcus’s stomach. The touch was a jolt, grounding and horrifying. This is happening, the thought screamed. You did this.
And as Chad lifted him effortlessly, carrying him toward the waiting bed, Marcus realized the terrible truth. He wasn’t proving he was a bad bitch. He was just proving he could be broken.
The weight of Chad was an absolute totality. It pressed Marcus down into the mattress, the childish bedsprings groaning in protest. He was engulfed. Chad’s forearm, thick as a cured ham, pinned his shoulder; a knee nudged his thighs apart with a casual, confident force. The sheer mass of him was a physics lesson Marcus’s new body was learning in real time.
He felt small. Not metaphorically, but in a literal, spatial sense. Dwarfed.Subsumed. He had craved this feeling moments ago, a violent proof of his new reality, but now it triggered a cascade of conflicting signals. His mind recoiled, screaming at the violation, at the profound wrongness of Chad’s breath hot on his neck.
His body, however, thrummed with a different electricity. A treacherous, involuntary heat pooled low in his stomach, a shocking pulse of sensation that had nothing to do with thought or desire. It was a raw, physiological response to the overwhelming physical contrast, to the helplessness of being so completely overpowered. He felt aroused being so petite under Chad's massive physique.
The realization hit him like a sucker punch, stealing what little air he had left. Disgust, sharp and acidic, followed an instant later. He tried to twist away, a feeble movement against the immovable object above him. “Wait,” he gasped, the word choked.
Chad misinterpreted it. He leaned down, his voice a low growl near Marcus’s ear. “Relax, Lexi. I got you.”
The use of the fake name, in that moment, was the final twist of the knife. This wasn’t happening to Marcus. It was happening to a phantom. A tear escaped, tracking hot and fast into his hairline. He couldn’t breathe. The ceiling with its faint glow-in-the-dark stars, stickers from a decade ago, swam in his vision.
Chad’s hand slid down, rough and purposeful. Marcus squeezed his eyes shut, his mind fleeing the scene entirely. He was back in his old gym, spotting Chad on the bench press. Two hundred and twenty, two hundred and forty. The clang of the bar. The smell of iron and sweat. A fist bump. “Good set, brother.”
The memory dissolved like sugar in water, leaving only the sour present. Chad’s weight was a cement blanket. The rough texture of the comforter scratched against Marcus’s back. A sick, hot shame pulsed through him, synchronized with his frantic heartbeat.
He couldn’t be here. He had to be here. This was the point.
A switch flipped, desperate and brutal. If he was going to break, he’d break on his own terms. He stopped resisting the weight. He arched his back instead, a deliberate, practiced motion that felt both alien and instinctively correct.
Marcus moaned and pushed his boobs into Chad's muscular physique, loving the power of being such a bad bitch.
The thought was a scream in the silent theater of his mind. He chased the feeling, the filthy, thrilling agency of it. He was choosing this. He was using this. He wrapped his legs tighter, digging his heels into the mattress for leverage, meeting Chad’s rhythm with a furious, performed enthusiasm.
“Yeah, like that,” Chad grunted, his voice slurred with effort. His eyes were glazed, fixed on a point over Marcus’s shoulder. “Knew you were a wild one.”
The validation was a narcotic. For three seconds, Marcus rode the wave of his own fabricated power. He was Lexi. Lexi was a tornado. Lexi took what she wanted. The high-pitched, choked sounds coming from his throat were weapons. He was winning at being the thing he’d invented.
Then his hip bumped the nightstand. The lamp rattled. A framed childhood photo of him and Lara at the beach wobbled and fell, face-down, with a soft thwack.
The sight of that fallen frame punctured the fantasy like a pin to a balloon.
He wasn’t winning. He was just a thing being fucked in his childhood bed by a man who thought his name was Lexi. The ‘power’ was a phantom limb. The moans were just noise. Chad wasn’t seeing him. He was seeing contours and sound, a convenient toy.
The illusion shattered, leaving only the grinding mechanics of the act. Marcus went still beneath him, a doll with the stuffing pulled out. His performance was over. He stared at the water stain on the ceiling, letting the motion happen around him, to him.
After what felt like both an eternity and a single heartbeat, it ended. Chad collapsed with a final, satisfied grunt, his weight a suffocating aftermath.
Silence rushed in, louder than the noise had been. It was broken by Chad’s labored breathing near his ear. “Damn, Lexi,” he slurred, patting Marcus’s hip like a side of beef. “You’re a hell of a welcome wagon.”
Marcus said nothing. He couldn’t. His voice was gone, buried under the collapse. Chad shifted, rolling off with a groan that shook the bed. The cool air on Marcus’s damp skin felt like a violation all its own.
“Bathroom?” Chad asked, already sitting up, pulling on his jeans.
Marcus pointed a limp hand toward the door, unable to look at him. The floorboards creaked under Chad’s weight as he left, whistling a tuneless snippet of some pop song. The bathroom door clicked shut down the hall.
Alone, Marcus scrambled upright. The sheets were tangled, damp. He felt slick and unclean. He pulled the stolen sweatshirt back on, yanking it down as far as it would go, covering himself. It smelled like Chad’s body spray now. He hugged his knees to his chest, rocking slightly, a silent, frantic motion.
From downstairs, the front door opened and closed. A car engine started, headlights sweeping the room again. Chad was leaving. No goodbye. Just an exit.
The finality of that engine sound broke something loose. A choked sob erupted from him, harsh and ugly. Then another. He clapped a hand over his mouth, muffling the sound. He couldn’t let them hear. He couldn’t.
In the hallway just outside the closed door, Leo stood frozen. He had emerged from his room at the first muffled, foreign sound, his blood running cold. He’d known instantly, horribly, what was happening. He’d taken two steps toward Marcus’s door, fist clenched, when Lara’s hand had shot out from her doorway and grabbed his wrist.
Her grip was vice-tight. Her face, pale in the shadowy hall, was a mask of furious pain. She shook her head once, a sharp, terrible command. Don’t.
So they had stood there, prisoners in the narrow space. They listened to the groaning bedsprings, to the unmistakable rhythm, to the high, artificial sounds that didn’t sound like Marcus and yet could only be him. Leo felt each sound like a physical blow. His stomach churned. He wanted to put his fist through the wall.
The wall was too close. The hallway was narrow. As he leaned slightly, agonized, trying to decipher a pause or a signal to intervene, his shoulder brushed against Lara’s.
He jerked back as if burned. “Sorry,” he whispered, the word gritty.
“It’s okay.” Her voice was a strained thread. She didn’t move away. In the profound, awful intimacy of eavesdropping, the physical contact didn’t break. Her arm remained against his, a line of warmth in the cool, dark space.
Her eyes, adjusting, traveled over him. He was shirtless, having thrown on only sweatpants when he’d heard the commotion. The harsh exit light from the smoke detector above bathed the hard planes of his chest and shoulders in a faint red glow. The definition of his abs was like topography in the low light.
“Jesus, Leo,” she breathed, the words barely audible. It wasn’t awe. It was a stark, clinical observation. “Your abs. They’re like… architectural. It’s unreal.”
He let out a soft, broken huff that was almost a laugh. “They’re a pain in the ass. I keep knocking things off counters.”
“A tragic burden,” she whispered back, a trace of her old dark humor surfacing through the shared horror. Her gaze flicked from his torso to his eyes. “The glasses are gone.”
“They don’t fit this face,” he said, his own voice low. “Everything’s blurry past ten feet. But up close…” He trailed off, realizing how close she was. He could see the faint freckles across her nose, the tight worry at the corners of her mouth.
“Up close?” she prompted, her voice dropping even lower.
“Up close is fine.” The air between them thickened, charged with a shared, desperate need to escape the sounds from the other side of the door. This was a different kind of tension, a live wire strung between trauma and something else entirely.
Lara’s hand, the one not holding his wrist earlier, came up. She didn’t touch his chest. Her fingers hovered just above the defined line of his pectoral muscle, near the sternum. “Does it feel… strange? Being in there?”
“Every second.” He watched her hand, not breathing. “Like wearing a full-body prosthetic that’s also on fire. But sometimes…” He swallowed. “Sometimes the wiring crosses. And it feels… good. And that’s the worst part.”
Her fingers finally made contact, a light, exploratory press against the solid muscle. “Good how?”
Before he could formulate an answer—before he could even process the surreal fact of Lara touching him like this—the bathroom door down the hall clicked open. Chad’s heavy footsteps descended the stairs. The front door shut. The house was plunged into a new, deeper silence, punctuated only by the muffled, choked sobs from Marcus’s room.
The shared spell broke for a second. Leo’s body tensed toward Marcus’s door, anguish flooding back. “I have to—”
“He won’t let you in right now,” Lara said, her hand still resting on his chest, holding him in place. Her eyes were fierce, wet. “He’s doing this to himself. To push us away. To feel something. Walking in there now… it’ll just be a bigger scene.”
“So we just listen to him break?” Leo’s whisper was raw.
“No.” Lara’s gaze locked on his. In the dim red light, her expression was unreadable, a mixture of grief, frustration, and a wild, reckless impulse. The adrenaline of the awful listen, the proximity, the sheer visceral shock of the night seeking any outlet at all.
She closed the last inch of space. Her other hand came up to the back of his neck, her fingers sliding into the short hair at his nape. It was not a gentle, exploratory touch. It was decisive.
“We do this,” she said, and then she kissed him.
It was not soft. It was a collision, a desperate anchor in the chaos. Her mouth was urgent, tasting of cold coffee and salt. Leo stiffened in pure shock for a full second, his mind short-circuiting. Then a dam broke—all the confusion, the protectiveness, the loneliness of the last month, the horror of the last twenty minutes. He kissed her back.
His hands, which had been hanging helplessly at his sides, came up. They settled on her waist, and he was instantly, acutely aware of their new size, their new strength. He could feel the delicate architecture of her ribs under his palms. He was terrified of crushing her.
She made a small, approving sound against his mouth and pressed closer. The kiss deepened, a frantic, silent conversation that bypassed all the ruined words upstairs. It was heat and need and a shared, screaming defiance of the night’s darkness.
Down the hall, the raw, ragged sounds of Marcus’s solitary grief continued, a terrible counterpoint to the sudden, breathless connection igniting in the shadows of the hallway.