I was in the locker room with Chad, getting dressed. He was chatting away like usual, and I wasn’t paying much attention, having something else on my mind, as usual.
This was a couple of weeks after I’d had the meltdown in my bedroom.
Things were different in the locker room now. I felt a lot happier about many things since I’d started hanging with Chad, and life in the locker room was one of those things. I was showering now, thanks to Chad.
Despite my improved comfort level I still was shy about my body. At 13, boys are either already into puberty or just starting. Or, in my case, unfortunately, just waiting to start. Some of those waiting to start aren’t real comfortable with what their bodies look like. So Chad, thinking I was that way, had that part right.
I didn’t have much going on down there. A few other kids in our class were about the same, I guessed. I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been showering, and I thought the others all avoided it for the same reason I’d been doing so.
It was so easy to get picked on if you were like me, waiting for development to start. Avoiding showers just avoided a lot of teasing.
Chad had started puberty, so didn’t have my problem. He also didn’t seem to worry about stuff like that. I had the feeling that if he had been like me, and didn’t have any hair at all and a miniscule dick and comparable balls, he still wouldn’t have worried, and still would have showered. That’s just the way he was. I really envied that.
-- -- --
On that day in my bedroom, when I realized I’d been wrong about why I was crying, which was when he’d said there was nothing wrong with gay kids, I’d been so happy! I felt so good, and so much in sync with him right then. So it wasn’t too surprising that when he suggested I should get used to being naked with him as a way to get over my body shyness, I just threw caution to the wind. And when, in my giddiness, I suggested he do the same thing so I could get used to looking at dicks without blushing, which after all had been his suggestion, too, and then he did that, well . . .
In my momentary giddiness, I’d forgotten about what that would do.
He undressed, and I got hard. I turned away before he could notice.
“Marc, the only way this works is if we look at each other.” There was a smile in his voice. I had no idea how much he was enjoying this, but I got the sense that there was at least a little more going on here than just the desensitizing that was the intended objective.
The smile was still in his voice as he tried to persuade me to go with the program. “I look at you, you get used to it, and it doesn’t bother you anymore. You look at me, you get used to looking at someone else, and it doesn’t bother you any longer. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. If instead you turn around and look at the wall, how’s this going to work? You’re kind of missing the point here. Screwing it all up.” He sounded a little like he was trying to keep from laughing.
“This was a bad idea, Chad.” And it was. In my enthusiasm to see him naked, in my enthusiasm to go along with his plan of desensitizing me, I’d forgotten what would happen. It might or might not have happened just from him looking at me, but it was positively 100% sure to happen when I looked at him. It would probably happen just thinking about undressing! It didn’t take me much.
And of course it had happened, as soon as he’d taken his pants off, well before he took his underpants off. Which he’d been in the process of doing when I’d turned my back to him.
“Marc? Come on, turn around.”
I was starting to panic. If I turned around, and had a boner, he might just accept it as something that happened because of the situation. But, he might start wondering, and I didn’t want him doing that. What could I do, though? He was going to keep insisting, then come over and turn me around. He’d do that thinking he was helping!
And then the solution hit me. I knew what to do!
“Marc, come on. This is silly.”
“No it isn’t,” I pouted, or pretended to pout. “You said I was shy. Well, I am, and I can’t turn around.” I said it like I was really bothered by it all. I knew what effect that would have on him, and it did.
“Come on, Marc.” I could hear his compassion. “This is silly. I’m undressed, too. We’re both the same here. Come on.”
And, as I’d known he would, he came over to me and put his hand on my arm.
“GRRRRRR,” I said, or something like that, and as he touched me, I attacked! I turned and tackled him, laughing as I did so, taking him to the floor easily because it was so unexpected. I wiggled on top of him, being careful to only do so with my chest and arms.
He was bigger and stronger than I was, and it didn’t take him long to get out from under me. When he did, and we were both still on the floor, sitting up, and he rolled over on top of me, knocking me flat, laughing.
“Uh oh,” I said. “Look what you made me do! You’ve given me a boner!” Ha! It had worked! I’d created an excuse for myself! I’d given myself a reason to be hard!
He laughed. “Yeah, me too. I guess it’s hard to wrestle naked at our age and not get a boner.”
This was just like him. He gets a boner with another boy, and it doesn’t even bother him. And, I discovered, because he wasn’t bothered by it, neither was I!
He got off of me and looked. Which is just what I was doing, too.
He was bigger than I was, as I already knew. I was a little nervous. Well, a lot nervous. But even with my nervousness, even with him staring at me and probably judging me, even with him seeing me for what I was, which wasn’t much, I wasn’t starting to deflate. I think that was because I was looking at him, and he was hard, and, my god, he was beautiful!
We both got to our feet. Both still hard. I reached for my underpants, some of my shyness returning, but he stopped me.
“This is what we have to do. It may seem strange at first because neither of us is used to it, but whenever we’re here in the afternoon, we should just get naked and stay naked. I don’t think it’ll take very long before it’ll just be normal. This feels really weird to me, too, probably because it’s just the two of us instead of a whole locker room full of people. But it’s a good weird, isn’t it? I didn’t think I’d get hard, but, so what? Maybe it just means I need some desensitizing, too.”
That made me really happy, that he was at least sharing with me some of his discomfort, and his uncertainty. I wished he was sharing some of my excitement, too, about being naked with my best friend. But, who knew? Maybe he was, if only a little bit. I mean, he was hard, wasn’t he? Couldn’t that have been because this excited him, too? Well, I doubted that. I thought it was the wrestling, but I was glad he was hard. Not only could I look at it, which was just about the most thrilling thing ever, but I didn’t have to worry at all about being hard myself.
“Chad?” I asked, wanting to take the opportunity when it seemed I might get away with it, to explain away future problems.
“Yeah?”
“Uh, I don’t know, but it’s possible, if we’re going to be naked together a lot, I might, well, I, uh, think I might get hard again, now and then, for no reason other than I think I might and I’m 13. That’ll be okay, won’t it?”
“It had better be, because it’ll probably happen to me, too. This’ll be good for both of us. We’ll get so we’re not embarrassed, and maybe get so we can control these things, too. I’m getting boners in class all the time these days, and wish I could stop it. I never seem to be able to.”
“You too? I thought I was the only one! Of course, look at you! You have more to be concerned with. Yours has to be much harder to hide than mine.”
He laughed. “Yours looks fine to me. And it’ll grow. It’s already nice, though.” Then he had the decency to blush. I really liked that.
We spent the time till he had to go home hanging out naked. I even went naked down to the kitchen and got us some cans of pop. Man, did that feel really strange. We each popped one a couple more times, too, and I don’t mean the tabs on the pop. Whenever he did it, I did it, and vice versa. It was kind of neat, and we laughed about it.
I don’t think I got desensitized much, but I did feel a lot closer to him by the time he had to go. I was really happy he didn’t say anything about how small I was, both when I was hard and when I wasn’t. I’d worried about that, but he never said one word to make me think there was anything wrong with me. It was an exciting afternoon, hanging out naked, doing homework naked, and trying to keep myself from tackling him again, as the idea kept coming back. I figured that might be too obvious, and so I didn’t do it.
When he finally left, after we were both dressed, I just slumped into a chair in the living room and sat there, smiling. I could hardly wait for tomorrow to come.
-- -- --
Tomorrow did come, and the next day after that, and slowly but surely, being naked with him every day, I did lose some of my sensitivity to seeing him that way. I stopped popping wood so frequently. He did too.
One day after gym when we’d spent a lot of afternoons naked together, I said to myself, I can do this. So when Chad got undressed to go shower, so did I.
It turned out to be less of a deal than I’d thought it would be. There weren’t a lot of guys in there, but, get this, I wasn’t the only one waiting for some growth to take place. I wasn’t! I saw who was showering, and I learned something. It wasn’t only the well-developed kids that were showering. But the kids in there did have one thing in common. It took me a couple of days to realize that, and what it was. The guys who were showering were the self-confident kids! Thinking about it, I probably should have realized that before, but I hadn’t.
Once I’d done it that first time, I’d been showering every day after gym. And was I ever proud of myself. Chad was proud of me too. He told me so. Only problem was, now that he’d desensitized me, we didn’t have any reason to get naked together all the time. So we stopped. I really missed that.
-- -- --
As I started to say, I was in the locker room, getting dressed after showering and drying off. Chad was talking about something, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I had something on my mind I wasn’t sure how to handle. I was trying to think what to do. It involved Brittany. And had started about a week earlier.
At lunch, Brittany had been sliding closer and closer to me, day by day. It made it hard to eat. I didn’t really want to talk much to her. I was so happy spending time with Chad now that I wasn’t really interested in paying much attention to her. The more I tried to make that clear by using body language instead of just telling her, which I didn’t want to do—after all, she was bigger than I was—the more she seemed to want to get together.
She finished her lunch early the day this all happened, which was about a week after I’d started showering with the other guys, then said, “Marc, let’s go outside for a minute. I want to talk to you.”
“We’re talking now, aren’t we?” Tom looked up, interested, perhaps alerted by the defensive tone in my voice. Mario did, too. Mario was cute, and whenever he’d get that really inquisitive, excited look on his face, the one he got when he recognized something potentially interesting was occurring, it made him even cuter.
Brittany glanced around the table and softened her voice. I think everyone could still hear it, though. Brittany at her softest could still be heard several tables away. “What I have to say needs to be more private than this.”
Tom and Mario smiled, and Mario sort of rolled his eyes.
“I’m eating lunch.” I was, and I slowed down. This sandwich might take the entire period. I was hoping so, at least.
“Come on. You can bring that.” And she grabbed my arm and stood up. It was go with her or go shopping either for a prosthetic arm like that one the guy in the movie The Fugitive had, or for a doctor knowledgeable in resetting dislocated shoulders.
She let go when it was obvious I was going to follow her. We left the caf and walked out into the courtyard. There were a lot of kids there, as usual, but she led me to a spot where we wouldn’t be overheard, unless she spoke in her usual voice. She didn’t.
“Why haven’t you asked me out again?” she breathed in my ear.
I’d been worried this was what she had on her mind, but was sort of hoping she wouldn’t be so blunt. “Uh, I’ve been real busy.”
“Well, I want to go on another date. Have you been watching afternoon TV?”
Huh? What did the one have to do with anything? I guess I could find out if I just answered the question and
stopped over-thinking everything.
“No, I usually do homework after school, and I’ve been hanging with Chad some. Why?”
“Oh, then you’ve been missing it. See, HBO has been running this special series about teens. Teens our age. Ones that are into the teen scene, partying and all. It’s about some of their problems, like drinking, and bullying, and sex.”
“Sex?”
“Yeah,” she said, and the almost whisper she’d begun with had grown into her normal voice. She didn’t seem to be able to help it when she got excited, and I guess the topic of sex got her juices flowing. “See, that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Yesterday they had a show where these girls my age were all talking about what they had to do to be popular with the boys, and all of them were talking about giving head, and—”
“Ssshh! Jeez!”
“Oh, sorry. Well, it sounded, well, it sounded hot and I sort of started to feel like I was missing out.”
Missing out? Giving head? Hey, I thought I was gay, but I’d never done that, and hadn’t even been thinking about it, really. I mean I’d thought about it, sure, and thought how nice it might be if someone wanted to do that to me, and trying to imagine what that must feel like, but I hadn’t been thinking I was missing out by not doing it to someone else! What was with her, anyway?
She continued, softly now. “I know I felt you a little bit in the theater, and that was nice, but it was too little. Then you did it to me, and it was wonderful. Really, really wonderful. But now I want to do it to you, and I want to do what the girls on that show were talking about. They seemed so happy they’d done it. So, can we? Can we go out again, and can I give you head?”
Uh, uh, what was I supposed to say here? Actually, I was still thinking about when she said she touched me and it was too little. Did she mean, like, I was too little? Or that she hadn’t got to do enough? I think it was the second. So I decided I wouldn’t worry about that, but instead think about the other thing. The head thing.
I liked Chad. I liked being with him, whether we had clothes on or not. During the times I was just by myself and thinking things—jeez, sex things if I have to spell it out—I was always thinking about doing things with him. Not with Brittany. But talking about sex wasn’t his thing, even when we were naked. Sometimes, he’d grin at me, then, and I was always looking at him and wishing, but he was trying to desensitize me, not seduce me. Actually doing sex wasn’t part of it.
And while he never talked about sex, he also absolutely didn’t talk about regretting the fact he was missing out by not giving me head, as she called it. Nor was he trying to set a date when he could. No, it was Brittany who was doing that.
What was I supposed to do, tell her I’d have to check my social calendar to see when I was available for, for what? For head? I wasn’t sure what the correct English usage was here. Was that a noun or a verb? I’d have to ask Miss Feeny, my English teacher, after lunch.
If I said yes, would I be cheating on Chad? Would that matter? I mean, if you’re a 13-year-old boy, and someone offers head—or was it offers to provide head?—it’s pretty hard to say no.
-- -- --
Chad slammed his locker. I looked down and discovered I was still naked. I hadn’t been getting dressed at all.
“Marc? What’s with you?”
“Oh.” Well, I had to say more than that! “Oops. I’ve just been thinking. I have to talk to you about something. That’s what I’ve decided. I have something I have to talk to you about.”
“Fine, but get dressed! You’ve got, like, thirty seconds before the bell rings. And Mr. Simmons kicks us all out of here. And I get to see you running down the hall, naked, carrying your clothes in one hand, trying to get your underpants on with the other while running, which would leave you one hand short to be hiding your goolies with.”
He laughed, no doubt continuing to think about how all that would look. I’d never heard it called goolies before. Or did goolies mean them rather than it?
I dressed as quickly as I could. I beat the bell, but not by much.