Petra Ironwood pressed a loaded barbell over her chest and counted reps out loud so Guy would hear her from the porch. She was three hundred pounds of muscle stacked on a five-foot-four frame, and every rep was for him. She wanted to marry him. She had decided that last Tuesday, watching him eat toast, and she had not stopped deciding it since. The barbell clanged onto the rack. Petra sat up, sweat rolling between her chest and her stomach, and shouted toward the house. "Guy! I did forty! You want me to do forty more?" No answer came through the open window. She stood, flexed once for the empty yard, and told herself he was probably busy. He was always busy. That was fine. She would get bigger. Bigger arms, bigger shoulders, bigger everything. Guy liked things that were impressive. She would be impressive enough that he had to look. She was chalking her hands for another set when the gate creaked. A short, thick man stepped into the yard, jaw clenched, a length of pipe held low against his thigh. Tattoos ran down both arms. A scar cut through one eyebrow. Petra had never seen him before. He had the look of someone who had been thinking about her for a long time. "Petra Ironwood," the man said. His voice was flat. "Viktor Krauss. I've come to kill you." She blinked. "Right now? I'm in the middle of a set." "Right now." She glanced at the porch. Still no Guy. She wanted him to see this. She wanted him to see her handle it, so he would understand what he was getting. She rolled her shoulders back, and her traps rose like loaves of bread. Viktor swung the pipe. Petra caught it in her fist and did not move. The pipe bent around her knuckles. Viktor stared at his own hand as if it had betrayed him. She plucked the pipe away and dropped it in the grass. "Guy!" she called, louder now, chest out. "Guy, come see!" Viktor drew a knife. She caught his wrist, lifted him off the ground, and set him down outside the gate like a sack of feed. He landed hard, scrambled up, and did not run. He stood there breathing, staring at her, memorizing her. "I'll come back," he said. "Every day. Until one of us is done." "Okay," Petra said, distracted. The porch was still empty. Guy hadn't come. Guy hadn't even looked. Viktor limped off. Petra stood in the yard with a bent pipe at her feet and a hollow feeling under her enormous ribs. Guy had missed it. All that strength, and he had missed it. She walked back to the barbell and added two more plates. If forty reps didn't bring him to the window, she would do eighty. She would get bigger until he had no choice.

The next morning Petra dragged her barbell out to the yard again. She loaded it heavier than yesterday. Guy's window stayed shut, but she started her set anyway. Halfway through the first rep, she heard boots on gravel behind the fence. Viktor Krauss was back. The short, thick man from yesterday, the one whose pipe she had bent around her knuckles. He crouched behind her woodpile, watching. His scarred eyebrow twitched every time she breathed out. He had promised to come every day until one of them was done, and here he was, keeping his word. Petra racked the bar. She could not count reps with him circling. Every time she lay back, she pictured his knife coming down. Every time she stood, she caught his shape sliding between trees. Her arms shook on a weight that should have felt easy. That made her angrier than the knife had. "Viktor," she called. "You're ruining my set." He stepped out from the woodpile. He had a fresh blade this time, smaller, meaner. He said nothing. He just moved sideways, keeping the fence between them, waiting for her to bend over so he could rush. Petra thought about throwing him again. But she had thrown him yesterday and it had solved nothing. He would come tomorrow. He would come the day after. She needed the noise gone so she could grow. She left the barbell in the grass and walked inside. She heard him follow along the outside wall, boots crunching. She went to her bathroom, turned the shower on hot, and stepped under it in her shorts and sports bra. Steam filled the small room. She waited. The window above the tub slid open. Viktor climbed through and dropped onto the tile, knife first. He froze when he saw her. Water ran down her shoulders, down arms thicker than his thighs. She did not reach for him. "Oh, it’s you," Petra said. “Care to join me?” His knife hand shook. He looked at her, then at the steam-fogged room, clearly thrown off by the surprise. After a long second, he lowered the blade. Petra kept staring him down until he backed out through the window and disappeared.

After Viktor climbed back out her bathroom window, Petra dried off and stared at her reflection. Her arms looked good. Her shoulders looked good. Her chest did not. She flexed and watched her pectorals twitch under the sports bra. Small. Flat. Not what a man like Guy would ever notice from a second-story window. The yard barbell wasn't enough anymore. She needed more iron than her yard could hold. She drove into town and parked in front of the big gym on the corner. Two stories of glass and steel. Through the windows she saw rows of machines stacked to the ceiling, cable stations, benches, pec decks lined up like church pews. She paid the desk clerk in cash and walked straight to the chest section. She started on the flat bench. She loaded four plates a side and pressed until her shirt was soaked. She moved to the incline. She moved to the decline. She moved to the pec deck and squeezed until the pin rattled at the bottom of the stack. Men stopped their sets to watch. She did not look at them. She counted her own reps and pictured her chest muscles growing under the bar. An hour in, her pecs burned so hard she could barely lower the handles. She kept going. Cable flies. Dumbbell pullovers. Push-ups between sets, feet up on a bench. Her sports bra strap dug a red line into her shoulder. She liked the line. It meant something underneath was pushing out. By the second hour, the bra strap snapped. The elastic gave up and slapped against her ribs. She looked down. Her chest had filled out tight against the fabric, solid muscle where yesterday there had been muscle but not enough of it. She pressed a palm flat against one pec and felt it push back into her hand like a stone under skin. She walked to the mirror wall by the free weights. She flexed. Her pecs jumped. They bounced when she released. They cast a shadow on her stomach. A man on the cable machine dropped his handle and it clanged against the frame. Petra grinned at the glass. This was what she'd come for. This was what Guy would see from his window. She drove home with her ruined bra in her fist and her shirt stretched tight. She pulled into her yard and looked up at Guy's house next door. His window was open. He was not in it. The curtain moved in the breeze and no face appeared behind it. She had grown her chest and he had not been watching. She stood in her yard with her new pecs aching and understood the problem. He didn’t think she was attractive. She will fix that

Petra started measuring her chest the morning after Guy's window stayed empty. She wrapped a cloth tape around her chest and wrote the number in a notebook she kept by the bed. Forty-eight inches. She wrote it every morning for three weeks. The number moved a quarter inch, then stopped. Then it dropped an eighth. She squeezed the pen until the plastic cracked. On the twenty-second morning she drove to the big gym on the corner and did not touch a weight. She walked past the racks of machines, past the pec decks and cable stations, and went straight to the hot tub in the back. She sank in up to her collarbones and closed her eyes. The tape number sat behind her eyelids. Forty-eight and one eighth. Three weeks of pressing and pulling for one eighth of an inch. A man dropped into the water across from her. He had gel in his hair and a chain around his neck. He stretched both arms along the tub's edge and told her he'd seen her lifting last week. He told her about his own bench numbers. He told her about his truck. He slid closer along the tiled bench until his knee touched hers. Petra opened her eyes. "What do you think of my chest?" He grinned. He leaned in to answer. She caught the back of his head with one hand and shoved his face down into the water for a moment. He thrashed. His hands slapped the water. His feet kicked up foam. She watched the bubbles rise around his shoulders and counted to twenty in her head. On twenty he wrenched sideways and broke free, gasping, chain tangled at his mouth. A hatch in the far wall opened. Sunny Larkspur entered the room, humming. She snapped off the overalls and smirked as she got in. Her arms were thicker than Petra's thighs. Her outfit was stretched tight across her chest. She took off her belt and overalls and slid into the tub, smirking at Petra. The man wiped his mouth. He looked at Sunny. His eyes widened. He said something about her huge upper body. Sunny unclipped one strap of her overalls and let the bib fall forward. Her chest dropped free into the water and displaced half the tub. The man's eyebrows climbed. He started a new boast. Petra stared at Sunny's chest. She stared at her own. She looked down at the water line across her chest, then at the water line across Sunny's, six inches higher. Her hands curled under the surface. She watched as the man flirted with Sunny, and Sunny casually flirted back. The man had no idea the trouble he was in as she pulled him closer. Petra knew the appetite Sunny had.

Petra stayed low in the water and watched them. Sunny's arm was draped along the tub's edge. The man with the gel hair had drifted to her side. He was still talking. Petra measured the two of them with her eyes. Sunny's shoulder was wider than the man's head. Sunny's forearm was thicker than Petra's calf. Petra pressed her own bicep under the water and squeezed. It felt small. She looked down at her chest. The water sat below her collarbone. She looked at Sunny's chest. The water sat above hers, pushed up by muscle and flesh Petra did not have. Petra had trained for three weeks and gained an eighth of an inch. Sunny was three times her age and had built a body the room bent around. The man laughed at something Sunny said. Sunny had not said anything funny. She had only tilted her head. He kept going, telling her about a bar fight he'd won. Sunny's smile did not move. Her eyes slid across the tub to Petra and held there. "Shut up," Sunny said. The man stopped mid-sentence. "Kiss my chest." He blinked. Then he grinned like he'd won a prize and pushed off the wall. He swam the short distance and set his mouth against her. He kissed once, then again, working across her chest. Sunny did not look at him. She looked at Petra. Petra's jaw locked. She watched the man's back rise and fall as he moved along Sunny. He was doing exactly what Sunny told him to do. He thought he was the one getting something. Sunny lifted one hand out of the water. She flexed her arm. The bicep swelled to the size of a melon. She held it there for Petra. Then she let it drop and stroked the back of the man's wet head, gentle, like he was a dog. "You've been counting inches," Sunny said across the water. Her voice was easy. "Wrong thing to count." Petra opened her mouth. Nothing came out. The man kept kissing. "He wanted you when he came in," Sunny said. "Now he wants me. You know why." Petra knew why. She stood up. Water sheeted off her shoulders. Her chest cleared the surface. It was not enough. Next to Sunny it would never be enough at this size. She climbed out of the tub. Her feet slapped the tile. She did not grab a towel. She walked past the hatch, through the door, and into the main floor of the gym. Rows of machines waited under the lights: cable stacks, pec decks, plate towers. She had been coming here for months. She had been lifting like a person. That was the mistake. She went to the heaviest bench and started loading the bar. She did not stop at the number she used last week. She kept adding plates.

Petra trained for six weeks after that day at the hot tub. She stopped counting inches. She counted plates. Every morning she loaded the heavy bar and drove it up until her arms shook. Every night she ate until her stomach hurt. Her shoulders spread. Her chest thickened. Her arms filled her sleeves and then split them. She stood in front of the mirror one morning and flexed. Her bicep rose the size of a melon. Same as Sunny's. She had matched her. That was not enough. Matching Sunny meant nothing if the man still chose Sunny. Petra remembered how he had swum across the tub. She remembered Sunny's hand on his wet head, like he was a dog. She wanted him to choose her instead. She wanted proof that her size could pull a man the way Sunny's did. She knew where Sunny lived. She walked there and did not knock. She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Sunny stood in the middle of the room in her paint-splattered overalls. The straps strained over her chest. The same man sat on her couch, shirt off, muscles on show. He had come here for Sunny. Petra saw that at once. Sunny turned. Her eyes went down Petra's new body, slow, from shoulders to fists. She smiled. She was not worried. That smile made Petra's jaw lock. "Look at that," Sunny said. "Somebody's been working." "I match you now," Petra said. She flexed. Her arm swelled hard. The man's mouth opened. He looked. Sunny smirked and loosened the straps of her overalls, showing off her toned figure. Petra did the same with her own outfit. The two muscle-bound women compared their size, Sunny’s enormous build slightly larger than Petra’s, their chests rising and falling with hard breaths.

The two women stood in Sunny's front room and sized each other up. Petra pushed her chest forward. Sunny pushed hers back, round under her loosened straps. Petra had spent everything she had to match this woman. Her arms shook now, drained from the flexing. She had emptied her tank to make her point. Sunny laughed and clapped her on the shoulder. "Not bad, kid. But guys need to be kept in line." She meant it kindly. She then showed off her figure. Petra stared in anger, they were twice as big as hers, making her top look tiny.