Chapter 1: The Expanding Embrace
The shower was running too long again.
Steam curled from the gap under the bathroom door, a hot, damp breath against Mia’s bare ankles.She leaned against the wall in the hallway, listening. It wasn’t the water she was tuned to, but the shape behind the fogged glass. A silhouette that seemed to shift and solidify every time she looked.
He’d been in there forty minutes.She pushed the door open, the humid air wrapping around her like a wet blanket. The room was a sauna, mirrors blind with condensation, the world reduced to the roar of the spray and the dark, moving form within the shower.“Leo? You’re going to use all the hot water.”
The figure turned. Through the pebbled glass, she saw the broad taper of his back, the improbable width of his shoulders.He was leaning against the wall, head bowed under the stream.
“Just… sore,” his voice came back, deeper than she remembered, a vibration she felt in her own chest.“Sore from what?” she asked, stepping closer. “You work at a computer.”
He didn’t answer. Mia reached out and wiped a clear streak on the glass with her palm.The sight still stole her breath.
Leo stood under the spray, water sluicing over a terrain that was foreign to her. Just three months ago, his body had been familiar geography—smooth, lean, a landscape she knew by heart.Now it was all upheaval. Dark, coarse hair spread across his pectorals, a trail thickening as it plunged down his taut stomach. His shoulders weren’t just broad; they were slab-like, the deltoids rounding under skin that seemed stretched taut. His arms, braced against the tile, were corded with new muscle, veins riding the surface like underground rivers.But it was his spine that held her gaze. A row of knobs, distinct and prominent, rising from the hollow of his back.He seemed… longer. Taller.Which was impossible.He was thirty.Men didn’t get taller at thirty.
“You’re staring,” he said, without turning. His voice was a low rumble under the water’s hiss.
“I’m allowed to stare,” she said, trying to lighten the thickness in the air. “You’re my husband.”
He turned then, and the full view was a gut-punch. His face was harder, the jaw more squared, shadowed with stubble that seemed to grow back darker by the hour. His eyes, usually a soft brown, looked almost black in the steam.A faint, purple bruise bloomed on his ribcage.
“Where did you get that?” she asked, pointing.
He glanced down as if noticing it for the first time.“I bumped into the door frame.The hallway one. It’s… narrower than it was.”
He said it plainly, a simple observation. Mia felt a cold trickle down her own spine, unrelated to the heat. He’d mentioned it last week—complaining he’d hit his head on the garage door.She’d laughed it off. Now, she wasn’t laughing.He reached for the bar of soap, and his hand seemed to swallow it. His fingers were thicker, the knuckles pronounced.She’d held those hands for years. They didn’t fit in hers the same way anymore.An impulse, reckless and needy, took hold of her. She unbuttoned her jeans, shimmied out of them and her shirt, letting the damp air kiss her skin.She slid the shower door open.
The heat enveloped her, the spray instantly plastering her auburn hair to her skull. Leo watched her, his expression unreadable.There was a new intensity in his gaze, a predator’s stillness.
“Scoot over,” she said, her voice barely above the water’s roar.
He moved back, and the space he occupied was vastly larger than before. She stepped under the water, turning her face up, letting it wash over the confusion prickling at her brain.This was her husband. Same eyes, same laugh lines… except the lines seemed shallower now, the boyish softness sanded away by some invisible force.She reached for the soap from him. Their fingers brushed, and a jolt went through her—not static, but a pure, visceral shock of his physical presence. His heat radiated stronger than the water.He was like a furnace.
She began to lather her arms, trying to act normal.But her eyes kept drifting back to him.To the changes. The sheer scale of him.Awe coiled in her stomach, tight and anxious. She was aroused, a fact that embarrassed her.