Muscle Maturity Ch. 03

"I can see that," Judith chuckled, looking at herself in the mirror and still performing the "incorrect" exercise with the dumbbells. "I definitely feel more heroic doing this. Pulleys, you say?"

"Yes, like... look, I actually have a setup over here. I don't have the actual machine, but this basically lets me do the same movement."

I showed her my improvised contraption, with high pulleys.

"Dr. Johnson, you are a man of many skills," she said, shaking her head slowly. "I've been wondering what this is, and now I know. You've basically managed to replicate a lot of the machines I see in the gym."

"Just a few of the ones I find more useful," I said, with a modest wave of my hand. "And it's pretty makeshift. I'm not about to oust Nautilus from business any time soon."

"Nautilus... a brand of gym equipment, I take it."

"Yeah, one of the prominent ones. Here, you want to try those... hero curls? Need me to show you?"

"Let me try for myself. I think I can manage."

I stood in front of her as she took hold of my cable handles and yanked them into position. With her natural instinct taking over, without any coaching from me, she adopted a firm stance – hips braced, shoulders square, chest out, back arched, arms stretched out to the sides.

Then, she began curling. And I stood, mesmerized by the sight of her two perfectly-shaped mounds of arm muscle slowly contracting, bunching up into balls. She had even more bodybuilding potential than I'd realized, to possess arms like that. She held my gaze as she relaxed and let her arms stretch out again, and then pulled. Once again the elongated ropes of arm muscle that I had painstakingly and conscientiously outlined for her earlier bunched up, forming themselves into round mounds of power.

Belatedly I glanced at the weight she was doing, and I pursed my lips, impressed. I'd neglected to take the pin out before she took hold of the handles, so it was still at the last weight I'd attempted. Judith was performing hero curls with approximately 75% of my regular working weight, and competently too – slow, controlled reps.

With every hero curl she performed, standing there in front of me, she seemed to be telling me, telling the world: Look how strong I am. Look how powerful I am. I am Woman; see me flex.

After five full curls, she released the handles with a sigh. "Mm... I feel nice and tight now," she said, bringing up her arms halfway and inspecting them, looking at each in turn. "This is a great exercise. I could really get used to this one."

Then she cocked her head to one side. "Jay? You okay? Paging Dr. Johnson."

I swallowed – my throat had gone dry. "That was... very well done," I managed to say, coughing a little. "You did that very well, yes. With decent weight, too."

"Really! That's good to know. That feels like as much as I can manage, right now. Five of those."

"That's one of my favorite accessory exercises too. I work them into my routine when I can. Well, a variant of it – I tend to put my arms forward, like so," I demonstrated, "but that's just my preference. It's a little unorthodox."

"Well, you can show me some of your main exercises now... stud muffin," she said, with a sly wink. "I'll follow along with your workout today."

I grinned, and moved to comply. I had already decided what I wanted to do this workout. It would be a lot of heavy biceps work – I wanted to show off to Judith with my one-rep max that I'd told her earlier. I knew she trusted that I wasn't an empty bloviating braggart, but I wanted to show her personally that I could do it. I wanted to, as a display of masculine prowess. That was the plain truth of it.

And if she was going to be doing what I was doing, matching me curl for curl, albeit with a lower weight... why, that'd be a nice sweaty prelude to one of our post-workout cuddles.

"First, some compound work, just to get the engine up and running," I quipped, sitting down at my lat-pulldown setup.

We took turns to warm up with some lat pulldowns – since it was only for warming up, I set the weight so low that she could do it easily as well. I was focusing on getting a proper contraction in my back and rear deltoids, in preparation for heavy curling. It was gratifying to see Judith do those in her sports bra – she did have naturally beefy rear deltoids, forming shelves of muscle at the back of her shoulders, and her nicely-developed lats undulated nicely under her skin.

Then we got down to some serious curling. Not the Olympic sort involving ice, of course. My kind of curling.

First, a set of warmup curls: with a lightly-loaded curl bar, about 40lbs in all, I pumped out 20 reps. My joints felt good, my breathing was steady, my blood was flowing just fine. It was just a warmup set, to get the relevant body parts moving in the right groove, but I loved seeing the silent admiration in Judith's eyes as I finished strong, with apparent ease. Damned if I didn't love curling – I liked the big compound exercises just fine, but curling was what made me really come alive.

She followed suit, with the empty curl bar – 25lbs, I'd weighed it myself after I'd bought it. "You don't have to do that many just for your warmup," I cautioned, but she simply shook her head and grunted her way to 15 reps. Then she paused, her chest heaving. Looking me in the eyes, she bent forward a little more and crunched out 5 more perfect reps, rocking slightly as she did so.

I could feel myself growing hard, with how she was holding my gaze so intently, and with her little display of strength and determination. It seemed that if she couldn't match me for weight, she was going to try her damnedest to match me rep for rep.

"Really, really good. Most women would've given up halfway through that," I said.

It was true. This was as much upper-body strength as I'd ever seen a woman show. There were women who could flat-out beat me for squats and deadlifts, but couldn't ever match me on the bench press or with other upper body exercises. It was just how our bodies were differently constituted. Of course there were some women who could beat many men at upper body strength in absolute terms, but by and large they were rare. I'd never met one before, though I had hoped – which guy in my position wouldn't?

But now, as Judith handed me the bar and worked her arms, exclaiming softly about how pumped she felt, I began to wonder, and to perform some quick mental arithmetic.

20 reps of 25lbs. Strict curls, or very nearly strict. And that hadn't taken her entire tank of gas, clearly. Where exactly was Judith, on the bell curve of female muscular strength? Was this normal? It wasn't as if I worked out with very many women, so I didn't really know for sure, but I cast my mind back to the last powerlifting meet I'd attended, where I'd attained my best result ever – the one I'd shyly told Judith about a few minutes ago. There had been some women taking part in that, but I only saw them perform their one-rep max for competition purposes – I didn't know how much they did for warmup.

We continued with another warmup set, and then my real working sets began. 5 sets of 3 reps, with a total of 100lbs. Judith matched me for the first couple of sets, with about half the weight I was doing, but ground out 2 extra reps, with clenched teeth and reddened face. She practically oozed sexiness, I thought.

And then she set down the barbell. "This is making me work up a sweat," she commented, as she stripped off her top. And I got a complete eyeful of what my strict curl routine had done to her.

The veins were popping out just beneath the surface of her skin, on her chest and shoulders. Her entire upper body looked pumped, as it did during each workout session, but her shoulders were more defined than I'd ever seen them. I could discern that with the sports bra on, of course, but somehow everything seemed clearer with her chest bared.

She smiled, and turned herself sideways, her arms arched gracefully overhead like a figure competitor's. Where had she learned that?

"I can practically feel my arms growing bigger," she chuckled, as she displayed herself as proudly as any Greek goddess. The statue of the Venus de Milo had probably been flexing like this, I thought idly. Some barbarian must've hacked them off out of spite – or maybe it had been some Greek noblewoman, out of envy.

"I... I think they are!"

"Well, good!"

As we rested up in between sets, we stood almost chest to chest, with our hands on each other's arms, kneading and prodding, feeling each other's firmness.

But she was outpacing me by the third set – she seemed to need less time than I did to recover. She was curling like a champion. And doing it topless, to boot! I became very aware of the bulge beneath my pants. Rarely had I been so aroused.

As I took my position for my last set, she came to stand in front of me. She was already resting up, having finished a few minutes ago, but sweat still trickled down the crevices formed by her muscles. Her round, pink nipples were hard and stiff.

"Come on, stud muffin. Show me your best."

I pumped out two easily enough. On the third, I got stuck halfway up. I could feel myself beginning to fail. Groaning, I held the bar in place, willing it not to go down, but to go up instead. My arms were on fire.

Then Judith reached down, and cupped my crotch.

My eyes must've fair popped out of my head. I expelled my breath in a gust of surprise, and the bar wavered in my hands. What in the world...?

"C'mon, big boy, up, up, up, c'mon..."

Adrenaline must've been flooding my veins, because I found the energy to power through. With a grunt of Herculean effort, I pulled the bar up high, and then let my arms relax, almost dropping the barbell as I set it down.

"Oof... hoo boy... oh man..." I stood bent over, with hands on knees, catching my breath.

"You did it," she said, her eyes twinkling as she looked down at me.

"That's a new way of spotting that I hadn't thought of," I said, grinning up at her.

"You haven't thought of it? Somehow I find that very unlikely," she retorted with a low, throaty chuckle. "I bet your fertile imagination's come up with a lot more than that, Jay."

"M-Maybe..."

I had to draw myself upright then, because she had moved in and pressed herself against me. Before I knew it, my shirt was off as well, with her assistance, and we were caressing and fondling each other, running our roughened hands all over each other's front torsos.

Somewhere at the back of my mind, though, I was thinking of numbers.

Judith weighed somewhere close to 125lbs – she'd told me that much. With some cutting done for a competition, she'd be in the 123 weight class – relatively easy to drop a couple of pounds for such purposes.

At the last meet I'd attended, the strongest women of her age and weight class had curled roughly 70lbs, slightly more. She'd just done 5 sets of 5 reps, with 50lbs, 52.5lbs to be precise. And she was a relative neophyte.

It wasn't inconceivable, I thought, that with more training, she could challenge some of those women for top spot at a regional or even national meet.

Then we were kissing, and all such thoughts were temporarily driven out of my head in a haze of pleasurable groping and moaning. Our hips pressed together with increasing urgency, with need demanding to be met.

She drew back for a moment, her breath hot on my lips. "We'll have to finish a proper workout some other time, Jay," she said, breathlessly. I concurred.

That is to say, I nodded vigorously, while clutching her firm buttocks hard and rubbing myself against her feverishly.

"Wait, I know how. Come here."

Somehow we stumbled over to the preacher curl bench without tripping over anything. With pleasing economy of movement she pulled down her bottoms and stepped out of them, kicking them to the side. Then she snatched up a dumbbell – the nearest one, which happened to be 20lbs – and adopted her position on the machine, posing as if she were working out her right arm only.

"Come on, Jay," she moaned huskily. "Fill me up. Pump me full."

I yanked off my shorts as well, letting my rod spring free. Already some pre-cum was oozing out the tip.

And as we'd discussed, I could enter her bareback. Which was good, because I was already overcome by the urgency of the moment.

With an animal grunt, I clutched her round, firm shoulders and positioned myself. The tip of my cock brushed her butt cheeks, and she spread her legs slightly to give me more access. Still, as I slid into her, I could feel the walls of her muscular buttocks pressing deliciously around my manhood.

At the first contact with her vulva we both gasped. Then it was silky wet warmth all the way in. I wrapped my arms around her waist and leaned forward, looking over her shoulder at her arm.

Then she began curling. I placed a hand on her biceps to feel it move. She brought the dumbbell up until it was level with her face, and then let out a growl, as if she were arm wrestling with a rival. I began to move in and out of her, slowly at first, before picking up the pace.

She turned her face sideways towards me, and her eyelids fluttered. "Oh yes," she moaned, "just like that... keep doing that, don't stop..."

I couldn't have stopped even if the building were burning down around me right then. The air in my basement was filled with the sound of grunting, moaning, panting, the slapping of flesh against flesh as I pounded her faster and faster. My grip on her biceps grew tighter even as I felt it bulge harder and harder. She kept it up for a few seconds at a time, then slowly let it down just as I'd shown her earlier. Then she somehow found the strength for another rep. I lost count of how many times she curled that 20lb dumbbell, but at one point she slowed, trembling all over, crying out softly with the pain of muscle fatigue as the dumbbell stayed suspended in the halfway position.

Sweat was trickling into my eyes by then, and I blinked them away as I kept pumping away at her. I was very, very close.

"Come on... come on... curl that up... you can do it... curl it... curl it..."

A low shuddering groan began in her throat, like I'd never heard before, and slowly built up. At the same time, her shaking arm began moving again, upwards, and the dumbbell slowly got closer and closer to our faces...

And then my eyes rolled up as I came, ejecting load after load into her pussy, which squeezed and pulsed around my cock as if it had a will of its own, draining every last drop out of me, until she and I both slumped, completely spent. The dumbbell rolled from her nerveless fingers and dropped onto the padded floor with a thump.

But neither of us cared. I was kneading her sore, fleshy biceps while sharing a furious kiss with her.

Finally, we broke apart, coming up for air.

"I think I like curling," she managed to say.