Chapter 3: Pecs and Predation
Julian left the leather bar that night with the taller man’s number burning a useless hole in his pocket and Marcus’s low promise echoing in his skull. By the end of the week. The arrogance of it should have been laughable. Julian Vance didn’t beg. Men begged for him.
Yet for three days, the words festered.
He threw himself into his work, drafting precise lines on his digital tablet, but his mind kept redrawing the compact, powerful frame of the man in the corner booth, the unblinking green eyes that had watched him with the patience of a glacier. It was infuriating. He swam his usual fifty laps at the Athletic Club, pushing his body through the water, but the repetitive motion became a meditation on that calm, deep voice. You’ll be begging, ass arched.
“Focus, Julian,” he muttered to himself in the steam room afterwards, slapping his thigh. The sound echoed in the tiled chamber. He was being ridiculous.
On the fourth day, he needed iron and sweat to purge the lingering ghost. The club’s weight room was quiet, just the hum of climate control and the occasional clank of plates. He loaded the incline bench, the weight a comfortable challenge. He focused on the burn in his pectorals, the satisfying strain of controlled power. Up. Down. His world narrowed to the bar, his breathing, the pulse in his temples.
Set done, he racked the bar and lay there for a moment, chest heaving.
“Form’s good. But you’re rushing the negative.”
The voice was a quiet rumble, familiar and immediate. Julian’s head snapped to the right. Marcus leaned against the nearby squat rack, a simple water bottle in his hand. He wore grey sweatpants and a tight black tee that did nothing to conceal the dense topography of his shoulders and chest. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
“You,” Julian said, sitting up abruptly, the vinyl bench creaking. Sweat dripped from his hairline. “What are you doing here? Following me?”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched Marcus’s lips. “This is my gym, too. Been a member for years.” He took a slow drink, his throat working. His eyes never left Julian. “You just never noticed before.”
The implication was a needle to Julian’s pride. He noticed everything. Everyone. He stood, using his height as he always did, looking down at the shorter, broader man. “Well, I’m mid-workout. You’re a distraction.”
Marcus pushed off the rack and took two steps forward. The space between them crackled, compressed by Julian’s height and Marcus’s sheer presence. He didn’t look up; he looked through. “That chest development,” Marcus said, his voice dropping so only Julian could hear amidst the distant whir of an elliptical. “All that definition. It’s not just for show, is it? It’s perfection. The kind of perfection meant to be pinned down. To be sucked on and bitten while you’re being bred deep in missionary. Makes the arch of your back even more dramatic.”
The words weren’t a leer; they were a clinical, devastating forecast. They bypassed Julian’s brain and seized something primal deep in his gut. His mouth went dry. His own cock, soft in his compression shorts, gave a treacherous twitch. A flash of memory–the dim bar, the dismissive glance–seemed childish now.
“You’re out of line,” Julian managed, but the snarl he intended came out strained, unconvincing.
“Am I?” Marcus asked, genuinely curious. He finally glanced down, a slow, deliberate journey from Julian’s eyes to his shorts and back up. “Your next set is going to shake. Your focus is gone. I just named the reason why.”
He turned then, as if the conversation was trivial, and walked toward the free weights. Julian stared at his retreating back, the powerful sweep of his shoulders, the way the sweatpants hung from his waist. A riot of heat and humiliation flooded him. He was rigid, exposed.
He had to leave. Now. He grabbed his towel and water, strides long and furious toward the locker room. It was empty, thank God. The silence was a relief. He went to his locker, fumbling with the combination, his fingers clumsy. He needed a cold shower. He needed to scrub that voice from his mind.
The click of another locker opening made him freeze. He didn’t want to look. He had to look.
Three stalls down, Marcus was placing his water bottle on the bench. He pulled his black tee over his head in one smooth motion, revealing a torso that was a masterpiece of functional muscle, layered and thick, crisscrossed with faint silvery scars. Then, his hands went to the waistband of his sweatpants.
Julian’s breath hitched. He told himself to turn away. His body refused the command.
Marcus pushed the sweatpants and the briefs beneath them down in a single movement, stepping out of them with a barefooted ease that was unnervingly casual. He was turned slightly away, bending to pick up the discarded clothes.
And Julian saw.
The air left his lungs in a quiet, shattered gasp.
It was… impossible. A dormant thickness that was frankly obscene, a heavy weight of flesh that even soft and at rest was like nothing Julian had ever encountered. Marcus’s own description hadn’t been bragging. It had been an understatement. The sheer scale of it, the profound girth, was a physical fact that rewired Julian’s understanding of everything. All his smug criteria—height, stature, a dominant presence—melted into absurd ash. This was the law. This was gravity.
Marcus straightened, still naked, and turned as if feeling the weight of Julian’s stare. He didn’t cover himself. He met Julian’s wide, shocked eyes with that same preternatural calm. He said nothing. He didn’t need to.
The last pillar of Julian’s arrogance crumbled inward, silently and completely. Every haughty thought, every dismissive glance from the bar, every internal sneer at Marcus’s height now felt like the pathetic posturing of a child. A dizzying wave of submission, hot and inexorable, washed through him, followed by a spike of pure, undiluted need so sharp it was almost painful.
His own handsome face, reflected in the locker’s polished metal, looked pale, stunned.
Marcus finally moved, walking naked toward the shower stalls without a backward glance. The sight of his powerful back, the formidable shift of his glutes, the implicit promise between his legs, was a branding iron on Julian’s soul.
The shower turned on with a hiss of spray.
Julian remained rooted, his knuckles white on his locker door. The echo of the promise completed itself in his mind, no longer a threat, but a prophecy he now desperately needed fulfilled.
By the end of the week.
It was only Thursday.
A low, shuddering breath finally escaped him. He closed his locker softly, not taking out his shower kit. He couldn’t be in here. Not with that. Not yet.
The metallic clang of weight plates echoed through the gym, a percussive soundtrack to Julian’s simmering fury. Or was it arousal? He couldn’t disentangle the two anymore, not after that last set. Marcus’s words—perfect for sucking on while breeding his cunt missionary—replayed in his head on a loop, a filthy mantra that made his hands sweat on the knurled grip of the barbell.
He finished his workout in a blurred, aggressive haze, attacking cables and dumbbells with a ferocity that drew sidelong glances. It was an attempt to sweat the image out, to purge the low, calm sound of that voice. It failed. Every flex of his pectorals brought the promise back, a phantom pressure on his skin.
Under the stinging spray of the shower, he replayed the dismissal at the leather bar, his own arrogant smirk. Too short. Unimpressive. The words felt idiotic now, a joke he’d told on himself. He scrubbed roughly at his skin, the hot water doing nothing to cool the flush that had taken permanent residence beneath his surface.
He was alone in the locker room, towel slung low on his hips, fumbling with the combination lock on his gym bag when the air changed.
It wasn’t a sound first. It was a temperature shift, a displacement of space. Then came the quiet, steady pad of bare feet on tile.
Julian turned.
Marcus stood ten feet away, just inside the doorway to the showers. And he was utterly, completely naked. Water from his recent shower gleamed on the formidable landscape of his body, tracing the deep valleys between his abdominals, glistening on the thick, powerful cords of his thighs. He was a statue of wet, living oak. And between his legs, soft and heavy, swung the reality of what Julian had only glimpsed.
It was a beast of flesh. Thick, veined, and impossibly long even in its unaroused state, a profound weight that made Julian’s breath catch in his throat. The earlier glimpse had been a rumor. This was a fact, a physical declaration that rendered every standard Julian had ever held laughably obsolete. His own confidence, his prized stature, his muscular frame—all of it shrank, felt insubstantial before the quiet, nude reality of the man watching him.
Marcus didn’t smile. He didn’t strut. He simply walked forward with that unnerving, predatory calm, his gaze locked on Julian’s face, reading every flicker of shock, every dart of Julian’s eyes down his body and helplessly back up.
He stopped a foot away. The scent of clean skin and soap filled the space between them. Julian could see the individual droplets of water caught in the dark hair on his chest.
“Your number,” Marcus said, his voice a low rumble that seemed to vibrate in the humid air. No greeting. No pretext. Just the command, delivered as if its fulfillment was already a foregone conclusion.
Julian’s mind blanked. The architectural precision of his thoughts, the sharp wit, the proud retorts—all of it dissolved into static. He was a thirty-year-old man, a former athlete, a professional who commanded respect, and he was staring, flushed and fluttering and utterly dazed by the massive, swinging beast so casually displayed before him. His mouth was dry. His own towel felt absurdly flimsy.
“I…” Julian managed, the word a shaky exhale. He saw a faint, almost imperceptible arch in one of Marcus’s brows. A challenge. A test.
Swallowing hard, Julian fumbled for his phone from the gym bag, his fingers clumsy. He opened a new contact, punched in his digits with trembling thumbs, and held the screen out, unable to form another syllable.
Marcus took the phone. His fingers brushed Julian’s. The contact was electric, jolting. He input his own name—just ‘Marcus’—and handed it back, his green eyes holding Julian’s, seeing every ounce of his unraveling.
“Good,” Marcus said, the single word a whisper of finality. Then he turned, the powerful muscles of his back and the perfect, formidable curve of his ass moving with fluid grace, and walked back toward the showers without another glance, leaving Julian standing frozen, clutching his phone, his number now in the possession of the storm he had so foolishly thought he could weather.