What's Up, Dude?

This isn't going to be one of those stories.

You know that kind of story. The kind of story where some teenager with a fourteen-foot cock bangs his older brother and then all the neighborhood kids and Justin Timberlake join in.

Those kinds of stories are around, but they're not my thing, and that's not what this is about.

This is a story about real guys who act like real guys, because in the end that's always the hottest thing, and really, I'm not writing this as much as a sex story (even though it gets to that, so chill) but because I've been thinking about these people a lot lately and thought it might be good to write it all out.

What's Up, Dude?

We're going to start with the basics. I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis. My mom was a prosecutor (now she's a judge) and my dad was a police detective, and if you think that your parents were tough, try getting away with anything in that house. On high school nights when I came home drunk, I tip-toed through the house like I was trying to sneak out of maximum security.

They were softies at heart. They treated it more like a cat-and-mouse game than anything. They worked difficult jobs and they really love their kids. They had good reasons to feel proud. My older brother got an engineering degree from MIT and my younger sister's now a sophomore at Carleton College.

Then there was me, Jon. I scored pretty much straight A's all through high school and had my biggest crisis when I got rejected by Princeton and Harvard. I was a wide receiver on the football team and went to state finals on the 800M relay for my swimming team. I was a fair-haired boy.

I was a good athlete, maybe not a great athlete. On the football team, I was kind of an anomaly pesonalitywise, but I was kick-ass as a receiver, if I do say so myself. I'm a little over 6'2 and built with really broad shoulders. My arms spread out long and I was fast on the field. My torso was about as long as my legs, so I had a good center of gravity. I knew how to take a tackle, how to stiff-arm a cornerback, and my legs had enough muscle that if someone was about to take me down I could usually gain a couple more yards as I hit the field.

Now, if this were one of those stories -- one of those stories -- this is where the locker-room post-game gang bang would happen. But this isn't one of those stories, and while I hate to bust up your fantasies, there aren't many things less arousing than a post-game football locker room. A third of the team is fat, half the team sports some kind of ugly bruise, a couple guys are probably bleeding, and the three or four guys who are properly hot don't seem that way when you're standing in the gang showers next to a 250-pound lineman.

The swimming team was something different. Freshman year of high school I played basketball, but I was second-rate at that. My best friend Steve was on the swimming team and he talked me into showing up to the first practice sophomore year. Even though I started out as one of the worst guys on the squad, I loved it. I took to the physical challenge and liked the water. It was a hard workout, but the mood was a lot lighter than at football practice, and, if I'm being honest with myself, the guys were a lot hotter.

See, even though I did a fair amount of peeking in the lockerroom, I didn't realize that I was gay at the time. I just thought of myself as an observer. But the guys on the swim team caught my eye more than the football players ever did. The fact that I recognized that should have been a clue, but I didn't pick up on it.

There was a really casual attitude about nudity. I've got a couple theories about this. One is that once you've practiced in speedos, there wasn't much left for modesty, so you might as well show. The other is that the cold water was an equalizer. Two hours in the pool, and all the dicks and balls are all going to shrink down to the same size. Cockpride isn't much of an issue. Third, the pool had its own lockerroom, so there was room for its own culture. It wasn't like the wrestling team or the JV basketball team was going to show up and double the crowd. Swim team guys hung looser because of that.

Practice wrapped and a couple dozen lean-muscled guys staggered into the lockerroom. Muscles felt like rubber. The suits peeled off before the showers were fully hot. I'd played sports for years, so I was unfazed by naked guys in the lockerroom, but still. I'd stand there washing the chlorine out of my hair, glance down, and there was a lean set of abs about eight inches away, a dude's tight balls and dick dangling out of a thick brown bush that spread down to a set of thighs that were big and muscular from a couple of years' worth of competitive swimming. There wasn't a lot of body fat, and something about swimming makes your shoulders spread out and your muscles lean.

One time after practice I got an inkling that maybe I was into other guys, but it wasn't anything serious and it didn't faze me. Mike was opposite me in the shower. I'd known Mike since second grade. By the time we were 16, he was 5'10, with a toned and defined body. He didn't have much body hair. Except for after swim practice, his cock was long, kind of thin. Girls loved him, but Mike was a huge smart-ass: it seemed like he was always getting kicked out of class for saying something obnoxious. I'd already pulled off my suit and was naked under a shower. Facing me in the crowded showers, Mike pulled his blue speedo down to his knees and just kind of left them there. He gave me a dumb look, like, "Check it out," and just left his suit halfway down his legs while he soaped up, the trail of suds streaming down his tight pecs and abs and sliding off his cock in a stream.

Mike pulled his suit all the way down and kicked it across the room at me, kind of playful. I picked up his suit and whipped it at him, nailing him in the shoulder and leaving a pink streak. He bent down and picked up his suit, but, like, held the position for a second longer than he needed, so that his balls were visible hanging down on the other side of his muscled, dimpled ass. It was a full-on gay-porn view. He wheeled around and whipped his suit at me, hitting me in the face. He was trying to use too much force and threw hunched over, so the dumbass stumbled a little and had to catch himself with one hand against the shower floor. "Goddammit!" he yelled, then pushed himself off the wet tile.

Then he kind of charged at me, naked, and I realized that I was beginning to sport some (very) soft wood. It was like he was about to throw me into a headlock just for play, but he probably realized that that would be too gay, and that he was pushing the envelope already. Instead, he sort of gave me a playful push (I backed up, my bare ass bumping into the wet thigh of a junior who'd been showering next to me) and Mike leapt up, hanging clumsily from my showerhead with both hands, whooping. As he swung, the side of his ass knocked up against my stomach, the junior next to me backed off several feet, Mike let go, and knocked into me.

His shoulder brushed my dick and pubes as he took his second spill within two minutes. He was on the ground, and he made a lunge like he wanted to take me out at the knees.

I play-kicked him and he turned over, naked on his back under my shower. "I'm done," he announced. "I'm already sore from practice. McCreary," he said to me, "you win."

If you think this sounds super-gay, you're kind of right, but still, I'm convinced that Mike was (and is) straight as hell, and that he never would have gone for this kind of horseplay if he'd had any inkling that I'd like guys.

Still, in retrospect: I was turned on. Mike was a hot, funny guy. In the lockerroom, I never went past the soft wood that I felt for a couple of minutes, which no one would have noticed unless they were scrutinizing my package really closely. But when I got home, I was thinking about how it felt when his smooth ass hit against me, when his arm sideswiped my cock as he went down to the floor. I jerked off to it twice that night. When I came, it was more forceful than normal.

No big deal, I told myself. I'm a young guy, and when all that wet skin brushes against you, it's sort of a turn-on. And if I thought about how hot Mike's ass looked to me when he was across from me in the shower, so what? This was a random thing. It wasn't gay, just hormonal. At the time, I'd just broken up with a girl -- and true, when she took off her shirt and rubbed her tits against my dick, it hadn't been exactly fun. But I'd just been nervous, I told myself. I wasn't concentrating on her hard enough.

If you weren't a high school athlete, you probably don't realize that the kind of shit that Mike pulled happens in lockerrooms. Track practice always was the rowdiest. The team didn't have strict standards, so a lot of people joined. There'd be 60 guys, freshmen to seniors, in a big locker room in various states of undress. Guys have hormones; they're growing into their bodies. They're cocky. They roughhouse.

When I was a freshman, there was this guy on the track team, Dan, who was a senior. Some of the seniors had known my older brother. They were always good to me. Dan was under the shower next to mine after track practice. He was about 6'3, Jewish, with a dusting of dark hair spread across his chest and over his round, full ass. He had a great body and tended to run shirtless at practice. Next to him in the shower, there was a clear line that distinguished his pale ass and his upper thighs from the light tan over the rest of his body.

Dan was hot. Unlike swimming practice, there weren't any shrinkage issues in track. Dan stood there in all his glory, his smooth, soft, six-inch cock and its purplish bell-shaped head swinging every time he moved. A trail of dark hair ran down his belly to his bush of pubes. I watched his long fat cock bounce wet over his low-hanging balls when he reached for more soap. He was giving me advice about classes and teachers to avoid, facing me, not really paying attention as he washed the arms that he'd carefully developed in the weight room.

I don't know how long I'd stared, but I was kind of fascinated. Dan was what a real man looked like.

Still: I wasn't gay. I wasn't even confused. I looked, but all guys looked. I lost my virginity to a girl when I was 16: it wasn't until I was older that I realized this was kind of young. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Being with girls wasn't a lot of fun -- it was more like forcing myself to study -- but I told myself that I was too self-conscious, and reassured myself that because a lot of girls liked me, I'd find one that would click.

Shit, dude, think about it. I was a starting receiver on the varsity football team. I was a man's man. I knew how to hunt and fish. I drank with the guys and girls liked me a lot. If you told the high school version of me, Jon McCreary, that I was gay, I would have laughed it off and told you not to be a dumbass. It wouldn't even have fazed me. No one guessed it, least of all me.

And then came college.

I knew it was going to be different, but I wasn't ready for how different.

High school had been good to me. I'd loved my friends, but most of us had known each other since elementary school, guys and girls alike. My guy friends, I'd never think of them sexually. They were more like cousins. I never had a free minute. I was a good athlete, but damn, I was a serious student. I didn't have the breathing room to think through things.

I wasn't prepared to start over in college.

While I didn't end up at Princeton or Harvard, I loved college immediately. I lucked out in the roommate situation. My roommate Tom grew up a three-hour drive from the university. We hit it off from the start. We were sloppy in kind of the same way. We'd played the same sports in high school and had the same taste in music, even if he didn't appreciate the hip-hop and I wasn't into the Grateful Dead.

My first night at school, Tom and I went out to an open frat party with some of the guys in our hall and the girls upstairs. The hall was all-male but the dorm was co-ed. Before rush started, all the frats had open parties. The freshmen piled in and the frats plied us with free beer. I started getting sloppy drunk for the first time.

I was on my fifth or sixth beer of the night. I'm a big, fit guy -- 6'2, 190 pounds with a 31-inch waist -- but I hadn't done that much boozing in high school, so already I was wasted. Tom and I had been bantering for awhile. My sarcasm didn't rattle him and I appreciated his vulgar sense of humor.

Tom and I were both hits with the girls. This blond-haired girl from the dorm, Sara, from Chicago, had been hanging off him during our conversation. It was tough to blame her. Tom was a little smaller than me, with short-cut black hair. He had this laid back, easy manner about him, bright blue eyes, a skinny and defined body, and he dressed in a way that showed it off. He and Sara started getting friendly. Their hands were on each other a lot already.

I made out with a girl that night. She was the last girl I ever made out with. While Tom was starting to focus on Sara, this girl Melissa from St. Louis was nudging against me. We'd been talking during the walk over from the dorm. She was a swimmer and a tennis player; her dad was some kind of corporate lawyer. I was drunk and my resistance was down. Getting this attention from Melissa -- who picked a shirt to show off her admittedly hot rack, whose low-riding jeans showed the top of a thong and the peak of a tight ass -- seemed like a good way to start college.

Tom and Sara had moved to the dancefloor. Drunk, I was pretending to be interested in whatever Melissa was talking about.

"So do you want to dance or what?" she said loudly into my ear, over the bass of the music.

It was a hot night, and the air inside the frat house was muggy. I was hammered and sweating. She pulled me by the shirtwaist into the frat's dark living room, jammed with bodies. I saw Tom and Sara dancing close. They were kissing. I could see the shadows of their tongues as they made out a few feet away. Without being too obvious, I kind of maneuvered Melissa toward them. Watching Tom and Sara was making me hard. Melissa was pressing herself up against me, her thigh brushing against my crotch, where she must have felt my half-boner. She pulled at my shirt collar so that I leaned down. She kissed me hard and full on the lips. Her lip gloss tasted sweet. I was feeling it. I put my arm around her neck. We kissed close and sloppy for about 20 seconds, until I pulled back. Her dancing was getting closer. I guess we were full-on grinding at that point, which is something that I wouldn't have been caught dead doing in high school. When I looked up a couple minutes later, I saw that Tom and Sara were next to us. Tom gave me this sort of proud, yeah-dude look and half a wink. I grinned. He turned back to Sara. I turned back to Melissa. She and I danced for another hour or so, occasionally pausing to make out or grab more beer.

The night didn't end with anything more than that. At around 3 a.m. the party started to dissolve. I was soaked in sweat and smelled like beer, so drunk that I stumbled when I walked and so tired that I had a tough time keeping my eyes open.

We all walked back to the dorm, all eight or nine of us that started the night together. Tom had his arm around Sara's shoulder. I was struggling to keep up with them all. Tom slowed up, still holding onto Sara.

"Jon, dude," he said, "I'm so fucking glad that you're going to be my roommate. We fucking lucked out."

I held my hand up in a fist and he tapped against it. "Great fucking night," I said. "I'm, like, hammered."

My being so drunk was an easy enough way to shake off Melissa, but really, that wasn't necessary. Sara wasn't going to sleep with Tom that night, and Melissa wasn't going to sleep with me. The girls were still testing the waters, the way we all were.

Tom and I got back to our room. We'd barely started unpacking. He had a couple plastic cups. He kept going into the floor's communal bathroom to get us water. I found my pillows and sheets and had stripped down to my boxers. Our room was badly ventilated. It must have been eighty degrees. It already smelled like beer and sweat.

He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled down his jeans. He stood in boxer-briefs. He had a nice little body. His frame was narrower than mine, with a float of hair down the middle of his chest and a treasure trail running down his thin belly. Drunk and dazed, I sat on the lower bunk, my eyes on level with the bulge of his crotch. In my intoxicated haze I discerned the outline of the shaft of his cock and its sideways-positioned head.

Tom made me realize that I was gay, but we never did anything together. Tom was alpha-heterosexual but not a classic player, a serial monogomist who seemed to switch serious girlfriends once every six months.

We shot the shit for a few minutes, but I was too drunk to say much. We both said how glad we were not to get stuck with some kind of prick or dork. He talked about how hot Sara was. We argued for a couple of minutes about what was the best Stones album (Sticky Fingers v. Exile) but I was too wiped out. I'm pretty sure that I fell asleep mid-conversation.

I saw him naked the next morning when he came back from the hall's common shower. He had a towel around his waist. I was lying in my bed, covered by a sheet, too hungover for even the standard morning erection. Tom closed the door. I could smell his soap and shampoo. Maybe he assumed I was asleep, but regardless, he dropped the towel from his waist as he rummaged through his suitcase to find fresh clothes. I had a perfect profile view of his skinny tanlined ass and a beautiful set of cock and balls. It was great, lying there in bed, watching him totally unselfconscious as he dug through his bag, the way that his soft four-inch shaft and its outsized head bounced and swung, the tufts of his armpit hair on display while he rummaged.

I stopped breathing. My chest felt tight and flushed. My heart wanted to break out of my chest.

My naked roommate was making me horny as fuck. My cock was completely rigid.

The problem wasn't that I didn't focus hard enough when I was with girls. The problem was that I was big-time gay.

I know how this sounds to some guys -- the kind of guys who grew up knowing that they were into other dudes. They think that I must have been repressed or in denial, but it really wasn't like that. Before college, I'd been around pretty much the same group of people since elementary school. We grew up together. The few times I thought about guys, they went in and out of my head in a flash. It never seemed like more than a quick, bad idea, like taking acid or hurdling a barbwire fence.

That morning, I stayed in bed for a couple more hours. I rolled over so that I faced the wall. Tom was unpacking his stuff, but he was being quiet. (At base, he's an incredibly considerate guy.)

But I knew and I suddenly knew. Everything changed. With my eyes closed, I wondered if I'd suddenly acquire a limp wrist and a lisp. I worried that I'd get hard whenever I saw a guy naked. I thought about the girls I'd let down. I'd never have kids or a family. I'd break my parents' hearts. And having been surrounded by people for the first 18 years of my life, I felt crazily alone.

It worked out better than that, of course. For the first few days, I was paranoid that Tom and all the guys in the hall were going to figure it out. They didn't. That's not how those things work.

And this isn't one of those stories -- you know what I mean, those stories -- where Tom and I started getting off together or I fell in love with him. I'll admit that for the first month of college I was crushing on him pretty hard. I had to be careful not to look too closely in the morning, not only because I didn't want to get turned on, but I also didn't want to invade his privacy like that. When he punched me in the shoulder or threw his arm around my neck in drunken comeraderie, I was careful not to read anything into it, even if it made my skin tingle and my face blush.

There were a lot of other things to worry about. I was at a great school with a lot of really smart people who came from all over the country. Classes got rolling, and the same people who'd been getting wasted with me at frat parties started flipping out about calc quizzes and reaction papers for history class. When I wasn't studying or worrying about myself, I was trying to make friends, test out their personalities, see who was good for going to parties and who was good just to lay low if I wanted someone to study with or watch football on Sunday nights.

On mornings when I didn't have my 9 a.m. biology lecture, I'd go on long six- or seven-mile runs around campus. On Saturdays, I went to home football games with Tom and a couple of other guys from our floor, even though our school's team was predictably the worst in the conference. That didn't matter. We yelled even when the team was losing, and were as loud as anyone who went to Florida or USC.

"I was a bad-ass wide receiver in high school," I said, after one of our school's guys fumbled.

"Shit, here we go again," Tom said. "Guys, I don't know if you've heard this, but Jon McCreary was, like, the best whitebread wide receiver in the history of the Upper Midwest."

"Totally," I said. "If I went to Williams or Amherst I'm sure I could've been on the football team."

"Well I'm glad you didn't, dick," Tom said. "If I ended up with some kind of neat freak or Phish fan as my roommate, I'm pretty sure I would've shot myself by now."

"Yeah, Phish is for assholes," I said. "And I'm glad I didn't go to Amherst or Williams, because if I did I'd probably have some weirdo Deadhead for a roommate who was really into Keats and Byron." I paused for comic effect. "Oh, wait."

This was our way of saying that we liked each other. All platonic, of course.

When Tom was away at class, I'd fire up my laptop and look around online. I guess I thought if it as a kind of psychological experiment on myself. I'd get on a search engine and look up words like "naked guys" or "naked athletes," which were the only phrases I could think up. I'd find a picture that liked, beat off, clean up, and conclude that, yes, I was still gay. This wasn't a phase.

It's possible that while all of this was going on, the biggest stress in my life wasn't finding out that I liked cock, but Econ 101. Our school had a great economics department, which was part of the reason I went there. I thought at the time that I wanted to be an econ major.

The class was turning into a major struggle. In high school, I considered getting a B+ on a quiz to be the equivalent of failing. In Econ 101, we had weekly quizzes in our discussion section. When the first quiz came back, I got a 60 percent. I broke into a cold sweat and stuffed the quiz into my bag before anyone could glance at my score.

There was this guy in my class, Mark Claremont, who I talked to. He was a freshman too, from Seattle, and also set on being an econ major. He was a friendly, laid-back guy. We were in the same discussion section. The professor taught in a big auditorium, and I tended to sit close to the front, about five rows back, one seat off the aisle so that I could stretch my legs out. Mark and I had talked a couple times as we packed up after discussion section, mainly about how much tougher the class was than we expected.

A couple weeks into the semester he took the open seat next to me. "Hey man, what's up," he said. "You saving the seat?"

"Nah, it's all yours," I said. "Maybe your econ smarts will rub off on me."

"Doubtful," he said, taking out his notebook and balancing a cup of coffee on the chair's armrest. "That first quiz didn't go so smoothly."

"Yeah, same here," I said. "I like the professor," I said, gesturing up at the guy fiddling with the microphone, an unassuming sixtysomething who won a Nobel Prize a few years back, "but our T.A. is a prick."

"Agreed," Mark said, leaning back in his chair, extending his legs into the aisle the way I would have if he hadn't sat there.

The lecture that day was 90 minutes. It was about the premise of perfect competition. I took notes so quickly that my hand cramped. As I packed up my stuff I looked at Mark and said something about how econ was a joke if so much if it was premised on hypotheticals involving perfect competition, when the professor himself -- a dude who won the Nobel Prize -- conceded that perfect competition is impossible.

"Right," Mark said, "and the same thing for rational choice. I think the idea of rational choice and people always acting in their self-interest is kind of a joke."

He said something about how we should meet up and prep for Thursday's quiz. "Sounds good," I said. "I could probably use it."

I didn't think about it after that. I went back to the room and took a nap, then went to the campus pool and swam a mile. I had a history lecture in the afternoon, then a discussion section for my Shakespeare class, so I headed out for awhile.

When I came back, there was an e-mail from Mark Claremont. He'd be hanging out at a coffeehouse by campus for awhile studying econ and said I should swing by if I wanted. "Maybe your econ smarts will rub off on me," he wrote.

I needed to study anyway, Mark seemed like a nice guy, so I figured that I might as well.

He was sitting alone with some notes spread out on the table, bouncing his knee with his headphones on. I sat down across from him. He looked up startled, saw me, and then broke into this big smile. He had a nice smile, his teeth bright white and perfectly straight. I noticed for the first time that he was a really good-looking guy. His dark-blond hair was just a little bit lighter than mine, and he had sort of sculpted features, high cheekbones and dimples, and subtle cleft in his chin. He had bright blue eyes that were just a little bit lighter than mine. In khaki shorts, his bare legs with their fine coating of blond hairs, stretched into the aisle.

"What's up, dude," he said, taking off his headphones. "Sorry for the random e-mail, just thought I'd see if you wanted to hang out and go over this."

"Nah, I'm glad you did," I said. "I probably would have sat around the PlayStation with my roommate and procrastinated half the night."

"You get along okay with your roommate?"

I said yeah, really well actually. Mark said that his kind of sucked, that he was kind of an uptight neat freak with a weird temper who didn't watch anything but CNBC. I said that I'd been scared of something like that, but that Tom and I had already become good friends.

We got down to business. Mark clearly understood this stuff better than I did, but he was patient about it. I'd talk about how something didn't make any sense, and then Mark would agree but find a way to explain it in a way that made it crystal clear. We spent two or three solid hours studying in the coffeehouse, and then just kind of talked for awhile afterward. Before he lived in Seattle he was in Kansas -- his dad was an exec for Boeing. He'd been in a swim club on Lake Washington, where in the summers they'd go for three-mile swims in the open water. He'd had a girlfriend for two years in high school but they broke up a couple weeks after graduation.

Mark and I got into a routine where we'd meet up a couple times a week to hang out and study. My econ scores started nudging up -- I'd get 8 or 9 out of ten answers, which was enough to move me into B+/A- range under the grading curve. He came over to the dorm a few times to hang out with me and Tom while we watched DVDs or played video game football. Mark was there on the Saturday night in early October, the night where Tom paid a senior to buy a bunch of vodka and we had 15 people in our room with the music blasting, until our RA showed up at 2 a.m., kicked everybody out, and wrote up me and Tom. (It turned into one of those good war stories.)

I invited Mark to the Sunday flag football games that Tom organized. We all hung out afterward, drinking beers in somebody's room and watching NFL games.

Then, it was late October, and everything started going down.

I was hanging out with Mark at the coffeehouse one night. We were on the verge of midterms and the place was busy. We sat in the back corner with our econ notes and books spread out. It was late, around 1:30 in the morning. The place was open until three but other people started clearing.

I leaned back in the chair and stretched, covering my mouth as I yawned. "I bet stuff wouldn't be this hard if I'd gone to the University of Minnesota," I said. "I bet I'd ace everything and that it'd all be cake."

"I'm glad you didn't," Mark said. "You're a bright enough dude when you're not being a spaz. Stop psyching yourself out." He gave me this look like I was a little crazy. He was chewing gum (he always chewed gum) and I watched for a second as he turned back to his books, the way the muscles in his jaw moved when he chewed and how the muscle on the side of his forehead pulsed in and out. He stared back down at his book and worked on his notes, and I did the same.

A couple minutes later his knee bumped against mine and stayed there. I figured it was an accident but it felt kind of nice, so I let it go. I took a deep breath and glanced over to him, but apparently he didn't notice. He licked his lips while he wrote and I started to take it in, how hot his mouth looked and how cute the cleft on his chin was.

Dude, Mark was making me horny.

It had been about two months since I figured out that I was gay, and all things considered, I think I'd handled myself pretty well. I jerked off furiously twice a day when Tom was out of the room. Somehow, I'd forced myself not to be seriously attracted to guys that I actually knew -- I didn't want to psych myself out or get ideas and mess up a friendship. It was all too new. Someday I'd try things, but not yet.

Mark was too good. I didn't want to make him the subject of my headtrip.

His knee had been up against mine for a couple of minutes when I slowly moved it away.

A few minutes later, he did it again. His knee was back in position, and we were touching each other.

My face flushed. I'm a fair-complected guy, so when those things happen, my face goes pink and people notice. My hand started to quiver. I glanced over to Mark. He made eye contact with me, all nervous-like, and his eyes darted back down to his paper.

I pushed my right knee next to his a little bit harder. His tan had faded over the fall. I could tell that he was blushing now too. We sat like that for a few minutes. I pretended to study but my mind was going crazy. My dick started doing push-ups in my jeans. I could feel my hard-on press against my thigh and held down by the denim. Mark's face, the way he was trying to be so nonchalant, and his posture, the way he sat there rigid, I knew that he was going through the same thing.

And then I got bold. I shifted my chair a little bit. I pushed my left knee to his right knee, with my head down like I was looking at my notes but my eyes looking right at Mark's face. He played cool. He didn't look up but he didn't look away. I watched his chest rise and fall with his breath. I noticed how hard he was breathing and that I was breathing the same way. He pushed up with the toe of his shoe a little, so that his knee rubbed against mine.

I put down my pen and looked up at him, smirking. He looked up and broke into his toothy smile, his dimples retracted. He laughed and brushed his hands through his fine dark-blond hair. "Aw, hell, man," he said, and laughed.

I looked at him and laughed too. We didn't take our eyes off each other, and sat there like that for about ten seconds. My cock was so riled that it hurt -- if we stayed like that long enough, I would have jizzed myself right there, without having to touch it.

There wasn't really anything to say. "So, uh," I said, putting my hand down on the table, with my voice sounding softer and deeper than usual.

"Yeah," Mark said, and laughed. "It's kind of nice, right?"

"Dude," I said, "you have no idea."

Mark loved how I said this, I could tell. He moved his hand down. I thought that he was reaching down for his backpack, but instead he put his hand on my right knee, the knee that was against the wall and hidden from public view. I breathed in hard. I wanted to reach under and touch his hand -- I wanted my hands all over him.

"What do you think?" he said.

"I, uh," stammer, "I think maybe I want to know if you've got any plans tonight once we're done studying."

"Dude," Mark said, "I'm pretty sure that we're done studying."

It was like he tickled the inside of my stomach. My chest was sweating. It was like 50 pounds of body armor lifted.

We needed to find a place. I would have gone anywhere. Not necessarily to have sex, just to touch him. Shit, if knees could do this to me, how much did I need? I was an eighteen-year-old guy who'd never touched anyone he was legitimately attracted to. The girls didn't count anymore. I was two months into a new sex life, and here was this smart, nice, extremely attractive guy ready to get all over me.

"Let me call my roommate," Mark said, pulling his cell out of his backpack.

It was goddamn late. If one of our places wouldn't work, I could tell that we were going to end up in some cold shadows behind a library or in the back of a sorority house -- that's how hot we suddenly were. And I wasn't ready to start with this subterfuge with Tom, even though I could have lied and told him that I was about to come over with a girl, and that I needed him to clear out pronto. That would have been easy -- it was the lies the next day that I couldn't stand.

Mark was on the phone with his roommate for a few minutes: "That thing we talked about at the start of the year, yeah that thing, dude, I'm sorry, I'll owe you one, I know that midterms start Monday but that's still four days away. Look, Seth, I'll give you $20. Okay, fine, $40, but that's kind of ridiculous. I know it's fucking late. This shit happens though, right? I'd do it for you." Pause. "Okay. Fucking $50 if you're not there by the time I get home and if you promise that you don't even knock on the fucking door before noon. Right. Fair? Good."

My boner had dropped down enough that I could walk. Our walk to Mark's dorm, man, it was the longest ten minutes of my life. We weren't really talking or touching, but I kind of couldn't help myself. We'd walk and I'd kind of pinch his elbow, or else he'd walk close and act like he was accidentally brushing against me.

"We could pretend that you're drunk," I said, "and that way you could kind of lean against me. I'll pretend that I'm holding you up for support."

He laughed and sort of clamped my neck for a second. "We'll get there soon enough."

If someone had seen us walking through campus like that, I don't know if they would have thought that we were homos or rowdy frat guys -- same difference, probably.

We got into Mark's dorm and bounded up the stairs. He made me wait in the stairwell to be sure that his room was all clear.

A couple minutes later we were in his room behind a locked door. Unlike me and Tom, Mark and his roommate had lofts. There was a futon under his bed. We dropped our coats and backpacks on the floor. He dropped down on the futon. I stayed standing, just wanting to look at Mark before we got started in earnest. He looked kind of amazing to me, with his arms draped out with their fine blond hair and their swimmer's muscles, his beautiful face looking up at me like a kid waiting to get his present.

I was about to take the plunge.

"Hey, Jon," he said, "I think I can see your boner in your jeans."

I laughed, too nervous to say much. "It's all you, dude."

"Maybe you should come over here," he said.

So I did. I sat down next to him on the futon, side by side, with my leg over his and my arm around his neck. He put his hand on my stomach. I kept running my hand in his hair. We weren't looking at each other's faces. I leaned in, my nose to his hair (hair never smelled so good) and put my lips on his cheek (no cheek ever felt so good). He sort of sighed and placed his hand on my thigh. I put my hand on top of his (no hand ever felt so good). We were both breathing hard and we hadn't even started yet. It was eighteen years' worth of release.

He turned his head toward mine and kissed me on the lips. We were nervous. It was a dry kiss, a total fifth-grade move, but it felt better than getting blown by one of the hottest girls in my high school. We had our arms around each other. We switched positions so that his leg was over mine now, pressing against the hard-on in my jeans.

"Dude," I said, "you are so fucking hot. You have no idea."

He looked at me and said, "At first I thought you were hot, and then I thought you were cool, and then I thought you were great, and then I started to fall for you, and I was pretty sure that you were straight," he said. "If you'd backed off of my knee we would've stayed just friends. But I still would have thought about how you felt when I jerked off."

"That was, like, the best knee move in the history of knee moves," I said, and watched him smile.

He leaned into me, all flushing, and kissed me slow on the lips. I opened my mouth a little and felt his tongue against mine. The air breathing out of his nose, I loved the way it felt against my upper lip. I wouldn't let the kiss stop. I hugged him and held him tight against me, my hands feeling out his shoulderblades while our lips locked against each other. The kiss started getting more passionate. I sucked on his lower lip and took it into my mouth, then moved up and our tongues went up against each other. His mouth tasted like sweet water, and I don't mean that as a metaphor, his mouth tasted the way a cold glass of water tastes on a hot day, just smooth and clean and all kinds of good. Our noses pressed against each other. He moved his face sideways so that our cheeks went up against each other, our eyebrows brushed.

We must have kissed for five minutes, maybe ten minutes. My cock pressed into his leg but it was all so much that I was scared I was going to jizz already, before we even tested out anything. I moved a little, and we were laying down on the futon, Mark lying on top of me, our jeans-encased hardons pressing against each other. Making out like that, we didn't even come up for air. We breathed out of our noses, my hands running up and down the back of his shirt, his hands running up and down my chest.

Mark felt so good. It already was the best feeling I'd ever had in my life. It wasn't like girls, where everything was always soft and fleshy and unfamiliar. Girls were like being lost in Cambodia and not speaking the language; Mark was like coming home. Holding Mark, he was all tight bone and muscle. I didn't want to stop touching him.

"You've got me so horny man," Mark said. "I'm about to shoot a wad in my jeans."

"Me too," I said. "We can't. I don't want it to stop."

"Even if we do," he said, "we're not going to stop."

"No fucking way," I said.

He stood up and unbuttoned his shirt, then slipped out of it. He had that great swimmer's build I told you about before, but his abs were more defined than most swimmers -- he must do a lot of crunches or something. His chest was almost totally hairless, except for some blond sprouts in the center and around the circumference of his quarter-sized nipples. The tops of his dark-blue boxers peeked out over the rim of his jeans. I could make out the outline of his hard-on.

"Your turn, hoss," he said, and tossed his shirt at me.

"Done," I said, and leaped off the futon. It was easy to tear off my sweatshirt and drop it on the floor.

My muscles were a bigger than Mark's, but a little less defined. I had freckles on my shoulders and on my upper arms, and a smattering of auburn hair down the middle of my chest. My body was lean after a summer when I got in the practice of running about six or seven miles a day.

We stood in the middle of Mark's dorm room, the lights fully on, just looking at each other. He moved his hands up and down my arms, and then onto my collarbone. I couldn't keep my hands off his chest. I moved them over his tight pecs, stroking at his nipples, then down over his abs. I put a finger in his belly button. He liked that -- I could see his cock twitch when I did.

"Maybe we should lose the jeans too," he said.

"But just the jeans," I said, "not the boxers."

"Exactly," he said. "No need to have all the fun at once."

So I reached over to the rim of his jeans and pulled him toward me. Feeling the outline of his hard-on made my hands shaky. I fumbled to undo the button, so he put his hands on mine to help. He stepped out of his jeans one leg and then kicked them off, making a kind of kung fu gesture in the process, then smiling at his own playfulness. I could see his boner bob when he moved. I pulled him toward me as he put his hand on my cock and tangled with my fly, until I was unbuttoned and unzipped. My dick made a thwacking noise as it hit my belly. My boxers were hanging a little low, so the top of my light-brown pubes and the tip of my cock was visible. I left it like that long enough for Mark to get a look, then pulled them back up.

We were back down on the futon, this time with skin on skin. He was all kinds of smooth and silky, his body temperature hot. We were on our sides, with our dicks smushed against each other, this time separated only by thin layers of cotton. We started kissing again, our hands all over each others' chests. I put my hand down to his asscheek, caressing it through his boxers, lifting his leg up until it draped over my thigh.

I wanted to move my face down to his chest and his belly, but really, I couldn't stop kissing him. Girls had told me that I was a great kisser, which was news to me at the time. Mark was a better kisser than the girls. Our lips and tongues would get into this rhythm, sliding up against each other, mine taking over his mouth for awhile, going in deep, I felt the top of his mouth with my tongue, and then the back of his teeth. Our teeth clicked together. He started moaning, these short, soft, quasi-whimpers, and I realized that I was doing the same, our hips and cocks grinding together while we did, the feel of his clothed dick on my thigh almost more than I could bear.

I had to stop and explore more. I pulled out of the kiss and put my mouth to his neck, and started working my way down his body. "Shit Jon," he said, "you have no idea how good this feels." "I have a pretty good idea how good this feels." "Oh, fuck, man," he said. "You're the fucking hottest thing ever," I said. "You kind of smell like chlorine," he said. "It smells good." "I went swimming today," I said, "and you smell like Irish Spring. It smells good." He laughed and hugged my upper torso, but I missed it, because I was working my way down his chest. My mouth was at his nipple. I nuzzled his chest with my chin. When I sucked at his nipple his back arched. I put a finger to his other nipple and rubbed around it, real gentle. My cock was now against his leg, which he used to rub against it; Mark's cock was just below my ribcage; he moved his hips to rub against it. I rested my head on his chest so that I heard his heart. My hands kept going all over him, one going up and down the side of his chest and the other all over his left leg.

The I went down to his stomach and his abs. My mouth was at his navel. His cock was at my neck. My hand was at the elastic of his boxers.

"Aw, man," he said, moaning and laughing, "go for it."

My mouth was at the thin line of blond hair that ran from his belly into his boxers. They were fine little gold springs. I looked up at him and his face was looking down at me, his head resting against a pillow, his white teeth framed by full smiling lips. He was moving his hips slightly so that his dick was dry-humping my Adam's apple through the boxers.

"We're both wearing blue boxers," I said.

"I know," he said. "I always notice what your boxers are when you stand up and stretch. I'm glad you don't wear longer shirts."

"You know," I said, "that I've never done anything with a guy. Like, literally nothing."

"Ha," Mark said, "and you think I have? I was totally sprung in that coffeehouse just thinking about my slick knee move. Like, boned up all night. I had to work up some courage. When you played along I thought that I was gonna have a stroke."

My hand went down into his boxers, my fingers threading his pubes. His hot rock-hard cock was against the back of my fingers. Its skin felt so soft. I knew as soon as I pulled back his shorts that I was going to have a rapture, so I waited, just feeling out his pubes, running my hand down the length of his cock, then down to his balls. Mark squirmed. He was caressing my hair. I was scared to pull down his shorts because as soon as I did, I'd never have the chance to see it for the first time again. I wanted to feel it all out first, tracing the triangle of his pubes (they were softer and finer than mine) and the contours of what felt like a perfectly shaped cock.

I tugged gently at his boxers, pulling them down real slow. He lifted up his hips to make it easier. His cock popped out, just a couple of inches from my face. It was the first time I'd seen a hard-on that wasn't my own, and Mark's was beautiful. It was average-sized like mine, but thick like mine, circumcised like mine, with a full helmeted head like mine. It looked so clean, rested against his pubes like that. I pulled his shorts down further, so that his balls were out now. Mine had pulled up tight against me, but his hung low. I cradled his in my left hand, my right hand up on his chest, looking at the contrast of his pink balls against my hand and their thin yellow hairs against it. Seeing it all on display like that, so up close in personal, it felt incredibly intimate.

This was all so much -- so much stimulation, so much fun, so much surprise, so different than the uncomfortable disciplined sex that I'd had with girls -- that I didn't want to push too far. I wasn't going to blow him, but I put my face right up next to it. My nose was in his pubes, with this smell of musk, soap and sweat, and it put me over the top. I put my closed lips up against his smooth perfect dick, kind of rubbing it with my chin.

Mark said that if I wasn't careful he was going to cum right there. I put my tongue into the slit just a little, but then pulled back and rested my cheek on his hip. My hand was on his chest, and I wanted to go back to his face and to go back to what it was like to have him all up against me. Slowly, I climbed back up over him, so that our chests and bellies could rub against each other until I came back to his bright-blue eyes and his dimples and his hot mouth.

We made out again, even more passionately than before, if that was even possible. There was a lot of moaning and heavy breathing from both of us now; I liked how when he moaned I felt the low vibration in my chest. He was getting more aggressive with his hands. Since he was lying on his back and I was on top of him, he could slip his hands down my boxers and onto my ass, which he did a little frantically, almost aggressively. The way that he was rubbing against me, I could tell that he might have been seconds away from cumming, which maybe he didn't want yet.

Mark and I switched positions so that I was on my back and he had his chance to look. He didn't waste any time: he wanted my boxers off. He sort of straddled over me, giving me a great view: Mark Claremont, boner at full mast, balls swinging down, sweaty and red in the face, blond hair a mess, perfect abs, and a grin that could confuse a sun dial. I had one hand at his dick and the other on the back of his knee, feeling out his calf muscle, kind of massaging it. Then he moved further back so that he was straddling my legs. I lifted my hips and Mark pulled down my boxers. Our dicks were both free and in each other's eyesight. He just stared down at mine for a couple of minutes, the same way that I'd stared at his. He played with it with his fingers, lifting it until it sprung back down and smacked into my belly, tracing it with his fingers. I liked the sight of both of us like that, with Mark straddling and on full view to me, me on my back and on full view to him, our dicks just a few inches away from each other. He took my cock into his fist, real gentle, pulling at it, then stroking with the back of his hand, like it was a pet. He laid down and curled up, his face at the side of my cock and pubes the way mine had been at his.

"I kind of want to blow you, man," he said, "but I don't think I'm ready for that."

"We've got all the time we want" I said. "We don't need to do that. Just, like, come back up here," I said, and so he did, and started kissing at me hard, and then for a minute we weren't even really kissing, we were just kind of breathing into each others mouths, so that when he breathed out I breathed in. Then we went back at it, our mouths so acrobatic that it was sloppy, juice from our mouths lubricating our chins. I took both of our dicks into my hand so that they were hugged up against each other. They fit together almost perfectly. Mark's was a little longer, mine was a little thicker, but they curved in the exact same way and our heads were proportioned in the exact same way. His cock was literally and figuratively hot, but felt so soft and comfortable pressed up against mine. While we kept making out, he started thrusting his hips. He put his hand around my hand, then cupped my balls, and I think it was that gesture that put me over the top.

I let out this kind of high-pitched moan and a hot stream of jizz pumped out of my cock, shooting up between our bellies and sandwiching in our ribcages.

Mark must have been holding back for a long time, because within two seconds he let go too. It felt great, having his dick in my grip and against my own shaft when his jizz sprayed out of him, like there was this volt of electricity that went through his cock as this hot, silky cum shot out, hitting his stomach and then ricocheting down to mine. Lying flat on my back, my stomach was coated in both of our cum, but still, we didn't stop kissing, we didn't even miss a beat, neither of us went soft, we both stayed totally rigid.

I let go of our dicks. The side of my hand was covered in our cum. I put it on Mark's lower back, leaving kind of a streak.

"Is this your futon?" I asked, pulling away from his mouth for a second.

He kissed me back. "No," he said (kiss), "it's my roommate's."

I kissed him. "Well," I said (kiss), "if you guys were" (kiss) "having problems before" (kiss, while we both kind of laughed) "he's gonna be pretty" (kiss) "unhappy" (kiss) "when he sees" (kiss) "this cum-coated futon."

Mark pulled back and laughed. He looked down at me and pushed my hair off from my forehead, smiling. "I'll pay for the new one."

"Does he know?" I asked.

"Hell no," he said. "He's a Republican, which kind of defeats the purpose of this whole school. I told him that you were a girl."

I closed my eyes and smiled. I let out this kind of happy groan. "Should we get cleaned up?"

"Nah," he said. "It's too good, lying here like this."

"It's kind of hot," I said (kiss) "with our jizz" (kiss) "all mixed up" (kiss) "and sticking us together" (kiss, long kiss) "like this."

He agreed. He got off from on top of me, lying next to me so that we could admire our handiwork. My stomach was coated and glistening. There were white splotches on my ribcage and my whole stomach looked wet. Some of it was starting to liquefy and drip down to the futon. Mark carefully reached out with a finger, like our mixed cum was fingerpaint, and used it to trace the faint outline of a J on my chest. So fucking fun, I said. I took his hand and pressed it onto my stomach, so that it was coated, and then I pressed the palm of my hand against his and rubbed it a little -- like a spit swear, but a splooge swear. I could smell the smell -- bleach and metallic -- on his hand. My eyes kind of rolled back. His mouth was all over mine again.

"Uh, yow," I said, and with my cock partly lubricated from our jizz, I pulled at it a couple times. That's all it took. My wad shot again. Three minutes couldn't have passed since I shot last. Mark had a close-up few as the first gush geysered out. I'd intentionally had it pointed toward him a little, but he took a direct shot. Spots of my wet splooge hit a bullseye halfway down his chest. A couple of weaker ropes shot and landed on my stomach. A little pool of it had collected in my navel.

"You won the second race, too," he said.

"First race was pretty much a tie," I said.

He scooped my cum off his chest with his fingers and just looked at it, and lifted it to his nose. He put his fingers down to his cock. I guess Mark liked my lube idea. He got up and took the position he had before, the one that got me so hot, where he straddled over my legs, facing me. My arms were long enough that I could reach down. I grabbed the back of his legs with my hands, just below his ass, and then let my fingers reach up so that they went into the hair running between his asscrack to the back of his balls, all hot and matted and sweaty. While he jerked himself with my cum, his whole face tightened, he leaned his head back, balanced in a way that he was actually relying on my holding him in order to maintain his balance. I felt his muscles tighten and saw his abs squeeze. He let a high-pitch gasp and sprayed out his cum. With the angle and his hips thrusting, it shot all over the place. Some hit my neck; some hit my face; some landed in my hair and on the pillow next to my head. I think that some hit the side of the mini-fridge. Mark's second stream went almost as far, leaving a line of hot white splatter down my chest.

His body relaxed and he crashed on top of me. We were now a total mess, just soaked in each other. Our heads knocked as he landed down on me, with enough force that it almost hurt, but it didn't really matter. My boner was still there, and it had been going on so long that it was starting to hurt, but it didn't really matter. My five senses had never been worked so hard for so long, and all at once, but it didn't really matter. All kind of self-consciousness and hesitation had burned off. His hot jizz on my face felt smooth and silky. We didn't even make an effort to clear it off when we started making out again. It was ending up in both of our mouths, and the way we couldn't keep our hands off each other, it was ending up all over.

Mark gasped out, "Jon, dude (kiss) I'm fucking tired (kiss) but this (kiss) is still (kiss) so fucking hot."

While his mouth worked on my chin and my neck, I looked at the clock. Between the making out and touching and the game of it, we'd been going at it for about three hours -- it was just a little after 5 a.m. At some point in the morning his roommate would come back; at some point this would have to stop. "Maybe we can get a little sleep," I said. "Three or four hours' sleep, we'll both still be here."

He looked almost relieved that I said it would be okay for us to sleep. He affectionately messed my hair (both of us now had unruly semen-gelled hairdos) and slowly pushed himself off of me. I saw him standing naked for the first time, the trim cheeks of his ass bouncing a little as he walked toward the light switch. Wait a second, I told him, just stand there and let me look. Mark faced me and struck this fake model pose, hands on his hips, a mock pout staring out into the sunset. There were a few wet streaks on his chest, his cock red and wet and at half mast.

"Just, take that green comforter off my bed," he said, "so I can get a look."

I pushed up, my shoulder muscles a little sore, my dick a little more erect than Mark's. We stood under the lights, checking each other out across the room. I turned to his bed to pull off his comforter, and dropped it to the futon mattress lying askance on the floor.

"Hot ass," Mark said.

"Thanks dude," I said. My ass is a little hairy. It isn't forested or anything, just a dusting of dark blond hair, but it made me self-conscious. It did when I was with girls, and sometimes it did when I was in the lockerroom. Still, it was more rounded-out and muscled than Mark's, which was trim and lean. His compliment was kind of a relief.

He flipped off the lights and we went back to the mattress, face to face and holding onto each other. It was difficult to get much sleep, no matter how spent I felt. I'd never slept in the same bed with someone. He'd move a little and I'd remember who I was with and what we were doing. I woke up a little and kissed him in his sleep; he woke up a little and kissed me back. We dozed with our mouths connected. A little later I woke for a couple of minutes. We were both fully hard. In his sleep, Mark had grabbed hold of both of our cocks with his hand. I shifted so that my face was down at his neck, breathing through my nose, thinking about how good he smelled, how nice it felt to have his smooth skin and muscles pressed against mine. Then I went back to sleep.

The alarm went off at 8:30. Mark and his roommate woke up to NPR, the way that Tom and I did. Mark kind of groaned and hugged my head. Waking up next to him felt great. His boner pressed against my belly. I was curled up around him, my face still in his neck and my dick against his upper thigh. I said that our breath probably stinks. Mark said that he didn't even care. We kissed with our dry mouths. I felt dehydrated and sticky, kind of like it was a hangover. Mark said that his roommate was supposed to call his cell before he came back to the room.

There wasn't much that I wanted to do right then. I just wanted to be with him and not have to stop touching him. My hands kept running up and down his chest. He lifted up a legs so that he was curled around me. I cupped his asscheck with my hand. We held our kiss, with our noses and foreheads pressed together. My fingers reached down to his asscrack a little. His ass was smooth but there were some fine soft hairs that ran down the length of its crack. He gasped a little, and almost pulled away.

The night before it was like we'd made an unspoken decision to leave that one alone. My hand there seemed to make him a little uncomfortable, so it went back to his buttock. He leaned back in, pushing his dick hard against mine.

Stilled curled up around me, he moved down. He had his mouth at my collarbone, which he bit kind of softly. His tongue rubbed up against my skin. "I guess this is what dried cum tastes like," he said.

I was hugging him tight.

"Wow, man," I said, "I like you so much. I was liking you a lot as a friend before any of this."

"I liked you so much before any of this too," he said.

"We sound like chicks," I said.

"I know," he said, "but it feels nice, right? It feels nice to say that."

I knew how he felt. I hadn't grown up with any angst about my sexuality, true, but I also hadn't realized how much that I'd been missing. It was like he'd brought a dead nerve to life. In high school, I always thought my friends were being melodramatic or exaggerating about sex, and a couple of times I told them as much. Now I understood.

Gray light was coming through the blinds. I heard the sounds of doors closing in the hallway, male voices chattering outside. A girl laughed I was breathing through my nose, in and out, real slow. I started talking to him about this, how all of it dawned on me a couple of months ago, my first morning waking up at college when I spotted Tom. And I told him how I expected that nothing was going to come out of this for me -- that I wasn't going to get the balls to do anything, that I didn't want to wake up to turn into some swishy guy.

"Ha, you're not going to be some swishy guy," he said.

Mark's experiences hadn't been like mine. He told me about them, how he grew up the youngest of four boys in a pretty traditional family. He realized that he was gay in sixth or seventh grade but tried to avoid it. If he didn't think about it, he said, he thought that it would probably go away. He'd had girlfriends almost constantly during high school and junior high, but he said that he didn't like doing anything with them. The last girlfriend he had in high school, he went out with for two years, she'd been pressuring him to have sex for awhile, and finally he did. By then he was positive he liked guys, but he did it with her because it seemed weird not to, and he didn't want any rumors to start. He'd been a good varsity pitcher (second-team, all-conference!) and a second-string quarterback (not so great -- he mostly handed the ball to the tailback during garbage time when his team was ahead, and senior year threw three interceptions but only 10 completions) but in a way all of that was just part of his cover story.

"And it was like I knew," he said, "I was positive sometime in tenth grade. I had this huge crush on my best friend, jerked off thinking about him almost every night, but I never ever acted on it, wouldn't even think about doing that. It was horrible. My parents, they're not crazy Christians or anything, but they're very traditional, liberal Presbytarians, go to church every Sunday. I mean, they vote Democratic and everything," he said, "but it's one thing to be cool with gays in the abstract and another to have your youngest son like cock. Shit, I mean, my oldest brother graduated from the Naval Academy. By 11th grade I was just counting down the days until I left for college, so I could get away from all of that. That's part of why I came to this school in the first place, because it's so progressive, right? And then I get stuck rooming with, like, one of the 10 Republicans on campus. Then I started hanging out with you and Tom and all of your friends in your dorm, and I thought that it was going to be high school all over again, where I was getting crushes on these great guys who were totally unattainable because they're completely straight, and I wasn't going to come out to any of you because I didn't want you to treat me any differently."

"So what, like, prompted you to make your big move last night?" I asked.

"Uh, well," he paused, and his voice quavered a little, "I guess for one, I thought that you were hot and totally nice. I figured that if my knee kind of went against yours, you could back off and I'd just be, 'Sorry man, wasn't paying attention,' and you wouldn't think anything of it. I mean, it wasn't a big act of courage or anything, but even before I did it, I decided that I needed to finally have the balls to at least make an effort."

"Wow," I said, "am I ever lucky that you did that."

It was those words, it was like a whole world of relief for him. His eyes were closed. He made these three or four short little laughs. His body had me completely hard again. I was pushing my boner up into his ribs. He put his hand on it. The angle of my dickhead and the feel of his stomach was perfect, better than a handjob, and sure, waking up like that, his breath was a little stale, but that was even hotter in a way. He put his face down, breathing hot on my chest, stretching out his upper lip as he moved down. At first I was disappointed because the old position felt so great, but then he moved his face toward my dick. He licked it at the tip, holding it carefully with one hand while the other was at my face, feeling out my chin like he was blind. I took his index finger and put it in my mouth while he wrapped the tip of my dick with his lips.

I was moving my hands through his mussed-up hair. "Dude, you don't have to go down on me if it'll weird you out later," I said.

He pulled back, his face serious, staring at my thick, six-inch boner, completely preoccupied. "You have no idea how long I've wanted to try this," he said. The covers were off and he was kneeled down. His pale, perfect butt was arched into the air as he slipped half the length of my cock into his mouth. My breathing got wobbly. He moved his tongue around the tip of my dick, slipping it into the slit of my cock. He angled his head and rubbed my dick against the inside of his cheek, getting into this nice rhythm. I looked down, watching his face at my dick. He took his finger out of my mouth and put his hand on my chest. I held onto it tight. His other hand, he used to guide my dick through his mouth. I was gasping, lifting my hips off the futon a little. He looked up toward me, my dick in his mouth, like he wanted to see how I was reacting. I gave him a thumbs up and put my hand down to his head.

It felt and looked great, seeing his hot mouth on my rod, his ass up in the air a little, and then moved down, his dick pressed against my leg. He slowly slid my dick against his inner cheek, pressing it hard enough that there was a lot of tension. The middle of my shaft slid against his white teeth. I slowly moved my hips up and down, essentially face-fucking him. Every nerve in my body felt concentrated in the tip of my cock. My face and my back were sweating. I could tell that his chest was sweating. The stuffy room smelled like dude-funk. Mark let my cock out of his mouth for a second, breathing heavy, then took it back in, trying to take in as much as possible. I let out a loud, long groan and a bolt of energy ran down my spine. My whole back arched up. Mark grabbed onto my sweaty ass and held it. I told him that I was gonna cum and maybe he should pull out -- he groaned out a "nuh uh" with my dick in his mouth. I tried to pull it out but Mark pressed down on my hips and planted them to the futon mattress.

My hips gyrated and thrust up a little. "Aw, fuck man!" I said loudly. I blew my wad; I felt the jizz hit the roof of his mouth. He made a small gag and pulled back so that only the tip of my head was in the roof of my mouth.

Shit, dude -- Mark had just swallowed my cum.

He was running his tongue around the tip of my dick, which had never felt so stimulated and sensitive. It all felt so good that it freaked me out a little. I was light in the head. I let out a long moan that turned into a laugh. He took his lips off my dick, and it made a smooching sound.

He coughed a little. We were both out of breath. "Hell, man," I said, "you didn't have to do that for me."

"I did it for me too," he said, making eye contact, and then staring back down at my dick. He got back up, standing on his knees. His dick was at full mast. Breathing hard, his stomach moved in and out a little, his smooth symmetrical six-inch rod pushing in and out too. He stared down at it. "Don't get me wrong," he said, "I wasn't going to do that for just anybody. You seem like a good bet." He stared down at himself and tugged at his cock. "We shot off so much last night that it seemed a little demystified. You didn't cum as much as I expected. Maybe you were still spent."

Without even thinking, I surprised us both and lunged at him. I wrapped my arms around his lower waist, just above his ass. I plunged his cock into my mouth and buried my face in his pubes. I'd never understood the appeal before now. "Jon fuckin' McCreary!" Mark Claremont shouted out -- almost whooped -- his voice loud enough that someone in the hall could have heard. Tasting out his cockhead, it felt more comfortable and confident than when I'd tested this out the night before. The taste was faintly salty, probably dried residue from last night's charges. The tip of his dick at my lips and my tongue, it felt so soft and comfortable. I know he didn't like it, but I moved my finger down toward his asscrack, just enough to feel out the thin blond hairs that ran along it. He made masculine little squeak. I took his cock in deeper, so that half of his shaft was in my mouth, hitting the roof. I tried to imitate his moves, angling his head so that it rubbed the interior of my cheek. My jaw muscles hurt, like getting a too-big jawbreaker at the grocery store when I was a kid. The blond hair of his swinging balls traced against my chin. My thumbs and index fingers were at a diamond around my mouth, with my other fingers in his pubes and my thumbs at his nuts. He made an abrupt hip gesture and most of his cock was in my mouth now -- I felt the tip hit my throat and the shaft go against my teeth. I suppressed a gag reflex and felt the curls of his pubes tickle the lower interior of my nostrils. Now I was fully hard again, too. If I moved my hands down I would have gotten off again. The appeal was all clear.

I slid his dick out of my mouth for a second. "Tell me when you're going to cum," I said, "if you cum in my mouth I'm going to freak out." "Shit Jon," he said, "I'm gonna cum any second, I'm just holding off because it feels so fucking good." I told him to give me another thirty seconds, and then took him back in, working the round helmet-headed tip with my lips and tongue, taking him in deep again. He was moving his hips in a little circle so that his balls swung side-to-side. I spread my hands over his stomach and then gripped his ass hard. He did a sudden forward thrust and told me to pull out.

I did just it just in time. My face was an inch away when a small sprout of splooge shot out. It was a perfect view, just a small arc. A small stream of it landed on my neck and chest. Mark pumped his dick, and I had a close-up view as a little more squeezed out, going down his fingers, streaking down the length of his dick, a couple of drips dropping onto the futon covering. He leaned in, dropping down on me face forward. I squirmed out from under him. He was face-down on the futon, his head sideways. I was completely turned on -- every inch of me was turned on and electric. One of Mark's pubes was in my mouth; I left it there on my tongue. I still had a little juice in me and it didn't take much. I was over him on my knees, positioned so that I was just above his ass, staring down at it as I gave myself three or four hard tugs. "Awww, shit, man," I said, as I had my fourth orgasm in about seven hours, just a little bit of splooge jumping out, landing on his lower back. It felt like the blood rushed out of my head, the way it does when you pull to a stop after a long run and you feel faintly lightheaded.

"Final score," Mark said, "is Jon 4, Mark 3."

I landed on top of him. My dick was finally softening. It was between his asscheeks. I kissed the back of his neck.

"Mwehhh," Mark said, "this isn't very comfortable."

"Yeah, but it feels nice," I said.

"Let me roll over," he said, so I relented, holding myself up in kind of a push-up position while he rolled over and we were face-to-face again. He put his arms around my shoulders and gave a long slow kiss. Our mouths were a little dry. I felt dehydrated.

He broke off, laughing. "Is that one of my pubes in your mouth?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's, like, a souvenir." I paused. "Why, is that my cum on your breath?"

"It, like, fights cavities," Mark said.

"Mine has that power," I said.

It was almost impossible to pull myself off of him that morning. We dozed off for a few minutes, and then it was 10 a.m., and I suddenly got paranoid that his roommate was going to walk in any second. I threw on my clothes and studied myself in his mirror. My hair was a mess, and a little Mark residue was visible on my neck. He stood behind me in his boxers with his arms around my shoulder while I studied myself in the mirror. I licked my fingers and rubbed it against the streak on my neck to wash it off, and smoothed out my hair. It wasn't great but it was enough to be presentable on my walk across campus.

We had another long kiss before I walked out -- me fully dressed with my backpack, Mark just in his boxers, looking great. "We're going to have to do this again," Mark said.

"Yeah, like, tonight," I said, and then broke into kind of a cold sweat, "except we're going to have to figure out our roommate situations."

"Mine just sucks," he said, before he planted another kiss on my mouth. We were both pretty hard again. I thought about dropping my backpack and going for another round, but we had to break it sometime. Instead I reached down into his boxers and gave it a few nice strokes. We stood like that making out for a few minutes more. Mark slipped his boxers down to around his knees while I stayed fully dressed. Our foreheads leaned heavy against each other as I looked down and surveyed the length of his body. I gave him a long hug and said that I'd see him in Econ lecture that afternoon.

And so I did see him in Econ lecture, and I saw him all the time.

It was perfect and terrible all at once. After a lifetime of being functionally asexual, I was aroused all the time. All I thought about was that night with him. I'd see him in our Econ lecture. We'd sit next to each other and would find a way that, every five minutes, our legs would brush. Every time it happened, it put me over the top. The prof talked about antitrust theories but all I could think about was Mark and my hard-on. We'd walk out together afterward. Sometimes we'd get coffee or something to eat, and sometimes we'd just walk around for awhile, talking about whatever.

Tom didn't suspect a thing. After my night with Mark, I came home and Tom was away for an English Lit lecture. I was sound asleep when he walked in, all full of bravado and pride on my behalf.

"Who was the unlucky girl?" he asked. "I thought you were just studying with Claremont?"

Yeah yeah, I said, I was, and then this girl he was friends with showed up and she had rum in her dorm room, so the three of us went there, and a couple of her friends showed up late, and one thing led to another so I shacked up with this sophomore from L.A., I lied.

"Was she hot or were you wasted?" Tom asked.

I sort of stammered, and my lies, while necessary, felt horrible. "She gave me the best blowjob I ever had," I said, "and sometimes that's enough. But yeah, she was hot. I think she had fake tits. I've never seen those before."

Tom and Mark got along very well -- like I said, Mark had folded into our steadily tightening group of friends at least a month before he and I figured things out. So it was natural enough when he started showing up and hanging out. And a lot of times, that was enough. Yeah, Mark made me totally hot, but it was good just to have him around, even if we didn't have the chance to do anything.

I mean, more than two weeks went by after that night, and we didn't do anything. We talked about it, yeah.

There was an unusually warm day in early November. We left our discussion section, grabbed some coffee, and sat out on the grass by the library. A lot of people were out. Some hippies played hackysack by the library steps and frat guys flirted with their girls. We laid down in the grass next to each other, but not too close that we looked gay. Mark was wearing sunglasses and with his arms outstretched behind his neck, his shirt lifted enough that I could see the skin above his jeans.

"You know," I said, "that was kind of the most fun I've ever had. With you, that night."

His sunglasses made it hard for me to read his face. "I know dude," he said. "I think about it all the time. It's driving me crazy."

"Like, your roommate doesn't leave town for the weekend?" I said.

"My roommate doesn't even have friends," Mark laughed. "What about Tom? He's never out?"

"Not for the whole night," I said. Tom had just started dating a girl in the dorm next door. It seemed like it might have potential.

"It's just, like, making me a little nuts," he said, "to finally have this and not be able to do anything about it." He moved so that he wasn't on his back, he was on his side, looking at me. "Like, you walk into the room and I get a little nuts, man. I don't mean in a stalker way, just in a good way."

"I know man," I said, all kinds of thoughts rushing through my head. "You have the same effect."

At some point I was going to have to tell Tom. There was no way around it. Tom and Mark were my two best friends at school. There had been a lot of stuff I haven't been talking about because I know why you guys are reading this, and getting too bogged down in the details -- about how Tom had been thinking about rushing a frat but didn't because he wanted to get a place next year with me and our friend Greg down the hall, and about all the nights out beering and chopping it up, and all the good shit that happens when you hang out with your friends and one thing leads to another and then it's 4:30 in the morning on a Saturday and you're ordering breakfast at an all-night diner and then sleep in until the afternoon and just hang out watching football, that stuff, the normal stuff that makes life good even if it doesn't get your rocks off -- getting bogged down in thosekinds of details, it's the stuff that makes for a great life but not a good sex story.

Mark glanced at his watch. "My roommate's got a math class in a half hour. We could go over to my room. Dumbass didn't notice how badly we trashed his futon, but it was nasty so I bought him a new cover for it."

We were in public but I couldn't help it, so I just reached over and touched the crook of Mark's elbow for just a second. He smiled big behind his sunglasses, his dimples chiseled in.

When we got into his empty dorm room we were manic. We started going at it right away. We kissed so hard that it was almost violent. I'd try to get leverage to unbutton my shirt and Mark wouldn't budge, refusing to take his lips and his tongue away from my mouth. I told him to turn up the stereo so that any noise would be covered up, so he plugged in a Beastie Boys CD -- something his roommate hated -- and turned it up loud. It gave me enough time to kick off my shoes, rip off my jeans and boxers, and get my shirt half-unbuttoned -- naked from the waist down. Mark liked the idea. He kicked his shoes off, tore off his khakis and his boxers at once, and kicked them across the room. There was the dick that I'd been missing so much, sticking out from his dark-gray T-shirt with the name of our college on it. We grabbed onto his each other hard, making out so hard that our kisses sounded like suctions and movie smacks, his tongue pressing up hard against mine. The first time we'd been so slow and gentle, but now time was of the essence. We leaned against each other hard, like it was a rugby scrum, and when we came up for air, we were just there standing, foreheads pressed hard against each other, staring down at each other's boners.

"Oh, fuck it," I said, and grabbed his shirt by the back of the neck, lifting it off him in one pull. He was totally naked and still beautiful. If he looked even better to me than before, it was because I was more comfortable this time. He carefully unbuttoned my shirt while we made out, going at it a little more gently, giving our tongues the chance to feel each other out again. My shirt slipped off and we held each other at arm's length. I stared back down at the blond hair under his navel, the alert hard-on, his quads and thigh muscles and the way that a blue vein was visible running from his inner thigh up to his hip. I looked down at myself, staring down at my heavy-breathing chest and my boner that seemed to be swinging slightly even though I stood still. It seemed like my own body had never looked better, too.

We kind of jumped into each other and crashed down on the futon, hitting it so hard that it made a cracking sound. (That poor fucking futon, it already had suffered enough for our love.)

"Fuck man," he said, pausing, then sliding his tongue softly into my mouth, "I'm gonna (kiss) cum (kiss) right now (kiss) I get home (kiss) and beat off to you (kiss) so bad."

"Aw, Mark," I said, "you (kiss) make me (kiss) so horny (kiss) I jerk off (kiss) like four (kiss) times (kiss) a (kiss) day (kiss) and it's all (kiss) you man." We kissed long, smooth, his mouth felt and tasted so good. I held his face back from mine so we could look at each other. "When you were over a couple days ago, when we were on PlayStation with Tom and Greg. How I got up to go to the bathroom and was gone for five minutes -- I just went into a stall and beat off to you," I said. "That was all. That's the truth." I reached down and pulled at his cock. "I thought you'd like to know."

His hands were moving all over me while we talked. "I haven't stopped jerking off or thinking about it in the last two weeks," he said. "It can't go this long again."

It was a slow kiss at first and then it fired up, like we were almost biting at each other. I was on my back, he was on top of me, our hips kept pressing our cocks against each other. Mark just held them both tight in a fist while my hand was at his ass. He whimpered as we kissed when he shot his wad already, we hadn't been naked together for even five minutes, and he shot off, and the feel of that again, his hot splooge back all over my stomach, plus knowing how horny we got each other, I shuddered and shot too.

We still had 50 minutes until his roommate's class was out.

"It's not as fun on a deadline," he said.

"Much better sleeping over," I said.

"Way better," he agreed. "This is good too though."

"Pretty fucking good, yeah."

"I'm going to go down on you again."

"Fuck yes you should. But, like," I said.

"What?" he said.

"Put your legs by my head." I knew that he'd gone to swim laps before Econ section so everything was clean. "Just, like, so your cock is by my face."

"Ha," he said, "like sixty-nine. Goddamn, you got kinky fast."

"It's not kinky," I said, "it's just hot."

"It feels, like, vulnerable," he said, but he started to push himself off of me. "Like, you're going to see my asshole."

"True," I said, "but we're going to see them eventually, and yours is hotter than mine."

"Yeah, I don't know about that," he said.

"Dude, you're fucking beautiful," I said.

"You're no slouch," he said.

"Just, like, try it," I said, because I knew he wanted to, it was just one of those things, and we said a lot of those things for awhile, some up-front precautions to insure against the vulnerability and the newness of it.

He made a toothy smile, kissed me, and shrugged. He pushed himself up off of me and stood up, studying himself and his body, like he wanted to make sure that it was up to snuff. I was reclined back on the futon with my hands behind my head, naked and uncovered, hard-on standing out and posed in full porn-star glory. Again, our bellies were slicked by our mutual semen.

I was an inch or two taller than Mark, but our torsos were about the same length. At first he laid down next to me, like we were measuring it out, with his face adjacent to my hard-on and his ass next to my head. Yeah, it would work okay. He gave me a leery look and pressed his face against my hip, kissing it a little.

Then he pushed up and assumed the position. First he started working over my dick with his mouth, but then moved down to my balls. I felt his tongue on my ballsack, and then his mouth around it. I tensed -- if he was going to feel vulnerable, he was going to make me feel vulnerable too, which made me feel that much hotter and that much closer to him. He inched closer so that his hip was next to my head. I reached over for his leg and pulled it over. My cock was in his mouth and I was in love with the feeling of it, but I was also pulled in by his body and wanted more of it. His ass was right next to my head. I put my lips on the side of his buttock and then pulled his leg over at the knee. He gave token resistance, and then relented and shifted. Any hesitation was betrayed by his boner. Straddled low over my head, the back of his balls hit my nose, smelling like chlorine with sweat and soap. I had a view of the spread of blond hair that ran between his balls and his asshole, and then with his legs spread, to his asshole itself, which was pink and tight, shielded on either side by his blond hair. He let out a low moan and took his dick off my mouth.

"Yeah, how's that view?" he said, somewhere between joking and defensive.

I'm the cleanest guy in the world. It never occurred to me that I'd be interested in anybody's asshole in any respect. The idea sounded nasty. But seeing all of Mark, I loved it. "It's sort of great," I said, my voice shaky.

I had one hand on his dick as his balls flopped on my face. I wanted to take it in my mouth but the angle was difficult. My hands moved over his ass. I pulled him toward me a little so that I could take one of his balls into my mouth. He squirmed. I could tell that he felt vulnerable, but every time one of our bodies tensed it relaxed a little and then felt that much more comfortable. I pulled on his legs, adjusting him so that his balls were at my forehead. I licked the palm of my hand and started stroking at his cock. Even in that position, his stomach didn't sag down. I saw it move in and out as he breathed heavy, with the shadowy view of his chin and neck and his mouth working down my cock. I was less focused on the way that he was blowing me than I was on his body -- the way his balls hung low and how there's that kind of tendon-like webbing that extends down the length of a guy's balls, and the tiny red blood vessels that I could see on the skin of his scrotum. I took in the short curled dark-blond hair that ran thick between his legs, the smell of it, how it felt to push my fingers soft against it. I never thought that I'd be so interested in another person's body this way, or that I could feel so close to it. I licked the palm of my hand again, and kept it moving slowly, up and down his cock. When I pushed it back his balls pressed back against my face a little.

I was so preoccupied by his body that I didn't tell him that I was about to cum. I'm not even sure that it was his blowjob that did it to me, just the feel and sight of him so up-close. But when I jizzed he didn't miss a beat, just clenched my calf muscle (which is big) tight, and let out a kind of groan. I could feel his throat constrict as he swallowed it. He didn't take his mouth off my cock, just kept it going, his hips rocking back and forth. He was about to jizz too (we were never more than 60 seconds apart, it seems like it was an unwritten rule of etiquette) and I felt the splooge rush through his cock and then drop down on me.

As soon as he came, Mark dropped down on me. The position worked out strangely. His taint was at my mouth, and my cock was still in his. I couldn't see much because my eyes were buried between his legs. We stayed like that for a couple of minutes, no movement, his mouth on my dick, his balls at my mouth and his hair at my nose, just feeling it. I moved my hand up to his ass, feeling out his thin hair, and then pressed a finger gently against his asshole. Mark tensed and kind of bounced up. He slid himself away toward my face and flipped around, laying next to me.

"That last move wasn't too fair," he said. "I think that you'll probably pay for that."

"Ha, pay how?" I said.

"When the time comes I'm not going to be the first one to take it up the ass," he said.

"I kind of figured we'd have to do rock-paper-scissors," I said.

"Remember who swallows for you," he said.

"Only because you insist on it," I said. "Not that it isn't thoughtful."

"Wait, weren't you a receiver in high school? Wasn't I a pitcher on the baseball team?" Mark said. "Huh, that kind of adds up, right?"

"Different sports," I said. "No wonder you were a bad quarterback." I hugged him around the shoulders and kissed him. He was flushed and sweaty. I could taste the salt on his upper lip. "Well, we don't have to work that out for a long time. No rush."

He moaned in agreement when he kissed me. He said that it was nice just being able to do anything. "We're going to have to kick out your roommate for a night again," I said. He agreed. We had maybe twenty more minutes before his roommate's class got out. We spent the next fifteen minutes or so lying next to each other and making out with our hands running up and down each other's bodies.

He was wearing black windpants, a sweatshirt with our school's name on it, and a black knit cap. His cheeks were rosy. It was Sunday in November, cold enough that you could see your breath. The leaves were off the trees. Mark was quarterback for the other team. I knew that he hadn't been good in high school varsity, but in our dorm pick-up games he was kind of a stud. Their center hiked the ball to him and he moved back, looking poised and confident, like he was a real quarterback who knew what he was doing.

I was supposed to play cornerback when we were on defense. Watching Mark distracted me. I was supposed to cover Greg, but he got a good jump on me. Greg had been a pretty decent basketball player in high school. He had an inch on me. I think Mark liked fucking with me, because at least a third of his plays that game had been passes to Greg. Mark's throw to him was decent, but Greg wasn't wearing gloves and the air was cold. The football bounced out of Greg's grip.

"Stonehands!" Mark yelled at him from upfield.

"Hey," Tom said, "I don't know what was uglier -- Stonehands, or McCreary's bullshit coverage!"

I shook it off. I'd dropped a few passes myself that game, but caught a few short tosses and a couple of longer ones, including one that I took in for a touchdown. Not that it mattered much -- there were just a dozen of us out on the field on a Sunday, fucking around, not caring too much about what happened. Melissa and Susan (you might remember them as the girls that Tom and I hooked up with the first night at school) had come down and were playing. No one took it seriously.

After awhile we broke up the game and went back into the dorm. Greg and his roommate Luke had everybody in their room to watch the Cowboys-Redskins game. Tom and another guy from our hall decided they were going to scout off campus to see if some senior would buy beers on our behalf. I hung out in their room for awhile, sitting on the floor next to Mark and talking smack. Even with the door ajar and the window cracked, the room was stuffy. I got up to go to my room and change out of my bulky sweatshirt.

I wasn't in my room for a few seconds when there was a knock. It was Mark. He closed the door. I was already out of my sweatshirt and my T-shirt was sweaty. He gave me a long kiss, slow at first, just on the lips, and then he moved his tongue in, sliding it up against mine. He reached a hand up into my sweatshirt and rubbed it against my slightly sweaty chest. He pressed his face harder against mine. Being a Sunday, neither of us had shaved. Our chins scraped against each other. Both of us were off balance. We crashed backward into my lower bunk. We were both hard, dry-humping, me in my grass-stained jeans and Mark in his windpants. This went on for a couple of minutes. I was holding him tight when I said that we can't do this because Tom is going to be back any minute.

"I know," he said. "I just wanted to do that."

"You looked pretty hot out there today," I said.

"You looked pretty hot watching me," he said.

"We need to study Econ later tonight," I said. "That's not a euphemism. I really need to study."

"I know," he said. "We'll go over that stupid problem set. I'll get you straightened out."

He pushed off me, his boner cleanly visible through his wind pants. He leaned against the door and watched me peel off my T-shirt and throw on a button-down. He pulled out the elastic waist of his pants and his boxer-briefs and dropped them down below his hips, showing off his half-mast dick. "Don't do that," I said, laughing, "don't do that now, we can't get set off. It's tough enough being in there with you next to me as it is."

He smiled big. We liked being able to get that reaction out of each other.

It turned out that the last girl I ever hooked up with was the first one to figure out that I was gay.

For awhile after school started Melissa had flirted with me, but it was pretty benign. I hadn't been focused on how persistent she was in her overtures. While she was trying to woo me, I was in my first weeks of figuring out that I liked guys, and Mark Claremont was just a really nice dude in my Econ class who started hanging out on the weekends.

Melissa and I had sort of become buddies. We had different classes on similar schedules, so most mornings I had breakfast with her in the dorm cafeteria, the two of us sitting there bleary with coffee while we flipped through the student newspaper and talked about the people in the dorm. On nights when I had dinner in the cafeteria, she came along with me, Tom, Greg and a couple guys from our floor. She was wicked-sarcastic and pretty profane, not prone to pulling punches.

One night she called me and said that she needed to study. "Let's go get coffee and read," she said. "I need to stay up until, like, three to get through my assignment."

We went to the same coffeehouse where Mark and I went to study. She liked to smoke, so we went upstairs, where there was a smoking room.

"So what's up McCreary," she said. "Tell me about your lovelife. What's going on. It's disturbingly quiet. Everyone else is hooking up and you're just hitting the books."

"Yeah, don't you have reading to do?" I said.

"Don't avoid my question."

"I'm not, I'm just trying to keep you on track. You need to finish Invisible Man."

"Sketchy, sketchy," she said. "Tom says you're a secret player. Something about some girl that you met through Claremont, with fake boobs."

I crinkled my nose. "No." I sniffed. "When did Tom become such a gossip?"

"When did you become such a prude?" she said. "At first you were all, 'Whoah, here are my hips! Come out on the dance floor and let me make out with you!' And now you're all getting the vapors and issuing sweeping denials."

"This isn't going to help you get an A," I said.

"Wait, I'm not coming onto you," she said. "You're hot but you're not my type. Too earnest. I'd steamroll you. I'm just concerned about your welfare."

"What if the question on your quiz tomorrow is, what's the name of the main character in *Invisible Man? *And then you won't know because you didn't finish the book, because you were too busy worrying about me."

"Very funny," she said. She turned down to her book and pretended to read for a couple of minutes. "So there's no girl in your life?"

"Nah," I said.

"What about guys? No guy?"

Oh fuck, I could feel myself blush. I crinkled my nose and snorted. "No."

"Wait, what was that?"

"Uh, that was a no."

"That was a weak-assed no. Say it again."

"No. No, there is definitely no boy, I can guarantee that."

"That," she said, "was so sketchy. And look at you blush."

Not only was I blushing, but I was starting to sweat. I felt my heart race. Studious, I stared down at my notes. I wasn't going to look at her face. That decision didn't help any. She was staring me down, I could tell. She snorted and broke out into a little laugh. She kicked me under the table. "Look at me," she said.

I put my pen down and looked up at her, giving her a face that was intended to tell her to stop being ridiculous. She said, "Oh. My. God. I was kidding before but now I'm totally not kidding." She laughed for a few more seconds and then stopped. She put her hand on my arm. "Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I had no idea. I never would have been so jokey if I thought that it was true." She reached into her purse and pulled out a cigarette, which she lit. "Wow," she said, exhaling smoke sideways, "just, wow."

And it's true, I'm a terrible liar. In my parents' house you couldn't get away with anything, so there was no point in trying to lie, really. My parents could figure out the answer before I could spit out a complete sentence. I never had the practice. And it wasn't like I'd grown up with this. I'm sure that if Mark had been faced with this line of questioning he would have handled it smoothly. But I'd never been called out on it. I never even expected the question, not even in jest.

"Melissa," I said, "don't. Just don't. I know you're joking around."

"Am I?" she said. "Really? So this is just joking around? You're not into boys?"

"No, of course not."

It must have been something in my face or the tenor of my voice, but whatever it was, every time I denied it she believed me that much less. "So wait," she said. "If I'm understanding you correctly, what you're telling me is, is that you are definitely not gay, and definitely not into guys. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"Okay, so tell me how much you like girls."

"I really like girls a lot," I said. And at this point, there really was no point. When I said, "I mean, I love pussy," my delivery sounded so sarcastic that it made her laugh.

This was how I started to tell her. I didn't tell her about Mark. I only told her that it all hit me just after school started. She was funny about it, but not in a way that was uncomfortable. She said that she never would have guessed, which is the reaction that I wanted to hear.

"Just, don't fuck around with this," I said. "Don't drop any hints. Don't tell Tom or anybody."

"Don't sweat that," she said. "I'm not going to tell. I kind of like acting like a bitch but I'm not going to fuck up your life for shits and giggles."

"I just need to think it through and, like, tell Tom and tell people, the way that I need to tell them," I said.

She lit a cigarette. "Yeah, wow, I literally never would have guessed it," she said. "I might have guessed it about Tom, just because he's so progressive and has that weird poetry thing. You're such a man's man."

"An extra man's man," I said.

Tom was a planner. Barely a month into school, he started talking about next year's living situation. He wanted to rent a house off campus, one of the big two- or three-story places. One afternoon we walked around taking notes on houses and writing down addresses. Tom decided early on that he wanted to live with me and our friend Greg down the hall -- a mellow, pot-headed doctor's kid from Santa Monica who was becoming a fixture. Greg and I both were in on the idea, but Tom wanted six or seven people. He was always dropping names and trying to mix and match personalities, like he was a social chemist.

We were playing beer pong in the basement of an off-campus house party -- me, Tom, Greg and Mark. It was hosted by some seniors on Greg's IM soccer team. We'd gotten drunk fast. The basement smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke. Tom rambled about the comparative hotness of girls in the dorm and Mark complained bitterly about his roommate. These topics were their favorites.

"Oh, shit, Claremont," Tom said, "I think you should be living with us next year."

"Oh yeah?" Mark said.

"Hell yeah," Tom said. He got animated and pitched his plans for house parties and barbecues in the backyard. Tom pointed out to Mark that he hated his roommate and spent most of his social time hanging out with us. Everybody liked him, Tom said, and it made so much sense that he couldn't believe he hadn't pushed for it before.

Mark gave me brief glances throughout Tom's pitch. Tom hadn't pre-cleared this with me. This idea could force me and Mark both to come clean. I was pretty drunk during the conversation. Like Tom, I tend to be an enthusiastic drunk.

"Hey, Jon, tell Mark that he should live with us," Tom said to me.

"Yeah, Mark, come fucking live with us," I said.

Tom wanted to hear an excited "Hell yes," and I guess that I did too, but Mark held off. "It sounds fucking awesome," Mark said. He said that he'd need to talk to his parents about the expense of it. Tom wasn't going to take no for an answer -- it'll end up being way cheaper than the dorms, he said.

"Yeah, yeah," Mark said, after Tom ran through the numbers. "You're totally right. So yeah, what the fuck? I'm in for next year."

I could tell by his face what Mark confirmed later that night -- that he could always weasel his way out of it if he needed to. He was scared of us living together with a bunch of other people. There would be pretty much no way for us to fool around on the sly with four or five housemates nearby.

He pulled me outside, into the backyard of the house party, to talk about this. We were both pretty wasted, and Mark was more stressed than I'd seen him before. It was a chilly night and we were both in jackets. Mark was running at the mouth, talking about all the ways that this was a bad idea.

"Aw, shut up dude!" I yelled, grabbing him affectionately by the collar of his jacket and shaking him gently. "It'll be awesome." And I moved forward and kissed him, in that empty backyard. I jumped up and looked around, scared that someone else was around (they weren't) and I pulled him by the coat, taking him farther back in the yard, where I kissed him hard again with our beer breaths. He relented, throwing an arm around my neck, pushing the palm of his hand against my abrupt hard-on.

"Tom's the best roommate," I said, pulling back while Mark kissed at my neck. "I promise. It'll all be great."

"Mweh," he moaned with his nose on my chin, "we can't do anything here but I'm hammered and I really want to do something. I think maybe I really should be living with you guys after all probably."

I said that we'll get our time, but not right now, and that we should go back inside and school some more motherfuckers at beer pong.

Then it happened that Tom would be leaving early for Thanksgiving. His grandparents were flying in from Florida to his parents' house. His parents were going to drive up on Saturday to pick him up and bring him home for the full week. I wouldn't be flying home to Minneapolis until Wednesday morning, and Mark was leaving early Wednesday afternoon.

This gave us a four-night opening with my room available. I waited until Tom walked out of our room to call Mark and tell him.

"Hey," I said to Tom when he came back, "since you'll be out, do you care if Claremont crashes here? He's dying to get away from his roommate for a few days."

"Sure dude, totally fine," Tom said. He was so unsuspecting that it killed me a little. "My parents want to take us both to breakfast on Saturday when they pick me up. They've heard me talk about you."

I went to breakfast with Tom's folks that Saturday. His mom was great, and seeing his parents made me homesick. Tom's mom was an employment lawyer (that was one of the first things we talked about, what a pain in the ass it could be having lawyer-moms) and his dad was a sociology prof at a public university.

"The problem with Tom," his dad said, "is that he wants to be a ladies' man but he's a serial monogomist. He likes all the girls and then he finds one and gets grandiose ideas, and then everything falls apart. It's been like that since sixth grade."

"You see, what he's doing right now is trying to embarrass me in front of you," Tom said, turning to me. "It's been like that since sixth grade."

His dad smiled, smug and satisfied. "It was a lot more fun when I could do it successfully," he said. "It's less fun now that you're more mature."

"More mature than you," Tom told his dad.

"We're just glad that Tom ended up with a roommate who can appreciate his quirks," his mom said. "That was something that we worried about. Less for Tom's sake than for whoever ended up having to live with him."

"Nah, we get along pretty well," I said, wanting to defend him from his parents' barbs, entertaining as they were. "Tom comes up with a plan and the rest of us go along with him. It's good. He keeps things organized."

Over coffee and pancakes, the banter mellowed that morning. Tom and his parents missed each other and their heckling was how they showed it. It was kind of sweet, and seeing him with his parents made me kind of love him -- not in a gay way or anything, just as a friend and a person. Sometimes you see people with their parents and that's how the whole picture comes into view.

"Tom says that you're a pretty serious student," his mom said. "He said that you hit the books a lot."

"Econ, yeah," I said. I told them that I came in thinking I'd be an econ major, but that the subject wasn't agreeing with me.

"And you're not seeing anybody right now, right?" his mom said, being a lawyer.

"Nah, nah," I said, and could tell that I blushed slightly. "Nothing like that for now."

Breakfast went on for 90 minutes or so. His mom hugged me at the end. She said that if there was snow in Minneapolis or my flight got screwed up, to call Tom and come to their house for Thanksgiving. Tom gave me a dude-hug and said Happy Thanksgiving. It made me kind of sad, to my surprise, seeing them all go, and it made me feel a little guilty that I'd never told him about Mark.

Mark was going to wait until I called to come over. I got back to the room and then went out for a long run, eight miles, going the perimeter of campus and then through the student neighborhoods, then out to the wealthy residential neighborhoods before circling back and getting back to the dorm. I peeled off my sweat-soaked shirt and walked into the showers in my basketball shorts and boxer briefs.

We didn't have gang showers or anything. The showerroom was small, with three private stalls on each side, for the 30 guys in our hall. I noticed that where a guy grew up affected his attitude about nudity. In the morning I tended to leave my towel on a hook, go into the showers in my boxers, drop them, and then walk out naked and quickly towel off before I wrapped it around myself and went back to the room.

Guys who grew up on the West Coast seemed the most casual. They'd strip off before they got into the shower and then take their time drying off in the common area. The other guys on my hall who were from the Midwest, they were like me -- okay with being naked but not prone to linger. Guys from the Northeast were skittish: they covered up quickly and looked resentful about it. (The exception was this guy who prepped at Groton. He was an exhibitionist. He shaved naked. One time I saw him brush his teeth naked.) The Southerners, forget about it: They went to whatever lengths necessary to avoid showing a glimpse.

At 1:30 in the afternoon, I figured that I'd have the showerroom to myself, but when I walked in Greg was standing there in white briefs. Greg being from Santa Monica, he fit into my geography thesis pretty accurately. He was a bit of an exhibitionist, or at least seemed to take his sweet time whenever I saw him in the showerroom once every couple weeks. He was 6'3 and skinny, with black shaggy hair. There was black hair spread across his chest, and his ass and legs were about as hairy as mine, but it was more pronounced because his hair was black. He had a nice face, with big brown eyes and an attractive, thick-lipped smile. He was also well hung: about six inches soft, pretty thick, with a set of low-hanging balls.

I'd adopted a detached attitude about nudity in the dorm showers. I mean, my whole life, my attitude was detached, but since figuring out that I was gay, I was disciplined about not looking or letting my mind wander. It was important to me that I didn't think of these guys that way. But Greg, even if he didn't make me hot or anything, I found attractive enough that I tended to glance.

When he saw me walk in he looked up, a little startled. He said that he'd been out until 6 a.m. at a party the night before. He'd been pretty wasted and did a couple of bong hits. "Dude, I barely remember how I got home," he said. "I still feel a little fucked up even now."

He stayed in his white briefs while we made conversation, then walked over to a shower and turned it on to get the water warm. I did the same thing, dropping my towel on a hook. I took off my basketball shorts and put them on a hook, too, so that I was just in my boxer-briefs.

Greg took down his briefs with his thumbs, facing me while I talked about Tom's parents (I said that they were eccentric) and mentioned to him that Mark would be crashing in my room while Tom was gone. Greg removed his briefs kind of slowly. His long dick drooped out swinging. He picked up his briefs with his toes and kicked them up to his hands. He faced me naked, kind of laughing while I talked about Tom's dad making fun of him. I faced Greg as I took off my boxer briefs, standing naked in front of him, wrapping up conversation as the warm steam moved against my back.

There are a few reasons why Greg might have been making me horny: I'd intentionally avoided jerking off for a couple of days because I knew that I'd have a lot of time with Mark; the long run had put my body into a pretty alert state; my hormones were amped up from anticipating Mark; and Greg was pretty attractive to me in his own right. Whatever the reason, my cock came out of my boxer briefs in something approximating a semi-erection -- enough to be elongated but not really enough to notice or appear suspicious. So Greg and I stood there casually naked and face-to-face for a few seconds while I finished my recap of breakfast with Tom parents.

I was relieved to close the shower curtain, where Greg was out of eyesight and thus not able to turn me on so directly. I scrubbed myself pretty vigorously, not really sure how far Mark was going to take things. (Thinking about that, in the privacy of the shower stall, brought me to half-mast.) Greg and I chatted across the closed curtains and the showerroom, just about NFL bullshit and what classes we thought we'd be taking next semester. Greg would periodically interrupt to exclaim that he couldn't believe how fucked up he got last night.

"Fuck, McCreary, I forgot my shampoo," he said. "Let me borrow your shampoo."

I decided that I'd slide it across the floor of the showerroom, bowling-style, into his shower stall. I was going soft by then. I opened the curtain to line up my pitch. Greg had opened his curtain, planning to walk over so that he could retrieve it from me, so I got another full view of him, this time with his wet hair hanging over his forehead, and his chest hair and pubes soaped. With a bowler's posture, I slid my shampoo bottle across the floor, hitting his foot with it. I bragged that I just hit a strike. "I'm done with it for now," I said. "Just give it back to me when we're out."

I rinsed the soap off and stood under the shower for another minute or so, letting it pelt me in the face, feeling out the backs of my legs and considering how tight they felt after a run like that. I turned off the nozzle and stepped outside to dry off. About 20 seconds later Greg stepped out too, his wet, furry package flapping as he walked out to his towel and went to work drying off his hair. He said that he should start going running with me on the weekends and I said sure. I was quick drying off, just taking care of my chest and legs and wrapping the towel around myself, but Greg took his time, drying off his neck and shoulders, then taking care of his arms, chatting with me the whole time and totally unselfconscious about the fact that he was naked in front of me.

I told Greg that I'd catch him later, and walked out of the shower room with my towel tight around my waist. It was heavy enough that my semi was bound in. I got dressed and told Mark to come over.

It was the first time that we got to be alone together without serious time pressure. It had been a month since I spent the night in his room. Between hanging out between classes and on the weekends, we'd probably spent almost two hundred hours together -- but aside from that hour-long session in his dorm room and a couple of stolen moments, we hadn't had the room to do anything.

He showed up at my room with a traveler's backpack over one shoulder and a backpack of his notes and schoolbooks over the other. His cheeks were pink from the walk across campus. He put his stuff down next to Tom's desk. We put our arms around each other and kissed for a minute. His lips and his cheeks were cold. We'd both just shaved, so our faces felt smooth when they touched. He kicked off his shoes and we dropped together on my lower bunk.

And we stayed like that for awhile. (I know that's probably not what you're wanting to hear -- you wanted us to immediately go nuts together, but more action is coming, so chill.) College football was on TV and for awhile we just laid together in my bed, fully clothed, watching the game and commenting. Sometimes you lose sight that the physical stuff isn't just about sex, it's about being starved for affection, and because we had all this time open we could just do our thing and not worry about it.

We were curled up in fetal positions with Mark behind me, one arm draped over my chest and the other stretched out above my head. He held me tight against him. Turned out that he'd had a late night -- he'd been drinking with Greg and a few other guys from my dorm until around 3 a.m., when he crashed and headed home. I was rock-hard, just being next to him, so I unbuttoned my jeans and took the zipper down a little, just to give it room to breathe. Mark put his hand down there, undoing my zipper a little more, just putting his hand on top of it without trying to get me off. He sighed, sort of content. His lips were on the back of my neck. I felt myself start to doze.

I woke up sometime later. Mark was sleeping heavy. His hand was still on my boner. I put my hand on his and squeezed it. That must have waked him because he let a long sigh from his nose. He hugged me tighter.

I felt a rush of blood to my head and a burst of energy. I reached behind him and pulled at the back of his hooded sweatshirt. I untangled and turned over to face him. His eyes were closed and he had a close-lipped smile. My hard-on was peeking from the top of my rumpled-up boxers and my unbuttoned jeans. I undressed him pretty quickly. I pulled off his hooded sweatshirt. His blue eyes flashed open and he lifted his arms to cooperate. He wasn't sure why I came to life so suddenly, but he seemed to like it and was going to let me do what I wanted. He watched with his hands behind his head, showing his blond armpit hair. I undid his jeans and slipped them down with his boxers all at once. He was stretched out on my lower bunk, naked except for his white socks, his boner full up and tilted to the right. I stood up and threw off all of my clothes except for the boxers, which I left for him to peel off, because that seemed to be one of his favorite parts.

I went straight to the punchline and took his dick into my mouth. The positioning on the narrow mattress was difficult. I kneeled next to the bed, but not being able to touch more of each other, that sort of took the fun out of it. We dragged the mattress from my lower bunk and slid it to the floor with a thump.

Repositioned, it was easier. Mark stretched out, looking down at me with his head propped on a pillow. He spread his legs out so that they were on either side of my shoulder, and then moved them so that he was sort of hugging my back with his legs.

His dick seemed more awesome and interesting every time. It was so smooth and perfectly proportioned, and getting more familiar with it had made me more comfortable. I took my time working over the head of it with my mouth, holding the base of it with one hand. I ran my tongue around the circumference of it quickly. Then I focused the top of my tongue on the underside of his head, where the two halve converged just below the slit of his dick. I moved my tongue back and forth, like I was trying to sand it down, trying to push hard against it. Mark issued a low moan. He played with my hair while I worked.

I took it out and looked at the tip of it closely, slicked by my saliva, slightly pinkish and stimulated. The first time I saw it like this, I was so wound up that I didn't really get to study it. The trace outline of a blue vein ran the length, from the base to the head. His shaft had a smooth, consistent shape to it, with a nice little arch. His dickhead was fat and rounded out, a full helmet-head. His pubes were long blond curls -- he didn't clip or shave them or anything, like some of the pictures I'd seen of guys on the internet. They stretched out in the inverted triangle, going down to his inner thighs. Studying it all like that, it was a life-lesson in lust, the kind of thing that I hadn't felt before, maybe not even on that first night when we were together.

It was more than just being attracted to his body. I wanted to make him feel good. I took his cock back into my mouth, working it slow, rubbing the tip of it slowly back and forth against my inner cheek, and then picking up the pace, moving it faster. "God, Jon," he said, "that feels so great." He gasped, like he choked on himself, just breathing. "God, just keep it up man." So I did, even though my jaws were hurting from it just a little bit. I put my hand up to his lean pec, pressing against his nipple like it was a button. He held onto my hand. "Shit man," he said. I needed to give my jaw muscles a break, so I pulled back, so that just the head of his dick was in my mouth. I worked it over with my tongue some more, and then I just stopped, clenching it in my lips, trying to suck on it as hard as I could, like I was trying to create a vacuum. I took the length of it into my mouth, until I felt the tip of it hit the roof of my throat and my nose was up into his pubes. (This was maybe a key benefit to both of us having average-sized dicks.) Then I moved my mouth up and down, using the method that I'd seen from porn actresses in the movies that I saw in high school. (Believe it or not, I'd never seen a gay porno.) After a few uncomfortable gestures like that, I went back to the move he liked most, where his cockhead was rubbed hard against my inner cheek.

He'd been doing these hip thrusts for awhile, these short isometric pumps, I could see his abs tighten up when he did it. He warned me that he was going to cum. I'd decided that I was going to swallow it, not just because the idea sounded hot as hell to me for the first time ever, but because I wanted to have that inside of me. He was still holding onto my hand on his chest, so I squeezed it back, signaling that this would be okay.

He made a few more gentle thrusts and I felt Mark's jizz pump out of him, hitting the roof of my mouth and the back of my throat. Mark's cum landed on the back of my tongue. I was keeping his dick in my mouth. The sensation of it all was hot as fuck and disorienting at once -- I hadn't been ready for how big his load was. I was trying hard to swallow it all, feeling his warm spray slide down the back of my throat, the taste of it -- salty, bitter, maybe a little sweet -- about what I'd expected, albeit heavier in volume and texture than I'd anticipated. I realized that I was sweating harder than usual, enough that the hair at my neck was a little damp. With my free hand, I squeezed up the length of his shaft, clearing out whatever was left, a little more of his jizz slipping out to my tongue. This, I swallowed quickly.

"That," Mark said, while I kept my face down by his dick, playing with it a little, "was fucking awesome."

"Getting over my hang-ups, I guess," I said, trying to sound as deep-voiced and manly as possible, despite the fact that I'd just swallowed what felt like a quart of Mark's jizz.

"Maybe it's easier for me because I've spent so much time thinking about it," Mark said. "Like, this is pretty much everything I've fantasized about since I was thirteen."

"I'm glad that you found me," I said.

"Dude," he said, laughing, "don't even get me started."

I felt weird, making out with him after drinking down his cum, but he didn't show any flash of discomfort. His skin felt so hot up against me. I was still wearing my boxers. He still had his socks on. Mark clenched my ass kind of tight while we kissed. His breath tasted like wintergreen gum. He sucked hard on my lower lip. Through the fabric of my boxers, I could feel my dick against his.

The sight and feel of what I'd just done was too much. Him kissing me, his cock, just the way he smelled, I shot my wad in my boxers. Two days' worth of stored up jizz, it was a big volume. I saved it all up to get overstimulated and blow my wad in my shorts.

"Fuck man," I said. "I'm sorry." I told him that I hadn't jerked off because I wanted to shoot a big load for his entertainment. "It would've been a porn-star money shot," I bragged. I sat up, still straddling him, and looked down at my light-blue boxers. A big wet mark spread across it down the middle. Mark was laughing at me. He said that he appreciated the thought.

He reached his hand out and said, "Take them off. Give them to me."

"Ha, why?" I said, standing up, and slipping them down. My jizz was matted into my pubes. I handed him my shorts.

"I just want to look," he said. He sat up indian-style, naked and boned, and flipped them inside out. He looked down at the fly of them, at the whitish clumps congealed in the liquid. I was standing up, looking down at him. He sort of shrugged and said, nonchalant and funny, "Nice semen. Looks healthy."

"You're a freak," I said, joking. "You're all about the jizz."

"Nah," he said, "I'm just all about you."

Not to sound like a chick, but when he said stuff like that, it made my heart flutter. It just felt right. He'd put his finger onto the jizz patch of my boxers and rubbed it against his thumb. "Healthy consistency," he said.

"Aw, shut up dude," I said.

He lifted his finger up to his nose and sniffed. "Unfortunately, your jizz smells like bus exhaust, so I don't think it's unleaded."

"You're sexy even when you're being a dumbass," I said.

"Oh, shit," he said, feigning a revelation, "I'm becoming a dumbass because your cum gave me lead poisoning."

I cracked up and pinned him down on the mattress, grabbing him by the wrists and holding them against the floor. He pressed up against me with his legs. We were both totally hard, laughing. "You know," he said, "you've got a totally hot face. It's like, something about your jawline and your lips. Like, every time I see you, I just want to make out with you," he said. "That's what I think about half the time when I jerk off, just your face and how hot you are at making out."

It was enough to make me lean down and kiss him, even though I didn't need much excuse for that. My whole body tingled. I stopped pretending that I was trying to pin him and held both of his hands instead. Our kneecaps hit each other. I owned his mouth. I loved how smooth his lips felt when I kissed him. (I told him this.) I loved how his eyes got big and he kind of smirked whenever we saw each other. (I told him this.) I loved how quickly he transitioned from being smart and serious to goofy and dumb. (I told him this.) His tongue made its way into my mouth and I just kind of sucked on it, feeling it in my lips and not letting go. When I was done I kissed at his neck. I put my mouth to his ear, breathing into it, sucking soft on his earlobe and then sliding my tongue into his ear. He laughed and squirmed, like it tickled, and said, with his voice kind of shaky, "Jon, let's just say that I like you an awful lot."

"Yeah dude," I said, my mouth at his ear, kind of whispering, "I really really like you an awful awful lot."

"Well," he said, "I'd really really really like you an awful lot, even if you weren't gay, or even if you were gay and not so fucking hot."

I was pressing my cock hard against his. "You are," I said, my heart beating kind of hard as I tried to think of a way to complete the sentence, "I think," I said, trying to make my voice sound light so that it wasn't a big moment, "probably the most fun thing that ever happened to me."

"Wait, even better than that time you caught that great touchdown pass against Eden Prairie or whatever the fuck?" he said.

"Uh huh," I said, softly, because my mouth was still at his ear.

"That is some kind of huge compliment," he said,. "I'm, huh, trying to decide how far I should push what I'm saying here," he said, hugging me tight. His voice got more serious when he said, "But I think you know what I'm thinking here, and what I'd say right now if I was a chick and this was some big moment in the movie, you know, that scene in the movie, where the music gets loud and she says something bold, and then he kisses her."

My mouth was still at his ear. "I hear you," I said, my voice still soft, kind of brittle, "like, that big scene."

"That's the scene I'm talking about," he said. "I keep trying to settle myself down. Keep telling myself that it's all new and I don't know what I'm talking about, but then it all feels so damn good."

"You don't need to settle down," I said. "Don't worry. We're in the same boat."

He pulled my face down and kissed me hard. It's almost embarrassing, how words like this got me so wound up and made my cock rigid. As much fun as we were having, I was kind of tense the whole time, wondering if I was going to screw up or whether he deep down liked me as much as I was liking him. As he pulled my face down to him, the clean feel of his mouth and his lips sucking mine in, the hand he used to hold me against him, whatever twinges I'd had were all gone.

"I just want to tell you again," he said, breathing heavy, holding my head and talking low into my ear, "that I like you by fucking tons."

"I just want to tell you again," I said, holding him down tight, "that movie."

"We're going to have sex soon," he said.

"I know," I said. "Just don't get pregnant."

"But your ass is so hot," he said. "It's kind of the classic bubble butt. My ass is just a skinny guy's ass."

"No, but it's such a nice ass," I said. "It's so toned and smooth."

"Somebody's going to have to go first," he said.

"Not if it's not going to be fun," I said. "We don't need to fuck with a good thing."

"But fucking would be a good thing," Mark said, going back to kissing me. "For now let's just get off."

It didn't take much for that to happen. He licked his palm and stroked our cocks together. The other hand was at my ass. He slid his hand against it for a few seconds and then put one of his lean fingers at my asshole and pressed down a little. I've got to say, knowing that it was him -- it turned me on. The kissing was so sloppy and wet that slobber was getting all over our chins and cheeks. Mark said that we should time it to be exact. Fuck, I said, I could shoot any second. Me too, Mark said. Count of three: 1, 2, 3. Kissing hard, our chins slick with our saliva, we both came right then, right on target. For both of us it was another gusher. I felt his cum strike my stomach, hitting at the sternum. His hand pumping our cocks, I felt myself spurt one, two, three more times. I moaned into his mouth, and I liked how sometimes he smiled while we kissed. He still kept his hands on our cocks and our cocks together, and when his hand brushed my belly I could feel that it was coated with our jizz. We made a point not to stop kissing.

"Switch," Mark said. "Lie on the bottom for awhile."

When I moved to do so, cum literally dripped from our cocks and stomachs to the sheets. "You've always got to make a mess," Mark said.

He was always more comfortable lying on top, and I liked holding him there like that. I was only three inches or so taller than him, but weighed maybe 30 or 40 pounds more. It wasn't that I had any fat or was super-muscular, I just had a wider build. My shoulders and my chest were inches wider than his. My chest was bigger and my leg muscles were more pronounced. Mark had a narrow frame, but mine was more V-shaped, tightening below my ribs and staying straight and narrow to my hips. I could tell why he felt smothered when I was on top. He kissed my ears and my neck. "What are we going to do tonight when people knock on the door?" I said.

"Ignore it," Mark said.

"Yeah, but everybody knows you're crashing here for a few days. Greg is going to want to go out and drink. Melissa's going to come down to hang out and do something."

"Tomorrow's football day. We'll see them all then. We'll tell them we went to a movie tonight."

"Yeah, but then Melissa will think I dissed her by not asking her if she wanted to come along," I said.

"She'll get over it," Mark said.

"I'm telling you, Greg is going to pound on this door for, like, five minutes. He's a huge pain in the ass sometimes"

"We won't say anything. We'll just lie here."

"Greg got me a little horny in the showers this afternoon," I said. "He's kind of an exhibitionist. He just kind of hangs out naked in the showerroom, and his dick is pretty big."

"Yeah, Greg's pretty hot," Mark said. "I could see that. It might be interesting living with him."

"Not just because he likes to show his dick off, but because he's kind of nuts, yeah," I said.

"Let's not worry about everybody else right now," he said, staring me in the eyes.

And what do you want, five more pages of how hot it was to make out with him?

Because that's what we did for, like, an hour, lying on that mattress with our hard-ons next to each other and then pushing on each other, our cum keeping us slick for awhile, then getting sticky and then drying on us. It was a solid hour of fully-boned making out, breathing on each other and in each other. We'd shift positions -- lying on our sides for awhile, and then he'd move up and lie on top of me or vice versa. We didn't keep our hands off each other. One of us would hold our cocks together but we weren't really trying to get each other off just then, it was more about the closeness of it.

Then we just slept on each other for awhile. My TV was still on. The lights were off. It was dark out. Mark flipped to the end of a Michigan-Ohio State game. We lay there on my mattress, curled up, Mark's arm draped over me. I held onto his hand, playing with his fingers. After awhile he breathed slow and heavy. I could tell he was asleep. I drifted off too.

When I woke up he was slipping away from me to get dressed. He needed to walk down to the bathroom to take a piss. I kept dozing. He came back and dropped his jeans, getting back under the covers next to me in his boxers and T-shirt. He kissed my neck and my ear. I held onto his arm. He chewed gum (always with the gum) and his breath smelled sweet. I arched my back a little. He stroked around my left nipple. He was in his boxers, and his dick was pressed up against my ass. I could tell that he was in the mood to play some more, which was great by me. He was at my back and taking the lead, so I relaxed and let him do what he wanted. He was getting interested in my ass, the way he was rubbing his dick against it. He was still in his boxers and T-shirt, but he'd taken his dick out through his fly. I could feel it rub against me, against the hair in my asscrack. It was more of a turn-on than I expected, just getting touched like that in a place where I'd never been touched. He slipped his boxers down, his T-shirt still on. Our legs fit together so nicely when we were curled up like that. I kind of decided that I was going to return the favor. I reached back with my left arm, grabbing his ass behind me, pressing it against me. I think that Mark was surprised that I was going along. I reached back and slid my hand over his smooth ass, then along the crack of his ass, where he had that thin blond hair. I reached down and pressed my finger against his asshole. It felt smoother than I expected, kind of like soft leather. I pressed against it softly, and he let out a little moan. His dick was aligned with the length of my asscrack, rubbing up and down against it. I pressed just a little bit harder, not wanting to go in or anything, just to see how it felt and how he reacted. He moaned a little harder, and pressed the tip of his dick up harder, sort of against my tailbone.

"I'm pretty sure that I want to have sex with you pretty bad," Mark said, "and honestly, I don't care who's on the receiving end. I just need to be with you like that."

I was too focused and preoccupied to say much. I pressed my index finger against his asshole a little harder, just enough for the very tip of my finger to go in. I felt him tighten it up, then relax it, breathing heavy. He had his mouth on my shoulder, licking at it and pushing his teeth soft against it. Mark said quietly in my ear, "Man," he said in my ear, breathing hard, "I'd totally let your dick up there, just because it's you."

It was time to break the position and face him, take his face in again, and just see him while we said these things. His face was pink. I slipped his T-shirt off of him. We lay on our sides, nipple-to-nipple and cock-to-cock. I reached down and took our dicks into my hand together again. "Dude," I said, between kisses, "we'll do whatever you want." Kissing awhile. "You're going to fuck me, I'm going to fuck you," I said. His face, unusually serious, he looked almost driven when he leaned in to kiss me hard. "And like," I said, while he worked on my neck, "hopefully it'll be what you wanted for so long," I said, "and, like, what I never knew I wanted."

"Let's go tomorrow night," he said. "Not tonight. Tomorrow night, after football and everything." He kissed me long, breathing into each other's noses. His whole body felt tight and tense. He was kind of writhing. Every time I moved my hand he pressed tight against me and gasped, like even talking about this made his whole body hot. I moved fast, going down on him, taking his dick into my mouth, cradling his low-hanging balls in my hand. I just had the tip of his head in my mouth and was rubbing the bottom of his dickhead when he came.

His jizz went the length of my tongue and hit the roof of my mouth and the back of my throat. It fazed me less than it did the first time. It still was kind of tough to swallow it down. I tried to scrape the feel of it off with my teeth but that didn't quite work either. Mark's dick was still in my mouth and I kind of used it as a tongue cleaner, working it over. It smelled more like sweat and musk than the first time -- this seemed hotter to me.

"Dude," he said, "if you're not careful I'm going to cum again."

I took his dick out of my mouth and held onto it -- pink, shiny, hot and sticky. "Do you want to cum again? You can cum again if you want," I said. "Like, I wonder if it has vitamins and minerals." He played with my hair. "Fuck, Jon, keep doing it if you're down for it," he said. "You just feel so good, dude. It's so good being with you."

I rubbed my free hand over his stomach as I took his dick back into my mouth, leaving a finger pressed at his navel, feeling it move as he breathed in and out. My mouth already had what felt like a film of his cum in it when I went back to work on his cock. "You're so fucking great Jon," he said. "It's like I spent the last five years fantasizing that I'd be doing this with someone like you." As if I needed extra motivation. I took his cock deep into my mouth, sliding it back careful, my jaws hurting as it tipped the back of my throat. There were two or three of Mark's errant pubes in my mouth by then. I held the position, my nose buried in his blond pubes, breathing the smell of him, and then pulling back, going back to where just the tip of it was in my mouth, then moving my head to an angle, rubbing it hard against my cheek. I was on my side facing him kind of perpendicular, my hard-on on full view to him. I wanted to give it a few tugs, but didn't want to take my hands off him in order to do that. Suddenly I wanted to get him off fast -- I just wanted my full body pressed against him again, the way it was supposed to be. My jaws were hurting, rubbing his dick against the side of my mouth the way he liked. I wrapped my lips around the head again, rubbing the rough texture of my tongue against the slit of his penis, then trying to bring as much suction to it as possible, like I could create a vacuum. But nature abhors a vacuum, and nature did its thing, and Mark jerked his hips a few times and came again.

I swallowed fast, trying to work it out of my mouth with my tongue and teeth, sliding slow against him as I moved up, his hot wet cock brushing against my shoulder, then my chest and stomach, then lined back up so we were hip-to-hip. Mark was sweating. The feel of his skin and his body temperature, the smell of him, and being close to his face again, I shot my wad right there, no touching. It was a long, forceful spurt, my hips giving a quick involuntary thrash as I was over him in a sort of push-up style. I was so turned on that it hadn't been planned. I saw it squirt out of my dick with a good trajectory, going straight to Mark's ribs and solar plexis, and then one shorter spurt after that, with some oversupply drizzling down my cock.

We'd been lying on each other for a few minutes when a fist pounded at my door. "Yo, McCreary!" Greg said, his voice loud and deep. He hit the door five or six times. "Wake the fuck up, Jon! Let's get things going!" The lights were off, but the TV was on kind of loud. There was an SEC game playing on ESPN. I hadn't turned the TV off because I wanted something to mask any noise that Mark and I made, but I'd sort of blocked it out until now. "He'll go away eventually," I whispered in Mark's ear. "They'll pre-party in his room for awhile and probably bang on the door again before heading out."

Mark pulled the covers up over us and kind of nestled against me. "Let's watch football and sleep some more," he whispered. "Maybe go out and get something to eat later."

He spooned me from behind and I turned to face the TV. Mark ran his fingers through my hair. "McCreary," Greg said from the other side of the door, "if you and Claremont are in there watching football and not coming out, you're a couple of homos."

Greg could be like that. Mark snickered quietly. The ruckus stopped.

We went back to sleep for awhile. When I woke up he was kissing me, just real soft, with his hand on my hip. We were boned up and he was holding me close.

It was about 10 o'clock. Not having eaten since breakfast with Tom and his parents, I was feeling kind of faintheaded. We decided to head out for awhile. I went down the hall to the bathroom to clean up and check myself out, wiping a streak of Mark's dried jizz with a wet paper towel. There was this place near campus where Tom and I went because our fake IDs worked there. It was a restaurant with cheap pizza and burgers and five dollar pitchers.

Our waitress recognized me. She always flirted with me and Tom. I suspected that she knew we weren't of drinking age, but she let it fly. She brought over a pitcher for me and Mark without our asking for it or checking our IDs. We ordered a pizza and talked about that day's college football games. I glanced over my shoulder to the TVs over the bar whenever Mark said they were showing something interesting.

We hung out for a couple of hours, drinking beers and shooting the shit. I guess it wasn't the best use of our time -- we could have done this any night -- but we just talked about football and our friends, about what it might be like if that group of us ended up in a house together next year.

When we got back to the room, I was drunk and tired. I changed and got ready for bed. Mark did the same, but getting changed was kind of pointless because our clothes were off again not long after we hit my mattress. We made out for awhile and got off together, but I've described enough of that stuff enough for you guys by now -- it's probably getting boring; I was so drunk and tired by then that I was just half-awake. Plus, we knew that we were going to try to have sex the next night.

The weekly Sunday afternoon football game was scarcely attended -- people were either gone for Thanksgiving or taking care of business before they left. It was just five of us hanging out on the field outside the dorm, throwing a football around and talking smack to each other. It was chilly out, upper 30s and overcast. We could see our breath in the air. We all dressed in sweatshirts and windpants. Mark wore a green knit cap, and his blond bangs tucked out from it.

No reason to get dramatic about it, but hanging out with Greg and Luke and Melissa, in the middle of all the stuff Mark and I were doing, it felt really good. I'd never know until I came out, but being with Mark, just hanging out like guys with a bunch of other guys, and everything feeling so normal, all of it felt more workable. Everybody was in a good, funny mood. Being out there, with Greg giving me shit and Melissa running with a cigarette in her mouth, Mark blindsiding me with a play tackle, I just felt pretty full of love for everybody. Going home for Thanksgiving was the first time I'd be away from them since school started. I was going to miss them.

Nobody was going to hang out and drink that night. Melissa had a flight the next day and needed to pack. Greg said that he drank too much the night before and that he wanted to finish a problem set for his physics class that was due right after vacation. Greg's roommate Luke was rushing a frat, and they had some kind of mandatory meeting that night.

Mark and I got back to my room. We were both sweaty, and decided that if we were going to try to have sex that night, we should probably take a shower anyway. There wasn't anything flirtatious about it -- I wasn't going to fool around with him or get turned on in the shower room. We went in there with our shower supplies, and then we ran into Greg walking into the shower room with his stuff at the same time. Greg, being the exhibitionist that he is, took down his windpants as soon as we were into the showerroom, dropping them on a hook and standing there in a sweatshirt and white briefs. Then he dropped his briefs, so that he stood there with his longish cock hanging down, wearing just the sweatshirt, all before either Mark or I had removed a stitch or put our stuff into stalls, and talking to us the whole time.

Seriously, what's up with that? He was showing off, and he wasn't rushing into a stall or anything. He was talking to us about some kind of Greg nonsense -- the kind of thing where he'd mention George W. Bush, Steve Spurrier and Bono in the same sentence -- with his cock and balls swinging under a sweatshirt that stopped clean at his waist. This was just exhibitionism. Greg and his dick looked like they were making Mark uncomfortable. He was making a point not to look at either of us, but I caught him taking a couple of peeks at Greg while I was undressing. I peeked too.

Greg waited until I was down to my boxer briefs before he peeled off his sweatshirt and started running the water in one of the shower stalls. I checked out his slightly fuzzed bubble butt. Mark just had his shirt off. I glanced over, trying to see if he was sporting wood or something and was being naked-shy because of it, but everything looked okay. A couple seconds later he yanked his pants and his underwear off in one quick move. I had a good look at Mark's smooth ass and his flaccid dick (Mark and I both had average sizes, but compared to Greg, they looked small -- maybe that was why Greg liked letting it hang out so much) and even though I stayed soft, Mark was looking way more interesting to me than Greg. As soon as we were all behind the curtains in our separate stalls, Mark was his normal self again, yelling shit about the Seahawks and making fun of me and the Vikings.

I scrubbed myself pretty carefully in the shower. I wasn't exactly sure what was about to happen -- the mechanics of it and everything associated. I washed myself over three or four times. Maybe I was in the shower for about fifteen minutes, but neither Greg nor Mark were done before me, which I found kind of annoying. Eventually I turned off the water and reached out of the curtain to grab my towel and dry off, staying behind the shower curtain this time.

Mark was still in the shower when I went back to the room and threw on a pair of boxers. I sat cross-legged on the mattress, watching the Panthers game. Mark came in with his towel around his waist. He locked the door and dropped his towel. I felt this crazy-intense desire for him. I stretched my legs out and he sat down on my lap, facing me, with his legs on either side of my waist. He hugged my hips with his legs. Our lips pressed together and his tongue knotted around mine. The underside of his dick pressed against my stomach. I kept my boxers on, but let my hard-on out through the fly, so that the tip of it pressed against the crook of his balls. He smelled like fresh soap. His arms were around my shoulders, the hair of his armpits pressing against them. I ran my hands through his wet hair. He moaned and stopped kissing, pressing his forehead against mine, staring me in the eye and breathing at my nose with his sweet breath.

"I like you so fucking much, man," he said.

"Good," I said. "I kinda like you too."

"I want you to fuck me pretty bad," he said. "I dunno, I just want that to be a part of me."

My heart beat so hard I could hear it. I felt almost light in the head. "No you don't dude," I said. "You don't have to say that for me."

"Nah dude, I do," he said, kissing me, our chests pushed against each other, pushing my wet hair back, "and I know you're nervous about that. It's something I've been thinking about."

"Yeah, but you don't have to, like, fall on my sword because I'm a pussy about it," I said.

He laughed, looking me in the eyes. "And that kind of thinking," he said, "is why you're going to fuck me and not vice versa. It's not, like, a test of will." He was hugging me so tight while he said this, our noses and foreheads pressed against each other. "It should just be, like, hot and fun."

I kissed him, very softly, all romantic-like. "You probably don't even know how it works," he said. "You haven't even seen a gay porno."

"True," I said, "but it seems pretty obvious. You just stick it in."

"You probably don't even know about lube," he said. "I actually went to a drug store and bought lube. So embarrassing, dude."

"Lube?" I said.

"Told you," he said. "Just, like, try not to hurt me. I've read all about this. We have to take it real slow."

He got off of me and went into his backpack. I had a nice view when he leaned over his backpack, the webbing of his balls hanging down between his legs and the crevice of his dimpled ass. We'd become so much less self-conscious around each other. I slid off my boxers, still sitting up on the mattress with my back propped against the lower bunk, my legs extended out. He came back to his old position with a little bottle in his hand. He wrapped his legs back around my waist, put his arms around my shoulders, positioning himself so that my dick was pressed against his ass. Mark told me to hold out a finger, which I did, and he poured a little bit of the lube on it. It was slick, a little oily. He told my to put my finger at his asshole, which I did, and moistened it up. Touching him there, my cock was totally hard. It was pressing up to his taint. I tugged it a little, slicked it with the lube I'd had on my fingers. I could've cum right there, with just a little more friction. He made me put out my finger again. "You're supposed to, like, massage it a little," he said. "I just took a shower. It's clean, I promise, so don't freak out."

I pressed my finger up against his asshole, rubbing it around in a little circular motion, pressing against it and the short fine hairs that ringed it. I asked him of it felt okay; so far, so good, he said. He smiled a little, bringing out his dimples. He put on some more lube and told me to try to stick my finger inside. I was nervous doing this, but I did, very slowly and carefully. It made me nervous; I sweated more than he did. I pressed in. It was incredibly tight, putting pressure around the circumference of my fingertip, more pressure than I expected. I pressed in to the length of my fingertip. Again I asked Mark if it felt okay, and he said yeah, it felt okay. I pressed in deeper, until my finger was halfway in. His face winced a little. I could feel his muscle relax. Very slowly, I moved my finger back a little and then pushed back again. It feels all right man, he said. He leaned forward and kissed me. Mark's hard-on was still in full effect, and so was mine. He moved his hand down and started rubbing my cock back and forth, trying to keep it with the slow rhythm I used with my finger. This went on for a few minutes.

Mark told me to try adding a second finger. I was learning the drill. I slid out my index finger, reapplying lube to it and to my middle finger. I pressed my index finger back in -- it slid in more comfortably this time, warm and tight -- and slipped in the second finger. Mark let out a gasp. His face, a few inches away from me, went red. His whole face felt hot. Now he was sweating pretty hard. He looked at me and laughed a little, still stroking my cock.

The sound of his breathing, the heat off his face and the look on it, the feel of his hand on my dick, I jizzed right there, another good gusher. My hips thrust up involuntarily. This sudden and involuntary orgasms I had with Mark, they were the best, they always took me by surprise, and there was this half-second of wanting to hold back but then I didn't, and the next thing we knew my cock would start lunging up and my hips lifted a little, and my jizz ended up all over his wrist and our abdomens, coming out in three or four successively weakening shots. It didn't impede my horniness, and if anything, the feel of his hand on my cum-slicked dick, more sensitive than before, felt even better. He didn't say anything, just leaned in and kissed me again. He said that he was pretty close, too, he was just holding off. At this point I had two fingers pressed up into Mark's asshole, and he was taking it all pretty well. We kissed pretty hard, one of the sloppy kind, where his lower lip ended up on my chin and the skin around our mouths ended up wet. He was breathing into my mouth and the low half-stifled grunts and muffles he was making, they were so fucking hot with his mouth on mine like that. He made this soft squeaking noise and his dick, just above my navel, shot a heavy strand right into me, his cum sliding down my chest. He withdrew from our kiss and looked down, my two fingers still up his asshole, his fat purple cockhead dripping splooge, the shaft of it looking pink and overstimulated. I put my hand up against it and squeezed it up to my stomach, letting it rub against my now-moist treasure trail. Our positions seemed a little awkward and difficult -- Mark was straining his leg muscles to maintain an even balance -- but even that felt good.

It was at about that time that we realized that neither of us had condoms. Mark had been embarrassed about buying lube in the first place and assumed I had rubbers around. No, I said, I get embarrassed about that shit too, and I broke position long enough to peek carefully into Tom's dresser and desk drawers to see if he had any, but he didn't. This is why the first time Mark and I had sex it was unprotected. We were both virgins where guys were concerned and had been way cautious about girls in high school, and I know it was risky, which is why I spent Thanksgiving break freaking out and then went to the college's health service as soon as I got back, was tested right away, was peevish with Mark without explaining why, so I don't need any lectures. We were both so new to it and it had taken a lot for us to get that far in the first place. After not finding any condoms in Tom's stuff, we decided, fuck it. Not the smartest decision, but I was pretty ignorant about all things gay at the time, and just judging from Mark's reactions to what we were doing, it was clear that this was his first time with this -- not that there was any doubt in my mind.

I got back on the mattress, lying on my back this time. Instead of having my put my finger back up, he put some lube on my dick, and straddled me on his knees. He ran his hands up and down my chest. I held onto his hips. We didn't say anything. I held onto my dick, at first just moving it around in a circle at the exterior of his asshole -- again, I could have jizzed right there, but I was being disciplined. Mark told me to put it in, just slowly. I put my hand on my cock and maneuvered the tip of it until I felt my head move slowly into his tight ass. It was tight as hell -- it felt awesome, way better than pussy ever did. From the look on his face, Mark wasn't feeling the same way. It was dark red. He'd been sweating a lot already, and now there were little beads on his forehead. I pulled it out, asking him if it was okay. He said yeah, keep going. So I pushed back in, just enough that my dickhead was inside of him. He gasped a low moan, breathing heavy. I moved in a little further, so that the top of my shaft was now in him. He told me just to hold it for a second. I could feel his sphincter tighten up a little and then loosen. Oh fuck, man, he said, it fuckin' hurts but it feels so good knowing that it's you dude, I swear to God. I pushed in a little further, so that half my cock was inside of him, then I made a slow, careful push, so that my whole shaft was inside of him. My balls were pressed against ass.

At that point, Mark kind of assumed control. He was positioned over me, balanced on his knees, holding himself back with his arms for balance and leverage. He lifted his hips up a little, so that my shaft was half out, really carefully and slowly at first, then steadily picking up some momentum. His dick stood up hard, almost flat against his belly with the way he leaned back. I had one hand on my cock to guide it and I needed my other arm for leverage. Our bodies were positioned like a V. It probably was a pretty advanced position for our first time, but we wanted to be able to see each other's face while we did this. Mark was breathing heavy. I was worried that I was hurting him, but it also felt so fucking good. Fucking his ass, it was tight as hell, and seeing the sweat on his chest, the way his ab muscles tightened up with his movement and his hot-as-fuck dick bouncing in front of me like that, his pink face and blue eyes and his blond hair messed up against his forehead, it was all pretty amazing to me. I wondered what I looked like right then and hoped that I looked half as hot to him as he did to me.

He must have been getting more comfortable, because he started moving up and down my dick more quickly. I think my whole spine shuddered. I let out kind of a long slow moan. Mark liked the reaction; he smiled. We hadn't been saying much or making much noise -- none of the kind of playful banter that had characterized most of our fooling around before then. We'd both been kind of stressed, I guess, and I was concentrating on it pretty hard. His whole body felt so hot and tense. We were both sweating. I could feel the sheets damp on my ass. Mark moved up and down more quickly, his cock and balls bouncing with the movement; his face was still red, but he wasn't wincing like he was before. The pain must have been easing up, at least a little.

His triceps were hurting from holding himself up. We paused to switch positions. When we stopped for a couple minutes, he looked kind of relieved.

"How you feeling, champ?" I said.

"I guess I'm glad that you don't have a massive donkey dick," he said. "It's getting easier."

"We can stop if you want," I said.

"Fuck no," he said, "not until you've blown your load in me."

I kind of laughed. "Dude, if somebody told me three months ago ..."

He planted a quick kiss on my lips and hugged me hard around the shoulders. "If someone told me three months ago that I'd meet a dude like you first semester, I would've been fucking stoked."

We made out for a couple minutes, and I'm sure you're sick of that, but really, he has the best face, and for me that was always kind of the most fun part.

We went back to fucking, this time in the kind of classic position, where he was on all fours. I never liked that position, always thought it was kind of demeaning, but it was a lot easier for us trying it the first time. He was able to hold himself stable. I stared down at his asshole, which was pink and wet and exposed. I held my cock at halfway down the shaft. It looked like it wanted to bust, my purple cockhead was so fat and rounded right then. Watching it push into his ass was kind of amazing. It looked like a miracle of physics and biology. Slowly, I pushed the length of my shaft in, seeing the vein on the side of my dick and the musculature of it tense and tight as it slid in. When I was all into him and my balls were pressed against his ass, I just held the position for a second, staring down at myself and at him. Then I pulled back gently, watching my glistening dick slip out, feeling the tension of his muscles. He was relaxing it pretty well but I could occasionally feel it tense ever-so-slightly, like some kind of little tremor shuddered through him. He groaned as I carefully slid the length of my dick in and out. I took my cock out and rubbed my head around the rim of his asshole, feeling its fine wet hairs rub against the slit of my dick. I alternated between holding my hands at the sides of his slim ass and running them down the length of his sides. Then I gently put my dick back into him.

He told me that it was feeling okay, gasping while I said this. I asked if he was sure. Yeah, he said, we were all good. I've never been the type to fuck like a jackhammer or anything: it was always my habit to keep it steady and sensual. Mark had given me a kind of greenlight, so I got into a slow, careful rhythm. I put my torso down so that our legs were lined up together, and my sweaty chest was pressed against his sweaty back. The hair at the base of his neck was soaked with sweat. I put my nose to his hair and breathed in, fucking him pretty gently, slowly pushing in and out, gradually picking up pace just a little. I leaned in and kissed the skin behind his ear. Leaning on his body, I reached down to put my hand on his cock, just kind of hugging it with my fist.

"I'm going to shoot my load, dude," I said in his ear.

"Good man," he said, "go for it."

A few seconds later I let go. Sometimes you read metaphors about exploding in sex, but dude, it felt like by dick was literally going to blow up, like it was too big and he felt so tight. I made a couple of involuntary hip thrusts and felt myself cum inside of him. I pulled out of him carefully and just kind of hung onto him for a second. I still had one hand holding onto his cock. He was breathing hard, and he shot his wad. He grunted kind of loud when he did this and a couple seconds later just dropped down onto the mattress. I landed down next to him. We were both pretty sweaty, and he'd splattered cum on the sheets of my mattress. We were a huge mess. Our hair was tossed up and it seemed like we were kind of coated with sweat, jizz and lube. His face was bright red and he kind of laughed. He tugged at my earlobe a little and put his mouth at my chin. I hugged him with one arm and asked how it was.

"You've gotta make that one up to me sometime," he said.

"I'll do my best," I said. "I'll get my turn sometime."

"Nah," he said, "I think we've picked our roles. Once I got over the part where it felt like I was shitting a sandstone pillar it actually felt kinda good."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. Plus, they say it gets better after the first couple of times." He wrapped his arm around my neck and kissed me on the chin. "It's not like you're just anybody, man. You were kind of sweet about it."

I sighed. My thigh muscles actually were a little sore and my abs even hurt a little. I couldn't imagine what it felt like for him. I felt a little spent and shellshocked. My hard-on had died quicker than usual, lying at half-mast down my thigh. He was pretty fully boned. I started to finger at it a little and he said, "Nah dude, it's okay for now. I just need to catch my breath a little."

I woke up in the middle of the night. We were under covers below the waist. Mark had his arms around my chest and the corner of his face on my shoulder. He must have just moved a little, enough to wake me up.

I don't know why, but it kind of struck me for the first time how different this was for the two of us. It was a much bigger deal for Mark. He'd grown up wanting this. Whatever you want to call my own sexual confusion before college, it wasn't repression -- more like numbness. I was filling a gap that I never knew was missing. For Mark, it was more of a relief and a release. Starting around age 13 he'd been fighting it, and then fearing it, and the fact that he'd wanted it so bad at the same time -- let's say that I think his adolescence was much more painful than mine, which really wasn't painful at all. I don't know if he'd describe it this way, but he was getting to do things that he'd always wanted, that probably scared him a little -- but it was working. It was a bigger release for him, just the fact that he got to be with someone and that it turned out to be good. He occasionally had these flashes of intensity, just the way that he looked at me or reacted when I touched him. I had pretty much fallen for him, true, but I could tell that it meant something different to Mark. It made me feel a little responsible for him.

His body temperature felt so hot, when he curled around me like that. The way his face was at my armpit and my arm was wrapped above his head, the angle hurt my shoulder a little, but that was okay. I didn't want to wake him or get him off. He just seemed so vulnerable to me right then. I leaned down with my nose and mouth at his hair and against his scalp. He didn't rouse. After a few minutes I went back to sleep, lying there with him like that.

Hope it's not disappointing, but that's pretty much it for the sex, guys. I've got enough material to go for a couple thousand more pages. During the rest of our time at college there probably wasn't an inch of our bodies that didn't get sucked, fucked, kissed, licked or jizzed on. Once we let loose, Mark and I went on a spree. But at a certain point, telling you guys all about that just gets a little exhausting and repetitive. So we'll leave the sex at that for now.

There was half-an-incident that I'll get to later, but if you're just reading this to get your rocks off (if you did, I'm flattered as hell) then now would be an okay time to quit. I've just got a few loose ends to tie up. If it wasn't clear already, Mark and I were liking each other a lot. When we got back from Thanksgiving it was harder than before to stay apart. His roommate had a block of classes on Teusday afternoons. I skipped my last two weeks of Tuesday Shakespeare lectures so that I could meet Mark in his room, where we had marathon sessions of kissing and sucking and fucking that were almost impossible to break away from. In some capacity, we hung out with each other every day, even if it was just lunch or studying or meeting up with Tom and Greg for dinner in my dorm.

At the same time, I was starting to resent Tom a little bit. It wasn't fair. I just grew a little colder toward him. I wanted to be with Mark more, and having a roommate seemed like an obstruction to all of that. Poor Tom, I think I confused him and hurt his feelings. I was never openly a dick, just a little aloof. A couple of times he asked me if something was wrong. "Nothing," I'd say, "I guess I'm just a little stressed with finals coming up." This had the benefit of being true. "Don't mean to take it out on you. I'm sorry, man." So I spent Christmas break trying to get the balls to tell Tom what had been going on. I wrapped up exams, went back to Minneapolis, and had a rough couple of weeks. I'd go into the backyard at night in my winter coat and call Mark on his cell, just shooting the shit, telling Mark that I had to tell Tom about all of this. My parents were thrilled to have me back, I had a blast hanging out with my high school friends, but the whole time, coming out to Tom and dealing with my feelings about Mark were heavy on my mind.

When we got back after break, I practically avoided Tom for the week. He'd called me a couple times over break to talk about bowl games and what we'd been up to. Every time, I felt nervous. That week back, I stayed out of the room as much as possible. On Sunday I went for a long swim -- more than two miles -- and came back to the room to study. We'd registered for the same British history class, and as soon as I came in he started peppering me with some questions about the reading. I sort of couldn't handle it at the time, and asked him if he could just lay off for a couple of minutes.

"Seriously dude," Tom said to me, "what's been going on? Is everything good? Did something happen at home?"

"Nah dude," I said, "things are fine."

"Is it living together next year?" he said. "I wasn't trying to pressure you into that. If you want to room with Claremont or Marcus or if you want to rush next fall or something, I understand. I never should have put you in that position. Sometimes I'm pushier than I realize."

Something about the tone of his voice -- trying not to sound wounded while he was saying considerate things -- and the look on his face killed me. "Dude, of course I want to live with you," I said. "We just have some stuff that I probably should talk to you about. I've had some shit come up that I wasn't expecting, and I should tell you about it, but talking about it kind of scares of the hell out of me."

And that's when I told him. I didn't look him in the face once, just stared at the floor. I was sitting on my lower bunk and he sat at his desk. What I told him was that I'd had girlfriends in high school, done a lot of stuff with girls, but somehow it just wasn't clicking. Then I came here and things just started happening in succession. I didn't tell him about the morning when I saw him come back from the shower and threw wood because of it (hell no -- Tom doesn't know that, and he'll never know that) just that I started to see things differently. All of a sudden I realized that I was gay.

It took a few minutes even getting that far, with a lot of stammering and stuttering, false starts and digressions.

"Dude," he said. I was still staring at the floor, all nervous. "Dude," he said, "just look at me."

I looked over at him.

"So you've heard me talk about my friend Billy, right?"

"Yeah," I said, my voice all shaky, "your friend from the lacrosse team who always was doing funny shit. Goes to Michigan now."

"Junior year in high school, Billy told me he was gay. We'd just been hanging out at the end of the night, drinking beers in my parents' basement. He had this look on his face when he told me, like he wasn't sure how I was going to react. It looked like he thought maybe I was going to punch him or tell him to fuck off or call him a faggot. He was so scared right then. So I just look over at him and was like, 'Dude, it's good. It doesn't matter to me if you're gay. You're still one of my best friends and I love you.' And it kind of hurt when he told me, not because he was gay, but just seeing how scared he was of me in that moment. You're doing that same face right now, Jon." Tom paused and tried to think about what to say. "It's okay, man. I'm honored as hell that you told me. It's going to be okay. You're still one of my best friends, too, and I'll still love you." He paused and said, "I mean, not love you in a gay way, but love you just the same."

"Ha," I said, pausing, my voice shaking, but relieved that he was still cool giving me a hard time, "what makes you think I'd ever gay love you?" "Gimme a break, McCreary," he said, "everybody wants a piece of this."

"Questionable at best," I said. He laughed a little. "Seriously, though. I'm glad that you told me. I mean, it's kind of an honor that you think enough of me to tell me. Not to get all Lifetime movie and shit, but I mean it."

I paused and gave him a look. "Well," I said, "since you took this news like a sport, I've got another bombshell." That's when I told him about Mark. He went bug-eyed. "Claremont, too?" he said. He went through about a minute of shock ("You and Claremont? * Together*? For real?") and then concluded that this whole conversation had been a prank. It took about five minutes to persuade him that it wasn't a joke, and even then he seemed skeptical. I dialed Mark on my cell phone. He picked up and I said, "It's all fine, don't worry about this, I promise. My roommate wants to talk to you."

*** We all ended up in the same house. I know it doesn't work this way at every school, but honestly, I'm convinced that life doesn't get any better than being in a big house with five of your best friends between the time that you're 19 and 22. It ended up with me, Tom, Greg, Melissa and Mark. It was a big two-story house in the middle of a student neighborhood, just a couple of blocks from the bars and a short walk to campus.

In terms of me and Mark, it worked out to be a lot less awkward than you might guess. I took the lone bedroom in the basement because I figured it'd give us a little more privacy and I didn't mind; Mark had his own room on the second floor. He slept down in my room three or four nights a week, but unless the rest of the house was keeping track of us, they really wouldn't have guessed. We never made out in the living room or anything like that; in terms of intrusiveness, Greg was way more obnoxious than either of us, walking around the house in tighty whiteys for hours some mornings (Melissa: "What the fuck, man? Put on some fucking pants. Other people need to sit in that chair. And shave while you're at it.") and it wasn't rare to come home to see Tom basically dry-humping a girlfriend on the couch.

We all had a blast together. It sounds obnoxious to say, but our house parties were legendary. At some we probably had more than 100 people packed in and another 50 spilled out in the backyard. Greg had his friends from the club soccer team, Tom had people from his student Democrat groups, Mark had his friends from the student newspaper (he became an editor by senior year), Melissa had everyone from her volunteer groups -- you get the picture. I ended up on the club water polo team, and when my teammates found out I was gay in junior year (I hadn't been hiding it or anything; it just got casually mentioned by Greg one night at a party) it was pretty much a non-issue. We had two parties broken up by cops, but on Friday nights in fall and spring, it wasn't unusual for things to last until sunrise the next morning, with people still sitting around on the couch on our front porch, shooting the shit and trying to finish a keg before heading home or going to bed.

Mark and I -- we didn't even fight. We gave each other shit the way that guys give each other shit. I know it sounds risky or restrictive, to end up living with the first guy that you meet and making that decision before you even know what you're doing. I don't know what to tell you. We just clicked like that. Things could have crashed romantically but we still would have been good friends -- I'm confident of that. There were plenty of nights when I'd come home from the library at midnight or 1 a.m. and I'd go into my room to find him on my bed, in flannel pants and a white T-shirt, working on his laptop with a game on my TV. I loved that. We both had pretty busy lives and were serious students (he stuck with econ; not being a quantitative guy, I became a history major in the end) but it always felt so good to come home and find him.

Our roommates were great. Once in awhile they'd give us a little shit (along the lines of, "Wow, I never thought I'd spend college living with married couple.") but it was all pretty gentle, way less obnoxious than the shit that Tom, Greg and I would talk to each other after a few beers.

Everyone went their separate ways in the summer. It always sucked, being away -- not just from Mark, but the rest of them, too. This sounds cheesy, but we were a pretty tight, makeshift family. Fourth of July weekend after sophomore year, we all flew out to Seattle for a long weekend and stayed at Mark's parents' place. His parents still didn't know he was gay; I wound up sleeping in his room. There weren't enough guest rooms to house everybody, so his mom left a blow-up mattress on the floor next to his bed. We were up until past 5 a.m. that night, making out and blowing each other pretty much non-stop, his door locked, the two of us barely making a sound. I finally dressed and went to sleep on the air mattress. Mark and I both overslept way too late the next day; our housemates had finished up with breakfast and gave us these kind of knowing smirks that went over Mark's parents' heads.

Honestly, I think about these people and these stories all the time, which was half of why I wanted to write this. Summer between junior and senior year, Mark, Melissa and Tom all had internships in D.C. and sublet a house together. I had an internship at a company in Boston, where I crashed on a fold-out bed in my older brother's home office. I talked to one of the three of them on the phone almost every day. Every other weekend, I flew down to stay with them. At the end of the summer, Mark and Tom came back with me to Minnesota for the week. We stayed at my parents' cottage a couple hours from Minneapolis, with my high school friends there half the time.

I still hadn't been with anyone but Mark. The summer I was in Boston, one night I passed by a couple of gay bars. I was 21 by then. I glanced at the guys as I passed, circled the block, stepped into one of them for a beer, struck up a conversation with a nice, attractive enough guy who was starting law school at BU that fall. He seemed pretty interested, and I was getting a little semi in my jeans. Then I just started talking to him about Mark and thanked him, and said that I wasn't really looking.

Bizarrely, the only other time in college that I touched another guy, it was Greg. It's probably time that I tell you some more about Greg. I've already established his exhibitionist streak. He was enough of a pothead that Tom was always yelling at him about not leaving his bong in the living room. During our time in college, he dropped acid three or four times. At one party he got messed up on ecstasy and kept creeping behind us and hugging us. I thought it was funny, so maybe I indulged him a little more than everyone else (Mark just elbowed him hard in the gut) petting his hair a little and hugging him back. Greg started talking about how much he loved me and how he wished he could be gay too. It was just the drugs talking, and everybody got kind of a laugh out of it. He also had a wild libido. Greg probably slept with about three-dozen girls when we were in college. He had at least one threesome. True, Greg was a very good-looking guy. His hair grew out kind of shaggy, and when he let a couple days pass without shaving, he looked like a hipster model. Mark, Tom and I were all pretty good-looking guys, but straitlaced in appearance and demeanor. Greg was a little more rakish, a little more artsy. Something about him just connoted fun to those girls, whereas Tom was always regarded as relationship material.

Greg was also some kind of a genius. In senior year I found out that he was a legend among the undergrads in the Physics Department. I heard that he never had a grade below an A-, that he just understood things that no one else did. In fall of senior year he was taking graduate-level classes in astrophysics. It was impossible for me to reconcile the dude sitting around in his undies late on a Wednesday afternoon taking a hit off his bong in the living room, or making out with some sorority chick in a corner of our kitchen at a house party, with the guy who was rumored to be a scientific genius. But there you have it. That's Greg. It was one Tuesday night, second semester of senior year. I'd had a tough workout from water polo practice and was in bed, dozing. Mark was next to me under the covers, sitting there with a book in hand, underlining. It was pretty much a given that when he was done studying we were going to slip out of our clothes and fuck around, but I was feeling pretty calm and blissed out, happy enough to doze and watch Letterman with my leg over Mark's.

Our rooms were all pretty much open-door (Tom and Melissa had accidentally seen each other in states of undress on separate occasions, which led to sibling-like yelling and quarrels about respecting privacy) but because mine was in the basement and because the house knew about the Mark situation, I didn't get many visitors coming by late at night to borrow a shirt or a DVD. My room was cut off from the rest of the house and we weren't doing anything, so the door was half ajar.

I saw Greg in my line of vision, dressed only in his briefs, a can of Diet Coke in his hand. I didn't really think much of it. "What's up, dude?" I said to him. He just shrugged a little. "Nothing, guys. Just bored. I never swing down here so I thought I'd see what's up."

"Nothing's up," I said, leaning up in bed. I was in boxer and a T-shirt with our school's name on it.

"Just studying and watching TV," Mark said. "You're not interrupting hot gay sex."

"That's sort of a shame," Greg said. "For you guys, I mean. You should be having hot gay sex." He sat down at the foot of our bed. "What are you guys gonna do when we're not all living here anymore?"

"We'll be okay," Mark said. Truth was, I wasn't sure. We'd been avoiding the topic. I was planning to head to New York, and Mark had a slew of law school applications sent out, with hopes of going to Stanford.

"I don't know about that," Greg said. "You're, like, practically married to each other."

"Whatever, dick," I said. "We're not married. We do our own thing."

"Aw, shut up man," Greg said. He kind of leaned back on my bed, his legs dangling over the side. "You guys, like, love each other and shit. I think it's awesome. Nothing wrong with that." I couldn't tell where he was headed. My sarcasm defenses were up, but Greg was being unusually earnest.

"It's okay, Greg," I said. "Maybe someday you'll find an autistic heroin-addicted girl who's a calc prodigy, and you'll finally have someone who can understand you."

"Dude!" Mark said. "That was a little severe."

"Fair enough," I said,.

"What about that girl Amy who was hanging out here a couple weeks ago?" Mark said.

"Pfft," said Greg. "Moody bitch."

"Oh, nice," said Mark. "I forgot what a smooth talker you are."

Greg crawled up the length of the bed. He wrapped a sarcastic arm around me. "I'm gonna sleep down here with you guys tonight. I'm bored and lonesome. I just want company."

"Maybe, retard," I said, "if all you do is sleep, but I know you snore like a motherfucker, so probably not."

"Yeah dude," Mark said, "the snoring means a veto."

Greg sighed. He shook my shoulder with his hand. "You're both so fuckin' delicate."

"Greg, dude, your breath stinks," I said.

"Claremont, why's your boyfriend always so mean to me?" Greg said.

"He's a tough dude."

Greg nuzzled me. I could feel the scruff of his chin on the back of my neck. It seemed like more sarcasm, like he was just trying to get a reaction out of me. "Wait, do you think you're gay now or what?" I asked.

"I'm, like, experimenting. I'm bi-curious."

"Man, shut up," I said.

"What? I'm not going to run for president someday, and if I do I've done weirder stuff than this," he said. He got out of bed and lifted the covers, crawling in next to me. I've got to admit, it suddenly felt kind of nice. He wasn't spooning me or anything, but he had a hand on my shoulder and I could feel the body heat coming off of him. "This probably isn't even the weirdest thing I've done this month."

"I don't want your pubic lice or herpes," I said.

"Shit, who told you?" He reached his hand down and put it onto my dick. "That's very interesting, see," he said. "I told you, I'm bi-curious."

I shoved his hand away and told him to knock it off. I told him it was molestation. Mark laughed. He enjoyed this. "Claremont," Greg said, "your boyfriend has a stiffy. Which one of us gave him the stiffy?"

"Both of us gave him the stiffy, probably," Mark said.

"You're both giving me the stiffy," I confirmed, elbowing Greg away, "but I don't want Greg to give me a stiffy, so stop Greg, stop being annoying Greg, go upstairs and go to bed Greg."

He put his hand back on the boner outlined in my boxers. He pinched the skin of it, just below the head. "Goddammit Greg, that hurts, dude," I said. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"That's how I jerk off sometimes," he said. "I pinch the skin just below the head and then rub it a little. It has a good tension when I do that."

"If you don't stop I'm going to kick your ass, man," I said. "Just because I like dudes, that doesn't mean I can't kick your ass."

"Awww, you're not going to kick my ass," Greg said. (He was right, I wasn't going to kick his ass, and I admit, having my hand on Mark's stomach and my bare legs pressed up to his while Greg was touching me from behind, it felt pretty nice.) "You just want to sound bad-assed in front of your boyfriend." He sighed and put his hand on my face. He started lifting up my eyebrows and lips so that I was making involuntary faces. "I'm not gonna have sex with you guys or anything, I just want, like, a little affection."

"Freakshow," I said. "What are you going to tell Tom and Melissa about this?"

"Pfft. They're not my mom and dad. You're the one who worries about Tom and Melissa. 'Oh, Tom and Melissa, they'll be so disappointed that I got a B+ on my paper!' Ha." Mark laughed.

"If you're gonna sleep here you're going to have to shut the fuck up," I said.

He took that as an invitation and an encouragement, which I guess it was. He reached his long, slightly hairy arm across me and put his hand on Mark's chest. "Claremont, get in here," he said.

Mark put down his paperback. I was entertained by the whole thing, but now I was starting to get turned on. Mark burrowed down under the covers next to me, facing me. Being in the middle, there was a whole lot of skin pressed against me. It was late February and chilly out; the basement was underheated. Now Mark's face was next to mine. Our foreheads pressed against each other. The scruff of Greg's chin was against the back of my neck. Mark and I kissed but it wasn't a tongue kiss. That much alone was more than we'd done in front of people -- the most physical contact we showed around the rest of the house was on rare afternoons or weeknights, where we were on opposite ends of the living room couch with our feet up by each other's heads.

"No one's going to kiss you, Greg," I said, "because your breath fucking stinks, man."

"Take off your shirt, McCreary," he said.

"Yeah McCreary," Mark said. "Take off your shirt."

"Only if you do, Claremont," I said, sitting up and lifting off my shirt. Mark did the same thing. "You know," I said, "this is practically the first time Claremont and I have even touched in front of other people." "Does that mean you guys will have hot gay sex in front of me?" Greg said.

"No, fucktard," I said.

"Not unless you pay us," Mark said.

"Yeah, pay us a couple thousand, maybe we'll have hot gay sex in front of you," I said.

"That can be arranged," Greg said, sounding drowsy.

"It's okay Greg," I said. "I know you're just weird."

"Sometimes," he said, "I'm just kind of jealous of you guys. You guys have a nice thing. That's all. It's better than any straight relationship."

"Yeah, we lucked out," Mark said.

"So I decided to come down," Greg said.

"You don't get to have a threesome," I said.

"I just want to sleep here," Greg said, kind of whining, snuggling against me in a way that suddenly felt kind of sweet and flattering.

I was sandwiched in the middle, kind of curled up facing Mark, with my hand on his stomach. I was fingering his belly button because I always thought that there was something hot and funny about doing that. He and I both had boners. I wasn't exactly sure what Greg was thinking or what he had in mind. He wasn't quite pressed up against me, but he had his arm over my shoulder. He poked Mark in the nipple. "Both of you should stop poking me," Mark said.

Naturally, this meant that Greg poked him again. Then he said, "Titty twister," and gave Mark's left nipple a pull.

"That wasn't a twister, that was a titty tug," Mark said.

Greg pinched Mark's nose and said, "Honk."

"Stop."

"McCreary accused me of molesting him when I touched his boner," Greg said, "so I have to poke you instead." "You're the worst person to be in bed with," I said.

"That's not what the ladies say," Greg said.

"And you're just gonna fart and snore all night, I know it," Mark said.

"Yeah, but on the other hand, I haven't wet the bed in almost 20 years, so you're safe there," Greg said.

I repositioned so that I was lying on my back. I didn't trust Greg's grabbing and didn't want to have my back to him. "You guys both have great shoulders," he said. "It must be the swimming." He smelled my shoulder. "You smell like chlorine." He pinched my shoulder, kind of massaging it.

"Is this your way of flirting with Jon?" Mark said. "Because it won't work. You just have to start grabbing his junk, like this." Mark put his hand down my boxers, lifting up my hard-on and letting it smack against my stomach. He did this a couple times.

Under the covers, I felt Greg put his hand down my stomach and his fingers to my pubes, kind of carefully. He did the same thing as Mark. "Stop being shy, McCreary," he said. "Take off your boxers. You know you want to."

I hesitated for a second, and then I did, sliding my boxers down and kicking them off. We were all still under the covers. Greg gave my boner a few tugs. He sort of curled up next to me. I could feel his semi against my hip. It felt pretty big. I've got to say, I was getting kind of curious, and it was feeling pretty good. Mark and I had never even seen another guy's hard-on. For some reason, Greg felt safe. He smelled really good, too -- musky and warm, just manly. He must have seen the look on my face because he smiled, kind of like, "I've got you now."

"Damn it, Greg," I said, finally acknowledging him with something that wasn't hostility. I reached around his head with my left arm, kind of putting him in a headlock, pressing his face against my shoulder and armpit. "You're such a freak."

"I know I am," he said, "but I love you guys. I mean, not like that. I'm not messing with your heads or anything. You're just good friends."

"It's okay," I said, playing with his hair a little, feeling turned on and nervous. Mark reached his hand across and put his hand on Greg's cheek. Mark kissed at my ear a little. I turned my head to him and kissed Mark on the lips. Greg craned his neck up to see that. For him to watch me kiss Mark, it felt a little more vulnerable than having his hand on my hard-on.

"Greg," Mark said, "take off your shorts."

He took his hand off my hard-on and lifted his hips. His shins slid against the side of my legs, and I felt his briefs brush against me on the way down. He was kind of stiff. I felt his boner at my hip. It felt big and hot. Greg had this pretty sexy look on his face -- it turned me. Like I've said before, I was always careful to desexualize my friends, but looking at Greg's face then, the way his eyes were big and his lips looked really thick, the way his cock felt at my hip: I remembered how he turned me on when I periodically saw him naked in the dorm showers. I turned my face over to Mark, who took has gaze down from Greg to me. I kissed Mark a little more fully this time. If Greg was going to get a hard-on from this, I wasn't going to be self-conscious making out with Mark in front of him. He and I kissed for about 15 or 20 seconds. Mark gave me a tight squeeze, then reached his arm down across me so that his hand was on Greg's dick, which Mark pressed against my hip, feeling out the head of his cock.

"Dude," Mark said, "Greg's got a kind of massive dong."

"I know," I said. "I remember seeing it in the dorm showers."

"Voyeur," Greg said.

"Exhibitionist," I said.

Mark pulled down the covers. I was lying on my back with my hard-on fully exposed to both of them. Greg's was half concealed against my side. He apparently knew what we wanted to see, so he turned over, lying on his back, the three of us fitting pretty tightly in my bed.

Greg's dick was big. Mark and I were about average sized, somewhere around six inches hard, but Greg dwarfed us. It was maybe 8-1/2 or 9 inches hard, and thick, too. His balls hung low and there was a faded tanline at his hips. His dick almost went up to his navel. It looked soft and perfectly smooth. He had a full bush of black hair, and thick treasure trail that ran up his thin stomach and circled his navel. He had a spread of thin black hair that ran down the middle of his chest and circled his nipples.

"That is a giant cock," I said, trying to sound like Amber Waves.

It made Greg laugh. "Maybe," he said, "but you guys have better bodies." He groaned and stretched, lifting his back and his hips.

I put my hand down to his dick. It was soft and heavy, the skin of it totally silky. The head of it was different than mines and Marks. It wasn't quite and plump and rounded; it went down his shaft at more of an angle, and the slit of his dick didn't look as wide as ours. I was kind of fascinated by it.

"Poor Claremont," Greg said. "He isn't getting any attention here."

"Poor Claremont still has his boxers on," I said.

Mark got out of bed, springing kind of playfully. He kicked off his shorts -- Greg had me excited, true, but Mark naked always turned me on the most. He told Greg to get in the middle. So I kind of climbed over him, with my ass on view to Mark, taking Greg's place in the bed, feeling his imprint and his body heat on my sheets.

It was kind of a science experiment, I guess. Mark and I both were pretty intrigued with his body -- the way his cock was different, the way his skin smelled just a little different from either of ours, different enough that it was novel and a turn-on. Mark had his hand down on Greg's cock and was giving it a pretty good working over. Greg was leaking pre-cum, which is something that I've read about but hadn't seen. Mark worked it around Greg's head with his thumb.

"Fuck, guys," Greg said, "if I knew that Claremont gave handjobs like this I would've started coming down here two years ago."

"Yeah, well if you only know what his blowjobs were like," I said, playing around with my own dick while I watched Mark and Greg. Greg had his hand around Mark's knob, but he was just maneuvering it around, giving it the occasional tug.

"I'm not gonna blow Greg," Mark said. "For one thing, I couldn't fit that in my mouth. Plus, that's just for you, McCreary. My mouth isn't gonna put out for just anybody."

"Thanks dude," I said. "I love it when you sweet-talk me that way."

"And I love it when my dick's in your mouth," Mark said.

"Claremont talks dirty," Greg said. "I wouldn't have guessed that from either of you."

"That's not the only thing that Claremont does dirty," I said.

It went on like that for awhile. Mark and I alternated turns giving Greg a handjob. Greg periodically put his hand down and fumbled with one of our cocks. We bantered, alternating between raunch, affection and hostility.

It was all pretty fun. Greg liked the attention, for sure. He was always starved for affection. I wouldn't call him gay or bi, but he was definitely curious and horny. We were all pretty comfortable. For me and Mark, it was kind of a revelation seeing another guy's body like that, just feeling it out. It had been more than three years, and we'd only been with each other. That was great and all, but there's a little bit of a curiosity factor.

Greg shot his load first. He was sweating just a little. It didn't shoot that far, or at least as far as Mark and I tended to shoot. It kind of spurted and dribbled out of him. He kind of moaned and laughed as he did it. I came a couple minutes after that, shooting up to my chest, and Mark was just a few seconds behind. I got out of bed to get a towel off the floor, which we passed around to wipe up. It seemed like Greg would've gone up to bed then, but no, he wanted to spend the night in my room. We did some negotiating and decided that Mark would sleep in the middle, because he promised to hit Greg if he snored. We turned out the lights, with Mark hugging me and his back to Greg. Mark and I made out for a few minutes. We kind of made a show of moaning when we did this.

"You two are just so cute," Greg said, which was the last thing that anyone said before we went to sleep.

There wasn't any fallout from that, believe it or not. Greg kind of lingered in bed the next morning. I flipped on the TV and the three of us just laid there for awhile, watching SportsCenter. It probably turned out to be a healthy thing. There were times after that when Greg was physically affectionate toward me and Mark both -- not in a gay way, just a little more touchy. Mark and I were a little more comfortable with how we held ourselves out to the house in the last few months. We didn't bone in the kitchen or anything, but just kind of hanging off each other on the living room couch no longer seemed like an affront to decorum.

So, yeah, this hasn't been one of those stories, the kind with a gay orgy at the frat house or a gang bang with the coach.

And I know what you might be thinking, that this was just a fantasy all the same -- that there's no way I could just stumble across a guy like Mark, or that I'd just happen to live with a guy who was as cool and understanding as Tom when we'd only known each other a few months, or that Greg would just wander into my room that night and things would unfold, and maybe you'll say to yourself that people like this don't exist.

It was all just dumb luck. Without the right people my life might be different. I could have ended up with an asshole roommate. Maybe then I would have rushed some frat, realized I was gay sometime sophomore year, and spent the whole time torturing myself and looking for any kind of sign when one of my frat brothers was drunk or stoned, desperate that one night one of them would slip up and that I'd get a release. And maybe I'd still be tortured about the whole thing. That happened to guys I know.

But that's not what happened. Not here. Not ever.

Sometimes good people come along. They just show up. You luck out. Don't take them for granted or cut corners. You treat them like you love them and don't let go.

I was there on the day he got his acceptance letter from Stanford Law. He whooped and tackled me on the couch, shouting about how he got in. We wrestled around for awhile. Melissa heard the screaming and came into the living room. It was what he wanted, Stanford Law, the way that Tom wanted Harvard Law. Maybe the Stanford worship was a West Coast thing, something he grew up with in Seattle. Mark was accepted by both schools; Tom got rejected by Stanford but he made it into Harvard. They had both been wrecks about the LSAT and there had been a serious edge of competition between them about it. In the end, Tom and Mark hit identical scores.

He'd be at Stanford. I'd been interviewing for investment banking and consulting jobs in New York, which wasn't necessarily the kind of job I wanted, but the money was great, a lot of my friends were doing it, and I wanted to be in New York.

It just started to creep up on me, how tough it would be leaving Mark. It would be hard leaving the house, sure, but Greg and Melissa were both talking about moving to New York, and Tom would be a few hours away. Mark would be on the other side of the country. Obviously, we'd become pretty invested in each other by then, although we never quite articulated it like that. We just sort of felt it. You don't always need to say things.

Still, as graduation got closer, it got more difficult. We were all on the lease for the summer. Greg, Melissa and Tom were planning a trip to Europe; Mark and I talked about hanging back just to have more time to be together, but at the last minute we jumped in. It was the right decision. Everybody had a blast, and Mark and I having sex in cheap hotel rooms in Western Europe was more fun than sitting around together in an empty house. We got back to the house and still had a couple weeks together -- he was in my room every night, and we were together all day. One morning it started to hit me. I was alone in the shower. I hadn't slept that much the night before. For some reason it hit me, and I just started crying -- and believe me, it embarrasses the hell out of me to say that. I rinsed and dried off, and got back into bed next to him.

He was half-awake, drinking from a room-temperature water bottle, Price is Right on my TV. "Dude," I said, "I'm going to miss you so much. You have no idea."

"I know," he said. "I've been wanting to tell you that." He put his arms around my shoulder. "It's okay. We'll talk all the time. We'll travel. We'll see each other."

"It's just, like," I said, "I don't know. You're my best friend. Not to mention the fact that you're totally hot and sexy as hell and I still get boned whenever I see you. But even if it weren't like that. You're just the greatest guy."

"Man, can you imagine what would've happened if I signed up for a different Econ lecture freshman year?" he said.

"It's terrifying to think about."

He kissed me. I was almost getting choked up. We're not the most emotional guys. I don't know why. We didn't have anything to hid from each other. Maybe it was because if you said things, it was like acknowledging the hurt.

"Seriously, McCreary," he said, "you're sort of the greatest thing that ever happened in my life, man."

"Or will ever happen, I know," I said, thinking it was sarcastic but it came out sincere. "I feel the same way. Believe me."

And then a few days later, the house was empty. We were gone. ***

Now I live in New York -- Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn. I work at an investment bank and share a place with Melissa and Greg -- three bedrooms, a big living room and a small garden in back, where Melissa grows potted tomatoes and Greg smokes joints. Melissa works in advertising and Greg teaches physics at a private high school while he's finding himself and considering Ph.D programs. I am considered the breadwinner.

For me, the gay thing turned out to be more difficult than I expected. At first I told myself that it would be a new adventure, being away from Mark, getting to test the waters with other guys. Truth is, I've visited a gay bar only four times since moving to New York more than a year ago. It wasn't for me -- the guys seemed high-strung and overgroomed, and I felt on edge the whole time. I went with Melissa and Greg, and every time the night ended with me and Melissa standing alone, drinking bottles of beer and commenting on the spectacle, while Greg boosted his ego by flirting with gay dudes -- as he put it, just enough to feel flattered but not enough to lead them on. Whatever: Greg is weird. Tom missed us. He was bored at Harvard. He took Amtrak down about once a month to crash our couch and hang out, the entire time cursing himself for not going to NYU Law and living with us. (He got over some of the bitterness when he began seeing a girl seriously, but he still came down to New York once a month.)

I tried dating; I tried a lot of avenues, but nothing worked. I fooled around a couple of times with a guy I met online. He was a few years older than me -- I was 22 and he was 27. It was all brand new to him, it kind of came to him one day the way that it came to me a few years before. His name was Geoff and he was a journalist. He was 6'4 and skinny, with a smooth body. He looks a little like Adrien Brody. I met him for beers and then we went to his place. He was so nervous that it kind of took the fun out of things. When I made out with him he was a tense kisser and his whole body was uptight. He had a long, beautiful cock. I slipped him out of his clothes and we got into his bed together, where he got off in just two or three minutes. He was a smart masculine guy -- a real guy -- and I tried with him, but it just didn't work. He was too wound up. Now we're friends.

Mark and I talk two or three times a week. We e-mail every day. He's my best friend. I've seen him three times since graduation -- he came to New York during his spring break and for a week before he started his second year at Stanford. I flew out to Northern California for a long weekend last winter. Every time I see him, I'm nervous that something's going to be different, that we've grown apart the way that people do. I know that he's messed around with a couple of guys since college, even sort of dated one (a senior at Stanford) for a few weeks. "I don't want to flatter your ego, McCreary," he told me over the phone, "but when I'm with Drew, half the time, all I think about is how I like you more. And he's a nice, attractive guy, just objectively high quality. He deserves better than that from me, right?" I didn't say much, and suggested that maybe he should try to give it a go. It's not like I was going to discourage him from having a good life. "Nah, I don't think so," Mark said. He called a couple days later to say that he let Drew down easy, and that it went fine.

So we haven't grown apart. Every time I see him it starts with the handshake that leads to the dude-hug that leads to a real hug, all in just a few seconds. My chest gets tight and I feel it all over again. I know that this makes me sound like a chick, but when I wake up next to him it all just feels right.

A few weeks ago I was leaving work late when my cell phone rang. It was Mark. He hadn't told me that he was in the city, interviewing for law firm jobs the following summer. These weren't normal internships, because getting an offer to work for the summer meant that you were guaranteed to be hired full time after law school. Tom had just been down for interviews and had his offers, and I knew that he and Mark had been trading notes on law firms.

Mark had just received an offer from his first-choice firm. He'd left his hotel, just to get out and walk, right on the edge of Union Square.

"So I'll be moving to New York next summer," he said to me on the phone. "I kind of figured that it was time to pick up where we left off." He paused, cocky. "I mean, if you're game. I don't want to be presumptuous and shit." I was about to leave the office and head to the gym when he called. I hadn't even known he was in the city -- Mark said that it was a sudden trip, and that he'd spring a surprise on us by showing up. So I left my gym bag under my desk, took the elevator down, and haled the first cab.

There he was in Union Square, waiting for me like I said he should, changed out of his interview suit, in jeans and a dark jacket. I was still in my work suit, messenger bag over my shoulder. I bounded to him, about to high-five him and give the dude-hug. He smirked and his cheeks were pink from the October air.

When I got close he took me by the shoulders, put his face up to mine, and kissed me in public, just for a couple of seconds.

This threw me -- we were always so restrained in public -- but I didn't mind. My face was hot but I wasn't blushing. I hugged him tight, said in his ear that this was the best news ever. He just smiled huge and said yeah, he thought so too. He pushed his knee against mine. And I told him that I loved him, dude.