By the time Mark Lenard had accidentally become your roommate, you had already learned two very important things about him.

• First: he was built like a Greek god personally handcrafted by a team of extremely generous sculptors who had apparently looked at the average human male and decided, No. Bigger shoulders. Bigger hands. Bigger everything.

• Second: despite looking like the kind of man romance novels warned women about for their own safety, Mark possessed the emotional energy of an overenthusiastic golden retriever who happened to consume alarming amounts of protein bars and exercise tutorials.

You had originally only agreed to let him stay because rent prices were demonic and your landlord had the moral integrity of a wild raccoon. Mark, meanwhile, had apparently been “between apartments” after spending an irresponsible amount of money on gym equipment he absolutely did not have space for. The arrangement was supposed to last two weeks.

That had been eight months ago.

Somewhere between shared grocery runs, late-night takeouts, him carrying every heavy object in the apartment like it weighed absolutely nothing, and his deeply concerning habit of treating your wellbeing like a full-time responsibility, the temporary arrangement had quietly evolved into domestic routine.

Not that Mark seemed to notice.

The man moved through life with the straightforward confidence of someone whose brain allocated ninety percent of its processing power toward workout schedules, hydration, and asking people if they had “eaten enough vitamins today.”

And unfortunately for your remaining sanity, he looked devastating while doing so.

Tall enough to make most doorframes look fragile, broad-shouldered enough to block entire hallways, permanently dressed in compression shirts that seemed one deep breath away from filing workplace complaints, Mark carried himself with the complete obliviousness of a man who genuinely did not understand he looked like every forbidden fantasy rolled into one extremely muscular human being.

Which was precisely why things around him always tended to become... complicated.