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bodies, she seems to go limp, deflating, letting out a long, harsh breath. She straightens after a moment, visibly composing herself, and glances at the sky. “It’s going to rain, I think.”  
    I follow her gaze skyward, and see that low, angry gray clouds have rolled in suddenly, covering the blue sky and the sun. It’s dark now, and cooling off quickly. My skin prickles, and a deafening clap of thunder splits the air, accompanied by a blinding flash of lightning streaking across the sky, stabbing and then gone. There’s a drip, a drop, two and three and four, and then before either of us can even move, the clouds have opened up, releasing rain in torrential buckets.  
    “Holy shit!” I grab her hand and pull her into a run. “Where the hell did this come from?”
    She’s running with me and laughing as the rain pounds on our heads, soaking us to the bone within seconds. I have no idea where I’m going, I’m just running, and she’s following me.
    “Where are we going, Adam?”
    “I don’t know!”  
    We’re at an intersection and she jerks me to the left, pulls ahead and leads down a short street that dead-ends at Main Street. She’s opening a door and leading me into an old bar, low ceilings and aged wood floors and thick beams, sports channels on TVs, a dartboard on one wall, a small bar with eight or ten stools. There are two or three rooms to the bar, several tables and booths in each, with the bar itself in the corner as the centerpiece. It’s a warm, dark, and comfortable place, the kind of bar I can imagine the handful of year-round locals drinking at when the tourists have all gone home.  
    “Jesus, that was fast,” Des says, wringing her hair out. “That came out of nowhere.”
    I rub my hand over my short, spiked black hair. “No kidding. Sunny one minute, pouring down the next.”  
    How the hell can I be expected to have dinner with this girl now? She’s soaking wet, her shirt plastered to her skin, outlining the cups of her bra and the flat of her stomach and the curves of her back. I can see the erect nubs of her nipples poking through the fabric of her shirt and bra.  
    I’m wet too, though, and my shirt is a plain white undershirt. And now that it’s wet, the thin cotton is basically see-through. And yeah, being an athlete and an action-movie star, I’m expected to be in top shape, especially during filming. And I am. I spend hours at the gym every day to retain the bulky physique the producers expect for my role, which is a renegade roughneck superhero. Kind of like Wolverine meets Batman. He’s dark and brooding. He wants nothing to do with his superpowers, though, and avoids using them, until events conspire to force him into action. In the graphic novel on which the movie is based, my character is drawn to be impossibly proportioned, even more so than most superheroes, and when the film people started casting, they knew they had to find someone who was capable of achieving the level of bulk needed to fill the role. The Rock could have played it, but he’s older than they were looking for, and too well known. They wanted a relative unknown, someone who’d done enough acting to pull off the lead role, but not famous enough to be immediately recognizable on a household level.  
    That’s where I came in. Marek in Fulcrum was my breakout role, but I’d had supporting actor roles here and there, enough to establish my chops. And I’m naturally big enough that with the right regimen and training, I could bulk up enough to fill the massive profile the character demanded. Which meant that, at the moment, I’m bulked out to the max. Even in my one season with the San Diego Chargers I wasn’t this shredded, and with my T-shirt soaked through I might as well be shirtless.
    Des is eyeing me pretty openly as she wipes the moisture from her face with a stack of bar napkins. “Good thing I just took a shower,” she says.
    “Good thing for you you’re not wearing this