Janie and Adam cross a serious boundary

[asbg777]

INTRO: I'm sharing here an excerpt from a work-in-progress that might turn out to be a long story, or of short-novel length.

I am writing it episodically and not chronologically, but the intention is that the chapters will intersect a small community of women who share a friendship, acquaintance, or connection to a gifted, but socially stunted scientist who has developed a formula, reinforced by a specially concocted and modified spinach that makes their bodies become cloaked in muscles.

Most of the women are involved with, or encounter guys with an attraction to muscled women, or discover that they are roused by them or can become roused by them because they know what the girl or young woman can do with them to send lovemaking to another level.

I know some people on this board are attracted to characters who are cruel and pulverize their targets.  The women that emerge in my chapters are not cruel but can be roused to vigilantism or revenge or objectification. By and large, the guys are pretty woke to women's' concerns most of the time but are capable of stupidity or blundering if they experience sthenolagnia or cratolagnia and indulge the fetish thoughtlessly or with disrespect to others.

In this excerpt, you'll get to know  something about Janie – who  developed the formula – and  Adam, to whom she had been attracted long before they became a couple. He was also attracted to her, but never allowed himself to act upon it because Janie seemed childlike and socially stunted. By the time of the episode below, Janie and Adam have indulged in one another for a few months and Adam has found that she has matured significantly since her success with developing the formula and experiencing her own strength.

A good portion of the draft so far sets up how some of the characters come together. You might enjoy the way it unfolds, but the experience of muscled woman does not leap from every page.  Nor does it do so exactly in what follows, but there is tension and it seems a good spot in which to bring you in. 

****************

Many continued to do their work at home, but you could not create a research lab in your home office or basement and Janie was considered essential. She had been gifted with a brilliant mind but there is -- with some people -- a price paid for that gift. Janie had always been focused on academics and reading through shelves of books to inform her research. She was well-liked by her co-workers; people thought her "sweet." She was cute after a fashion, but no vixen and was not comfortable in social settings. There had been some guys in her past, but they tended to be guys who hadn't laid their pipe anywhere for some time and Janie's naivete made her easy to manipulate. She thought she enjoyed sex but did not realize as of yet that she accommodated her lovers and asked nothing for herself -- in  part, because she would not have known how to frame the question. Women did not feel threatened by her in the slightest so what she drew out of them was their maternal instinct to see that Janie did not get hurt or exploited.

Her team was working on a piece of the work to analyze how COVID-like viruses are communicated and whether there are more subtle differences than has been supposed about COVID variants. There is still so much that is not known or understood and some skepticism about the curve of the return to a semblance of pre-COVID life. The hope is that results of the team's work may have application to curb geographically-bounded resurgences of these viruses. 

Janie was tele-communicating with people all over the country. Owing to the time difference between east and west coast Janie, who was generally observed to work long hours, frequently returned to her apartment late where Adam often had some food prepared for her. It made her so happy that she would leap up and straddle him by the waist with her legs and plant enthused kisses on his lips. She was, in her natural state, a comfortable weight at her height of five-feet-five, and her buns were a tidy size that made her easy to support with his hands cupped on them. For the rest, the grasp of her legs braced the rest of her weight. Sometimes, she had had her feet on the floor for about half a minute since coming to the door when Adam, still cradling her, would carry her to the bedroom. On this occasion, she let go of his waist and stood on her toes. "Easy, tiger. I'm starving. Smells like your homemade chicken with barley soup if my nose does not deceive me. And some crusty bread in the oven, yes?"

Adam smiled. "Your nose does not deceive you, dear girl." He gave an exaggerated sigh. "If I must curb my own appetites while we are captive to your own, I will make the sacrifice. But" he wagged his finger close in front of Janie's face, "only for the briefest period!"

Janie gave a mild laugh. She had no quarrel with Adam's libido, which was cranked pretty high because Janie satisfied him as no other woman had with whom he had been. It was gratifying to Janie that he seemed happy with their lovemaking when she wasn't cloaked in a steel coat of pulsating muscle. Oh, she was not able to drive him as crazy nor did he build to a climax the same way, but she felt no less loved. Indeed, on those occasions, Janie felt more loved because he was enjoying the real her, without benefit of the response of her body to her dosing herself with a pill and triggering her muscles to swell and gather into rocks with the addition of organic spinach treated to an ultraviolet light spectrum Janie had deduced might alter the molecular – oh, well, Janie understood it and he needed nothing more than to understand the scientific principle at its most basic. What mattered most to him was the effect upon her body and her incredible skill at exploiting it for pleasure that could leave him shaky for several minutes after climaxing.

When it was a night of muscle love, Adam went into a frenzy that could feel, ironically, a little disembodied from Janie herself. Not that she had any quarrel with this because her sexual response was magnified at the same time by the energy that ran through her body that reached towering intensity when her muscles gathered and clenched involuntarily as she closed in on her own mighty orgasm. Adam was pure gold as a lover. If he failed to render her divine pleasure – often orally – he was as deflated as if he had experienced erectile dysfunction. He pleased her inside and out.

All this said, she had been feeling a little taken-for-granted recently. Adam had been particularly frisky, almost annoyingly playful like a puppy humping your leg. He wanted to jump her the moment he caught sight of her. It was adolescent and did not always reflect her own mood – lately, especially.

Unfortunately, Adam could not read Janie's mind. His wish for sex had been heightened lately and, before Janie returned home, he had been reading a story on his phone about how female bodybuilders were managing to train when they couldn't visit their gyms. He had looked up pictures of some of the women profiled in the article and thought about stealing into Janie's bedroom to masturbate. However, he decided that he could have the real thing soon, for which he had rarely found a masturbation fantasy to come close to lovemaking with Janie.

What had disturbed him recently was that one of the few fantasies that could arouse him in any big way was of a sort that made him uneasy and was something that he and Janie had decided from the very start was not to be in the ballpark. Domination was ok with them both and it could include playful instances when Janie could deliver slight, playful pain or discomfort – enough to demonstrate what she could do if they were locked in combat. However, Adam and Janie were clear that the infliction of real pain and injury was never going to be a part of it.

Adam, though, had been thinking about it lately. He did not want to be badly hurt, but he wanted Janie to raise the temperature and exhibit a humorless, more determined mastery over him. In his fantasy, she would move with speed to pin him against a wall or on the bed with an unforgiving expression on her face or wrestle his body into a configuration that would stretch his joints to a point where the pain was sharp, and she would hold him in position to sustain it for several seconds. He had learned that one of the women profiled in the article had appeared in some videos under the name of Lady Demolition in which she encountered guys who stopped in their tracks when they saw how built she was and, left speechless, hadn't the wisdom to just remain silent and walk by with a nod to her. Instead, some turned around and made taunting remarks. Eventually, this led to her approaching the guys in a friendly way, asking if they'd like to have a drink or coffee and then inviting them to her apartment. If they expected a night of sex that would be unusual for them, they were to have it, but not in the way they had hoped.

Adam ponied up $19.95 to see one of her videos while the food simmered on the stove. The guy she'd lured to his doom in the video took puzzled note that the walls of Lady Demolition's bedroom were made up of the sort of material you might see in pictures of a sound recording studio where it was crucial to mask noise. "Do you record music in here sometime?" He asked of Lady. She shook her head and said, "I make plenty of music in my bedroom, but I record nothing."  He grinned at the sexual innuendo and looked forward to sampling whatever harmonies she would deliver.

All began quietly enough with Lady flexing and coaxing the guy into a bit of muscle worship. In this case, the sucker needed no persuasion. Lady Demolition would pulverize these dumbshit men in the pursuit of her own satisfaction, crushing limbs and breaking bones and tearing ligaments to make several joints useless short of surgery and prolonged rehabilitation. In a couple of the videos, she wound up killing the guy with a "gosh-I-don't-know-my-own-strength" reaction. "I must be more careful in the future." She'd pick up her phone and tell it to call someone in her directory to whom she said, "Um, I'm afraid I went a little too far again and, uh, could I get you to come and pick this up for me?"

After some dude with a dolly and trunk loaded up the remains and departed, the videos ended with Lady Demolition shrugging, running a tub for herself, adding bubble bath to make it inviting. She lit a few candles, stripped, and sank into the hot water, giving cooing sounds of satisfaction. She spent the next  several minutes soaping up her muscles which slicked them up and gave them a glow in the lights she set up for her video recording sessions. Nonsense it was, but after soaping herself up, she'd stand up in the tub and bend over to grab a 40-pound barbell which she would curl. The soap bubbles on her skin would skitter about. By paying attention to the beads of water on her skin, you could see them spread out as she made her upper arm swell with her exertions.

Finished with the barbell, she would sink down into the tub again and lie quietly, touching herself below the water line. She stood up and turned on the shower for a good rinse. The soap would coast down her muscles as she rinsed and the producers added close-ups in slow motion of the soap trailing down, hugging and highlighting every curve and bulge and valley. 

Smiling, she stood up, wrapped a towel around herself, trailed into the kitchen where she poured herself a little glass of wine that she drank quickly. Then, into the bedroom where she turned off all the lights and slid under the coverings. She smiled and fell quickly into a sleep unburdened by remorse or concern. The closing scene immediately followed, showing some last shovelfuls of dirt being overturned, and a body wrapped in a dirty old sheet tossed into a makeshift grave.

These videos were always a little preposterous. Adam wondered how no one could have spotted the encounter between Lady Demolition and her victims. Certainly, she would be one of the most recognizable figures in the neighborhood – or even out of her own neighborhood. Someone in a neighboring apartment might hear the voices of her and a man going into her apartment and then wonder about the sound of the dolly's wheels coming from the apartment a couple of hours later. Adam had shaken his head with the expression of someone who just couldn't overlook the amateur caliber of the continuity. Oddly, it never crossed his mind that having a girlfriend who could swallow a few compounds and a vegetable and become jacked with muscles... . Well, written up in a story, the reader would know that the entire premise was preposterous, but it would serve its purpose of furnishing a tale to which you'd jerk off to.

Adam had been entertained by the video but was puzzled why he had paid money to watch an amateurish production that had an ugly finish. The rebalancing of traditional male and female roles had been like looking at the contents of a whale's stomach. You found that it had consumed a lot of crap. Society was now passing through a period when it was furiously trying to pump its stomach. Adam was young and had not grown up wrapped in the sexism that had been so engrained in the social fabric that very few had any consciousness whatsoever about it, or the hurtfulness of all the microaggressions around race, nationality and gender.  A lot of men were attracted to powerful women, albeit in different ways. In the workplace and any setting in which there is competition, men are inclined to joust. Some men try to joust with women in the same way. In doing so, they only expose their insecurity.

Sitting on Janie's couch, Adam was feeling confused. He was aching to make love to Janie. It had been one of those days when his libido had been activated big time. To be honest, Adam reflected, he had been horny for several days. Nights when he wasn't with Janie generally included at least one episode  of masturbation.

Hungry for her as he was, he watched her move about. She had changed into a t-shirt and denim cutoffs. She really had lovely legs to start with. You wondered what they were doing on a brainy scientist like Janie. He could not keep his eyes away from them, piling muscles on her quads and taking it off.

The cutoffs were high on Janie's thighs. Adam looked at her as if he had X-ray vision. He imagined tracing the raggedy edge of those shorts and moving his hand up her leg and to her crotch. He knew the path well, and he did not need Janie fired up with muscle to feel drawn to her body. She wasn't doing anything to be provocative, but Adam was almost shaking with desire.

"Have you eaten already?" she called from the kitchen. "This really looks good, sweetie."

"Yeah, I did eat. Here, let me set a place for you at the table. I know you're really beat."

She said that would be great. He had really offered to do it because he wanted to go into the kitchen and be with her. He opened the silverware drawer and started to grab a fresh placemat when he seized her, drew her close and began to kiss her. It was sort of nice that he clearly wanted her, but she found it annoying because she had been clear that it wouldn't be welcomed right now.

Adam figured that there was one way to rouse Janie's energy and get her pumped for some sex. And that was to persuade her to take one of those pills and a "snort" of those organic spinach greens. What was stealing over Adam was that he didn't just want to lay back. He wanted her; it was as simple as that, and his urge was so sharp that he did not feel accommodating.

"Come on," he said. "Let's wrestle!" He reached for her hand and started pulling at her.

"Adam, cut it out," she said sharply, pulling her hand away. "I'm really beat. I'm ready to have a little something to eat, call it a day and climb into bed, read for a few minutes maybe. That's probably all I can do. You're welcome to stay up and join me later. Snuggle close and spoon me. I probably won't even wake up." She came close to him, raised up slightly on her toes, and gave him a peck on the cheek. "You don't mind taking care of the kitchen, do you?" She studied his face momentarily.

"Fuck! You bastard," she said with a knowing smile. "You look like you're pouting. What's going on with you? Maybe you should just go back to your place for the night and put your hands to some use!" She smiled. "You know, I'm not your on-call vessel for gratification!"

"Oh, yeah?" Adam say in a childish way. He grabbed her arm, pulled her up to him and then put one foot behind her and tripped her off balance. He lowered her to the floor, spread her arms out and anchored her with his knees.

"Alright, enough now, Adam." Janie said beginning to push at his knees with her hands. "Let me up!" She stopped struggling, and sighed. "Quit being a fucking asshole. You've been trying to push me around since the moment I walked in here. I don't like it. So, let me up." She started pushing again and trying to raise herself up, but she hadn't the power to overcome him. Adam bent down and kissed her. She kissed him back and then turned her head. "OK, lover. You got yourself a kiss. I'm not going to wrestle with you. I'll give you thirty seconds to enjoy that you pinned me and whatever dick-slinging shit has gotten into your head. And now you got twenty seconds!"

"You could give me a blow job in a couple of minutes, I'm hot for you and you are so good at it!"

"OK," she said. "Anything to get this evening over with."

He released her wrists and taking one of her arms, pulled her up with him. He started to unbuckle his belt. Her face was flushed. "Not a chance, Adam. Not a chance." She walked over to the chair where Adam had tossed his jacket. Picking it up, she tossed it at Adam. "Get out of here, Adam. We'll talk tomorrow after you've had a cold shower."

"I'll need an ice bath," he growled.

"Grow up. Please, I don't like you like this."

But tonight, he liked himself as he was. No, he knew it was bullshit but there was something going on that was confusing him. He was baiting her and did not want to stop. "Throw me out of here, Janie. "Throw me out. If you can."

"If I can? If I can?" she raised her voice the second time she said it. "Go! Just get the hell out of here."

"I  ground one of the pills into a powder. It was in the water you just drank. All you need is some of the green stuff and we'll party and then you can eat."

"You did WHAT?" Janie gasped. "What the –"

"I know, you told me never to screw with your stuff because you needed to ride herd over dosing and there couldn't be any surprises. But, look, I told you. I wasn't going to keep it from you. I just wanted to save time."

"I can't believe you did that. It's a breach of trust, Adam and I've always trusted you. But, now?" She sounded as if she were going to cry. It was giving him some measure of satisfaction. "All right," he said. "You're right. I'm being – oh, I just don't know." He paused. "Let me just get some of the extra chicken that the soup didn't need." She nodded and stood at the threshold of the kitchen while he went to the refrigerator. He lingered a bit after opening the door of the refrigerator and then turned around holding a package of boneless chicken breast. "Have you a bag I can take, honey?"

"Sure," she said. She went to a cabinet where she kept reusable bags. She was very shaken but wanted to do anything that would get him to leave. They'd work through this, she thought. She knew that was what she wanted. Sometime, she'd do something to disappoint Alan's faith in her. It's inevitable in any relationship the longer and more committed it is.

As she reached for the box of bags, Adam set down the chicken, came up behind her, scooped her up and moved quickly into the living room where he again put her on the floor and pinned her. From the moment he lifted her up, she had begun to fight to get out of the cradle in which he held her, but he had her close to his chest and she couldn't get an arm free. Still, it was a real challenge to keep her subdued. Her face was red, and a few tears ran down her cheeks. "Adam," she said, in a defeated voice. "This is coming up to the line of domestic violence! You're hurting me, you're frightening me!" Now, her tears were working themselves into a stream and her eyes had narrowed to a slit. Confident she would take no notice, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a wad of spinach. He quickly tucked it into the side of his mouth.

He leaned down and kissed her, forcing her mouth open. He snared the spinach with his tongue, brought it to the front of his mouth and quickly poked it into hers. Her eyes opened wide. She tried to speak. "Aahdum, wha'?" He straightened up and put one hand on her nose, squeezing it to make it difficult for her to breath. "Come on, Janie. Just take it! Swallow it? You just need a little pick-me-up." He relaxed the hold on her nose. "Come on, now. I don't like the idea of holding your nose to get you to swallow."

She looked at him in frozen disbelief. And then she became hot with rage. Adam 's thinking was so twisted in the moment, and he knew it. He had set out to piss Janie off and, with spinach at the threshold of her throat, he had equipped her as one might equip an army, ceding all the advantage to her. Did he really want her to throw him out on his ass? Then came the horrifying thought; did Adam think he really wanted her to beat him up in every real sense? Rain her fists on his head and body, the muscles in her shoulders firing her arms forward and back with piston-like fury. In less than half a minute, Adam would look like a bloodied towel balled up and thrown on the locker room floor where you'd have to walk around or over it until somebody picked it up and threw it into the tub to clean it up. That would be on her, too. 

They'd talked about this before. If she were ever so heavily dosed that she could not temper and regulate her strength and power, she could be a clear and present danger to him, to herself and everyone and everything dear to them both. The very thought that Adam could be so fucked up that his entire universe of thought and feeling was at this moment the package installed between his legs. All this went through Janie's head like a bolt of lightning -- and to the worst possible outcome. It was sweeping her to a fury that itself might have been fed some formula and greens. Now, there was a frightening prospect!

Her face had been flushed and there had been tears, but now her face had become hot. Hot to the touch and the blood had risen until her skin color was a red flecked with orange. Adam felt the heat radiating from Janie's face before he noticed anything else. He hadn't been looking at her face, but had arched himself slightly above her, gripping and holding her down at her wrists. But she was no longer struggling and there was a wave of warmth that he felt along the underside of his chin. He looked down at Janie. She looked straight up at him, her eyes dry and her pupils dark.  A cloud passed over her face and when it passed, her expression had changed to one of pure menace, and like the wheels of a locomotive that turn so slowly as they stir from motionless, Janie's jaw began to go into a slow, circular motion.

She began chewing the spinach – slowly, as if she were trying to assess the situation and be thoughtful about it. come up with a thoughtful solution. Adam was still looking at her with his game face. Yeah, that was it. Did he think of her as some sort of fucking videogame? She hoped he'd noticed that not only had her tears stopped, but they had also dried from the flushing of her face. But that was purely superficial. Molten rage was welling up inside her. She began chewing the greens faster and then furiously and then – she swallowed the spinach, stretching her neck as she did so. Her eyes grew bright from the initial rush she felt before the transformation, a tingling woosh that swept up and down her body and then out to her extremities. It always made her eyes open wide. Ordinarily, they would sparkle at Adam in anticipation of the sex they would be having. But, this time, her eyes grew wide for a split second and then just as quickly narrowed. She had been staring straight at him while she chewed – nearly expressionless – but now, as if a cloud had passed over it, her face took on an expression of pure menace.

She shifted her body under his grip.  Speaking slowly with each word dripping with more venom than the last, she said: "You...haven't...much...time...before...I...will...be...able...to...throw...you...through the...wall."

© 2021 asbg777

[asbg777]

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[crow004]

This is really good! I love the tension that you created. I'd love to know what happens next. Does she keep herself under control? Or does she get so pissed that her emotions just take over and really gives it to him? Or maybe he comes to his senses just as she starts to hurt him a little? Either way, their relationship won't be the same.
Can't wait to see what happens next!
K+

[ArkhamAsylum]

Great first part. Well done.

[asbg777]

Appreciate your kind reception!  Second part is about to be posted.

[asbg777]

Part Two

Adam's eyes widened. The tone of her voice struck fright in him, rising to a full terror. But, good God, what Janie just said had turned him on. His erection was constricted by his briefs, yearning to straighten.  He lifted one arm to shift his penis free so that he'd be able to think. What a misjudgment that was. Now he could think, yes. But only a very little because his dick was vibrating with desire.

He still had Janie pinned down and exerted extra force and leaning forward to use the force of his weight to keep her pinned as long as possible. And it wouldn't be long. He knew that. He needed to think about what might happen when she could free herself. What to do before she could, and what would he face after and what to do about it? Would she let him bolt and run? Would she be willing to talk things through with him tonight? After a few days? Ever? If he still had his teeth. What had he risked, bodily to himself and for this relationship which was so special for him.

He looked into her face. Now, her stare had become as if she were looking upon him as a stranger. Her body and arms were thickening. He could see her musculature shaping itself and beginning to gather under her t-shirt and give it hard, shapely lines. He could imagine the muscles that were now caking her legs and the iron curtain that her abs were forming. A vein prominently ran down the center of where her bicep would gather; coursing through her body was blood that might have been rocket fuel. With a slight grunt, she began raising herself slowly and steadily, gripping to Adam's hands and pushing up against them. Her abdominal muscles clenched as she rose with a steady motion that a bystander watching would have characterized as downright graceful. She kept coming up – forming a 120-degree angle, then 110 and 100. Adam's hands felt like they were in a vise, and it panicked him as the foot of his back was curling backwards. How far could Janie keep this going before his back would break or rupture? The answer came quickly.  When she was almost at a right angle, she snapped Adam's hands back and held them as pain shot sharply through Adam's wrists. "Ahch," he sputtered. She pushed his hands back just a little bit further and held the position for somewhere between five and ten seconds. She was now sitting upright, his back bent above the waist to a point where he did not think it could yield another micron. His stomach was stretched to the point where it was hard to breath. Janie would not relax her grip. His breath was leaving him. Someone coming upon them might have thought Adam was a stone figure because no one would have detected any movement whatsoever.

"Are-you-serious?" she said with her mouth clenched. "Do-you-really-want-to-do-this-Adam?" She leaned back slightly to relieve the tension on his back and torso. He gasped and began breathing noisily in and out, panic in his expression. With a decisive sharp movement, Janie fell all the way back to the  floor, bringing one of her knees up as she did, clipping Adam underneath his jaw. Because she still had her fingers gripped around his, there was no place for him to go from the force of the blow, but Janie had moderated it with care. Just during this last minute alone, she could have killed Adam in about two dozen different ways. But she had enough awareness to be fearful of getting sucked into the whirlpool of her rage.

The rush of strength had opened her up to feel how much she loved this man. But Adam was going to get a frightful lesson, goddammit, because what had happened this night was never to happen again. She was conscious of what she was doing and was going to inflict. She wished Adam had not plunged as much spinach in her mouth as he did. A lot less and they could have had that wrestling match he'd said he wanted. She could have unleashed herself and not be concerned about seriously hurting him. But, no, she thought, getting angry again. He had to load her engines with enough fuel to power a couple of turbines. He was an idiot and – with that thought paramount -- she flung him over on his back, kneeled over him and brought her face close to his.

"What is it you fucking want?" she said in a threatening growl. "Tell me how much shit you want me to beat out of you? How many ribs you want me to snap using my legs alone? You want new teeth? Have your nose reset?" She twisted her body so that she could position her arm to do a side flex in his face. A hard lump, compact at the base but significant in its rise to a craggy peak, consumed his field of vision. She relaxed the arm and twisted the other way, bending her left arm to the same effect. "Does the thought of crawling to your phone to call 911 turn you on?" Alan looked sort of pale as if the blood had drained from his face. She cupped his crotch to give his balls a hard squeeze and discovered where his blood had collected. He was as hard as a length of railroad track.

It thoroughly disgusted her. His reaction to her anger at being disrespected was to get a hard-on. What was it with men that the prospect of getting dismembered by a woman was such a turn-on? He can have this fantasy all he wants, Janie thought, but not like this. Not to this degree, anyway. Here capacity to own him entirely was sometimes a teasing part of their foreplay. Domination was playful and unplanned and without no accessories beyond Janie's sculpted braids and ridges of muscle and the pulsating mounds of muscle that Janie made provocatively rise from her arms and chest and legs in slow motion.

Adam was breathing hard and entirely pale in this moment. She couldn't stand that he had an erection and wanted it gone. She cupped a hand below where his scrotum had to be and squeezed, working her fingers against his pants to reach the sensitive spot at the top and behind his balls. Adam made a wordless noise when the pressure began to bring him pain. She relaxed her hand quickly. He relaxed for about two seconds before she squeezed again, only harder. He caught his breath. She let go and smacked the outline of his shaft with her knuckles. She felt it soften, gathered her hand into a fist and slammed it into his crotch. The outline of his shaft slackened into the fabric of the trousers. His eyes were wide, and he seemed to be waiting for whatever she was going to do to him next. If he made no move to resist, he could not imagine it to be in Janie's nature to punish him hard.

Janie rose from the floor, planting one foot and then the other aside his knees. "What do you want?" she asked again, less slowly and sternly than before. Towering over him, she flexed both biceps so that mostly what he could see from the floor were the peaks, and the spread of her chest into a "V." She held the flex tightly, causing her fists, forearms, and biceps to quiver as if her arms were just short of bursting.

She had read his mind. "Is this the sort of thing you wanted me to do?" she said in a low voice.

"I – I don't know – I don't know why – why – what I meant to do exactly." She bent down and pulled him up by his shirt, raising him off the floor by the full length of her arm. All he could do was allow it to happen and feel his feet dangling in the air. "You don't sound happy. You don't know what you want so obviously you're still waiting for whatever it is."  Adam tried to shrug. It only made his body wobble in her grip. "I guess I should help you find it," Janie said. "That's what people who love one another do, isn't it? I'll help you find what you want from me."

Janie set him down, and instantly drove a fist deep into his stomach. His eyes went wide as he bent forward with the force of the blow and staggered unsteadily backwards. Maybe she hadn't knocked any shit out of him, but she certainly had his wind and he wondered how long it would be before he'd be able to breathe again. He was thinking about this while his eyes were focused on the floor. He tried straightening up and had only done so by a couple of inches when he noticed that, with every step he had taken backwards, Janie had come forward. All he saw was a slight blur of her other fist into the same spot, which was stinging from the first impact. He felt as if his stomach had been flattened against the inside of his back and that he might never catch his breath again. The second shot threw him entirely off balance and he began to pitch back toward the wall where he might strike his head on a sculpture that sat on an end table. She grabbed him, again by the shirt, and pulled him up. It had finally taken hold of Adam how stupid he had been. He raised his hand in a plea that she not hit him again. Janie was pulling her fist back. Adam closed his eyes and braced himself with what little he had left for a third cannonball to be fired into his middle. But nothing happened. He was afraid that she was waiting for him to open his eyes before sending her fist singing at him. He would wait her out.

She saw that he was keeping his eyes closed. "You know how much I love your eyes, Alan." "Yes," he whispered. Saying it took just about all the breath he had restored. He closed his eyes again. Janie  slapped him sharply on one of his cheeks with her free arm. It made his eyes fly open and, as he was fearing, her left arm was pulled back and cocked like a slingshot. He hadn't long to wait. Her fist came around fast and clipped him on the left side of his jaw. He felt his head snap back and to the right. She brough her left arm down and grabbed his with her hand to keep him from spinning off toward the credenza. She pulled his arm down hard. As she did, her right fist came up and struck him sharply below his chin. His body started to careen straight back, his arms flapping. Janie reached out and grabbed his shirt to pull him toward her. She held him up with her right hand and struck him full on with her left fist, buried into his cheek. His head turned but his body had nowhere to go because she held him by his shirt with her right. Janie let go of the shirt before the momentum from the blow had been spent. Adam began to crumple. She grabbed his shirt with her left hand and landed a comparable blow to the right cheek. She let his shirt slip out of her grasp. He sank down hard on his knees, wobbling, his eyes  looking at her imploringly. He hadn't recovered enough from the blows to his stomach to retrieve his voice from the rubble of his punishment.

"What else do you want, Adam?" Janie said through clenched teeth. "You wanted me a little frisky tonight, and you certainly did get me energized. She crooked her arm into a side flex and cupped the bicep with her other hand. "So hard, so hard," she murmured. Then she looked down at her chest, tightening her pectoral muscles and ran both hands over them and one finger down the deep recess of her breastbone.

"Well, if you don't know what you want at this point, I can improvise from here." She knew that was cruel because he still couldn't summon any voice. His eyes widened as he shook his head and raised his hand one more time. She brought a fist lightly against his jaw. "I'm just checking out the flight path," she said as if she was ordering a beverage in a restaurant. "I wouldn't want to take out an eye." She now glanced at him, cupping her fist in the palm of her other hand, and applying pressure there until two of her knuckles gave off a crack.  She gave out a long "ohhhhh, I feel really warmed up now."

Janie shoved him against the wall. Standing a few inches in front of him, she began peppering his stomach with short, straight punches, firing like a machine gun.  These were relatively light punches, enough to keep him in discomfort and in fear that she would ramp up the intensity, powered by the muscles bunched in her shoulders.

But now she suddenly stopped. Her eyes seemed to clear so that she could take in just how terrible Adam's face looked from its encounter with her fists. She was seized with horror because it was she who had inflicted these injuries. Adam had not recovered his breath and was beginning to see the spots and darkening in his eyes that preceded a faint. Adam's knees buckled and he sank to the floor, holding his hand up again, seeking mercy. Janie stood there, straightening her top and cut-offs, and running a hand through her hair as if she had just come in off the street on a windy day. She still looked rageful, but disgusted, too. She left him there and went into the kitchen to pour a glass of water. She returned to the living room and perched herself on one end of her couch, setting the water glass on a coaster. She let a couple of minutes pass so that Adam's breath could return, and he could take stock of himself. One hand was over his stomach, and he sat against the wall, rocking slightly to take some measure of how much pain he was in and likely to feel when he stood up.

Finally, she said, "Do you want some help up?"

He nodded. She came over and gently worked with him to rise from the floor and slowly come into a standing position.

"For chrissake –Ja, Janie" he gave out at little more than a whisper. He wanted to tell her how sorry he was, but his stomach felt so knotted and flattened that he couldn't get enough air to launch into an apology. "Talk?" was all he could muster.

Janie shook her head with a snap. She did not want him around. She could not bear to look at him and see how badly she had bruised him. Bruised?  No, plain-and-simple, she had beaten him up. She was seeing cuts on his face and some vacancy in his expression. They were both in shock. She didn't want to clean up his cuts because it would only force her to experience even more the moments when she had been unable to quell her savagery. Yes, she could have done much, much worse. She could have broken ribs and limbs, robbed him of consciousness with one blow. Adam would heal and she searched her mind to feel grateful for that. Instead, she could not get past that any of this happened at all.

"Let me stay. Don't have to talk. Please."

"I can't do this tonight," Janie said firmly. "If you need some more time to pull yourself together, that's OK. But I expect you to be gone when I come back in twenty minutes."

"You going?" Adam asked. He began to furrow his brow and take on a questioning look, but it made the pain from his face spike.

"I'm going into the bedroom to get away from you." She picked up a scientific journal that had come in that day's mail and walked into the hallway to the back of the apartment. Before she disappeared from  view, Janie turned to say, "I mean what I say. I do not want to find you here when I come out. You fucked with me, so I fucked you up. Don't fuck with me anymore." She went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. A minute passed and he could hear that Janie had turned the radio on. The muffled sound of classical music came through the door dimly.

Adam felt something trickling down his cheek and knew it wasn't a tear. He limped slightly into the kitchen, grabbed a paper towel that he wetted with cold water from the sink and wiped his face. It looked like he was bleeding from a few places. There was a mirror near the front door to the apartment and Adam went to stand before it. "I can't go out looking like this and walking unsteadily," he thought.

He remembered that Janie kept a first aid kit in one of the kitchen cabinets. He took it into her half-bath opposite the front closet and began to dress his wounds with tools in the kit. The pain was formidable from the alcohols and other agents. A few cuts were significant enough that he knew he would have to put gauze or some sort of strip over them to keep out infection. By the time he had taken this self-care about as far as it could be taken, ten minutes had passed.

He went back to the living room and collapsed on the couch, leaving the first aid kit on the coffee table so that Janie would spot it and know she had hurt him badly. He was impressed by what she had done to him, and he shuddered that, now that it was over, he could appreciate the part of himself that had enjoyed it. He felt stricken at the thought. He wanted to sort out all his reactions, but it would have to wait until his body hurt less. The entire experience had made him feel so weary. He had picked up the water glass and took a few sips and then held the cool surface of the glass against various parts of his face. He put the glass down and leaned back on one of the couch pillows. He closed his eyes and tried to quiet his mind. Whatever he did worked. In a few minutes, he had fallen asleep.

And this is how Janie found him when she came out of the bedroom. She hadn't heard him leave before twenty minutes had passed, so she gave him ten more. But she was feeling spent, too, and wanted to spend a full day in the lab the next day. She wasn't going to go to bed if Adam was still out there, waiting for her to talk with her. Screw that.

She opened the bedroom door and walked into the living room. When she saw him asleep on the couch, her body immediately tensed and she didn't like the feeling, so she quickly went into a series of stretches to loosen up the tangle her muscles were in. She approached the couch and gave Adam a mild kick with her foot. He opened his eyes and looked at her, making no motion to stir from where he sat.

"I'm still seeing you here and I don't like what I see," she said. She pulled him up from the couch but when she let go of him, he collapsed back on the couch.

"I'm surprised that I'm even speaking to you, Adam," Janie said. "I meant what I  said, and I shouldn't have to repeat that. Get whatever shit you had with you and get out!"

"I said, we don't have to talk." said Adam, slurring the words owing to the swelling that was setting in around his mouth where he'd absorbed some of Janie's fusillade. It hurt to breath in, so it took him a few seconds to get some breath back. "I need to stay. I want to lie with you tonight. Won't bother you. Won't touch you. Bad idea for me to go."

"Much worse idea for you to stay," she said, starting to pull him up by his shirt. He reacted with pain, so she slipped into a gentler lift bringing his face up to hers. "You're still bleeding," Janie said. Her eyes roamed all over his face. "And you missed a lot."

"Well," Adam said with some petulance, "you fucking hit me a lot and your first aid kit was pissant and not equal to the challenge. Call it what it is. I have been beat up!" He stretched out each word in that last sentence. He decided to rephrase. "YOU beat me up," he said word-by-word. " He was mumbling some because his lower lip had become swollen.

She lowered him to the couch. "I've got another first aid kit in the linen closet." She trailed off to retrieve it. When she returned, she set the kit on the coffee table and sat down next to him. "Turn toward me!" she said curtly.

"Sure, if I can," said Alan, shifting gingerly.

"Let me help you," she said, threateningly, grabbing his shirt with agitation. He was hurting, she knew, but also feeling recovered enough to be bullshitting her.

"No! I can do it," he croaked out. He brushed at her hand to get her to let go and turned toward her as she opened the kit. She went to work. As she dug out a second Q-tip, Alan said, "We must talk. I must tell you –"

She stiffened and was motionless. "I don't want to hear a word from you. Not one word." She shook her torso from the waist up to try to relieve some of the tension she still felt. "You say anything and I flat out stop what I'm doing. I will prop you up and hit you so hard your nose will break. And then I'll take a couple of your teeth out. That should shut you up."

Janie's expression was steely. He had no reason to doubt her. She probably would be strong enough to disassemble him for another 45 minutes before her bulk would begin to retract and that would take another 45 minutes, he estimated. He had stoked her pretty good. Not real smart. And he still wasn't real smart because what she just said was making him feel a little defiant. But he kept his mouth shut and was grateful for her cleaning him up, applying antiseptics on the open cuts and covering them with  gauze. Everything stung, but the pain was localizing. He felt his ribs gingerly, wondering if any of them were cracked. Janie pushed his hand away and applied pressure along his rib cage herself. He winced. "Bruised, not broken," she said. She closed the first aid kit. "We're done here."

She didn't sound so angry anymore. He wasn't feeling so much defiant as defensive now. Yes, he'd behaved horribly – he'd been self-absorbed and inconsiderate -- but hadn't he gotten much worse than he inflicted?  She stood up and began to gather the packaging she had opened to get at the medications and cotton and other items from the kit that she had used. She went into the kitchen to dump them in the trash. 

Adam sank back into the couch. He heard her open the refrigerator door and crack loose some ice from one of the trays. When she returned to the room and face him, she looked impatient. He looked up at her. "I'll sleep on the couch," he said with a tone of resignation. "In the morning, we can think this through. Not until lunch if that's the way you want it. I'll keep my mouth shut. You won't even know that --"

Janie shook her head and handed him a bag full of ice. "Keep this on your face on your way home. You want to control the swelling."

Adam sighed.  "A final indignity. If I don't go, you're going to throw me out on my ass into the hall."

Janie was done. She disliked this conversation – if you could call it that – intensely. She had no compromise inside her, but she also wanted to stay in control of herself. 

Before Adam could react, Janie picked Adam up in the very same cradle he had used on her before, only when she pressed him to her chest, she did so with force. She didn't ease off until he sucked his breath in and winced. "Unnhh," came from his mouth. She squeezed tighter, only for a second, before relaxing the tension and raising him above her head. Adam's panic began to rise.

It was a warm night and the glass door to the terrace was slightly ajar. She pushed it open with her foot and leg and stepped out, with Adam still raised above her head. He strained to look and gauge the distance to the ground from her second-floor apartment. Well, at least, he wouldn't be killed, but he better hope that someone would call 911 because he didn't have his phone on him. Still, he found no comfort in this climax to a terrible night that would get no sorting out or at least a start in doing so.

His heart was pounding.

"Janie, I apologize. I apologize. I love you. You know I love you." He was begging now, his voice not much more than a croak. It was hard for him to talk. Breathing was painful. His stomach burned. But he pushed forward. "This -- this went -- all wrong. Please. No more, Janie. Please, baby, calm down. Enough to not throw me off the balcony. No good – no good for either of us."

What Adam had not given thought to was that the apartment's swimming pool was about twenty feet away from the building. It was after hours and the fence gate to it was locked for the night, although the pool lights remained on all night. Suddenly, he felt himself aloft and soaring through the air.

"OhGodohGod!" he thought. His body turned over to face the ground. The fence of the pool enclosure flashed by below him. He was losing altitude and landed in the deep end of the pool with a splash. He was on his back and, thanks to the weight of his clothes, dipped down a couple of feet before coming back to the surface. He dog-paddled painfully to reach a depth where he could stand on his feet. It was cold, but the water felt good. Janie stood on her balcony, clearly watching to assure herself that Adam had survived the landing and would be able to get himself out of there though it might be rough for him climbing over the fence given his injuries.

When he bobbed up to the surface, Adam's fright had disappeared even if his pain hadn't and was going to be with him for he knew not how long. "That was one fucking hell of a throw," he said in a loud whisper, looking up to her balcony. He was aware of a wave of wonder and admiration for Janie. "What a woman!" he thought to himself. He looked up at her and shouted. "You love me! I know you do," he loudly whispered again." The exertion on his chest to make his voice carry further elicited a stabling pain. God, that hurt, he thought, wincing, and clutching his side. He looked up again to speak, but Janie had disappeared from her balcony.

Four residents on lower floors, still awake, had heard the splash, and figured that somebody who had had too much to drink had leapt the fence. If a resident violated pool hours, it was a serious breaking of rules, subject to stiff fines. A couple grabbed their phones before they went to look out just in case they needed to call the police.

Janie had stepped back and was leaning against the glass door in the dark. Many in the building knew her and she could not risk anyone seeing her V-shaped torso still flaring with muscles, the steel legs, or  that her shoulders were striated with ropes of muscle, although the mass and definition were now receding.  It was a good thing she took this precaution because Janie's immediate neighbor to the left, a widow named Mrs. Porter, who frequently spent the night with Mr. Grissom, a widower from the fifth floor, stepped out and looked over at the pool. Janie quickly retreated further into her apartment. Mrs. Porter had met Adam, and they had taken her out to dinner a few times, only to have her return the gesture. "Why, Adam!" she said. "Whatever are you doing in there?" Some of the neighbors on the upper floor were clearly angry and one person shouted, "I'm calling police on you, asshole!"

"Wait, it's OK," hollered Mrs. Porter up to the man. "It's OK, I know him. Don't phone the police!"

"Well, have him stay out of the pool after hours." The man's wife could be heard from inside asking what the commotion was. "Oh," he said, his voice fading as he turned to go back into his apartment. "Some friend of Mrs. Porter's. That gal must still have it!  I don't think that guy's much more than a millennial!"

Janie stifled a laugh. She knew Mrs. Porter must be getting a real boot out of it and would enjoy regaling her friends with that story for some time to come.

Mrs. Porter looked over to Adam and whispered loud enough for him to hear. "Adam, what the hell are you doing? Where's Janie? Good heavens, you've got your clothes on!"

"Yeah, this isn't my finest hour, Susan." He was struggling to speak as normally as he could.

"You looked like you've injured yourself. You OK?"

"Fine, Susan. Took a football in the face a couple of times this afternoon." What made him think of that explanation was his face felt as if it had nearly swollen football-size.

"Football this time of year? That doesn't sound right, Adam." Her voice had taken on a scolding tone. "You're not going to tell me that Janie pitched you into the pool!"

"Ah, of course not." Janie must be really howling to herself, he imagined. "That would be really something if she could, wouldn't it!"

"It certainly would," Susan commented. "I might want to take that ride myself!"

Adam had stepped out of the pool.

"Is Janie away? I thought I saw her early this morning heading off to work."

"Ah, yeah, Susan. It's just an overnighter to visit a lab down I-70. She'll be back early tomorrow."

"Well, get yourself dry, Adam. I don't want to give Janie a bad report on you!  Good night!"

It was a struggle to get over the fence, just as Janie predicted. He started to give out a loud "Ahh!" or two, but knew he had to remain silent. This was when he could use a bullet to clench between his teeth, Adam thought. He landed on the other side of the fence with a splat.  Janie had not come back out on the terrace. Uncertain what to do, he stood looking up there for about half a minute, trying to measure how well he would be able to get to his car.

Something landed on the soft grass next to the sidewalk. It was his phone. Maybe she wanted him to phone her? But then he saw the lamp in the living room go out, followed by the bedside lamp in Janie's bedroom. Now entirely by himself, he felt himself sinking inside despite the humor in what had just happened while he stood in the water. Adam hoped everything would be OK. It was one more well-placed blow that he would not know for awhile.

[jhunter]

Nice, great to see so much. And written well to boot. Keep up the nice work.