Disclaimer goodness:
This is a story involving romantic and sexual behavior between young, consenting adult males. It is not for the eyes of minors. And do guys who don't want to read gay stories really just "stumble" upon this?
This is also a story told in parts that sum up portions of our handsome protagonist's life, and each part consists of many chapters. It is fictional, with certain elements loosely based on my actual life. Names have been changed to protect the (not so) innocent.
The first chapter is a little light on the sexual stuff, but be patient, and you shall be richly rewarded. Send comments or questions to pure.author@gmail.com. No flames, please. (The other kinds of flamers are fine with me, however.)
So Long, Stanley by Pure Author
Part I: The Ins and Outs
Chapter 1: An Unfair Trade
It was my last night at home, and I was expecting myself to be happier. Or asleep, really. It was three in the morning, and Mom was waking me up early to load the van we'd rented. Sure, the August night was humid as hell, and our century old house had no air conditioning, but that I was used to. I'd grown up in Stanley, an Ohio River Valley steel town, was damned proud of it, and didn't care if it meant being poor and having to sleep naked in our hot box of an old house.
I threw off the sticky sheet and knelt up on my bed to lean out my open window. Closing my eyes, inhaling some night air from my open window, I followed my breath down to the pit of my stomach, hoping it would do the knots some good. No luck.
At the least, I could feel some of the cool air gently drifting in to my room. The sweat began to evaporate a little, sending shivers up my spine, and I collapsed back down onto my bed, flipping the pillow over to feel the chilly side against my face. "In college," I thought, "I'll have air conditioning. As much as I loved my hometown, it was one of many thoughts like that I'd been having for years. "In college, liking to read won't make me a 'nerd.'" "In college, wearing something other than flannel and denim won't make me a 'fag.'" "In college, I won't have to keep pretending I'm..."
Or would I? I already knew the truth at this point. By the middle of my junior year or so, I stopped deluding myself into thinking that some hetero hormone hadn't kicked in, that soon my veins would freely pump the testosterone of a rugged male, eager to spread his seed. I was bound for thorough disappointment. At first, I forced women into every sexual fantasy, insisting that I just liked the idea of being the man. By 16, the women were gone, and I was jacking off about twice a day, something I was sure was unnatural, or at least unhealthy.
And I was developing in other ways, too - ways that only made it more difficult to deal with the absolute disinterest my dick was showing girls. You see, they were starting to pay attention to me in high school. I'm okay-looking: jet black hair; clear, porcelain skin; a boyish face; average height; and what I'm told are piercing blue eyes. Personally, I think it's just that sixth sense girls have, guys too, to become drawn to something they can't have - even if they don't know that yet.
But I was growing, and fast. I'd been swimming since I was about 10 and playing tennis since 13 or so, but once I got to high school I picked up track, mostly hurdles and the 400m at first, and I loved it. It's a sport that basically just says, "Get yourself in incredible shape. Refine your technique. Uh...that's about it." I started training hard. Suddenly the growth spurt I'd had in middle school that sent me up to 5'11" at age 14 - and sent my mother into fits as she bought pair after pair of new pants for me - turned into another kind of growth spurt: I was getting muscles all over. Pecs and biceps and abs from training, but my legs... Within a year of track, it was hard for me to even look at my legs (or my ass) in a mirror without feeling strange or disconnected from my own body. These were mine? 15 years of being the skinny kid, and all of the sudden my legs looked like a man's legs. "A really attractive, muscular man's legs," I'd think, before shoving the thought out of my head.
My coach actually scaled back my weights and restricted my diet at first. I was getting too big for a runner, he'd said, and I was. But it seemingly couldn't be stopped; I was just growing. So the coach switched me to javelin and long jump, which I enjoyed more, since it allowed me to keep on gaining. My Dad thought it was great. He was a real big athlete when he was young, and even though he'd gained a little weight since then, he was still in incredible shape. When it looked like I was getting gawkier by the year, and literature and drama seemed to mean more to me than sports, his concern was palpable. "My kid might be queer," I could almost hear him thinking when he'd look at me sometimes. He's not a bad guy, and my Mom's cool too. They're both old hippies, so they're pretty open-minded and intelligent, just not about gay stuff. They're still just as much from Southern Ohio as anyone else around here. Overall, they were amazing parents to my older sister and me. She just finished college at Miami of Ohio.
But while my sudden success in sports and vastly improved musculature were easing my Dad's fears, I was only getting more anxious. Girls, with whom I'd once joked around harmlessly, were suddenly bombarding my space in the strangest ways, and joking had suddenly been declared flirting. Why did this bother me so much? Why wasn't I loving every second of it like all of my buddies?
I guess it's no small wonder I stuck mostly to guys for friends. Girls were freaking me out. I hung out with all sorts of crowds, never really stuck to one, but I guess my most frequent friends were the ones deemed the "classic rock" kids. They came to school in tee shirts and jeans, rarely cut the hair they held back in bandannas, and cared so little about what people thought about them that it actually made them pretty popular. The best part was that almost none of them were very good-looking, so there probably wouldn't be any crushes to deal with.
Sure, I didn't exactly "fit in" with them. I got my hair cut fairly often, and usually had to bring in a GQ to explain it to the hairdresser. I hated Lynyrd Skynyrd and loved Radiohead. Plus, as I was starting to reconcile, I was attracted to other boys...other men. And that was not very "classic rock." But I guess they just seemed a little more genuine to me than the other kids. Apparently, they felt the same about me.
My closest friend in high school, Tucker, was in this group. In fact, he eventually felt like the brother I never had. He was easily the first person I ever fell for, and I hated the fact that it was happening every second of the way. "If I am gay," I would tell myself, often shortly after masturbating with his image in mind, "this is still wrong. Liking him is wrong. He's a buddy. A pal."
And he was. He was just this sweet, caring, hilarious kid, who seemed invincibly upbeat and confident - and attractive in sort of an atypical way. A wrestler, but short and kind of skinny with a distinctive nose and a sharp, square jaw line; still, good enough to be captain his senior year, just like me with track. And he was one of the most talented artists I'd ever met in my life, something the rockers teased him about relentlessly but still admired, deep down.
He was also a pal I was becoming more and more obsessed with. By sophomore year, he was in almost every jackoff fantasy, and I felt guilty every time. I started getting butterflies around him every time he was near. "God his ass looks tight in those jeans." "Damn his hair looks good today." He'd have to snap me back into reality every now and then, but he seemed unfazed by my sudden nervousness.
One weekend, right before the start of junior year, he accidentally left one of his tee shirts at my house, and it inexplicably led to me coming to terms with myself. He'd just helped throw me a surprise birthday party for me at one of the rockers' places down the street, a huge booze up thanks to vacationing parents, and we both stumbled to my place afterwards to crash. He insisted on taking my floor mat.
"Good for my back. Good for wrestling," he said, which was typical. Almost everything had something to do with wrestling for him.
"Okay," I said, mesmerized by him as he clumsily undressed. He was so tan all over, and his golden hair was swooping down and flying out, framing his face like a lion's mane.
"It's hot in here," he said, and stripped down to his boxer briefs. Oh God. His ass.
"Yeah," I said stupidly. He looked at me with his head cocked in the half-light.
"Happy Birthday, kid."
I opened up my arms for a hug, anything to touch his bare skin. He walked over, hesitantly, and wrapped his arms around me. God, he was warm. And strong. "No!" I thought. "He's your buddy! And you aren't gay!" As quickly as I'd clenched the flesh of his back with my hungry fingers, I stiffened and pulled away.
"Well, goodnight!" I said awkwardly and flopped on to bed in my clothes.
The light from the streetlamp outside beamed directly onto his body, and I watched his cut chest, a little smaller than mine, rising and falling as he slept. Inebriated, I could only hold myself awake for an hour to watch him. But the sight was burned on my brain for many nights to come.
The next morning I woke up with a headache, and invincible Tucker was hopping about, pulling on a fresh shirt from his backpack.
"Hey kid, I'm out! Got work at Denny's in fifteen!" and he was walking out of my bedroom door. "There's his tee shirt from last night," I thought, "on the floor. Tell him." He was walking down the stairs, picking up his car keys from the front table. "Tell him his tee shirt is sitting here." He was zipping up the last of his things into his backpack and saying a quick hello to my parents before he split. "Why aren't you telling him?!"
"Seeya, Heath!" he called.
"Seeya!"
And that was it. I'd let him leave his tee shirt in my room. And somehow, at that moment, I knew could no longer deny that I was gay. I was GAY. I'd avoided the label for so long, at first because I thought it was "wrong," and still did once I got over the so-called moral issues. Why? I just didn't identify with what I'd been told gay people were like. I liked sports, playing and watching. Okay, watching some guys in particular. I wasn't limpwristed and didn't have a lisp. Though I was into theatre and stuff. But dammit, I hated being in a department store for more than half an hour. In and out! That was my philosophy! I couldn't be gay! But this moment, it was just so undeniably...gay. In every sense I longed for him, a man, and I knew the whole time I wasn't telling Tucker about at his shirt that I could only think of keeping it here and smelling its scent - like the smell of clean clothes and clean hair, concentrated - while jacking off and thinking of him.
And that's what I did. I let the shirt sit there for a few hours, eyeing it every so often from my bed as if it were challenging me, daring me to use it. By 1pm I caved. I yanked it up to my face and breathed in hard. It smelled amazing, a more potent version of the aroma I whiffed each time he walked past. My cock hardened immediately, and I reached for it to give it a few good strokes.
I tore my own shirt off, then my boxers, and I leapt onto my bed, ass-first, frantically going after my dick with one hand while my other held the tee shirt up to my face. I thought of the way he bathed in the faint light of the streetlamp, the way it outlined the elegant curvature of his muscles. I got hard as steel.
My cut cock had grown admirably along with the rest of my body, and stood out a good seven inches from my body when erect. But the most impressive aspects of it were its girth and the enormous set of balls hanging beneath it. They'd always been that way, and when I was young I'd thought my penis looked abnormally small, until it hit me that it was only by comparison to the family jewels.
Soon my crotch was on fire, and I needed more attention down there. I left the tee shirt sitting on my face, breathing it in over and over while I brought my other hand down to start playing with my balls. Soon pre-cum was seeping out the tip of my flushing cockhead, and the wetness cascaded down around my shaft. I imagined it was Tucker's saliva, that my hand was the vacuum suction of his mouth, that my other hand, gently tickling my balls and upper thighs, was his hair tumbling down in golden locks.
With one hand still furiously stroking, I scooped up some fresh pre-cum and massaged it up my "V" to my six pack, tracing each curve and ridge before sailing over the biggest ridge: my round, hard pecs. My nipples were average-sized, but right then they were sticking out alertly. I massaged my pre-cum into one, then began tracing circles around it.
I imagined Tucker was kissing my chest, soaking it in saliva, and tugging at my nipples; my stroking became more urgent. My hips were thrusting up into the air, and God, Tucker was giving me his asshole. He was sitting right down on my cock and humping it, milking it. I was close. He called my name as his pace quickened and his asshole tightened around my manhood. God, his smell was suffocating me. I felt my own huge balls glide up towards the base of my cock, my head and slit trembling in anticipation.
I erupted jet after jet of cum inside him, a bigger orgasm than I'd yet experienced.
"I love you, Tucker," I gasped, hardly getting it out. He shot first on to my chin, and I licked it off before the second shot hit my pecs. Four more - damn he's amazing - on my abs, on my...on my hand. All over my hand.
I used my free hand to tear Tucker's tee shirt off my face and looked down at my cum-soaked body. Just me and my hand, alone in my room in the middle of a Saturday, and my parents right downstairs, probably wondering what I'm up to. "Or," I thought, "maybe one of them saw me while I was doing it, while I was faintly proclaiming my love for him, but I didn't see it because I was inhaling his tee shirt like it was cotton crack. How pathetic."
I threw it across the room, pissed at myself. "If I'm going to make this friendship work," I thought, "this friendship that means so much to me, then I can't stay like this over him. It has to change. And I resolved to change, cut off all sexual thoughts of Tucker, though I didn't know how it would happen. I washed the shirt twice before I gave it back. By then, his scent was gone, and the temptation wasn't killing me anymore.
I guess it's surprising that things did change between us, though not by force of will, and not for the worse. In fact, because we became closer, I started thinking about him sexually less and less.
When NYU rejected him, I think our whole school was shocked. But Tucker took it in stride. Cincinnati, he'd decided, would be the better place to go. He'd be close to me and his girlfriend, Beth, who was going to Ohio Valley College for musical theatre.
I'd done shows with her, and she's nice - she is! Okay, so maybe I was a little jealous at first. But just at first. They started dating during junior year, when we were all in Cinderella together. She was Cinderella. I was, you guessed it, the Prince. (Yeah, I also like to sing, and my acting was...coming along at the time, shall we say.) Tucker, in his desperate stage debut attempt to get to know her, was the dude who carried around the glass slipper on a velvet pillow. God, he looked hot in tights, but he just complained about how his little skirt thing made him look silly.
"At least you don't have to wear a fucking cod piece, like me," I retorted.
"Hey, the girls don't seem to mind about that," he said. "All I hear is 'Heath's butt this' and 'Heath's legs that.' A cod piece would be a goddamn dream right now, compared to this skirt."
And it only reminded me of how different we were, the way his thoughts revolved around attracting girls, mine around trying to keep from getting noticed. He really was straight, and while I'd long ago recognized that he always would be, I was starting to love him in a new way, a way I'd never expected.
"So, talk to Beth about me at all?"
Reluctantly at first, I started playing matchmaker during rehearsals. Just months earlier, I'd been masturbating with his shirt on my face, so priority number one wasn't getting him his girl. But the more I got to know her, the more I genuinely liked her, and I understood why he did so much. She wasn't like the other girls, who fawned over boys like a giggle and a wink were enough to make up for a personality. (Maybe it was for some guys.) She was actually pretty cool. And smart. And gorgeous and talented and generally amazing. And still, my dick was unimpressed.
And to top it all off, my efforts were working. Sly hints and clever plots to get them close were actually starting to pay off. By final curtain, they were an item. They stayed that way through graduation. And now all of us would be in Cincinnati for college.
Where was I going? Well, not to brag, but I aced my SATs and was pretty damn involved in school. Add a solid GPA and hours of research on what makes a winning essay...and there you have an acceptance to Hewitt-Knoll University, one of the best schools in the world, let alone Ohio. Hell, who cares if I got in off the wait list? It's about as good as you can do without going Ivy, and I'd still get to go out to start for track for their DII team. Frankly, I was relieved they finally accepted me. Harvard, Swarthmore, and Columbia had all sent me rejection letters, and I'd been too cocky (Can you tell?) to apply to a safety school.
My parents were thrilled with Hewitt-Knoll, and Tucker was pleased. I guess I was too. At least I felt I should have been. Even as my feelings for Tucker were subsiding, or I guess changing is a better word, I still felt weird moving forward, out of Stanley, as much as I'd always wanted it. In some ways, I loved Tucker more than ever, but it was different. I didn't know how to feel, I guess.
We'd poured our souls out to each other - well, mostly - a lot during our senior year, and he really did come to feel like a brother to me. Even as the rockers fell apart, we got closer. New attractions were popping up left and right, and each time I watched Tucker fart and laugh about it, each time I saw how happy he and Beth were, it was harder to remember what it was like to love him like I had: romantically. Or like I thought I had. I didn't know for sure anymore. It seemed like a less mature version of me had felt that way.
And what about college? Would I come out? No. I couldn't. Ohio couldn't deal. And I loved my hometown, despite being considered a little odd by most of my neighbors. I'd just have to get married to a woman, think about men when we had sex, make babies, and never tell a soul for the rest of my life. Or...
Or maybe I'd meet someone. Someone who showed me a solution without the drawbacks of coming out or staying closeted. Maybe there was some alternative I wasn't seeing that this man could show me. But what would I do until then? What would I do on the first day? If I lied on the first day, wouldn't I have to lie for all four years? And then what? If I came out, the first day is most appropriate, because it's a clean slate. I would never have to feel guilty with these friends, or question what they'd actually think of me. No one from Stanley was going there...but Tucker would probably catch wind. And it was tomorrow. It was too soon. "What if I'm trading in four years of dedication to staying closeted for...another four years of the same thing?" I thought. It seemed like a raw deal.
I sat back up and stuck my head out the window again. A breeze flew across my face. A train went by a few blocks away, gently blowing its horn. I sighed as the feeling I might throw up subsided. I glanced back over at the clock. It was now 3:40am. Less than four hours to sleep. Great. I flipped my pillow over again and tried to think about the positive things that I thought might await me in my future. If the negative issues were getting to me, maybe some positive hopes and dreams might put me to sleep.
"Tucker and Beth will get married. I'll be Best Man, then Uncle Heath. Awesome."
"I'll break it to the parents that I'm switching out of the Engineering School I got into and transferring into Hewitt-Knoll's Public Policy program. And they'll be supportive."
"I'll make enough money so that my parents can retire at a reasonable age."
Okay, that covered family, friends, and finances. Romance. Hm.
"Someone will make me happy," I thought to myself, and with that, I finally drifted off.
Next chapter coming imminently: Heath's first day of Orientation!
Oh, and copywright: me. Or whatever.