Chapter 2: The Other Woman's Dose
The phone buzzed on the nightstand, a frantic insect in the dark. David jolted awake, his heart already pounding before he was fully conscious. The digital clock read 2:17 AM. Emma was a deep, rumbling presence beside him, the mattress dipping profoundly toward her center. She didn’t stir.
He fumbled for the phone, squinting at the screen. SAM. The name was a punch to the gut. Guilt, sour and immediate, flooded his mouth. He’d avoided Sam for days, letting calls go to voicemail, replying to texts with single-word answers. The memory of Sam’s hands, Sam’s smug reassurance, was a stain he couldn’t scrub out.
He silenced it. The screen went dark for three seconds before lighting up again. SAM. On the third buzz, he slipped out from under the sheets, the floor cold under his feet, and padded into the wreckage of the living room. He answered.
“David.” Sam’s voice wasn’t smug. It was thin, stretched tight with a panic that was instantly familiar. It was the same tone Emma had used weeks ago. “You need to come over. Right now.”
“Sam, it’s the middle of the—”
“It’s happening.” The words were a rushed whisper. “I took one. Just one, last night. To see. And now… things are… moving. I can feel my bones, David. I can hear my fucking tendons.”
His blood went cold. The infection. He’d passed it on. “Call a doctor.”
“Are you not listening? Look at what’s happening to your wife! What would I even say?” A sharp, shuddering inhale crackled down the line. “Please. I’m… I’m scared. And I’m alone. You did this. You need to see it.”
The accusation, however fair, was a rope around his neck. He glanced back at the bedroom doorway, a black rectangle holding the shape of his sleeping, changing wife. The guilt mutated, twisting into a heavy, unavoidable responsibility. And underneath it, that same dark, shameful curiosity. What did it look like from the outside? How did it start?
“I’m on my way,” he whispered, and hung up.
Sam’s apartment building was a sleek, soulless tower of glass and steel. The lobby was silent, the night concierge dozing behind his desk. David took the elevator up, his reflection in the brass doors a mess of rumpled clothes and wide, frightened eyes.
He knocked softly on her door. It opened almost immediately, as if she’d been waiting right behind it.
“Jesus,” David breathed.
Sam stood backlit by a single floor lamp, and the change, even in the dim light, was arresting. It hadn’t been two weeks. It had been days. The pretty, willowy receptionist was gone. The woman in the doorway had her familiar long blonde hair, but it framed a face whose jawline was already hardening, losing its softness. She wore a thin, gray cotton tank top and sleep shorts. The tank top was fighting a losing battle. Her shoulders, once slender, now strained the seams, the deltoids pushing against the fabric like small, hard apples. Her chest, always pronounced, was now a massive, shelf-like expanse that made the garment ride up, exposing a tight strip of abdomen that was no longer soft but lined with new, faint definition.
But it was her height that stopped him. She’d always been tall. Now, she seemed to fill the doorway, her head brushing the top of the frame. She had to be pushing six-five, maybe more.
“See?” she said, her voice trembling. It was lower. Not as deep as Emma’s rolling contrail, but it had lost its bright, chirpy top notes.
She stepped back, letting him in. The apartment was as he remembered—sleek, black furniture, minimalist art. But it felt different. A floor-to-ceiling mirror in the living room now reflected a distorted version of the room, and of Sam. In its surface, her burgeoning form looked even more pronounced, warped by the glass and the panic in the air. In the corner, her neat gym area was in disarray. A protein shaker lay on its side, brown liquid crusting on the rim. Next to it, on the carpet, was the bottle.
MaxGirl. The neon pink label was a violent slash of color in the monochrome room. The cap was off. A single, oily-looking black capsule had rolled out, and a dark, viscous stain was spreading slowly into the cream-colored carpet, like blood from a hidden wound.
“I only took one,” she repeated, following his gaze, wringing her hands. They were bigger. The fingers blunt, the knuckles pronounced. “Just one. I was curious. You made it sound so… intense. I wanted to feel powerful, you know? Like her.”
“Emma didn’t want this,” David said quietly, his eyes fixed on the stain.
“Didn’t she?” Sam challenged, a flicker of her old defiance returning. “She kept taking them, didn’t she? There’s a want there. A deep, hungry want.” She walked to the center of the room, her movements less fluid, more deliberate, as if testing her new balance. “Come here.”
He approached slowly, feeling like he was walking into a laboratory experiment gone wrong.
“Look.” She gestured at her own body, a helpless, sweeping motion. “My lats are flaring. I can feel them knitting into my back. My resting heart rate is fifty-two. It was sixty-eight. My clothes from Tuesday don’t fit.” She hugged herself, her massive arms flexing unconsciously. The simple gesture made the muscle in her biceps peak, a solid mound beneath the skin. “And it’s… it’s not just the outside.”
She went very still. Her eyes, wide and blue and terrified, locked on his. “You said she… grew something.”
David’s throat was desert-dry. He nodded.
“Me too.” The confession was a whisper. She let her arms fall to her sides. “It started as this… insane ache. This pressure. Like my pelvis was being pried open from the inside. And now there’s… there’s a shape. It’s there. I can feel it filling out.” Her hands hovered over the waistband of her shorts, not touching, just trembling. “I need you to look at it. I need… a witness. Or I’ll think I’m dreaming this. I’ll think I’ve lost my mind.”
“Sam, I shouldn’t—”
“You already did,” she cut in, her new voice gaining a sharp edge. “You already crossed that line. This is just… follow-through.” The panic was morphing into something else, a desperate, hungry need for validation. For someone to mirror her awe back at her. It was the same need he’d seen in Emma’s eyes.
She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her shorts and underwear and pushed them down in one jerky motion.
David’s breath hitched.
It was there. Thick and full, lying against the curve of her thigh, still soft but impressively formed. The skin was flushed, the veins prominent. It was a twin to Emma’s early development, but somehow more shocking here, in this sterile apartment, on the body of a woman he’d known in a completely different context. It was a brutal rewrite.
“Touch it.” Her voice was ragged. “Please. I need to know it’s real.”
He didn’t want to. Every cell screamed this was a deeper, more profound betrayal. But his hand moved anyway, as if pulled by the gravity of her transformation. His fingers, still slightly cut from the chandelier glass, brushed against the warm, smooth skin.
It twitched.
Sam gasped, a sharp, shuddering intake of air. Her whole body tensed, the new muscle across her abdomen and thighs cording. “Again.”
He curled his hand around it. It was solid, a dense weight. As he touched it, it began to swell, lengthening and thickening in his palm with a swift, alarming vitality. It was becoming erect, the head pushing out from its sheath, dark and ruddy.
“Oh, god,” she moaned, her head falling back. Her hands came up to cover her own breasts, squeezing through the thin tank top, her fingers digging into the overwhelming softness. The parallel to Emma was uncanny, devastating. “It’s… it’s like it’s wired directly into my spine. Everything is so loud.”
She looked down at him, her eyes blazing with a chaotic mix of fear and a dark, dawning arousal. “You did this. You gave this to me.” It wasn’t an accusation anymore. It was a claim.
She stepped forward, pushing his hand away, and her own huge hand—now easily capable of enveloping his whole wrist—closed around the back of his neck. She pulled him to her, kissing him with a frantic, searching force. It was nothing like their first time. There was no strategy, no clever seduction. This was pure, biological need, a feedback loop of sensation and validation.
She broke the kiss, breathing hard. “I want to feel what she feels. I want to know what it’s for.”
She guided his hand back to her, now fully, aggressively hard. Then she turned him, with that same terrifying, easy strength Emma possessed, pressing his front against the cool black leather of her sofa. Her other hand tugged at his pants.
“Sam, wait—”
“Do you tell her to wait?” The question was growled against his ear. Her body pressed against his back, a wall of relentless, radiant heat. He felt the insistent pressure of her, more eager, less controlled than Emma had been. There was no patient guidance, just a desperate, driving need.
He braced himself. The intrusion was sharper, less careful. He cried out, a short, pained sound muffled by the leather.
“Shhh,” she breathed, not stopping, pushing deeper until she was fully seated inside him. She held there, panting. “Oh. Oh, that’s… that’s the circuit. That’s the whole thing.”
She began to move, and her rhythm was different. Faster, more frantic, less about depth and more about frantic friction. It was like she was trying to outrun her own terror. Her hands gripped his hips, her fingers sure to leave bruises. The sound of her breathing, of their bodies meeting, of the sofa squeaking under their combined weight, filled the sterile apartment.
“You feel smaller,” she grunted, the observation slipping out, unvarnished and cruel.
It shattered whatever fragile connection he was trying to feel. He wasn’t a participant. He was a benchmark. A measure of her growth. He saw the floor-to-ceiling mirror across the room. In its distorted reflection, he saw it all: his own small, prone form, and Sam rising over him, a blonde giantess, her back muscles flexing in a terrifying, beautiful map of her change, her face a mask of agonized ecstasy.
She came with a sharp, truncated shout, her body stiffening into a rigid sculpture of tension. The pulses inside him felt vicious, claiming. She collapsed onto his back, her weight crushing the air from his lungs.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of her ragged breathing in his ear. Then she pushed herself up. He slid off the sofa, his legs buckling, and sank to the floor.
Sam stood over him, looking down. She was staring at her own body, at the member now softening between her legs. She touched it, her expression one of profound, alien disconnection. “It works,” she whispered, to herself more than to him.
Then her eyes focused on him, crumpled on her rug. The fear rushed back in, eclipsing the post-coital haze. “It’s not stopping, David. I can feel it. It’s like a furnace in my gut. It’s… cooking me.”
As if to prove her point, she shuddered. A visible ripple went through the massive muscles of her quadriceps. They seemed to swell, just a fraction, the definition etching itself deeper before his eyes. She glanced at the mirror, at her own broadening back, and a pure, animal panic seized her.
“Get more,” she said, turning to him, her eyes wild.
“What?”
“The supplement. MaxGirl. You must know where she got it. Get more. If it’s not going to stop, I need… I need to steer it. I need to be ready. I can’t just be a victim of this.” Her voice was climbing, hysterical. “If I’m becoming this, I’m going to own it. I’m going to be more than her. Bring me more.”
David stared up at her, this frantic, swelling creature he’d helped create. The guilt was a cold stone. The curiosity was gone, burned away by the reality of her hunger. This wasn’t awe. This was an arms race.
He pulled his clothes on, his body sore, his mind numb. He said nothing. He just left, closing the door softly on the image of Sam standing in the center of her apartment, alone with the grotesque stain on the carpet and the colossal, terrifying future swelling silently within her frame.
The elevator descended. He leaned his head against the cool metal wall. He had two women now, both blooming into monsters, both demanding more from him, both looking at him as if he held some answer. And all he had was the web address for a black-market supplement site, a maxed-out credit card, and the crushing certainty that he was no longer the accountant in the story.
He was the supplier.
He was the supplier. The thought played on a sick loop during his commute, as the subway car rattled through tunnels that felt increasingly claustrophobic. He’d ordered three more bottles of MaxGirl using the anonymous digital currency Emma had set up months ago. One for Sam’s frantic demand. Two as backups, because a terrible, logical part of his brain whispered that the demand would only grow. The website’s checkout page had a new banner: “Batch #7: Enhanced Profile.” He didn’t want to know what that meant.
Work was a bleary-eyed pantomime. Numbers blurred on his screen. He jumped at every ping from his phone, expecting Sam’s panic or Emma’s dark, ruminative questions. But Emma had been silent all morning, a new and deeper kind of quiet that worried him more than her confusion.
His office door, always slightly ajar, swung open.
“David? Got a sec?” Amy leaned against the doorframe, a gym bag slung over one shoulder. She was twenty-two, a semi-pro volleyball player who’d come to him six months ago with a tax situation so messy it smelled of outright fraud. He’d fixed it. It had taken sleepless nights and creative interpretations of athletic grant law.
“Amy. Come in.” He gestured, trying to smooth his rumpled hair.
She closed the door behind her with a soft click. She was tall, easily six foot eleven, with the lean, corded musculature of an endurance athlete. Her dark hair was in a tight braid. She carried a different energy than Sam or Emma—less anxious fury, more focused, predatory confidence. She dropped her gym bag and slid a crisp envelope across his desk.
“What’s this?”
“Open it.” She smiled, settling into the chair opposite him, her long legs stretching out.
He lifted the flap. The check was printed on thick, creamy stock. The amount made his breath stop. One million dollars. The payer was a corporate entity he’d helped her establish in Delaware. The memo line read: Consulting - Discretion Appreciated.
“Amy. This is… this is too much. My fee was—”
“Your fee was for the paperwork,” she interrupted, her voice calm and low. “This is for not asking the questions you definitely had. This is for the discretion.” Her eyes, a cool hazel, held his. “You saved my career. Maybe kept me out of jail. That’s worth more than a standard fee.”
He stared at the number. It was life-changing. It was blood money, or at least fraud-adjacent money. It was also an escape hatch he’d never dreamed of having. He thought of the creaking penthouse, the endless supplements, the look in Sam’s eyes. This check was a door.
“Thank you,” he whispered, the words inadequate.
“Don’t mention it.” She stood up, but instead of leaving, she walked around the desk. She moved with an athlete’s silent grace. The office was small. Her presence filled it. She leaned back against the desk’s edge, right beside his chair, looking down at him. The city light from the window haloed her form. “Seriously. Don’t ever mention it to anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“I know.” She reached down and plucked his glasses from his face, folding them neatly and setting them on the desk. Her fingers were long, strong. “You’re a good guy, David. Weirdly honest in a dishonest business.” She put a hand on his shoulder, her thumb rubbing the tense muscle of his neck. “You look stressed.”
He was frozen. This was happening. Her touch was deliberate, not tentative like Sam’s initial exploration, not awestruck like Emma’s. This was a transaction of a different kind. A predatory kindness. Her other hand went to his belt, fingers adeptly finding the buckle.
“Amy, we shouldn’t—”
“Why?” She undid the clasp. The sound was loud in the quiet room. “You earned this. I want to give it. Think of it as a tip.” Her smile was all sharp edges and promise.
He was overwhelmed, utterly passive. The million-dollar check lay beside his keyboard. Her hands were on him, cool and sure. She sank to her knees, her braid brushing his thigh, and took him into her mouth without ceremony. Her technique was practiced, aggressive, devoid of the frantic need that defined Sam or the world-altering wonder that now defined Emma. This was a victory lap. For her. For him.
He came faster than he’d ever have wanted, a shuddering release of weeks of tension, guilt, and fear. His hands gripped the armrests of his office chair. She swallowed, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and looked up at him, that same calculating calm in her eyes.
“Better?” she asked, rising smoothly to her feet.
He could only nod, trying to catch his breath, reassembling his sanity.
She straightened her shirt. “Good.” She picked up her gym bag, slinging it over her shoulder. She was leaving. The entire encounter had taken less than five minutes. It was the most efficient, unsettling experience of his life.
As her hand touched the doorknob, he spoke. The words tumbled out, fueled by a sudden, vicious impulse. He saw her powerful frame, her disciplined athleticism. He imagined that body, amplified. He thought of Sam wanting to be more than Emma. A dark, giddy calculus clicked in his mind.
“There’s… there’s something.A supplement. It’s not on the market.”
She paused, glancing back over her shoulder, one eyebrow arched.
“It enhances performance. Dramatically. Physically. It’s… intense.” He was panting slightly, his clothes still in disarray. “It changed my wife. She’s stronger. Bigger. If you think you’re peak now… you’re not. This can take you further.”
Amy’s expression shifted. The casual predator was gone, replaced by the focused competitor. The one who’d risked tax evasion for an edge. “How further?”
“Measureably. In days. It rewrites you.” He was selling it. He heard the fever in his own voice. “It’s not without side effects. It’s… transformative.”
A slow smile spread across her face. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was the smile of someone who heard the word “limit” as a personal insult. “Transformative how? Give me a metric.”
He thought of Emma, of the cracking headboard, the shattered chandelier. Of Sam’s new, terrifying height. “Vertical growth. Density. Raw power. It doesn’t stop where nature says it should.”
She studied him for a long, silent moment. “Send me the link.” It wasn’t a request. She opened the door. “And David? Cash that check.”
Then she was gone, the door sighing shut behind her. He sat in the sudden silence, the smell of her sporty deodorant and his own shame mixing with the office’s stale coffee air. He had just fed a new, hungrier wolf. He pulled his clothes together with trembling hands, staring at the million-dollar check. It felt like a warrant for his own irrelevance.
Across town, in a warehouse loft owned by a reclusive artist named Hera, Emma was discovering she was not alone.
Hera had found her through a shrouded forum thread titled “Unofficial MaxGirl Experiences.” She was forty, a sculptor who worked in steel and stone, and she’d been on Batch #5. She stood six-foot-four without the two-inch lifts in her heavy boots. Her shoulders were broad, her hands scarred from welding torches and wire brushes. She didn’t have Emma’s shocking, curvaceous mass, but a rangy, dense power, like industrial cable. And she had, as she’d phrased it in her direct message, “the same new equipment.”
The loft was a cathedral of space, smelling of ozone, dust, and linseed oil. Half-finished metal sculptures loomed like silent observers.
“You’re bigger than your photos,” Hera said, her voice a pleasant, gravelly baritone. She circled Emma, not like a predator, but like an artist assessing a new block of marble. “Batch #7?”
“Started on #6,” Emma said. Her own voice felt small here. She was used to dominating spaces. Here, she was simply another large object. It was a relief.
“The androgenic shift is more pronounced in the later batches. Faster. Deeper.” Hera stopped in front of her. She wore simple, paint-stained coveralls, unzipped to the sternum. “You’re scared of it.”
“I was,” Emma admitted. The honesty felt dangerous and necessary. “Now I’m… curious. It’s in me. I want to know what it wants.”
“It doesn’t want anything,” Hera said, moving closer. “It’s a tool. A new limb. The question is what you want with it.” She reached out, calloused fingers not touching Emma, but hovering near the staggering curve of her bicep. “May I?”
Emma nodded.
Hera’s touch was clinical at first, tracing the vascularity, the hard seam of the muscle. Then it softened, becoming exploratory. Her hand slid up to Emma’s shoulder, her neck. “The architecture is incredible. You’re a goddamn monument.”
Then Hera kissed her. It was nothing like kissing David. There was no gentleness, no hesitation, but also no frantic hunger. It was a confident, searching pressure, a meeting of equals. Emma felt a jolt go through her, a circuit completing that David, for all his love, could never close. Her own body responded fiercely, the unfamiliar organ between her legs swelling, pressing against the confines of her adapted clothing.
Hera broke the kiss, her eyes dark. “Let me see.”
There, under the high, distant skylights of the industrial loft, Emma let the makeshift clothes fall. Hera did the same. The differences were fascinating. Hera’s development was leaner, more integrated, like it had been built by a different engineer. But the central, defining fact was the same.
Hera approached, her own arousal evident. She didn’t kneel. She didn’t look up. She met Emma’s gaze directly. “How do you want this?”
The question was a gift. With David, it was always about guidance, about reassurance, about managing his fear and her own. This was a collaboration.
“I want to feel what it’s like,” Emma said, her voice thick. “From the other side.”
A slow smile touched Hera’s lips. She turned, bracing her hands on a solid steel worktable. “Then feel.”
Emma moved behind her. The perspective was dizzyingly new. She touched Hera’s back, feeling the powerful lat muscles flare under her palms. She guided herself, the sensation of being the penetrating rather than the penetrated sending a shock of dark power through her veins. She pushed forward.
Hera gasped, a rough, gratifying sound, and pushed back against her. “Yes. Like that.”
It was a different rhythm. Not a frantic search for release, nor a desperate claim. It was a dialogue. A testing of strength, of angle, of depth. The sounds were of strain and sweat and creaking metal as Hera’s grip tightened on the table edge. Emma watched the muscles in her own arms work, felt the awesome leverage in her hips, and for the first time, she didn’t feel like a monster or an experiment.
She felt like an invention. She felt potent.
When Hera climaxed, it was with a series of sharp, punched-out groans, her whole body locking into a tensile curve. The sight, the feeling of it pulsing around her, triggered Emma’s own release—a roaring, conquering wave that left her sightless and shuddering, her forehead pressed against Hera’s shuddering shoulder blades.
They stayed like that for long minutes, panting in the dusty, sunlit air. Finally, Hera spoke, her voice raspy. “Batch #7 is arriving tomorrow. They say the focal point of growth is more… directed.” She looked back over her shoulder, her expression unreadable. “We could direct it together. See how far this goes.”
Emma, still buried inside this stranger who understood her completely, thought of David’s frightened, loving eyes. She thought of the cracked ceiling at home, the world that could no longer hold her. Here was a world that could.
She nodded, a decision solidifying in the core of her rewritten bones. “Yes.”