From Virgin To Faggot
Chapter 1
The radiator in Bergstrom Hall clanked twice and died, which meant it was past midnight and maintenance had cranked the heat down again to save money nobody would ever see. I yanked my comforter up over my shoulders and stared at the glow of my laptop, the cursor blinking in an empty chat window like it was laughing at me.
Seven weeks. Seven weeks since I'd stood in the second-floor lounge with my heart slamming against my ribs and told my friends I was gay.
I'd planned it like I planned everything. I made flashcards for Gen Chem two weeks before the exam. I had a spreadsheet tracking my Magic: The Gathering collection down to which foils were in which sleeves. I'd decided before I ever unpacked my mini-fridge that I'd wait exactly one month before coming out. One month to make friends who liked me for me — the guy who could recite the periodic table in order, who'd stay up till three arguing about whether the Wheel of Time books were better than A Song of Ice and Fire. Once they couldn't un-like me, I'd tell them.
It went fine. Better than fine. Trey shrugged and said, "Cool, dude, more girls for me." Maren hugged me so hard my back cracked. Cody, who lived two doors down and grew up on a dairy farm outside Eau Claire, blinked at me for five full seconds and said, "Huh. You're like, huge, though." As if being six-two and two hundred pounds was supposed to vaccinate me against liking dick. Then he asked if I still wanted to hit the dining hall for chicken strip night, and that was that.
Nobody cared. Which was great.
The problem was that nobody cared. Including any guy who might want to actually do something about it.
I'd built a whole fantasy over the summer, lying in my childhood bedroom in Appleton reading the same three pages of a fantasy novel over and over without absorbing a word. I'd come out, and like magic there'd be some guy — a junior, maybe, a little older — who'd been watching me across the dining hall. He'd ask me to grab coffee. He'd ask what I was reading. We'd go back to his room.
Instead I found out exactly how small a college of roughly two thousand students in the ass-end of Wisconsin really was. There was a Gay-Straight Alliance that met Thursdays in the library basement. I went twice. Both times it was me, four girls, the faculty advisor, and a sophomore named Ellis who wore eyeliner and spent the entire meeting talking about his boyfriend in Madison. The town was worse. A Kwik Trip, two bars that reeked of Leinenkugel's and fryer grease, a Culver's, a Walmart, and a hobby shop that sold Magic cards and model trains where the owner looked at me like I might be a shoplifter every single time. If there were gay guys in that town, they were doing one hell of a job hiding.
So I was still a virgin. Eighteen, out, and I'd never so much as been kissed by another guy.
I'd tried. God, I'd tried. I set my Facebook profile to "Interested In: Men." I smiled at a cute guy in Intro to Psych until he started sitting on the other side of the hall. I let Maren set me up with her cousin's roommate, who turned out to be extremely straight and extremely confused about why she'd given him my number.
And every night I came back to this. My laptop. My fist. My aching, desperate cock and the water-stained ceiling of my single, which I'd lucked into because my assigned roommate dropped out two weeks before move-in.
I spent a lot of that semester staring at myself in the mirror, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.
Nothing, as it turned out. At least nothing you could see.
I'd played football all four years at Appleton North. Tight end mostly, some defensive line when Coach needed bodies. I'd been strong since eighth grade and kept filling out after that, so by the time I hit college I had broad shoulders, thick arms, and a chest that strained the buttons on the one dress shirt my mom packed for me. My thighs were heavy with muscle from years of squats and sled drills, and my ass — well. My ass had been a running joke on the team for years. The guys called it "the shelf." Round, high, so thick with muscle it stuck out behind me like it had its own zip code. Coach used to say I could balance a Gatorade on it. I laughed along with everyone else while my face went red as a stop sign.
That was the irony nobody on my floor could get past. I looked like I should be doing keg stands at a frat house, and instead I spent my Friday nights rolling a d20 and drafting Lorwyn booster packs with a bunch of guys who all weighed a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet. I was declared Chemistry, pre-everything, the kind of guy who actually enjoyed lab reports. Cody called me "the world's biggest nerd" with something almost like awe.
My hair was strawberry blond, that reddish gold that made old church ladies pinch my cheeks and say I looked like a Viking. Short on the sides, a little longer on top so it flopped into my eyes. Freckles across my nose and shoulders that darkened every summer, pale blue eyes, a face my mom swore was "handsome" and that I mostly thought was round. Down below, my pubes were a darker copper red, almost auburn, and there was a light dusting of fine blond hair on my forearms, my legs, and across my ass, the kind you only noticed when the light caught it.
My cock was six inches hard. I knew because I'd measured it more times than I'd ever admit with the ruler from my desk drawer. Uncut, pinkish, enough foreskin to stay over the head when I got stiff. Perfectly average, according to every website I'd ever read. I didn't care much about it. Even when I was jerking it, I wasn't really thinking about it.
I was thinking about my ass. About something filling it.
The first week of classes, with my door locked and my single finally all mine, I'd started experimenting. One finger at first, slick with the Jergens lotion my mom had tucked into my shower caddy, my face mashed into the pillow while I bit down to keep quiet — and even that first finger had made me shake, made my hole spasm and grab at it while my cock drooled a wet spot into the sheets. Then two. Then, one horrible and amazing night in late September, a cucumber I'd smuggled out of the dining hall salad bar wrapped in napkins, which I later double-bagged and threw into a dumpster behind the science building like a murderer ditching a body.
I'd done it on my back with my knees hooked over the edge of the mattress and my heels up on the frame, both hands shaking, working the cold wet thing into myself an inch at a time while I stared at the ceiling and told myself over and over it's just a vegetable, it's just a vegetable — and then it wasn't, it was this fat blunt pressure splitting me open and dragging over something inside me that lit up like a struck match. I came so hard that night I hit my own chin. My hole clenched and spasmed around the thing while I sobbed into my pillow, "fuck, fuck, fuuuck," and then lay there with my legs shaking in the air, stuffed full, cum cooling in the hollow of my throat.
So I knew what I wanted. Some part of me had always known. I wanted a man to hold me down and fuck me until I couldn't think.
I just couldn't find one.
Which brings me to the second week of November 2007, and the chat room.
I'd found it about two weeks earlier. One of those old-school gay sex chat sites with regional rooms, the kind where everybody's profile picture was a pixelated torso and the sidebar ads were for poppers and penis pumps. One night, after another evening of absolutely nothing, I'd made a profile in a fit of horny desperation. I hovered over the username box for a long time. Something clever? Something cute? Something that said I like fantasy novels and organic chemistry and would like to be gently courted?
I typed hungryhole18 and hit enter before I could chicken out.
I joined the Wisconsin room and immediately got fifteen private messages, most of which were some variation of "hey," "stats?" or a dick pic that loaded line by agonizing line on the shitty campus connection, so I got about four seconds of suspense before finding out I was looking at some guy's hairy thigh and a cock that may or may not have been his. A lot of them were old. Like, old old. One guy said he was sixty-one, lived in Wausau, and wanted to "teach me the ropes." Another wanted me to wear his wife's panties. A guy from Milwaukee chatted with me for an hour before admitting he had a boyfriend who "wouldn't mind" and that he could only meet on Tuesdays.
I logged off that first night feeling dirtier than the cucumber.
But I went back. Every night I went back. Because some of them were hot, and because every time some guy typed out what he'd do to me, I'd shove my sweatpants to my knees and blow all over my stomach in about ninety seconds flat.
That night I'd been in the room twenty minutes, half-heartedly chatting with a guy from Green Bay who typed "lol" after every sentence, when a new name popped up in the user list.
thicktop9
I stared at it. Something about it made my stomach clench. It was so blunt. No cutesy shit, no numbers that were obviously his birth year, no emoticons. Just what he was.
I clicked his profile. It said almost nothing. 36. 6'4. 190. Brown/brown. Work with my hands. Not into games. 8" thick cut. Looking for a bottom who knows his place.
A bottom who knows his place.
My cock jumped hard enough I felt it smack the inside of my sweatpants. I didn't even know what my place was. I wanted somebody to tell me.
I didn't message him. I wasn't brave enough. I just sat there with his profile open, refreshing it like an idiot, while Green Bay typed "u there? lol."
Then a chat window blinked open.
thicktop9: hey
My fingers froze over the keys. I took a breath that rattled.
hungryhole18: hey
thicktop9: saw u checkin out my profile
Shit. I hadn't known the site told you that. My face flamed even though I was completely alone.
hungryhole18: sorry. yeah. it was hot
thicktop9: dont be sorry. ur profile dont say shit. 18?
hungryhole18: yeah. turned 18 in august
thicktop9: cool. whatchu into
hungryhole18: I don't know. guys. older guys I think. being on bottom obviously lol
thicktop9: obviously lol. u got a man? fuck around with buddies?
My chest tightened. This was where it always went wrong. Guys either got weird and creepy when they found out, or they lost interest because they didn't want to "deal with" a virgin. One guy had literally typed "ugh nvm" and blocked me.
But something about the flat, no-bullshit way this guy typed made me want to tell him the truth.
hungryhole18: no. honestly I've never done anything with anyone. I came out in October and thought it would be easier to find a guy after that but there's nobody where I am. I've been looking for weeks.
hungryhole18: sorry if that's not what you're looking for
I hit enter and immediately wanted to puke. I'd basically just admitted to a stranger with an eight-inch cock that I was a pathetic, desperate virgin loser. I pulled my knees up to my chest and waited for him to log off.
thicktop9: fuck boy
thicktop9: ur a virgin?
hungryhole18: yeah...
thicktop9: never had a dick in ur hole?
hungryhole18: not a real one
thicktop9: lol whats that mean
My ears were on fire. I couldn't believe I was about to type this.
hungryhole18: fingers. and a cucumber once
thicktop9: HA. fuckin a. so u know u want it. u been lyin there dreamin bout it
hungryhole18: all the time. it's basically all I think about. I'm supposed to be studying for a chem exam right now and instead I'm here
thicktop9: chem huh. smart boy
hungryhole18: chem major. big nerd. I play D&D and read fantasy books. so yeah
thicktop9: dont know what that shit is. dont care. u got pics?
I did. I'd taken them the week before with the crappy camera on my Motorola Razr, then emailed them to myself because I couldn't figure out how else to get them off the phone. I'd never sent them to anyone. They sat in a folder on my desktop labeled "Thermodynamics Notes" like that would fool anybody.
I sent two. One of my face, smiling awkwardly, hair messy and falling in my eyes, a Wheel of Time poster crooked on the wall behind me. One of me from behind, standing in front of the mirror on my closet door, naked, looking back over my shoulder with my ass on full display. The flash washed me out, but you could see the shape of it. The shelf. The swell of muscle, the faint gold fuzz catching the light.
The chat went quiet. I counted. Thirty seconds. Forty-five. A full minute.
thicktop9: jesus christ
thicktop9: boy u got the fattest bubble butt ive seen in a long fuckin time
thicktop9: ur fuckin built. u play ball?
hungryhole18: in high school yeah. tight end
thicktop9: tight end lmao. fuckin perfect. bet it still is. cute face too. got that nerdy look even without the nerd shit behind u
I laughed out loud alone in my room, then clapped a hand over my mouth like someone might hear. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me. Not even close.
hungryhole18: thanks. can I see you?
thicktop9: sure
The first picture loaded line by line, painfully slow. Short brown hair, a little shaggy, like he cut it himself with clippers in a bathroom mirror. Then a face. Sharp, weathered cheekbones. A hard jaw with a few days of brown stubble going faintly gray at the chin. Brown eyes narrowed like he was squinting into the sun, and a mouth that wasn't quite smiling. He wore a faded Carhartt jacket over a gray t-shirt and stood in front of a beat-up red Chevy pickup with a gun rack in the back window, bare November trees behind him.
He looked like every guy I'd grown up around. The guys who worked at the paper mill, who drank Miller High Life at the VFW, who disappeared up north every deer season. He looked like a man, in a way none of the skinny guys in my D&D group ever would.
Then the second picture started loading.
A mirror shot, a cramped bathroom with fake wood paneling. He was naked, and he was tall, that much was obvious even in the grainy photo.
He had one hand braced on the sink and the other holding the camera up near his shoulder, and the flash had bounced off the mirror to leave a white starburst in the corner of the shot. It didn't matter. My eyes went right past it.
He was long. Long arms, long legs, long torso, all of it lean and hard in a way that didn't come from a gym. His shoulders were broad and a little bony, his arms roped with veins that stood up along his forearms like cords. A scatter of brown hair crossed his chest, nothing heavy, just enough to make him look like a grown man instead of one of the waxed, oiled guys in the porn I'd been downloading one slow, guilty megabyte at a time. Below his navel the hair gathered into a thick dark trail that ran straight down the flat ridges of his stomach into a full, untrimmed bush of brown pubes.
And hanging out of that bush was the biggest cock I had ever seen in real life. Well. Real-life photo.
It was soft, or maybe half-hard, heavy and thick and swinging low between his thighs, the head fat and fully exposed since he was cut. Even soft it looked like it outweighed mine hard. There was a vein running down the top of it as thick as a pencil.
I didn't breathe. I didn't realize I wasn't breathing until my chest started to burn.
Then a third picture started to load.
Same bathroom. Same mirror. This time he was hard.
Fuck.
It stood up off his body at an angle, thick from root to tip, the shaft wrapped in veins, the head flared and dark and shiny like it was already wet. He had his fist wrapped around the base and there was still a ton of cock sticking out past it. Eight or more inches. I'd measured mine enough times to know what six looked like, and this was not six. This was a whole different species.
My hand was already inside my sweatpants. I didn't remember putting it there.
thicktop9: well
hungryhole18: holy shit
hungryhole18: sorry. holy shit. that's huge
thicktop9: lol yeah. think u could take it virgin boy
I stared at the screen, my fist moving slow on my cock, my foreskin sliding up and down over the head while I looked at that third picture. I clenched my hole without meaning to, imagining it. That fat head pushing against me. Splitting me open. The cucumber had felt enormous and this was bigger — this was going to be a fight, and the thought of losing it made my thighs go hot.
hungryhole18: I don't know but I want to.
thicktop9: good answer. most guys lie and say yeah no problem then cry like a bitch when i get the head in
thicktop9: u jerkin right now?
My face burned. I looked at the closed door of my room like somebody might be standing behind it.
hungryhole18: yes
thicktop9: didnt say u could
My hand stopped dead. I actually stopped. I sat there with my fist frozen around my cock, my heart pounding, staring at those four words. Nobody had ever told me what to do like that. Not like that. My coach had yelled at me, my parents had told me to clean my room, my professors handed out syllabi. This was different. This was a man I'd never met telling me I didn't have permission to touch my own dick, and the craziest part was how badly I wanted to obey him.
hungryhole18: sorry. I stopped
thicktop9: lol did u really
hungryhole18: yeah
thicktop9: fuck. ok. thats hot. u might be a natural boy
thicktop9: go ahead. slow. look at my dick and think bout it stretchin that fat ass of urs. dont cum till i say
I didn't last long. I tried. I really tried. But he kept typing, short and filthy, and every line went into me like a hand down my throat.
id bend u over the tailgate of my truck and eat that hole till u quit squirmin
then id hold ur cheeks apart and push in slow so u feel every inch comin. make u count em out loud
big corn fed boy like u was built to take a poundin. that ass is wasted on a dorm room
I was panting by the second minute, my ass grinding down into the mattress, my fist slapping wet and fast, a little nngh, nnnhh, hnnng leaking out of me no matter how hard I bit my lip. My hole was clenching on nothing, over and over, so hungry it ached, and I kept pushing two fingers in dry just to feel something close.
hungryhole18: I'm close
thicktop9: beg
hungryhole18: please. please can I cum
thicktop9: go ahead boy
I came so hard it splashed my collarbone. "Uhh—fuck—ahhh," I gasped into the dark, my whole body jerking, my hole spasming around my fingers, wishing to God it was something fatter. It went on and on, thick white ropes painting my stomach and chest and soaking the waistband of my sweats. When I finally stopped shaking, I lay there with cum cooling on my skin, staring at his hard cock on my screen, feeling like I'd just run a full set of gassers.
hungryhole18: done. that was the hardest I've ever come I think
thicktop9: good boy
thicktop9: gotta crash. up at 5. talk tmrw
He logged off before I could even type goodnight.
I lay there for a long time, stomach sticky, the radiator ticking as it cooled. Good boy. I replayed it in my head about a hundred times before I fell asleep without even wiping off.
He was back the next night. And the night after that.
I started rushing through my homework so I could be logged in by ten. I bailed early on a Magic draft in the lounge on Wednesday, mumbling something about a lab report. I checked the room list compulsively, my stomach dropping every time I didn't see his name and flipping every time I did.
We didn't just talk about sex, either, which surprised me. He'd tell me about his day in that flat, no-punctuation way he typed. He did a little bit of everything: drywall, roofing, fixing farm equipment, running a plow truck for the county in the winter. He'd bitch about a customer who wanted a deck built for half price, or about his buddy who owed him rent. He asked me about my classes and actually seemed to read the answers, even when I rambled. When I tried to explain D&D to him, he typed so its like makebelieve with dice for grownups and I laughed so hard I had to put my face in a pillow, mostly because he wasn't entirely wrong.
His name was Dell. He told me on the third night, just dropped it like it was nothing. names dell btw. I told him mine was Brady, and for some reason that felt more naked than sending him the picture of my ass.
It was the fourth night when we figured out how close we were.
thicktop9: so where u at anyway. u said college. madison? stevens point?
I hesitated the same way I had the first night, my mom's warnings flashing through my head. Then I typed the name of my school.
The chat sat there for a second.
thicktop9: ur shittin me
hungryhole18: no? why?
thicktop9: i got a place like 10 min from ur campus
I read it three times.
hungryhole18: wait seriously?
thicktop9: yes boy not far at all
thicktop9: small fuckin world
hungryhole18: yeah. small world
I didn't sleep much that night.
The thing was, I'd been lying to myself for a long time about what I was waiting for.
I'd told myself I was waiting for the right guy. That I wanted to date first, have a boyfriend, the whole thing. Coffee and dinner and some sweet, slow first time with candles, the kind of scene I'd read in the one or two gay romance novels I'd ordered off Amazon and hidden inside the dust jacket of a Robert Jordan hardcover. I'd built a whole picture of it in my head, the way I built everything: carefully, logically, step by step.
But it was the middle of November. I'd been out for six weeks. And there was no right guy. There wasn't even a wrong guy. There was nobody. Just my fist and the chat room and a ceiling I'd memorized every water stain on.
I was sick of it. Sick of jerking off three times a night and still feeling wound tight enough to snap. Sick of fingering myself in the shower with my teeth clenched and my legs braced against the stall walls. Sick of lying in bed on Friday nights listening to the headboard in the room next door bang against the wall, knowing every single person on my floor was getting laid except me.
The more I talked to Dell, the clearer it got. I wasn't going to find a boyfriend in a town with one Culver's. And even if I did, what was I going to do with him? I didn't know anything. I didn't know how to kiss a guy, how to suck a cock, how to take one. I'd show up to that sweet, slow fantasy date and fumble around like an idiot with my tongue in the wrong place.
Dell wasn't a boyfriend. He was thirty-six, he drove a pickup with a gun rack, and he typed like he'd failed high school English on purpose. He didn't want to take me to dinner. He wanted to fuck me.
And God, I wanted to be fucked.
On Wednesday night, after chatting with him for over a week, after coming to his pictures more times than I could count, I sat on my bed with the laptop on my knees and the dorm dead quiet around me, and I finally said it out loud.
"Fuck it."
My voice sounded weird in the empty room. I said it again anyway.
"Fuck it. I don't want to be a virgin anymore."
Then I opened the chat window.
hungryhole18: can I ask you something
thicktop9: go
hungryhole18: you said you lived close by right? And have a car?
The little thicktop9 is typing appeared and disappeared. Appeared again.
thicktop9: yeah, why
My fingers were shaking. I typed it, deleted it, typed it again.
hungryhole18: because I'm tired of waiting. I've been waiting for some perfect guy to come along and it's not happening and I'm sick of it. I want to get fucked. I want you to fuck me. I don't want to be a virgin anymore.
I hit enter and immediately clapped my hand over my mouth, like I'd said it out loud to the whole floor.
It took him forever to answer. Probably fifteen seconds. It felt like a year.
thicktop9: u sure bout that boy?
thicktop9: cuz im not some college kid whos gonna be sweet and take it slow and cuddle u after. u come to me u get fucked like a man fucks
Something hot and liquid rolled through my stomach and settled between my legs. I pressed my palm against my cock through my sweatpants and squeezed.
hungryhole18: I'm sure
thicktop9: say it again
hungryhole18: I'm sure. I want you to fuck me. please
thicktop9: fuck yeah u do
thicktop9: ok. heres how its gonna go. im comin down Friday. ill pick u up at 10am. in front of ur dorm
thicktop9: be there. red chevy. dont make me wait
thicktop9: im gonna take u to the apartment and fuck u
hungryhole18: ok. for how long?
thicktop9: till im done with u. ill bring u back when we're done
My mind started spinning out all the logistics the way it always did. I had a Gen Chem problem set due Monday. I'd have to tell Toby something because he'd notice if I disappeared that long.
I didn't care. None of that mattered.
hungryhole18: ok. should I bring anything?
thicktop9: you won't need nothing. clothes won't be on long
thicktop9: and u gotta get that hole cleaned out before i pick u up
My face went hot all over again. I'd read about this, sort of. In vague terms, in the corners of the internet where I'd been learning everything about gay sex I wasn't brave enough to ask a real person.
hungryhole18: I've read about that but I don't really know how to do it...
thicktop9: figured. listen up college boy. take notes, ur good at that
thicktop9: go to walgreens or walmart tmrw. family planning aisle or by the laxatives. get an enema bulb. little rubber thing with a long nozzle. like 5 bucks. DONT get the fleet ones with the shit already in em, that stuff tears u up. just plain water
thicktop9: tomorrow mornin take a fiber pill or eat a bowl of oatmeal. Then Friday take a shit first. then fill the bulb with warm water. not hot, not cold. like baby bottle warm, test it on ur wrist
thicktop9: lube the tip. lay on ur side in the tub or squat over the toilet. slide it in, squeeze it slow, hold it like 30 sec, then let it go in the toilet
thicktop9: do it again. and again. keep goin till the water comes out clear. might take 3 times might take 10. dont rush it
thicktop9: then wait like half hour before u come out to the truck so ur not leakin water all over my seat
I sat there reading it with my mouth open. There was something almost funny about it, this rough, grunting redneck typing out step-by-step instructions like he was teaching me to change the oil on a truck. It was also the most matter-of-fact thing anyone had ever said to me about sex. No embarrassment. No ceremony. Just, this is how it's done, now do it.
hungryhole18: ok. I think I got all that
thicktop9: dont think. know. read it again
I actually did. I scrolled back up and read every line twice more, my lips moving like I was cramming for a quiz. Warm water. Clear. Half hour. Then, because I was me and couldn't help it, I highlighted the whole block, copied it, and pasted it into a Word document I saved as Lab Procedure -- FRI.doc.
hungryhole18: ok. I saved it. I'm good
thicktop9: lol course u did. nerd
thicktop9: one more rule
hungryhole18: ok
thicktop9: no cummin till Friday
I blinked at the screen. My cock, which had been rock-hard the whole time, throbbed in my sweatpants like it had heard him.
hungryhole18: But I usually jerk off like 3 times a day...
thicktop9: i know. thats why. want u fuckin desperate when u climb in my truck. want them balls full and that hole twitchin. u can touch it but u dont cum. understand?
I read it and my whole face went hot. Two days. I hadn't gone two days without coming since I was thirteen, not even the week I had mono. But I could already feel the shape of it, the ache building, the way I'd sit in Gen Chem on Friday with my legs crossed so tight they'd go numb, thinking about later that day. About him.
hungryhole18: I understand
thicktop9: say yes sir
My fingers hovered. Nobody had ever made me call them sir except Coach, and that had been nothing like this. This had weight to it. This felt like signing something.
hungryhole18: yes sir
thicktop9: good boy
There it was again. Two words, and I felt them all the way down in my gut. I pressed my palm hard against the front of my sweats and then, remembering, made myself take it away and set it flat on the mattress. It took real effort. My hand actually shook.
thicktop9: send me a pic before i crash. that ass. bent over
hungryhole18: right now?
thicktop9: no next tuesday. yes right now
I laughed, a nervous breathless huff, and scrambled off the bed. I checked the lock on my door twice. I peeled my sweatpants and boxers down and kicked them under the desk, grabbed the Razr off my nightstand, and stood in front of the closet mirror with the overhead light buzzing.
I bent forward with one hand braced on my knee, twisted the phone around behind me, and tried to aim it at myself without seeing what I was doing. The first one was just ceiling. The second was mostly thigh. The third, I spread my feet wider and arched my back the way I'd seen guys do in pictures, and when I looked at the tiny screen my breath caught.
Both cheeks round and pale and pushed out, the gold fuzz lit up by the flash, the crease between them parted just enough to show a pink pucker that I swear clenched on its own while I looked at it. My balls hung heavy and reddish-furred underneath, and my cock was hard and pointing at the floor, the foreskin already slipping back off a shiny head, a thread of precum hanging off the tip and swinging.
It took four minutes to email it to myself and another two to load it into the chat. I sat there naked on the edge of the bed the whole time, bouncing my knee, my bare ass on the scratchy dorm comforter.
thicktop9: fuuuuck
thicktop9: look at that hole. pink as hell. never been touched by a man
thicktop9: i cant wait to wreck that boy
thicktop9: gonna be stretched out and drippin my load by the time u go back to that dorm. ur buddies are gonna wonder why ur walkin funny
hungryhole18: fuck.
thicktop9: dont touch it
hungryhole18: I'm not. I swear. it's so hard though
thicktop9: good. stay that way. 10am Friday. front of Bergstrom. clean, empty, ready
thicktop9: night bitch
He logged off.
I stared at that last word for a long time. Bitch. I'd heard it a thousand times. In the locker room, at lunch, shouted out of a pickup window at a kid at my high school who wore his sister's eyeliner. I'd flinched every time, even back when nobody knew. It was the worst thing you could be called in Appleton, and here it was in a chat window, the last thing he'd said to me.
And it didn't feel like an insult. Not from him. It felt like a label on a jar. Like he'd looked at that picture of my ass and figured out exactly what I was, and then just written it down.
My cock jerked so hard it slapped against my stomach and left a wet smear of precum below my navel.
I didn't touch it. I lay down on top of the covers, naked, staring up at the water stains, my hands fisted in the comforter at my sides, and I didn't touch it.
Thursday was the longest day of my life.
I ate a bowl of oatmeal at the dining hall at seven-thirty in the morning, which was so far outside my normal routine that the lunch lady swiping cards actually asked if I was feeling okay. I sat through Gen Chem with my backpack in my lap. Dr. Sorbye spent fifty minutes on Le Chatelier's principle, and all I could think was that a system under stress shifts to relieve that stress, and that my system was under a lot of stress, and that no shift was coming until ten o'clock tomorrow morning.
My balls ached. Not a lot — just a dull, constant heaviness that reminded me they were there every time I sat down or stood up or crossed my legs. My cock got hard in English Comp. It got hard in the dining hall, hard enough that I had to sit with my tray in my lap. It got hard in the shower, where I stood under the hot water with the curtain closed and my forehead against the tile and my hands pressed flat against the wall, breathing through my nose, while some guy in the next stall hummed Fergie off-key and had no idea there was a two-hundred-pound virgin six feet away fighting for his life.
I let myself touch it for thirty seconds. Just hold it. Just feel the weight of it and the way the water made the foreskin slide. Then I took my hand away and whimpered out loud in the steam, and it echoed off the tiles.
After lunch I walked the mile and a half to Walmart instead of waiting for Toby to drive me anywhere, because I could not handle him asking what I needed. I wandered the pharmacy section for fifteen minutes pretending to look at cough drops, then shampoo, then shaving cream, waiting for an old guy with a cart full of Ensure to get out of the aisle. When he finally left, I found it on the bottom shelf, right where Dell said it would be. A little red rubber bulb with a long white nozzle in a clear plastic clamshell. Four dollars and eighty-seven cents.
I picked it up like it was radioactive. Then I grabbed a box of Kleenex, a bottle of Gatorade, a bag of Doritos, and a two-pack of Bic pens I didn't need, and stacked them on top of it in my basket like camouflage. The cashier was a middle-aged woman with a Packers lanyard who scanned every single item without looking at me once. She didn't care. Nobody cared. I still walked out of there with my face so red I could feel it in my ears.
Back in my room, I hid the bag in my bottom desk drawer behind my Magic binders.
I didn't log onto the chat that night. Dell had told me he'd be busy, finishing up a roofing job before the weather turned, and anyway I didn't trust myself. If he'd said one single filthy thing to me, I would've broken. So instead I studied to take my mind off it. As best as it could.
By ten my legs were jittery under the desk and I'd read the same paragraph on reaction rates six times. I gave up, brushed my teeth, and lay down on my back with my hands folded on my chest like a corpse in a coffin, trying not to move, because every time I moved something dragged across my cock.
It didn't work. Of course it didn't work. At eleven-thirty I pulled my boxers down to my thighs and let it out, just to look at it. It was so stiff it stood up off my belly on its own and swayed when I breathed, the head shiny and dark, the slit open and wet like it had already given up waiting. My balls were drawn up tight against my body, and when I cupped them they felt hot and full and heavy as river stones.
I touched it with one fingertip. Just the pad of my finger, on the ridge under the head. My whole lower body flinched. I did it again. Nine more times, until my thighs were trembling and there was a fist-sized wet patch in the sheet.
Then I took my hand away and lay there panting at the ceiling, and I thought: he'd be proud of me. He'd say good boy.
Then I set my alarm for six-thirty, which was two and a half hours earlier than I'd gotten up on a Friday in my entire life, and climbed into bed in nothing but my boxers.
Ten o'clock tomorrow. Red Chevy. In front of my dorm.
Eight thick inches of a man I'd never met in person, a man who'd called me a bitch and a good boy in the same week, who'd taught me how to clean myself out like he was teaching me how to change a tire, who was going to drive me ten minutes out of town and keep me there until he was done with me.
I should have been scared. Part of me was. The part of me that had grown up listening to my mom's warnings and watching Dateline was screaming that this was insane, that I was a chemistry major with a 3.8 GPA and I knew better.
But the rest of me — the part that had been waiting since I was thirteen, the part that had cried into a pillow with a cucumber in its ass and buried the evidence like a criminal — was just quiet. Settled. For the first time in months I wasn't wondering when it would happen or who it would be with.
I knew exactly when. And I knew exactly who.
I reached over and turned off the lamp. In the dark, I slid one hand down to cup my aching balls through my boxers, just holding them, not stroking, not squeezing, obeying him even though he'd never know if I didn't. I lay there and listened to the radiator clank twice and go silent, and I squeezed my eyes shut and counted the hours until ten.