by Dirk Hunter
He pulled himself the rest of the way out from under the bed and stood up. When he got to his feet, the blanket, which had been loosely wrapped around his body, fell to the floor. For the first time, I got to behold Adam, by the full light of day, in all his naked glory.
He stretched, at first oblivious to my wide-eyed staring. His incredibly well-defined muscles rippled under his skin. You know, I think it is entirely possible I had underestimated the worth of a well-defined musculature.
Watching the sunlight play over Adam’s abs, I found myself reassessing his place in Oak Lake’s hotness scale. And that wasn’t even mentioning his crowning glory, the fat tool that hung between his legs under a thick, blond bush. I had noticed the night before how large it was, but I had only been going by the feel against my hip and in my hand. But looking at it now, full in the face so to speak, I was breathless. It was by far the biggest dick I had seen, outside of Internet porn videos. And his balls, refusing to be outdone, hung equally low, swaying slightly with his every movement. It was like an erotic pocket watch, swinging back and forth, hypnotizing me.
Adam finally noticed my scrutiny. For a second, he got selfconscious. His shoulders slouched slightly, and he turned away from me, growing red in the face. But this only managed to bring me the sight of even more of his body. His broad shoulders, which I had always thought made him look kind of oafish, now only furthered my arousal. But it was nothing compared to the perfection that was his ass. It was like it had been sculpted out of marble by a Renaissance master to encapsulate the ideal behind. And through his legs I could still see his balls, dangling, enticing.
If Kai had been the Vitruvian Man, then Adam was Adonis.
He peeked over his shoulder and noticed my still rapt gaze. His blush deepened but, instead of trying to hide again, he began to flex. He started with his ass, one cheek, then the next, grinning as I gasped with desire. Then he flexed his shoulders, turning his torso to flex his arms, his pecs, even his abs, but kept his hips turned away from me, giving me only the occasional tantalizing glimpses of his cock.
Abruptly, Adam stooped and picked up the blanket, wrapping it around himself. I moaned in protest.
“This is hardly fair,” he said. “After all, I still haven’t had the chance to look at you.” With that, he sat down at my desk, turning the chair to look at me expectantly.
Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. I mean, I didn’t think I was un attractive or anything — quite the opposite, actually — but compared to Adam….
For one thing, everything was smaller. I was shorter, fewer muscles, smaller dick. I also lacked his healthy tan, hairless chest, and sculpted abs.
Sure, I had been naked in front of Kai, but then, he had never looked at me quite like Adam was doing now. With impatience, and hunger. What if he didn’t like what he saw?
Slowly, I stood up. I was still hard from Adam’s show, and the front of my sweatpants bulged outward. I refused to look at Adam. Tentatively, I pulled down my pants, kicked them off, and stood there, unsure what to do. Should I do a little show like Adam had? I mean, I didn’t really have many muscles worth flexing. Maybe I should, I don’t know, wiggle my dick suggestively at him? Was that a thing?
I worked up the nerve to peek at Adam, to see how he was taking the sight of me by the cruel light of day. To my surprise, his eyes were wide, drinking in every inch of me.
“Wow,” he said, gaze fixed firmly on my cock. He stood up, letting the blanket fall away. He too was hard, just from looking at me. I felt all self-consciousness melt away as he stepped up, grabbed me, thrust out bodies together, and began kissing me with a greater passion and intensity than ever before. I broke away and started to get down on my knees, determined to take Adam into my mouth. But he stopped me.
“Not —” He spoke, breathlessly, between kisses. “— until I — make up — for — every kiss I wanted — but was too afraid to take.” I melted, just a little. Adam wrapped his hand around both our cocks, stroking them as one. I moaned. Without breaking the kiss, he grabbed me by my waist and lifted me up. I wrapped my legs around his hips, feeling his hard cock poking against my ass.
“So strong,” I said, bending my head to kiss the taut muscles of his biceps. I could really get behind this whole “muscles” thing. That was becoming clearer by the second.
Adam grinned wickedly at me. He carried me across the room, dropping me onto the bed on my back. He got on top of me, arms on either side of my head holding himself above me. For a while, neither of us moved. I stared up at him, marveling at the sight of him above me, the strong muscles of his chest and arms working to hold him up, his bed-tousled hair and bright blue eyes. He stared down at me with a look I didn’t understand. Almost like disbelief. I reached up to touch his cheek, feeling the hints of beard stubble.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s strange. Seeing you like this. I’ve only ever looked down like this on girls….”
“Ew. Way to kill the mood there, guy.”
He laughed softly. “No, I mean I usually have to imagine… a guy.”
He hesitated for only a fraction of a second, but I noticed it and wondered what it meant, what he had been about to say. “It’s weird to actually have a guy under me.”
“But good?”
He smiled so large it almost split his face in two. “Oh yeah.” He dropped down onto the bed beside me, staring up at the ceiling.
The tone of the room had definitely changed. The lust and passion that had been there seconds ago seemed to have drained away, a more introspective feel replacing it. Inwardly, I raged a little, but gave no sign.
Instead, I took his hand, twining our fingers together. He squeezed tightly.
“You’ve, uh, done this with many girls?” I asked.
“You really want to know?”
Yes. “No, I guess not.”
He sighed. “I forced myself, hoping it would, I don’t know, change me. I never made it this far with any girl, I couldn’t make myself do it. But I had to keep up appearances.”
I gave his hand a squeeze. I hooked the blanket with my foot, lifting it until I could reach it with my free hand and pull it over us. “I understand,” I said, snuggling into Adam.
He snorted in disbelief. “Yeah, right.”
“Um, contrary to popular belief, I did not burst out of my mother’s vagina on the back of a rainbow in a cloud of glitter. I realized I was gay pretty young, but that didn’t stop me from hating myself for a while. I tried to play the ‘I promise I’m straight’ game for almost five years. I’ve only been out since the eighth grade.” Adam had squeezed my hand when I said I used to hate myself. It was a silent bit of protest, of reassurance. It was sweet.
“If you hated yourself for being gay, then how… I mean, why did you come out?”
“I’m not keen on dishonesty. Especially with myself. Plus, Kai helped me stop hating myself.”
“How?”
“By telling me he cared about me. Making me realize other people cared about me. It’s quite a bit more difficult to go on thinking you’re worthless when people whose opinions you value keep insisting otherwise.”
“Yeah. That makes sense.” He sounded sad. “Malachi sounds like a good friend.”
“He’s the best friend.”
“My friends would never have done that.”
I let go of his hand to wrap my arms around him, laying my head on his chest. “I’m sorry.”
He put his arm around me. “It’s okay. If any of them had told me they cared about me, I probably would have punched them and called them a fag. So, I guess it’s not entirely their fault.” He started idly playing with my hair. “But that doesn’t matter anymore. Only one more year of this and I’ll be out of here. College will be a new place, with new people, I’ll be able to start over.”
“So you’ve decided you’re going?” Last we’d talked about it, Adam had been torn between wanting to go and feeling like he needed to stay with his family.
“Yeah. Mom has already started picking out what schools she thinks I should go to. I’m like, Mom, I’m not going to be able to even apply until next year, but it is all she can talk about these days. It’s like she thinks she won’t….” He trailed off, but I knew what he had been about to say. Like she thinks she won’t be around next year. I squeezed him a little tighter.
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, the schools she’s picked are way out of my league. She wants me to apply to the most prestigious universities in the country, but I’ll never get in.”
“Why not? Your grades are good enough.”
“I guess. But I still have to take the SAT, and I’m bad at standardized tests.”
It was starting to sound like Adam was making excuses, like he had already decided he was going to fail and so wasn’t going to even try.
There was no way I was going to let that fly.
“I’ll help you.”
“I don’t know….”
“I’m serious. I’ve always been good at those. They’re pretty easy once you get the knack.” Adam started to say something, but I cut him off.
“Listen, you can argue all you want, but I’m helping you study and in two years your mom will be visiting you at Yale, or wherever.”
Adam shrugged, but at least he didn’t disagree. It was a start. I was still surprised that Adam was so insecure about all this. It was a little weird to reconcile that big, bravado-fueled jock I thought I’d known for all those years with this introspective, caring guy I was discovering him to be. I was really glad he had finally revealed himself to me, and not just in the naked-in-my-bed kind of way. I realized that, somewhere along the line, I had started to care for Adam.
It was a weird thought.
“What about you?” Adam asked. “What do you want to do when you graduate? What’s your dream?”
“Oh, something small. Ruler of the World. Batman. That kind of thing.”
Adam laughed. “I’m serious. I want to know.”
“My dream? Like, that thing you’ll probably never do, maybe even never try for, but sometimes you just sit and fantasize about?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Oh come on! You obviously have something in mind.”
I hesitated. My dreams were, well, personal.
“Well, sometimes, when I think about my future — and obviously this would probably never happen — but sometimes I dream about running away to some monastery at the top of a mountain or something, and spending the rest of my life singing hymns, like some kind of Gregorian monk.”
“Weird haircut and everything?”
“Weird haircut, scratchy brown robe, vow of silence, all of it. I picture a huge Gothic cathedral, silent but for the reverberations, the dying echoes of the last hymn. Surrounded by giant stained glass windows, which are always lit by epic sunsets in my imagination, by the way. I’d spend my days singing and reading — they might frown on all the sci-fi, but I’m sure I could work something out — and doing good deeds, and polishing stained glass windows. Really, the fantasies are, like, seventy percent stained glass window themed.”
“I didn’t know you were very religious.”
“Oh, I’m not, really. I mean, I believe in God. Jesus is pretty cool, though I don’t really care whether he really was the son of God or not. The story is powerful enough on its own. And besides, even if there is no God, no higher power of any kind, that doesn’t make the universe one iota less amazing, though maybe a tiny bit more depressing. So if I’m not singing praises to some omnipotent deity, then it’s to the marvelous entirety of existence. It doesn’t especially matter to me either way.”
“Worship the universe, huh?”
“Not worship, exactly. More like appreciate. Rather than just take advantage of. People tend to only wonder how to use all the miracles of existence to make their lives easier, which I guess is important too. But I don’t think they do enough of that. Appreciate the world and all the things in it, I mean. So I would kind of like to spend my life doing exactly that.”
“Appreciation through song and stained glass windows.”
“Exactly.”
“I like it.”
“Really?”
Adam laughed. “Yeah. Why? Is that surprising?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never really told anyone this before.”
“Not even Malachi?” Adam sounded pretty incredulous.
“Especially not Kai. He’d just make fun of me. Rightfully so. It is kind of silly. And not, like, in a malicious way or anything. He’d tease me like he does about everything. With anything else I’d be fine with it, but….”
“But when it’s your secret dream, it’s different.”
“Yeah.”
“I get that. But if you do decide to go the Batman route, I can always murder your parents for you. You know, anything to help out.”
We laughed, then lay for a while in comfortable silence.
Eventually, Adam said, “What time is it?”
“Nooooooo,” I protested.
“I don’t think ‘no’ is a time.”
“Asking what time it is inevitably leads to saying ‘look at the time! I have to go.’ How about we just don’t?”
But Adam wasn’t going to be dissuaded. He pushed me off him, slipped out of the bed, and padded across the room to where his pants were folded on my desk. He rifled through them and found his phone.
“It’s almost three,” he said to me, then to himself, “Holy shit, that’s a lot of messages.”
I still lay in bed, watching him standing there, completely naked, listening to voice mails. There might be better ways to spend Saturday afternoons, but I had a hard time thinking of one. He stood with his head cocked to one side, hand on his hip, lower lip caught distractedly in his teeth. I was getting hard, thinking of the things I’d like to do once I convinced him to come back to bed. But as he listened to the messages, a change started to come over his face. Tension returned to his jaw. His eyes became harder, losing the warmth I had seen when he looked at me.
He started to fidget.
Finally, the messages came to an end. He started pulling on his pants, turning away from me. “I should go,” he said.
See? I was right. Time-checking always leads to me-leaving. It’s an undeniable fact. But it didn’t seem appropriate to bring that up again, as much as I wanted to do an I-told-you-so gloat.
Instead, I said, “Who were the messages from?”
“Pete,” Adam said, pulling on his shirt. “He left me six messages. He started off crying, saying he was sorry, that he didn’t want to become like Dad. Begging me to forgive him. Then he got mad I wasn’t answering. Then the apologizing again.” He sighed. “I need to go home.”
Wordlessly, I slipped out of bed, walked over and grabbed Adam in a hug. At first he stood there, like he was stubbornly resisting the affection. Then he hugged me back, squeezing so tight my ribcage almost split open like a nut.
“Thanks,” he whispered in my ear.
“You could, just, not.”
“And stay here forever?”
“I mean, if you wanted.”
He sighed deeply and broke off the hug. “I can’t, as cool as that would be. He’s being an ass, but he’s family. I can’t just leave.” He went to the window and opened it. I shivered at the sudden blast of cold air.
Adam once again popped the screen out of the window, but stopped short of stepping out. He turned back to me and eyed me from head to toe as though memorizing the sight of my still naked body. I fidgeted a little self-consciously at the scrutiny. Adam stepped back up to me and paused, looking a little nervous. Bashful, almost. He gave me a quick peck on the lips. “Bye,” he said. And he left, popping the screen back in the window from the outside.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ASTUTE observer might have noticed by now that I was in a bit of a bind. Less than a month ago, I had been a slightly lonely, though impossibly ch
arming, seventeen-year-old with absolutely no romantic prospects on the horizon and, honestly, I wasn’t really looking for any. I certainly wasn’t expecting any. But now I found myself with two, equal in appeal and in confusion.
What was I going to do?
If this were any other situation, I could do what I usually did when I needed to figure something out: talk it over with Kai. But for the first time in our friendship, I didn’t know if I could. It wasn’t like it was right before I came out to Kai, when I had been afraid of what he would say or do, or if our friendship would survive. It was more like this nagging feeling he couldn’t help. That he was too involved in the situation. I certainly couldn’t talk to Mel about it, not without betraying Kai’s trust. It was obvious he didn’t want her to know about him and me. In my desperation I even considered asking my parents for advice.
Hey Mom, Dad, I’ve been fucking Kai. It’s not what you think — he’s probably still straight. My bully, on the other hand, is suddenly all gay for me. Thoughts? You know, maybe it would be worth it, just to see the look on their faces. But no, there was only one thing that was going to work. Awkward as it might be, Kai was my best friend, and I could trust him to help me figure out how I felt. And hopefully find out more about how he felt.
“You’re still coming over tonight, right?” I asked him at the lunch table on Monday. Mel was in line for food, and I had seized the opportunity to talk to Kai alone.
“You bet your ass I am.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.
“That’s not what I meant,” I began, but before I could clarify, Mel joined us at the table.
“What’s not what you meant?” she asked. Kai immediately turned his attention to the food on his tray, leaving me to face Mel’s inquisitive, arched eyebrows alone.
“Uhhhh… nothing. Kai was just being an asshole.” Kai snickered, probably thinking I’d made some kind of innuendo, or at least a pun.
Dammit, Mel, I was trying to get Kai’s mind off sex for a little while.
Mel looked unconvinced, but she didn’t press further. “Speaking of assholes,” she said.
I turned to see what Mel was talking about. Adam was heading straight toward us. Because of course that’s what would happen right then.