Chapter 3: Gym Rat Revelation
The gym’s fluorescent lights hummed a sickly yellow, bleaching the color from everything but the sheen of sweat on Brad’s colossal back. Nina stood frozen just inside the glass doors, her gym bag slipping from her fingers. He wasn't just bigger. He was a monument. Seven-and-a-half feet of densely packed, vein-corded muscle that made the heavy-duty squat rack look like a child's toy.
He was under eight hundred pounds, his form a slow-motion earthquake of rising steel. Candy stood behind him, not as a spotter but as a priestess, her hands gliding over the straining hemispheres of his glutes. "That's it, baby," she cooed, her voice cutting through the clang of iron. "Think about expansion. Think about filling the universe."
Nina watched, her stomach a cold knot, as Brad’s eyes, fixed on his own reflection, held a blank, narcotic hunger. He re-racked the weight with a ground-shaking crash that made everyone jump—everyone but Candy. She pressed her body against his sweat-slicked spine, whispering into his ear. He shuddered, a tremor of pure pleasure that had nothing to do with the burn of his quads.
"Brad," Nina called out, her voice thin and swallowed by the gym's roar.
He turned his head, the movement ponderous. His gaze slid over her, confused for a second, as if trying to place a familiar painting in the wrong gallery. "Oh. Hey, babe." The words were a distant rumble.
Candy’s smile was a surgical incision. "Nina! We weren't expecting you." Her hand stayed possessively on the small of his back.
"What did you do to him?" Nina’s whisper was a blade.
"Me?" Candy laughed, a light, tinkling sound. "He did this. I just provided the... blueprint." Brad, meanwhile, was staring at a woman on a distant elliptical, his head cocked with a simple, overwhelming want. Candy noticed. She snapped her fingers in front of his face. "Eyes here, superstar. Time for your shake."
She produced a familiar metallic pouch from her sports bra. Brad’s entire being focused on it with a terrifying, childlike intensity. The universe had narrowed to that powder. Nina saw it. And in that moment, watching the man she loved salivate like a dog for its dose, she knew the Brad she’d known was buried too deep to ever dig out.
She took a step forward, the rubber floor squeaking under her shoe. "Brad, look at me. Not the shake. Me."
His eyes, a foggy ocean blue, drifted down to her face. "I am looking, Neen. You're blocking the light." His voice was a concrete mixer full of stones.
Candy sighed, a theatrical sound of exasperation. "Can't you see he's in a recovery window? This isn't about you."
Candy already had the shake mixed, the cloying vanilla scent cutting through the gym’s stale sweat. She pressed the chilled blender bottle into Brad’s palm, and his fingers, now too thick to comfortably grip it, closed around it with a reverent certainty.
"It’s not a protein shake, Brad," Nina said, her voice breaking. "It’s that powder from the apartment. From the lumpy couch cushion. You know it is."
He looked from the shake to Nina’s tear-bright eyes, his brow a canyon of confusion. The cognitive effort was visible, a slow grinding of gears buried under layers of new muscle and chemical need. "It makes me strong, Neen. Bigger." He stated it as a simple, irrefutable fact, like the sky being blue.
"Look what it’s doing to you!" she pleaded, gesturing at his monstrous frame, the tank top seams screaming in protest.
"It’s what I asked for," he said, the words gaining a stubborn, gravelly weight. Candy watched, her lips parted in silent triumph.
He lifted the shake, his eyes locked on Nina’s, and in them she saw the ghost of the man who’d accidentally impaled her favorite fern with his grip, who’d laughed about it for days. "The bigger I get, the more I can have. The more I am. This is what I want." He said it plainly, a declaration.
Then he tipped the blender bottle back and drained the entire contents in three long, greedy gulps.
A deep, cellular shudder traveled through him, starting in his gut and radiating outward like a shockwave. His knuckles whitened around the empty bottle, the plastic crackling in his grip. Nina instinctively stepped back, her earlier anger frozen into something closer to dread.
Across the gym, a man reracking weights paused, his eyes widening. The change wasn't instant, but it was relentless. Brad’s shoulders seemed to broaden, the caps of them straining against his threadbare tank top with a sound like tearing linen.
“Yeah, that’s it. Feel it working,” Candy whispered, her hand flat against his lower abdomen.
He let out a low groan that was part pain, part ecstasy, his head lolling back on a corded neck. The visible veins in his arms and temples thickened, mapping a new, brutal topography under his skin. Nina’s argument died in her throat, replaced by a terrifying, magnetized fascination.
She decided to stay and watch Brad with awe.
It was a horrible, silent surrender. She watched the man she loved devolve into something more and less than human, a sculpture of flesh and appetite being carved in real time. His breath came in hot, ragged gusts that fogged the mirror in front of him.
“I can… I can feel the protein synthesizing,” Brad muttered, his voice several tones deeper, a vibration in the floor. He flexed his right arm absently, and the sleeve of his shirt split from bicep to seam with a loud rip.
Candy laughed, a sound of pure delight. “Look at that. Phenomenal.”
Nina watched the exposed muscle, glistening and impossibly full, and felt a primal thrill pierce her disgust. He was becoming a force of nature, and some weak, ancient part of her was wired to worship it. Her own heartbeat thudded in her ears, syncopated with the groaning metal of his next set.
Brad turned his head, his movements still strangely fluid despite his mass, and his eyes found Nina’s. They were crystalline, alert, but utterly vacant of the man she knew. “You see?” he said, the words slurred with pleasure. “You see how good it is?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, leaning down to grab the barbell again, his form now a terrifying engine of pure power. Nina didn’t speak. She just watched, her awe curdling into a cold, hard certainty in her gut.
The certainty was this: she could fight the powder, or she could touch the god it had made. Her hand, moving almost without her consent, rose from her side. It hovered in the air thick with the scent of his exertion and that cloying vanilla, then came to rest on the boiling, granite heat of his lower back, just beside Candy’s possessive palm.
The muscle beneath her fingers jumped, a live wire of raw power. “See?” Candy murmured, her voice slick with satisfaction. “He needs this. We all do.”
Brad’s next rep was a seismic event, a slow crushing of gravity that made the plates shiver on the bar. Nina watched the symphony of expansion in his latissimus dorsi, the flesh swelling against her touch. She leaned in, her lips nearly brushing his sweat-salted skin. “You’re incredible,” she whispered, and the words tasted like ash and truth.
A ragged, grateful sound escaped him. His eyes were glazed mirrors reflecting the relentless neon. “Don’t stop,” he grunted, the command muffled by the strain.
So she didn’t. Her other hand joined the first, mapping the terrifying new geography of him. Candy’s laugh was a soft echo in her ear, a shared, secret corruption. They were twin acolytes now, bearing witness to the altar of his form. He re-racked the weight, his breath a furnace blast, and simply grew larger between their hands.
The fabric of his shorts strained with an audible thread-snap. Nina flinched back, her hand retreating from the palpable heat radiating off his skin. "Brad, stop," she heard herself say, the words hollow against the gym's metallic din.
He didn’t hear her. A low, continuous groan vibrated in his chest as his deltoids swelled, rounding like boulders under the ruined tank top. The shake was still working, catalyzing a deeper, more structural change. Candy’s fingers dug into his side, her touch proprietary and encouraging.
"Just let it happen, Neen," Candy said, not looking at her, eyes fixed on the roadmap of veins surfacing on Brad’s neck. "You wanted him big. This is big."
"It’s wrong," Nina whispered, but her protest was swallowed by the sharp crack of his weight belt buckle giving way. It pinged off a nearby mirror. Brad’s head lolled forward, a string of sweat-soaked hair clinging to his forehead. His eyes were closed, his expression one of pained rapture.
He took a shuddering step back from the rack, the floor tiles creaking in protest under his massive feet. When his eyes opened, they were clearer, sharper, but feral with a new hunger. He looked directly at Nina, then down at his own body, a craftsman admiring a tool. "I feel… limitless," he rumbled, his voice box seemingly rearranged.
He flexed both arms experimentally and the remaining threads of his shirt gave up entirely, falling in tattered strips to the floor. The woman on the elliptical had stopped, openly staring. Candy tracked his gaze, a knowing smirk playing on her lips. "See what you've earned?" she purred, her voice only for him.
Brad’s attention snapped back to Nina, a blunt, demanding focus. "Get my stuff." It wasn’t a request.
Candy slid the metallic pouch from her own shorts pocket and held it up, a glint in her eyes. "We have more in the car." Brad reached for it, his movement startlingly fast for his new size. His hand enveloped hers, pouch and all.
Candy smiled triumphantly.