Author’s note: this is the second installment in a ten-part series.
~
That night, I am up late at the library reading for my politics class. The world is still roiling from the US invasion of Iraq back in the spring. The war and the broader actions of the US in the Middle East have dominated discussion in the class so far. The class is great, except for the fact that the professor has repeatedly singled me out — turning to me several times to ask specifically for my take. He’d even said, “as a representative of your community, Amir, I’m curious what you think about…” Twenty-odd, mostly white faces turn to look at me, eager to hear what I have to say on behalf of the entire Middle East. This has been daunting and quite uncomfortable. Now, I feel pressure to be insanely prepared for each class.
It is after two in the morning by the time I get back to my room. Pete goes to sleep pretty early, usually around midnight, so I try to be quiet as I change into my PJs and creep into bed. When I close my eyes, the images I’ve been suppressing all day start to play across my eyelids. Jamie’s hairy thighs, his easy smile. Streaks of cum across the toilet and the wall in the field house. Jamie’s sweaty torso, Tim’s muscular ass, my own hairy body in the mirror. My cock is at full mast, hard enough that I know it won’t let me sleep. Fuck.
I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling, watching the faint shadows cast by trees in the quad shift back and forth. Pete is snoring softly. I roll onto my side and tuck my erection up under the waistband of my pajama pants. The images keep coming, but after a while, I am relieved to feel my thoughts slipping into the absurdist ephemera that precedes sleep.
~
I am in the kitchen now. One of my buddies spots me, grabs my arm, and drags me across the room.
“Amir, you piece of shit!” he yells. “You need a fucking drink, bro!”
I watch as he fills a red cup with blue-tinted beverage from a huge bowl sitting on the counter. I take a gulp and the taste of fruit punch and rum fills my mouth. I feel the warmth of the liquor spread through my belly and, despite being incredibly drunk already, I feel my senses tingle with the infusion of fresh alcohol.
My buddy disappears as quickly as he came, and I am alone again, standing near the edge of the kitchen by a side door that has been propped open. The cool air feels great on my skin, so I move outside, onto a large porch, and lean back against the slatted siding of the house. I close my eyes and feel the world spin around me.
“Hey,” I hear a voice say.
He is standing outside, leaning on the porch railing. He is also drinking punch from a red cup. I can see his face, partially illuminated by the light from the kitchen. It’s the guy from the dance floor.
“Hey,” I say.
“Join me?” he says, waving me over to him. He has a cigarette in his hand and he takes a long drag from it.
I stand still for a second, processing his movements. Then I set my cup down on the windowsill and walk over to him. He exhales, blowing smoke out into the night as I move next to him. I lean on the railing, about a foot away. I feel an electric charge between us. He takes another drag on his cigarette, then stubs it out and tosses it into the bushes.
He turns toward me and flashes me a grin. I feel my throat constrict as I look into his eyes. He reaches over and sweeps something off my shoulder, then flicks his hand down my sleeve. I feel his fingertips brush the outside of my hand, slowly. It causes the hair on my arm to stand up and a shiver to run through my torso.
His eyes are dark and luminous in the night. I am suddenly consumed with the desire to kiss him. I reach up and grab his face, bring his lips to mine. I feel his tongue on mine, the roughness of his stubble against my skin as we kiss.
He puts a hand my chest and I feel his fingers twisting in the exposed hair where my shirt is partially open at the collar. He pushes me away, gently, breaking our kiss.
“Dude,” he says.
There is lust in his eyes. I stand there, shocked at what I’ve just done but in complete thrall to the arousal coursing through me.
“Dude, come with me,” he says. He grabs my shirt and gives it a tug, indicating that I should follow him. He hops off the porch and walks into the pine trees flanking the house, disappearing into a dark gap between them.
The party is roaring behind me and the booze, and the kiss, are roaring in my head. I jump off the porch and go after him. There is a little path through the trees, I can see now, leading into a large, overgrown yard behind the house. A rickety set of stairs snakes up the rear wall of the house, and I can see him on the stairs, almost to the top, at the third story of the house, looking back to see if I am coming. He gestures for me to follow him up.
Under me, the stairs feel precarious. The wood strains as I climb up, pulling away ominously from the side of the house. I feel removed from any actual danger, though, as if I were watching myself from behind thick glass. At the top of the stairs I enter the house through a cream-colored door. I see him in the middle of a long, narrow hallway, waiting for me. There is an otherworldly red light on everything. The walls are reverberating with the muffled bass beating from the speakers two floors below.
I walk toward him. When I get close, he grabs my shirt and pulls be toward him and we kiss again, I can taste the fruit punch and tobacco smoke in his mouth. I feel my body respond to his instantly, a hot hardness that builds against him, an energy that surges at each contact point. I push him against the wall and grind my hips into him. He spins away from me, grabs my hand and pulls me down the hallway, to the very end, where there is a closed door.
He pulls a key from his pocket, turns to me and grins. I see the flash of his teeth and the red light reflected in his eyes as he opens the door. His eyes appear momentarily mismatched, different colors. Translucent membranes flick up from the bottoms of his eyes. There is more light now, a bright, orange-yellow light from the room that hurts my eyes. He reaches for me, grabbing to pull me into the room.
I’m suddenly afraid. I want to turn around and run back down the hallway, out the cream-colored door and down the steps, back to my dorm through the cool night. But a second later I am on him, in his bed, my mouth is on his and the bright light is gone, replaced by a constellation of stars floating around us, and we are rolling in soft darkness.
I feel his hands on my belt, unbuckling it, pulling the buttons of my jeans open. My shirt is off, then his is off, and we are hot, sweaty skin against each other. I feel his fingers in the hair of my chest, he is moaning with pleasure, touching my body. We are kissing, jawing at each other’s faces. His stubble is scratching me. His body feels smooth and firm and soft and hot in my hands. Our erections are rubbing against each other through our pants. The muscles in his back flex and relax as we roll over each other in the bed.
He pushes me off of him and guides me off the bed to stand. He yanks my pants down, past my thighs, then off completely. He leans back on the bed, undoes his belt and pulls his pants down, then strips off his underwear and socks. His cock springs up and hits his belly when he pulls off his boxers. Then he stands up, next to me, and reaches into my underwear to grab my cock. The touch of his hand around the base of my cock feels like a liquid-metal fire.
“Big boy…” he whispers, and we are kissing again. He is massaging my cock in his hand and feeling my ass with his other hand. I tip my head up as he kisses down my neck and chest. My hands are on his shoulders, now, as he falls to his knees, pulling my underwear down, inch by inch across the bulge of my thighs, past my knees and ankles. I step out of them, toward him, and then my cock is in his mouth. I melt into the sensation of his mouth on me, the hardness of my erection. His fingers work their way across my ass, pulling me deeper and deeper into him.
The layered sensations begin to overwhelm me. The walls thudding with the music from below, the lights swirling around us, the feeling of his mouth on me. It’s too much. I reach down and push his shoulders away, but he only holds me tighter and increases his movements. I grab his hair and pull his head off of my cock. His neck cranes back — I yanked him harder than I meant to — and I see a flash of something in his eyes, but then he is smiling again, his beguiling grin.
My cock is pulsing and rigid-hard. He grabs it, moves his face under it and begins a long, slow lick, working his tongue across my balls and up the shaft. His eyes do that thing again, with the membranes. As his tongue moves across my cock, it splits. A shudder runs through me as the two halves of his tongue track up and around my cock, each prong probing, grasping, pulling as though animated by an autonomous intelligence.
I try to push him away but his arms are locked around my body, holding me in an iron grip. He is too strong, too strong for me to escape. As I push at his shoulders and arms, I feel rough, inflexible discs erupt from under the softness of his skin. When his sharp teeth bite into my cock, I scream.
~
I wake up soaking with sweat and twisted up in my sheets. With my heart racing, I reach down to feel my cock. It is hard — painfully hard — but it feels intact. I can still feel an echo of the pain from sharp teeth ripping into my flesh, the sensation of blood gushing from me. I take a few deep breaths, and then sit up. A feeling of relief washes over me. It was a dream. Just a dream.
“Dude, what the fuck?” Pete says. He is sitting at his desk. The room is filled with a low, blue glow from his computer screen.
“Pete?” I say. I am still disoriented. “What time is it?”
“It’s like 4:30 AM, man. You were moaning and rolling around, you woke me up. I tried to wake you up but, dude, you were, like, totally out of it.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I was having a super fucked-up dream.” I swing my legs out and stand up. I really need some water.
Pete doesn’t say anything. I stumble out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. At the urinal, I pull my semi-hard cock from my pajama pants to inspect it. Totally fine.
“Dude, what the fuck,” I whisper to myself as I pee.
I replay the events of my dream in my head. It felt so real, like no dream I had ever had before. My whole body feels raw, and my skin is still tingling from the feeling of the guy… Jamie… the feeling of Jamie’s body against mine. The feeling of his lightly hairy chest under my fingertips. The burn on my face from the scratch of his stubble.
I hear the bathroom door creak open. I turn to see one of the guys from my floor staring at me. I look down and see that my cock is completely hard again. I am still holding it but I must have have been finished peeing for a while. I quickly flush the urinal and stuff my cock back into my pants. I wash my hands, avoiding eye contact with the guy — it is someone I don’t know, thank god — and hurriedly leave the bathroom. In the dorm kitchen, I get some water in a cup. When I get back to my room, Pete is in his bed. I get back to my bed and try unsuccessfully to sleep. The dream keeps worming its way back into my thoughts. Eventually, a mist begins to coil in my head, obscuring the details of my thoughts, rounding their sharp edges. Exhausted, I let myself drift off, let myself forget.
~
I wake up to the sound of the door slamming. I check my alarm clock. Fuck. I must have slept through my alarm, because it’s almost ten. Meaning I missed my nine AM analytical chem lecture, and I will probably be late for my politics seminar. I stand up and feel the pounding of a bad headache.
The seminar is awful. I can’t clear my head and keep losing track of the discussion. After lunch, I feel a little better, but then I have an endless organic synthesis lab in the afternoon, which is a total disaster. Not only do I spill an entire liter of isopropanol over my bench, I also completely fuck up my purification, which means that my grade is already likely tanked for the semester. My TA seems sympathetic as he helps me clean up, but I am extremely angry with myself.
When I get back to my room after lab, I fall into bed and sleep until after nine PM, missing dinner and first PSA meeting of the semester. This is turning into one of the worst days I’ve had in a long time.
There is an angry email from Mahan, as I expected there would be. I write him a brief apology, explaining that I have been feeling sick. It’s the truth, in a way. I have felt like shit all day, but now, after my nap, I feel better, finally. My head feels a bit more clear.
So I had a weird dream, so what?
It was just a dream. I shouldn’t have let it affect me so much, ruin my day. It just reinforces how organized I will have to be to make this semester work, that I have almost no buffer between staying afloat and sinking. Having this realization, I am re-invigorated. I just need to work harder. I have always thrived under intense pressure.
I eat a few granola bars before putting on some music in my headphones and pulling out my organic synthesis lab handbook to go back over the lab again in detail. In retrospect, everything makes much more sense. I email my TA to see about finding a time to come in and re-do the lab, even if it won’t affect my grade.
Then I spend an hour or so creating a new spreadsheet to organize the PSA’s finances and email it out to the other board members with an apology for missing the meeting. Then I catch up on my politics reading, and even read ahead for the rest of this week and part of next week. I am just finishing up an outline for the first essay, due at the end of next week, when Pete comes back to the room to go to bed. I take a shower and then go to bed myself, feeling like things are falling back into place.
~
I get up early to eat and prepare for my algorithms class, which is at 8:30. This is my “easy” class for the semester, since I spent a lot of my off hours during my internship this past summer programming. I like the professor, and the material comes pretty easily to me. Computers are simple. They do what you tell them to do.
As I watch the professor lecture at the whiteboard in front of the computer lab, it occurs to me that she is pretty attractive for a middle-aged woman in her late thirties or early forties. I think about her body, what it might look like, naked. The way her body moves under the fabric of her clothes, it seems like she probably works out. I like watching her butt as she writes on the board. She’s more than just attractive… she’s hot. How have I not noticed before?
I look around at the other guys in the class, wondering if they are attracted to her. The class is roughly an even split in terms of gender. Most of the guys are nerdy, skinny, computery-looking guys. One guy catches my eye, though, a big, red-headed dude who looks like he must be on some sort of sports team. He always wears sweatpants and trainers to class, and usually has a jacket emblazoned with the school’s logo. Today, he is sitting in front and to the left of me, at a computer next to the window. I note how broad his shoulders are, massive really. He has a neatly trimmed beard, even redder than the hair on his head.
I watch him watch the professor. He opens his mouth to stretch his jaw and I see the outline of his tongue push out against his cheek, tracking along the ridge of his lower teeth. I imagine him then, with the professor, his hands on her breasts, her hands in his beard. I imagine how his beard might feel, pressed into my face. Probably a lot softer than Jamie’s rough stubble.
The redhead shifts in his seat and my attention is drawn to a prominent bulge in his sweatpants. It looks like maybe an iPod or a cell phone, wedged at an odd angle. He moves his hand down to rest on it and it dawns on me that the bulge is actually his cock, lying across his thigh. It looks hard, and massive. He pushes down on it slightly, but it springs right back up. I watch him give it a squeeze. It is pointing right at me. I swallow. My own cock begins to get hard.
I glance up at his face and I’m shocked to see him looking right at me. I look around, suddenly aware of my surroundings and see that everyone is looking at me, including the professor.
“Amir?” she says.
“Um, sorry,” I say. “I… I uh, didn’t hear what you said.”
“I asked if I could share your solution with the class, since it is quite elegant,” she says.
“Oh, sure,” I say. I lift a trembling hand to the mouse to share my screen.
“Thank you. So, you can all see that Amir came up with a really nifty solution here…”
After my code has been up on the projector for few moments, I glance again at the redhead. He is squinting at the projector screen and tracking his own code with a finger. I keep myself from looking again at his crotch. I rub my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose.
Amir, get it together.
Here I am, looking at dudes’ bulges during class. I have to acknowledge to myself that this whole Jamie thing is getting to me. I need to knock it off. Is it just some weird adjustment thing? Maybe I need to drop a class, ease up a bit on myself.
No. That’s bullshit. I just need to double down and get serious, tighten my grip. I have always been able to put troubles aside and focus on my work. This is no different. I imagine my mind as a large disc. I am struggling to stretch my arms wide enough to grasp it, to get my fingers into a secure lock around its edges. It keeps slipping out of my hands, but I am determined.
After algorithms, I sit through organic synthesis lecture. Then I eat a quick lunch in the dining hall and head back to my dorm. I grab my dirty laundry, including Jamie’s shirt, and take it down to the machines in the dorm’s basement. I will give Jamie his shirt back this afternoon at soccer, and that will be the end of it.
Back in my room, I work on chem for a while. In the back of my head, there is a timer going. I think it is for the laundry, but after I cycle the load to the dryer, and then bring the clothes back to my room and fold them, there is still the distinct sensation of a timer ticking in my brain. I look at the clock. A little less than an hour until soccer. A knot forms in my stomach when I realize that my body is counting down the time until I see him again. Jamie. The thought of him sends a shiver of anticipation through me.
With a feeling of desperation, I decide I need to head myself off, take myself down a notch before soccer. Pete is gone, probably in class. I pull up a browser window on my computer and load one of my usual jerk-off sites. My cock is hard before any pictures have even loaded. I unzip my jeans and pull it out. I haven’t blown a load since I was in the locker room two days earlier, which is surprising, since it feels like I’ve had a near-constant erection since then. Now, I’m so hard that veins are standing out in palpable ridges along the length of my cock.
I look at the images loading on my screen. Huge-breasted women, shaved and contorted into pretzel-like positions, splaying themselves open with long fingernails, polished and shining. I stroke myself while I look through a photo series of two women pleasuring each other, licking and sucking each other’s bodies. I imagine myself there with them, pounding my cock into one, then the other. The thought is arousing to me, but I’m not really getting where I need to go, so I navigate back to the home page.
A gallery of thumbnails representing different photo sets appears on the screen. I scan down the page until I see one that features a tall, lanky guy standing over a busty blonde. My heart rate ticks up a notch as I click the link. The guy looks like Jamie. Well, sort of. He has gym-rat muscles and he’s over-tanned, but the smattering of hair on his legs, stomach, and chest match Jamie’s. He has the same few-days’ stubble and a similar shock of brown hair. My cock pulses at the site of him.
I force myself to look at the woman. She is on her knees in front of the guy, cupping his balls and pursing her exaggerated, silicone-inflated lips in front of his long, thick cock. I click through the photos. The guy’s face cycles through a series of cartoonish expressions as she blows him. But his body, though… each pose seems to reveal another angle, another attitude, another set of muscles flexing under his lightly furry skin.
In my mind, I imagine that I can feel the contours of his body changing, as though I am touching each different posture of his body with my hands. I can almost feel, again, the flexing of Jamie’s muscles as we roll on the mattress together. The last few images show the guy blowing a huge load onto the blonde’s tits and face. I feel my butt and thigh muscles contract as I orgasm, too, sending cum rocketing out of my cock. It shoots up onto my T-shirt and some even hits me in the face, streaking my lips and cheek. At least one spurt flies over my shoulder and lands behind me. My stomach seizes with the last few pulses of my orgasm and my cock expels the last oozing drips of cum. Damn. That was a lot.
I strip off my shirt, careful not to smear more cum onto myself, and wipe the sticky fluid off of my hands and face. I find a glob of cum on the floor behind my chair and wipe that up with a dry corner of my shirt, then throw the whole gummy mess into my empty laundry basket.
I bend over my desk and look at the last image, the one that had sent me over the edge. The guy, holding his cock, is smiling down at the woman, who is covered in cum. His expression is somewhere between a smirk and a grin. In comparison to his previous, caricatured expressions, this face looks… what does it look like? I cock my head and look more closely. Wow, he really does look like Jamie. My heart starts up again, and my cock begins to swell. I glance at the clock. Fuck. Soccer starts in ten minutes. I close the porn window and pull on another shirt, grab my soccer bag, and hurry out the door.
At the last minute, I remember Jamie’s clean shirt. I run back for it.
~
I am late for soccer. I change as fast as I can and run out to the fields. The instructor rolls her eyes when she sees me. “I hope this isn’t going to be a habit,” she says. She nods across the field where the rest of the class is part-way through their warm-up run.
I run out after them. I scan the distant figures for Jamie. I don’t see him. At some point the class passes me, en masse, running back from their circuit of the far softball fields. Jamie isn’t among them. There’s a sinking feeling in my stomach. Is he skipping class? Did he drop the class?
So what if he did? I think, defiantly. Wouldn’t that be a good thing? It would mean I don’t have to deal with… whatever is happening. These thoughts run through my head as I lope around the softball fields and make my way back to the group.
We are done with our drills and we have just started scrimmaging when Jamie shows up. From across the field, I watch him jog up to the instructor. He gesticulates as he talks, and then I see him nodding as she speaks. The instructor calls for a sub and sends Jamie in to play a forward position on the team opposing me. I am playing midfield and I’m super winded from running up and down the field, but at the sight of him, the object of my anxiety these past few days, my body ascends into a higher tier of alertness. Even when I’m not looking at him, he burns in my mind’s awareness as I track his body across the field.
We scrimmage for about five or ten minutes before Jamie and I come into proximity. A pass puts him with the ball in my zone. I confront him and he tries to dribble past me but I easily read the way he’s bearing his weight, and step in to intercept the ball. Caught off-guard, he collides with me, his side against my chest. His feet twist beneath him and he falls, grunting as he hits the ground. I pass the ball up the field and then reach down help him up.
“Ha, well there’s no getting around you,” he says, once he’s up. He whacks my belly. “Ya big lug.”
His smile hits me with the force of a blow to the sternum. My breath catches. I laugh, awkwardly. “Are you OK?” I ask.
“Yeah, man.”
He dusts himself off. He is wearing the blue shorts again, and today just a plain white T-shirt that is a little snug on him. Lighter streaks in his hair glint in the sunlight as he wipes grass from his legs. His chest and shoulders have a subtle broadness that I hadn’t noticed before.
He’s beautiful.
The thought comes into my mind as though outlined in gleaming light. I feet the impulse to say something, anything, to break the tension I feel welling up.
“You’ve been working out,” I say, and I am immediately mortified. Fuck,This is what I come up with? I feel a wave of nausea. Amir, what the fuck?
He turns to look at me for a long moment. The sun is behind me and he raises his hand to shield his eyes. “You noticed?” he says. “I mean, I went to the gym, like, twice this week.”
I don’t know how to respond. I’ve put my foot in my mouth — I mean, who says something like that? — and now I am fucked. In a panic, I just kind of shrug and return my attention to the game. I know my ears must be bright red.
But Jamie just laughs. “I suppose you’re the expert,” he says, reaching out and squeezing my arm. “Hey, maybe you could show me the ropes sometime.”
The touch of his hand on my arm takes me back to the memory of him — the dream memory — in the red light of the hallway. Something about the pressure of his hand on my arm, the proximity of his body, his smell, the shape of his eyes. I can taste the cigarette and the fruity liquor on his mouth. Desire surges through me. And then, reflexively, denial and anger. I flinch, shrugging his hand off of my arm. He pulls his hand back.
“Hey, sorry man,” he says. “I didn’t mean…”
“Forget it,” I say, and run off.
I avoid him for the rest of our game, and also during the cool-down run. I am hoping to avoid him in the locker room by rushing in there, grabbing my stuff and going, without changing. I pause, though, when I see his shirt sitting on top of my bag in the locker. I pick it up, take a deep breath, and wait.
He hesitates for a moment when he sees me waiting by his locker. I am not sure if he is put off by what had happened earlier, but there is a doubtful look in his eyes as he comes up to me.
“Hey, you left your shirt on Tuesday,” I say, and hand it to him. He takes it from me and runs his hand across the gray and white stripes.
“You washed it?” he asks. He looks at me and smiles. “And folded it?”
My ears burn but I smile too. “Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I was doing laundry anyway, so… I just threw it in.”
“Can I give you my shorts to wash for next time? They’re pretty dirty,” he says. He cocks his eyebrow at me.
Adrenaline hits me again. I look at his scruffy chin, the line of his neck as it disappears into his shirt. I see that his nipples are hard under the fabric of his shirt.
“Um…”
“Amir, I’m kidding,” he says. He turns to unlock his locker. His shaggy hair falls in front of his face. “Thanks for washing my shirt. That’s… totally unexpected… and really nice of you.”
“Sure,” I say. I start to walk away. I am at the end of the row of lockers when I hear him call after me.
“Hey, man, what’s your AIM?” he says.
I stop and turn around. His shirt is off. “My AIM?” I say, not quite registering what he said. I am dumbstruck by the sight of his body. How perfectly the light brown hair on his chest and belly matches my dream-memory of him. My hands tingle with the sensation of running them over his neck and chest. All I want to do is press myself against him, devour his beautiful lips, and feel his tongue on mine.
“You know, to chat?” he says. He makes a typing motion in the air. “Maybe I’ll hit you up this weekend.”
“Oh, right,” I say. I give him my AIM handle and he tells me his, spelling it out to make sure I get the pun.
“Get it?”
“Ha, yeah. Clever,” I say. We say goodbye again and then I leave, the image of his body burning in my retinas.