I fell in love with Tim the minute he walked through the door on the first day of Rush Week. As secretary of the recruitment committee I knew the names of all the rushees who were due that afternoon. To some of those names I had associated mental images based on hometown, high school attended and in some cases on sentences I remembered from letters of recommendation. Tim had gone from Grosse Pointe to a fancy prep school where he had rowed on the crew that won a league championship. That much I knew. So he was big and would be probably be well dressed. Tim was also a direct legacy. His father had been a member of our chapter. He would have to be very obnoxious for us not to give him a bid, but one of his father's classmates had written us anyway. He said he had known Tim since Tim was a baby. The word from his letter that stuck in my mind was "deep," a word did not help much with my mental picture. Then a tall fellow stood at the door, rocking back and forth slightly, and said "Hello. I'm Tim Anderson. I hope I haven't kept you waiting." As I greeted him my mind was furiously recomputing his image. He was big, with very wide, sloping shoulders, long arms and the posture of a powerful athlete. His handshake was warm, dry and confident. He was not particularly well dressed; in fact, a little later, I said "I'll have to lend you a tie." He wasn't wearing one and they were de rigueur at dinner. He was also not particularly good-looking. He had short-cropped, dark hair and heavy eyebrows that almost met over his nose. The nose was short with a slight crook, as if it had been broken and not completely correctly set. His wide smile showed large and irregular teeth. His eyes were yellow, a very unusual and not very lovely color. But one look from those eyes and I understood what the letter-writer had meant. They conveyed a deep, but calm and friendly intelligence. And along with it a shyness and vulnerability that made me want to reach out and hug him, right there, still on the doorstep in the first minute of his first day in my life.
I lived over in the X-wing, not too far from the front door. I asked him to wait a moment while I went to get a tie. I sped to my room and came back with my favorite, and watched with interest and pleasure as he awkwardly but competently knotted it under his collar. Then the two of us walked up the stairs to the main floor. I introduced him to the rest of the recruitment committee and went off to get him a drink. Part of the excitement of Rush Week is that you are not just choosing compatible people to live in the house, but you are choosing people who have a good chance of becoming your friends for the rest of your life. Just those few minutes of contact with Tim had convinced me that I wanted him as a friend. He was certain to be invited to join. If he accepted (and why not, it was his father's fraternity) it meant that he and I would be living in the same house for the next two years, until I graduated, plenty of time to build a solid and lasting friendship.
Our custom was that all the Freshman we had bid were invited to a picnic down at Point Martha, where one of the alumni had a beach house he let us use. The upperclassmen often brought dates. Besides giving us a chance to impress on the Freshmen what good sports we were, what good times we had and what terrific girls we knew (the implication being that if they signed up they would get girls just as nice as these) it got them away from the campus and out of the reach of competing fraternities. Tim had been bid and came along. I brought Suzie Parkinson, a very smart, very sweet and very pretty girl I was seeing. I had told her how much I wanted Tim to join, so she sat next to him on the way down and did her best to make him feel comfortable and welcome.
When we got to the house we all changed into bathing suits and ran out on the beach and into the water. After a while, Tim and one of the upperclassmen were standing in the surf, tossing a football and having a great time. I was sitting on the sand next to Suzie, idly watching their game. It suddenly occurred to me that Tim had a beautiful behind. I had never before thought of a man's behind as a thing to notice, let alone to admire. Your behind was what you sat on. Women's behinds, of course, were something different. Their roundness was part of the "curves" that made a woman desirable. But Tim's behind was beautiful in a different way. It was solid, for one thing. His wet nylon trunks stuck close enough to his skin so you could see the muscles inside flexing as he threw the ball or ran for the pass. It was big, too, and stuck out just like the behind on a major-league pitcher. Once I had noticed it I couldn't take my eyes off it. I realized that I wanted to touch it, to grab those powerful globes with my bare hands and ... and what? This was a kind of thought I had had once or twice before, and I could tell from the tensing in my peter that it was no idle thought, and that it was connected to something deep inside me. Was I a queer? Maybe this was why my emotional life had been so lousy. I had a very nice body and a kind of cheap good looks, the kind that make it easy to get dates. But to go from a few dates, even a few heavy dates, to something more permament with a woman was beyond me. My relationships always disintegrated in a matter of weeks. I like sex with females as much as the next guy, I believe. There is nothing like kneeling between the legs of a woman who's ready for you, with a nice erection that you know she's going to like, reaching forward and kissing her breasts while you slip it into her. There is nothing like the feeling of your pubic hair grinding against hers as you work your penis around inside her. There is nothing like feeling the fit, knowing that "man is for the woman made" and that at the very same moment several million couples are doing just what you two are doing, rocking together in "the rythm that shakes the world." The problem is what you say during and after the act, when a man and a woman are supposed to open up to each other in the intimacy that comes with sex. I could never think of anything, and I guess my girfriends eventually would figure out that there was nothing there. That afternoon, watching Tim cavorting in the surf, I thought that things could be different with a man, and that in that way I probably was a queer.
This realization did not change my social life drastically. Of course not. To be a homosexual, a "pansy" as we called it, was socially completely beyond the pale. I remember, after the picnic, kissing Suzie good-night absent-mindedly but I still dated regularly and enjoyed it. It did make a huge difference in my relation with Tim. When I first met him I was all set for the start of a beautiful friendship. But now I knew that I really wanted more from him than friendship, and certainly much more than the bonds of brotherhood would allow. In our fraternity we sang about brothers guiding "each other's footsteps" and we took it seriously. We upperclassmen felt a sacred moral duty to educate and nurture our younger brothers. Cultivating a friendship with Tim while secretly coveting his body would be more hypocritical than I could bear. And telling him how much I wanted him, with the possible (and after all desired) effect of making my wishes come true, would be a betrayal of all the ideals of brotherhood that I believed in.
The only solution was for Tim to want me. If, unlikely as it was, he were to take the initiative, if he were to attempt to seduce me, then I could have him with no betrayal. But how could this come about? I am pretty good-looking, as I've mentioned before; the best I could think of was to be around Tim a lot, so he would have to notice me, and then maybe if he had any inclination in the homosexual direction he would make a move. There was no evidence for such an inclination except that he did not ask girls out unless he absolutely had to have a date for some fraternity function. But he was shy, most likely a virgin, and probably just waiting to hit his stride. My plan was pretty far-fetched, I admit, but it was the best I could think of. So I hung around where he would be. I started playing bridge because he played. That winter I went up to the mountains almost every weekend because he loved to ski. I never tried to talk to him one-on-one or to "get to know him;" that would have been against my rules. I was just always there. I made sure he got to see me ski (I grew up in Garmisch and I had raced as a teen-ager) but I never rode up in the chairlift with him. The scheme was bound to fail and it did. He never made the slightest gesture in my direction. Instead my constantly being around him worked on me. I was in a constant state of painful erotic awareness, and I became more and more obsessed with Tim. His soft and intelligent look, his shy smile, his vulnerable attitude were like forbidden fruit, all around me but just out of reach. That beautiful behind, that praechtiges Po, seemed to be everywhere except where I wanted it to be, cradled in my arms.
The next year was my last. My time was running out. I decided to be a little more aggressive. Maybe if I showed him the merchandise he would be tempted. In the Spring our shower was out of order so we had to use the one down on Tim's floor. My plan was for him to see me naked, but it had to be as if by accident. Once I had a glimmer of hope: he was sitting on the stairs as I went back up to my room with only a towel around me; but he looked away as I passed and it turned out he was waiting to use the telephone. I finally had my chance. I was going past his door after a shower when he called out: "Stef, can you give me a hand with this problem?" He had been having some trouble with a math course I had taken two years before. I rearranged my towel so that I was holding the two ends together with my right hand, and stood beside him at his desk. The problem was one that had given me a lot of trouble; it concerned a subtle point that was not covered in the text. Naturally I had to write some equations, and equally naturally I had to let the towel fall to my left side. Now I was naked right next to him. I noticed his eyes dart over to my groin a couple of times (I have a really good-looking peter and a nice set of balls) but the devil managed to follow my argument and asked a question that showed me he had understood the point perfectly. He thanked me and I went on my way, feeling like an exhibitionsitic idiot, angry at myself for having gotten into such a predicament and irritated at him even though he could hardly be blamed.
That summer Tim and I were the only residents in the X-wing, me on the upper floor and him on the lower. I used to lie awake and think of that rangy body and that golden behind just a few feet away from me but as unreachable as if they had been on Mars. One night I heard his bare footsteps going up the steps to the main house, and the door from us to the main house click softly shut. I stepped out onto the landing and noticed that the street door had been left open. I closed it, and went back to my room. After no more than three or four minutes I heard something hit my window. I walked softly in the dark into the room next door and looked out. There on the sidewalk was Tim, naked as the day he was born, trying to wake me up, I guess, by throwing pebbles at my window. I saw his behind totally bare for the first time, and even more beautiful than I had imagined it, when he stooped over to pick up some more debris from the gutter. The harsh light from the street-lamp threw shadows into the muscular dimples on each side. I felt my cock stirring as I watched.
Suddenly I saw the flash of headlights coming down the street, and I felt a pang of guilt that I had been savoring his nakedness rather than going down to let him in. He crept over and hid behind the garbage cans. I thought for sure he had been spotted because the car slowed down as it passed, but it did not stop and disappeared around the corner. Tim came back below my bedroom. He was rubbing his arms, and his teeth seemed to be chattering. He had a larger piece of debris that he was trying to pitch up to the window, but he wasn't hitting the pane at all. Finally I saw him stop, address the window like a basketball player, and toss the stone overhand. He gave a little curtsey before the throw just like the guys on the team. It was adorable.
Next thing I knew I heard breaking glass. This would certainly have woken me up! I ran into my room and looked out my window, as angrily as I could. Tim was whispering something and pointing to the door. Duh! I ran down and pulled the door open as soon as he got to it. The poor kid was trembling and looked like he was going to cry. This made me want him more than ever. I felt like taking him into my arms, kissing him and comforting him, but that was forbidden. "Get into your room!" I said. We stood by his bed. His behind shone softly in the lamplight. The bastard in me took over. I would punish him and his behind for the torment they had put me through. I told him he had it coming. "Lie face down and hold on to the bedposts!" I ordered. He was so shaken up that he obeyed without protesting. I would have loved to spank that behind with my bare palms, I would have loved, actually, to lie naked against that bare body and hug it to mine, but that was not for me. I looked around the room and spotted his belt. It was braided from thin strips of leather and seemed perfect for the job. I held it by the buckle and the free end and slapped it against my palm. It stung. I was improvising: "Ten lashes should be enough. Hang onto those bedposts!" and I cracked the belt across his behind. "One!" His whole body bucked and I saw his knuckles whiten as he squeezed the bedposts. "Two!" "Three!" "Four!" "Five!" I saw his shoulders shaking and realized he was sobbing. Tears of remorse came to my own eyes. I could easily have thrown the belt down and begged him to forgive me. But sick as it sounds part of me was loving every minute of it. The penis that had first let me know what Tim meant for me was standing stiff in my boxer shorts. "Six!" I couldn't stop now, but I tried to make the last five lashes as light as possible. After "Ten!" I stepped back, feeling despicable. Whatever could have happened between me and Tim was over now, and if he told the story to the chapter authorities I would probably get thrown out of the fraternity. Whipping a naked brother! They wouldn't know about the hard-on but they might guess. And what if his father found out! Then Tim stood up and faced me. Tears were running down his face and his peter had totally retracted inside his groin. I was waiting to hear him tell me exactly what kind of a slimy lowlife I was but instead, to my amazement, he apologized, mumbled something about being a virgin and not masturbating, and then said "I love you." Tim loved me. Tim loved me! I took off my clothes and reached out to him. He stumbled into my arms. I held him for a moment and then got into his bed and patted the space beside me."Come on in," I said, "we'll fix the window in the morning."