Choose Me

by Donya Lynne

  I masturbate about four times a week, so it looks like I’m above average in that statistic, too. Go me for overachieving.

  Before you call me a sexual deviant, let me explain that all this self-love isn’t about me walking around with a perpetual hard-on, needing sex all the time. Masturbating is more a stress reliever than something I enjoy. I mean, I do enjoy it—what man wouldn’t?—but for me, masturbating is more about clearing my head and releasing tension than satisfying sex-addict urges.

  It’s like what Matthew McConaughey said in The Wolf of Wall Street when he said you have to jerk off at least twice a day, not because you want to, but because you need to, to stay calm and focused.

  I’m not so bad that I need to jerk off twice a day, but the principle is the same.

  Hence the reason why I’m in my private executive bathroom, holding the latest issue of Swank Magazine in one hand while stroking my cock with the other. I’ve got a meeting with Rugged’s executive team—aka my two best friends Ed and Mike—and my brother Brent, who’s also my attorney, in less than an hour to discuss the acquisition of Freedom Cycle, and my brain has been all over the place for the past three hours. I need to refocus.

  But whacking off isn’t always about clearing my head. Sometimes it’s about necessity.

  For every one hundred times I jack off, I might get the chance to be with a woman once, and for every chance I get to be with a woman, I might make it to getting naked with her half the time. That’s when the odds really take a nosedive, because I might actually get the chance to have sex with forty per cent of the women I get naked with. And do you want to know how many of those women I’ve been able to fuck all the way to completion?

  None. Zero. Zilch. The big donut.

  Why? Because I’m just too goddamn big.

  And when a man isn’t getting real sex with a partner, all that sexual energy builds up like greasy gunk in an engine. Masturbating is like engine cleaner. It clears out the built-up gunk, allowing a man’s engine to run at optimal efficiency. Some men—like me—just need more cleaning than others. Because real sex cleans better than hand sex, so when you’re not getting laid on the regular, you have to masturbate at least twice as often.

  From the moment I lost my virginity, most women usually get a load of my . . . well, load . . . and give me the look. The oh-my-God-how-did-you-get-a-dick-that-big? look.

  From across a crowded bar, I don’t look as big as I am. Like an optical illusion, my Armani-covered cock deceptively and enticingly teases the unsuspecting woman’s eyes into thinking it’s only a hefty handful. She stares. Her eyebrow twitches with interest. Her lips curve into a subtle but hungry grin. Less than five minutes later, she’s introducing herself. Less than an hour later, she’s inviting me to go somewhere private. Somewhere she can get a closer look at what my pants are hiding, because, like most women, she thinks she wants a big dick. And she’s thinking to herself, “How big could it really be? Surely not that big.”

  She’s wrong, of course. And I’m the one left hanging after the big reveal. Literally. All worked up and hard with no place to go.

  But I never learn. For some reason, I think next time will be different. That my dick won’t always be a detriment. I’m masochistically optimistic that there’s someone out there made expressly for me and I just need to keep putting myself out there until I find her.

  My mind jumps to Rhian. It’s been two months since I returned from New Zealand, but I still find myself thinking about how excited she was over the size of my dick. How into it she was. For once, I’d found a woman capable of taking my monster, and for a handful of minutes, it was pure bliss.

  I focus on that rather than the disappointing outcome of that night as I use my thumb to flip to the next page of my dirty magazine. The glossy pages show two women with big tits getting it on, one going down on the other.

  Like most men, I get off on the fantasy of having sex with two women. But unlike most men, living out that fantasy is about as probable as hitting the lottery. It could happen, but it’s highly unlikely.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had girlfriends. I’ve even had a couple who stuck around longer than a few months. But I’ve yet to find a girlfriend who’s A) willing to endure uncomfortable or even painful sex for the rest of her life or B) willing to remain faithful to me and my Godzilla dick. Which means girlfriends are few and far between breakups.

  The bad news is that statistics show that women involved with men who have enormous cocks are more likely to cheat than women involved with men who have penises of average length and girth. I call it the Goldilocks penis. That’s what women want. Not too big, not too small, just right.

  I’ll never have a Goldilocks penis.

  Which leaves me with my fantasy girlfriends on the pages of Swank.

  I lay the magazine on top of the toilet’s tank and flip the page to a picture of one of the women having an orgasm, and oh my God, she’s a squirter. That shit’s even more of a turn-on than seeing two women sixty-nining each other.

  There’s a series of images of the woman squirting, and I imagine being under her as she sprays her ejaculation on my dick.

  My scrotum tightens. That’s the image I need. That’s what I want.

  My balls tingle in that way. The way that lets me know I’m about to come.

  I close my eyes, pounding my fist harder and faster up and down my shaft, swirling my palm over the head after every four or five strokes.

  My thighs tighten. My ass clenches. I shudder, and a garbled moan breaks from inside my throat as I tilt back my head.

  I’d rather be doing this with a woman. I’d rather it be her hands on me. Her mouth. Her pussy.

  My thoughts briefly zap to Rhian again. She duped me, and the bite still burns, but I won’t lie, I liked how I felt inside her.

  I quickly banish thoughts of Rhian, because if I keep thinking about her, my dick will shrivel up faster than a popped balloon. Instead, I imagine a woman standing over me, fingering herself as I continue pumping my hand up and down. Her legs are trembling, her eyes glazed, her finger plunging deep inside her over and over until she cries out as her legs shudder, and she squirts all over me.

  Fuck yeah.

  Just as I reach down with my left hand to squeeze my balls, I open my eyes and focus on the spray of womanly cum shooting from between the woman’s legs.

  My orgasm hammers into me, and my legs almost give out as semen rockets from my cock. It splatters against the front of the tank as another jet shoots out and lands on the toilet seat.

  I grunt, rock forward, and squeeze down hard on the base of my cock, riding out the pleasure, letting the fantasy end as a third stream flies from my dick and splashes into the bowl. A few more spurts dribble out, but the high is quickly subsiding as I pant through the lingering contractions in my abdomen and pay the woman on the page one last visit before flipping the magazine closed.

  Something about jacking off to pictures always makes me feel sleazy-deviant dirty. A little bit like a creepy voyeur who can’t attract women, so he has to whack off to porn magazines.

  But I can attract women. Mike and Ed used to say hanging out with me was like hanging out with a pussy magnet. That I have a face that makes women take off their clothes and a body that makes them drop their panties. Until they see my dick, of course, and then they put their panties right back on as if they’re made of impenetrable armor. And being that the women who ran from my colossus usually ended up in Mike’s or Ed’s bed, my buddies enjoyed trolling the bars with me. Not anymore, though. Not since Ed got married last year and Mike got engaged.

  The point is, I can attract women by the dozens. I just can’t keep them longer than it takes for them to see me with my pants down and a hard-on jutting out like a toddler-sized baseball bat between my legs.

  If any of these women would give me a chance, they’d learn I’m as loyal as a Labrador and want nothing but to spend the rest of my life making my special lady happy, even if I am incapable o
f giving her a ring. But hey, a man can be serious about a woman without marrying her.

  And yeah, I still have my share of delinquent, regular-man fantasies that involve threesomes and women squirting all over me. Who doesn’t have kinky sexual fantasies once in a while? It doesn’t make me a deviant.

  And neither does my past. I’ll admit I was a bit of a man whore back in the day. Back when my conscience and my compassion weren’t as developed as they are now.

  But my man whoring was always more about desperation than intention. Desperation because the more women I tried to get with, the more women refused to get with me because of my size—which made me try even harder to get with more women. At least for a few years. After all, I was a young man filled with hormones, not common sense.

  Those days are long over, my almost-one-night stand with Rhian notwithstanding. Owning and running a business will make you grow up fast, especially when you’re on your own.

  I started Rugged with Mike and Ed when I was twenty-two. Almost nobody thought Rugged would last more than a few months, a year at the most. They severely underestimated us and our vision. Today, the sporting goods company is an international conglomerate. We’ve even been selected to provide the official uniforms for the United States in the next Winter Olympics. Not too shabby for a company everyone thought would go belly up before its first birthday.

  But with success comes women, and when Rugged started doing well, I met Carla.

  Carla was my first taste of a gold digger. My only taste, too. I dated her for about a minute. I was twenty-eight and too young, dumb, and horny to know or even care what a gold digger was. But I’m a quick study, and boy did I learn the signs and behavior of a gold digger at record speed with Carla.

  I hadn’t known she was only after my money when I met her. All I cared about was that she didn’t complain about the size of my dick and seemed to want sex every night, even when I just wanted to sleep. Now I realize that was part of her game. She always came on to me when she knew I was exhausted then backed down at even the smallest hint of protest, even though I easily could have been persuaded to find a little get up and go for a quickie. Like I said, I haven’t experienced a lot of bangin’ sex. It wouldn’t have taken much to light my fire and get me going.

  I began to suspect something was amiss about a month into our relationship. She was overly concerned with my financial status and asked a lot of indirect questions about how much money I made. She wore three-hundred-dollar shoes and drove a BMW when she claimed she could barely pay her rent, and she always treated wait staff as if they were servants meant to lick her feet rather than human beings worthy of respect. I learned real quick that these are trademark characteristics of a gold digger.

  I tried to look beyond her shortcomings, because I’m patient to a fault and was willing to put up with a lot of shit for a woman who didn’t complain about my size, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt. But on our two-month anniversary, I found out she was fucking around on me when I left work early to surprise her with a romantic weekend at the fire lookout on Squaw Mountain. I arrived at her place to pick her up, and she was with another man.

  It took me about half a second to break up with her. I’ll put up with a lot of shit, but not infidelity. Not after what I endured as a kid.

  But Carla knocked the common sense into me. I’ve been a lot more cautious with women ever since, not counting my incident with Rhian.

  Hey, but at least one good thing came out of my failed tryst with Rhian. I know now that women who can handle my load do exist. And that gives me hope.

  But I don’t have time to think about Carla, Rhian, and all that shit right now. I’ve got to get ready for my meeting.

  I tear off a few squares of toilet paper and wipe off my dick, clean my hands, then pull up my slacks, tucking myself in and refastening my black leather belt. After cleaning the commode, I flush all evidence of my midafternoon pick-me-up down the toilet and wash my hands. Then I smooth my wet fingers through my brown hair, combing it up and back so that it stands on top in the manner that’s popular now, all GQ and shit.

  I button my collar, straighten my pewter tie, and emerge back into my corner office looking every bit the owner of one of Denver’s top ten companies that I am.

  I have it all. The company. The success. A job I love. A private bathroom in my office where I can jerk off any time I want.

  But what I really want is a woman to share it all with. A woman who won’t turn squeamish the moment she sees my erection. A woman who will find pleasure with me instead of pain. A woman who will give me the opportunity to fuck more and jerk off less. A woman who’s not already taken. A woman who won’t just fit my body, but one who will fit my life—my world—and who’ll want to stay in it even though I’m not the marrying kind.

  I know it’s not popular for a man to dream about doing the one-woman thing, but this is what I long for.

  Rolling the dirty magazine into a tube, I stroll to my desk feeling more clearheaded than I did twenty minutes ago. I stuff the magazine in my bag then open the e-mail from Brent so I can review all the data on Freedom Cycle before he and the others arrive.

  What I like about Freedom Cycle is that they’re an established business that won’t require a lot of capital to get going. They’ve built a solid reputation with both competitive and recreational cyclists, and they would fill a void in Rugged’s product offering. As successful as we’ve been at creating products superior to those of our competitors in every other area of recreational and professional sports, we haven’t had much success breaking into the cycling industry. Acquiring Freedom will allow Rugged to do that.

  As for what Rugged can do for Freedom, we can make them an international company. Right now, you can only buy a Freedom bicycle in the United States, and while their bikes are sold nationwide, the bulk of their sales are made in the western half of the country. Rugged can make their eastern sales as strong as, if not stronger than, their western sales, and we can do it while taking them international.

  I’m still reviewing the latest numbers when an instant message from Lily, my assistant, pops up on my computer to let me know Brent, Mike, and Ed are waiting.

  I type back to send them in, and a few seconds later, my brother and two best friends walk in.

  I don’t see Brent outside of work as often as I should, even though he’s my brother, but it’s hard for me to reconcile myself to the fact that he and my sister, Olivia, forgave Mom when I can’t justify doing so. But he is family, and as long as he respects my boundaries where Mom is concerned, I’ll allow him to be my counsel.

  “Brent.” I stand and shake his hand.

  Ed and Mike take seats at the cherry, oval-shaped conference table near the window overlooking downtown Denver.

  “Grey.” Brent nods. He’s aware of the subtle tension between us as much as I am. But he’s one of Denver’s best lawyers, and he’s honest. Being that he’s family also makes him trustworthy. We don’t have to have the best sibling relationship that ever was to work well together.

  Brent and I join the others at the table.

  Ed’s my CFO, and Mike is my Chief Operating Officer. Ed has always focused on the financial side of the business, but Mike has done everything. In the early years, when Ed was playing accountant and I was busting my balls to scrounge up capital and customers, Mike had his hands in marketing, advertising, customer service, product design, research and development, operations, and manufacturing. Sometimes I feel like he knows more about Rugged than I do. As the COO, he oversees every department except for accounting, which is Ed’s baby, and sales, which falls under my purview. It’s the perfect job for him. He’s the only person I know who has more energy than I do.

  For the next forty-five minutes, the four of us review the data on Freedom.

  “What I like,” Mike says as he looks over their dossier, “is this new technology they’ve developed. Harness.”

  “I like it, too.” Brent flips to the page in his packet
that goes over the specifics of Harness. “And the patent’s pending, so obtaining the company who has intellectual control over how the technology is used is a major advantage.”

  What Freedom’s team of engineers has done is create a device that harnesses the energy created when a cyclist pedals a bike. The device is a small component about the size of a thumb drive that attaches to a special port built in to one of their bikes that allows the energy to be stored much the way solar power is stored, only on a smaller scale. You can charge small devices such as cell phones or handheld video games with it.

  The technology is still a bit clunky and in its early stages, but as a visionary, it’s not hard for me to see a big future for Harness. Freedom predicts that within five years, they’ll be able to develop and adapt Harness for use not just on their bikes, but all bikes, without sacrificing performance. It’s a revolutionary idea, and since I’m all about sustainable living and going green, this technology coincides with my personal and professional initiatives.

  “It’s very innovative,” Mike adds, nodding his head and rubbing his thumb and index finger over his stubbly chin. If only I could look as good with facial hair as Mike does.

  Ed hasn’t said much the entire meeting, and he appears troubled.

  “Ed, what are your thoughts?” I ask, hoping his unusual silence isn’t because he thinks Freedom is a bad move. After all the work we’ve put into researching the company, I’d hate to hear anything negative from my numbers guy.

  He straightens and glances at his packet. “What? Oh, about Freedom?”

  “Yes, Ed, that is what this meeting is about.”

  His cheeks flush and he clears his throat. “Freedom is a solid choice. They’re well known in the industry, have a strong bottom line, but have gone as far as they can go on their own. If they want to make the leap to international sales and strengthen their national presence, they need us. That’s the approach I’d take when pitching them.”