Pitching Tents

by Mari Thorne

  It was Sean. His eyes were closed and his cheeks flushed, his lips parted and brow furrowed in concentration. He had his hands down his plaid pajama pants and he was stroking himself. All right, then. I didn’t need to stand in the bushes and watch him jerk off like a perv. I turned to go when I heard him whisper—no, not whisper—moan my name.

  “Alan.” He licked his lips and thrust into his hand. I watched with a morbid curiosity and fascination as he continued.

  When he stuck his fingers into his mouth, I thought, okay, you really need to get the fuck out of here, but my legs wouldn’t move. Something inexplicable ran through me, a shock of arousal that I hadn’t expected. I had to reach down and adjust myself, my dick already half-hard. What the fuck?

  He moaned, pulling his pants down and working his fingers into his ass. I was fully hard the next time my name came out of his mouth. What was wrong with me? I needed to leave. Instead, I took a step toward him, then started creeping, as quiet as possible until I stood right in front of him.

  His dick was swollen and flushed. A glistening dewdrop of precome leaked from the tip. Sean and I were close; casual nudity was nothing. I’d seen his dick before, peeks here and there in the locker room or when we were changing or skinny-dipping in the river. He had a nice dick, I’d compared it to my own in the past. Cut and thick, but mine was longer. I’d never seen it like this, bulging with need and fisted in his hand.

  The look on his face was new too, needy and desperate. I watched him with fascination. I thought I knew everything about Sean, but here was something new. He wasn’t just jerking off; he was thinking of me. My body flushed with heat and I clenched my fists. This whole situation should have weirded me out, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how we weren’t supposed to keep secrets from each other.

  Something in his expression changed, and he arched his back, scraping against the three bark. He panted, my name on his steaming breath, and before I realized it, he came with a moan, his dick aimed right at me. Hot jets of come splattered my chest. He opened his eyes and for a second, they were unfocused. His brown eyes widened in fear as realization hit him, then his cheeks became impossibly red up to his ears, and he croaked, “Oh, fuck.”

  He stood stock still, like a deer caught in the headlights. I looked down at the thick liquid dripping down my chest and turned by back to him so he couldn’t see my shame. My face heated and my dick strained against the fabric of my pajama pants. I couldn’t even explain it. Why had that turned me on so much? I wasn’t gay. And I surely wasn’t gay for my best friend, someone who I’d just found out saw me as more than that. Why wasn’t I mad? Why was I aroused instead?

  I walked back to the campsite, Sean’s jizz cooling on my bare skin. Part of me wanted to touch it, to run my fingers through it and feel its slickness. I could use it as a lubricant to take care of the aching need in my own pants. No, I couldn’t be gay. I liked women. Sean hadn’t been exaggerating when he said I had a different woman in my bed every night. I loved the feeling of a tight, wet pussy around my dick. There was something wonderful about the scent of a woman, the softness of her breasts, my fingers in long hair, eating a girl out, all of it. But what if there’s something tighter and better than a woman’s pussy? What if something more masculine could turn me on?

  I shoved those thoughts aside and dug through a bag in the back of the Jeep until I found the wet wipes. I purged his spunk off of my skin, wishing I had a shower to wash away the shame, a cold one to get rid of this persistent boner. I coaxed the campfire to life and tossed the wipes in, burning the evidence. The heat of the flames made me realize how cold I’d been, prickles of feeling seeping back into my hands as I held them over the fire.

  Sean had come back to the campsite sometime between me pulling my hoodie out of the tent and starting the fire. He said nothing, digging through the cooler to pull out a beer before dropping into one of the camp chairs. I wanted to give him shit about drinking so early in the morning, but I pulled one out for myself and cracked it open. We drank in silence, neither of us wanting to be the first to bring up that morning’s incident.

  I busied myself making breakfast, pulling out a propane stove and making eggs and bacon. I knew Sean liked his eggs hard in the middle and that he liked his bacon extra crispy. A nasty part of me said, how domestic of you, before I shoved the thought aside. I gave him a runny egg and floppy bacon to prove a point to that little voice in my head. Saying nothing, he ate the dripping yolk, even though I knew he hated it that way. He kept his eyes fixed on the flames. If we would have been back in civilization, he would have left, but he didn’t have anywhere to go, unless he wanted to throw himself into the icy river. The way his eyes kept darting to the path down to the water, he may have been contemplating it.

  I fucking hate awkward situations, so I cleared my throat and started yanking the tent stakes out of the frozen ground. “We need to pack up the tent.”

  He looked up at me, expression guarded. “Are we going back home?”

  I shook my head, “No way. Did you already lose track of time? This is a three-day trip. We’ve got to make it to the next campsite before someone else takes it.”

  His face fell, though his eyes held something strange. “Oh, I thought you might—you know…”

  I couldn’t help myself. I ruffled his hair, already messy from sleep, before taking his empty plate, ignoring how warm he was. My hand wanted to linger in that soft, brown hair, maybe even give it an experimental tug. I shook the thoughts out of my head. “I promised to make you fall in love with camping, and we’re not done yet. Not by a long shot.” A weird feeling tightened my chest, and an equally odd heat settled in my lower abdomen. Was I making the right decision? I sure hoped so. Sean was foremost my best friend, and I didn’t break promises to my best friend.

  I’d taken this trail before, going with a local Jeep group so I could get familiar with the area. My first thought when I did it was how much I wished Sean could have been there. He’d been off on a work trip, but I thought if I could persuade him to come camping, he’d fall in love with it as much as I had. I’d always been the outdoorsy one in our friendship. Sean was the nerd that that preferred to sit in front of a computer or TV and play video games or read comic books. We’d played sports together in school, but that was because he needed the PE credits, focusing on computer science and programming as soon as they were elective options.

  He took care of himself, though. We worked out together sometimes, when our schedules lined up. I’d never noticed his figure before, I’d always been so focused on my workout. Or maybe I’d never allowed myself to look at him in that way. As I drove, I snuck a few peeks. I couldn’t help noticing his biceps as they bulged when he gripped my Jeep’s grab handles for dear life. My mind wandered back to how his muscular legs had looked when he’d pressed himself against that tree, his shirt lifted to show his abs and the trail of brown hair that led from his naval into his jeans. Yeah, he definitely kept himself in excellent shape for a computer geek.

  I drove us down the mountain we’d camped on and found a spot in the valley next to the river to set up camp. It was still early, but I wanted to make this trip last the full three days I’d planned. The entire day had been awkward, our conversation not flowing as easily as it usually did, conversations ending with, “yeah,” and, “um,” or fizzling into silence. We were in new, uncharted territory, and neither of us knew how to navigate it. And we definitely didn’t want to talk about what’d happened that morning.

  So I did what I did best. I barreled forward like a rhino. I had to show him that what I saw—and felt—that morning hadn’t made things as awkward as they seemed. Sean got into his own head sometimes, and I needed to knock him out of it. We were still friends, and the morning’s incident changed nothing, even if I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My dick had been misbehaving all day, thanks to those images in my head. The sight of Sean’s thick cock—

  “I’ll sleep in the car tonight.” He pulled his pillows an
d a small throw blanket out of the tent. “I think it might be for the best.”

  I blinked stupidly, coming out of my fucked-up fantasies, “Why? We only have one heater. I charged the battery while we were driving. It’ll get cold in the Jeep and the tent is more comfortable.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I shouldn’t sleep in the tent.”

  I shook my head, “Why not?”

  His mouth formed a hard line, “You know why not. You’ve been uncomfortable with me all day.”

  I forced out a laugh, “Me, uncomfortable? You’re the one that’s uncomfortable. For no reason, I should say. What happened this morning is over, let’s just pretend it didn’t happen and move on.” I took the pillows and blanket from him and stuffed them back into the tent. “I don’t mind sharing a tent with you.”

  He worried his bottom lip with his top teeth, “You’re sure? You’re not just saying that? I—I didn’t think you could just forget—”

  Without thinking, I stepped forward and put my thumb on that lip, pulling it free from his teeth. A gasp escaped him and that heat from earlier unfurled inside of me. His lip was slightly swollen from his anxious habit, and I hadn’t expected it to be so soft. My breath hitched but I said, “Sean, you’re my best friend. Would you rather talk about it?”

  I was never a, “talk about your feelings,” kind of guy. My dad had taught me that real men didn’t do that. We were stoic bastions of pride, solid pillars for a woman to cry on, an arm to put around them and pat their hair. Sean was one of the few people that had ever broken through the crunchy outer shell my dad forced me to build. When my dad passed away a few years back, Sean was the only person to witness me crying. He’d held me and stroked my hair, just like my dad told me to do with the girls. I’d drenched his shirt in tears and snot and he’d told me everything would be okay. I could always be myself with Sean, free to smile and laugh and even cry.

  Sean shook his head, pulling free from my touch and shaking me from my thoughts. I nodded curtly and dropped my hands. Fuck, what was wrong with me? I’d just wanted to stop him from chewing on his lip, not grope his mouth.

  “Okay, so the other option is to forget it. But we will not entertain an option that involves us being awkward around each other anymore, okay? And I will not let you freeze to death in my Jeep when there’s a perfectly good tent.”

  Relief flooded his expression, and he chuckled, raking his hands over his face, “Oh man, oh fuck, I should have known you’d react this way. I’m such an idiot. Sorry.”

  “Yep, you definitely are. Now let’s go see if this part of the river is a better spot to catch dinner.”

  That night, we stuffed ourselves on largemouth bass and rainbow trout, finally getting lucky with our fishing poles. We were like real survivalists, living off the land, sitting around a crackling fire and drinking beer. The mood had lightened considerably and the tightness in my chest loosened a bit every time he laughed or smiled at me, just like always. When we’d doused the fire, the cold settled in, but it didn’t diminish the beauty of the stars. The full moon lit the valley so bright we didn’t need flashlights to see the dopey, drunken grins on our faces. When we climbed into the tent, the smell of campfire smoke clung to our clothes and my mouth was sticky with roasted marshmallows.

  I turned the heater on to warm the tent. I’d have to run it more sparingly tonight if we wanted to stay warm, but it was powerful enough to make the small space cozy in minutes.

  We crawled under the blankets. When I saw Sean trying to wrap himself in the thin fleece blanket he’d brought along, I draped my big down comforter over the both of us and wriggled closer. Body heat would be necessary to keep us warm enough to run the heater sparingly through the night. This is what I told myself, anyway.

  Sean stiffened when my hand grazed his back. It was then that I remembered how hard he’d rubbed himself against the tree. “Does it hurt?” I brushed my fingers on the t-shirt that covered his back. Part of me wanted to lift the shirt and look at them myself. Or just remove his shirt altogether.

  He paused a moment before responding, “I’ll be fine, I cleaned them. They weren’t too deep.”

  “I thought you were a bear,” I chuckled. We hadn’t spoken about the event, but now, warm and a little drunk, snug in the confines of the tent, it felt okay. He’d been jerking off, so what? It’s a natural, healthy thing to do. Even if he’d been fantasizing about me when he did it. I didn’t blame him. I was a catch.

  “Different kind of bear,” he muttered before letting loose a nervous giggle of his own. My hand brushed his skin and he gasped.

  My hands seemed to have a mind of their own, my brain wasn’t able to make them stop. I shoved his fleece blanket down to his feet. I slipped my hands under the front of his shirt and pulled him close, spooning him while I wound my arms around him as tightly as I could. His breathing became erratic, but he didn’t pull away, and neither did I. I’d always been taller and broader in the shoulders than Sean. Not by much, but enough to make it noticeable as I held him. Our bodies fit together like they’d been made to. Why didn’t best friends cuddle like this all the time?

  “Sean Wharton, don’t you ever keep secrets from me again,” I whispered into his ear. “I won’t allow it.”

  He shuddered and exhaled, breath shaky, trying to curl into a ball. But I just followed suit, curling around him. “What do you mean?”

  With my right hand, I cupped his pec, groping for his nipple. When I found it, I gave it a sharp pinch, and he gasped. I slipped my hand down his pants and grasp the erection he’d been trying to hide. The sounds he made egged me on, gasps giving way to moans when I rubbed a thumb over his precome-slick slit and ground my erection into his ass.

  “What are you—” he panted, trying to wriggle away.

  “Isn’t this what you want?” I asked, stilling. Had I read the signs all wrong? What the fuck was I even doing? This was Sean. This was my best friend, and I had his hard, leaking dick in my hand. But I wanted this. It was all I’d been able to think about all day, no matter how hard I’d tried not to.

  “But—you aren’t—I’m a man—and you’re straight,” he sputtered, rolling over to look at me. His face was flushed, and he had his teeth gnawing that damn bottom lip again.

  I looked into his cautious eyes. I was a little drunk, and so fucking hard, especially after his erotic show earlier that day. My brain wasn’t working right. “So what if I’m straight? I’m horny.” I punctuated my statement by grinding my aching dick against his. He let out a sound that was half-gasp, half-moan, and I didn’t know my dick could get any stiffer, but it somehow did. “You got off this morning, but I didn’t, and what’s the difference between a man and a woman? It’s just a hot wet hole in the wilderness.”

  He gaped at me, and I slid my hand into my pajama pants, stroking myself. “I guess I could jerk off. It wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying, but you can watch. It’s only fair.”

  “Oh my god, I can’t fucking believe this is happening.” He buried his face in his hands and when he peeked back at me, his entire face was beet red, even his ears. It spread down to his neck. Was his chest red too? I wanted to take his shirt off and find out.

  “It’s your fault,” I growled, rolling onto my back and shoving my pants down to my ankles and lazily stroking myself. His gaze followed my hand like I was holding his favorite snack, his expression hungry. “I’ve been hard all day because of you.” With my other hand, I took his chin and forced him to look into my eyes. They darkened at my touch, pupils dilating until they were almost black. My thumb slipped to his mouth, once more freeing his bottom lip from his teeth. Soft, warm, and wet, I wondered what those lips would feel like wrapped around my aching dick. “Think you can help me out?”

  3

  Sean

  I knew Alan had a healthy sexual appetite. He’d fucked a lot of women, and it was easy for him to get whoever he wanted because he was sexy and gorgeous and not an asshole. The winning trifecta. His dick was nice
too, and from what I’d heard, he was a generous lover, so he had plenty of women clamoring for a repeat.

  Now, said dick was staring me in the face while he slowly stroked it with one hand. Precome dribbled down the slit and the thumb of his other hand parted my lips. My entire body tensed as my brain short-circuited and my heart pounded. Was I brave enough to do this? This was a million wet dreams rolled into one. And so what if he was just using me to get off? I wasn’t stupid enough to pass up an opportunity like this.

  I sucked his thumb into my mouth, tasting the remnants of sweet marshmallow. He inhaled sharply as I ran my tongue up the pad of his thumb, then swirled it around the digit. I gave it a final hard suck before letting it go with a wet pop.

  “Fuck, that was hot,” Alan stared at me with a strange look in his eyes. I’d caught it a few times since that morning; a weird mix of fascination and curiosity that turned me on and scared the shit out of me at the same time.

  “Want to keep going?” I gave him a wicked grin full of promise. Tonight, I would finally fuck him out of my head. Hopefully he would be terrible in bed and I’d realize the secret crush I’d harbored for so many years had been a mistake.

  “Yes—” I shifted so I was eye-level with his dick. The thing was bigger than mine, flushed and hard and oh-so delectable. “Fuck, are you going to just stare at it all night? I need to come, I’m so fucking hard you asshole.”

  I looked at him again. I had to see his expression when I said, “I just wanted to make sure you’re on board with whatever will happen in this tent tonight.”

  His eyes widened, then he closed them. “Just shut up before I change my mind and masturbate into one of your socks,” he growled, his voice laced with need.