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  Suddenly, Adrian knew what made him so uneasy with Dale: He was jealous. Jealous of Dale’s natural confidence. Jealous of his ability to fit in anywhere. Jealous of his wealth. Jealous of his wiry frame. Jealous of his audacity to not give a fuck about what anyone thought or dared to say out loud.

  And Adrian was oddly excited by that jealousy.

  Chapter 2: Locker Room Talk

  Adrian brushed past Dale, ignoring the firm slap on his ass. He headed to his locker while stripping off his uniform in the process. Excited voices from the shower competed with the blasting water as steam leaked from the stalls into the dressing area. He stopped at a bench and high fived a stocky outfielder who was loudly defending himself against a gangly teammate wrapped in a towel.

  “Way to bring your A-game, Rudy,” Adrian joked, interrupting whatever conversation had been going on. These two were always embroiled in a heated debate of unimportance. “You only dropped half the balls this time.”

  “Fuck you and your mother! I missed, like, one.”

  “One!” The boy behind him guffawed. “You better stop skipping math, Rudolph. You gonna lose your scholarship. Non-counting ass mofo.”

  “Fuck you, Pete. And your—”

  “Yeah yeah, I know.” Pete whipped off his towel and snapped it at Rudy. Rudy dodged out of reach, but Pete didn’t bother to put the towel back on. He stood there, butt naked, flaccid penis dangling as he chatted without a care. “Almost lost us the game, shithead.”

  Adrian looked on from a sly vantage point at his locker. He didn’t want to appear interested in Pete’s willy, yet Pete’s confidence impressed him. Adrian would never be able to hold a conversation while nude. It wasn’t like Pete was blessed enough to show off; his dick had been the butt of many a “super-size me” joke until the novelty wore off. He didn’t care.

  Adrian could never be so nonchalant. Not that he had anything to be ashamed of. He’d measured back during his high school years and topped out at 8 ½ inches, 9 if he stretched the base. Even soft he was thick and almost the same size as Pete semi-hard—almost. Nevertheless, he was embarrassed to be seen naked.

  People considered him a natural on the diamond. But although his talent may have been God-given, his physique was far from an inherited blessing. Pete and Dale had the genetic predisposition for lean torsos that were easy to accentuate with a few pounds of muscle and look like they’d stepped off the cover of a fashion magazine. He, on the other hand, seemed to have fallen off a muscle and fitness rag. With popping veins he looked as if the closest he’d get to fashion was being a scar-faced bouncer at a catwalk show.

  Lots of jokes about steroids were directed at him. He suffered them with good humor, same as Pete suffered dwarf-dick jokes and Dale put up with jokes about his sexuality. But Adrian had never popped a pill or injected juice or however athletes used steroids. His physique was the honest-to-goodness result of hard work at the gym spurred by honest-to-goodness bullying.

  During middle school and his first two years in high school, Adrian had been downright fat. His parents were fat as far back as their yearbook photos, and so were his aunts and uncles. He had resigned himself to being a tub of lard like them—no amount of dieting worked. But then his older cousin had visited for Christmas. He hadn’t seen his cousin since the previous Christmas, and he was shocked to see a much thinner man not forced to sidle through the doorway, but walk through with room to spare. He must have been 150 or maybe even 200 pounds lighter!

  Adrian was finishing up his sophomore year the reigning joke of the cafeteria and desperately wanted to change that. He wasn’t simply overweight or slightly obese; he was a fucking zip code all to himself. So he had asked how he could lose that much weight. And his cousin told him the secret: the GOYA diet.

  “That some kind of low carb diet? I gotta eat beans and shit all the time?”

  “Nope. You gotta get off your ass and exercise: G-O-Y-A.”

  He was skeptical at first. It sounded too simplistic and obvious. Eventually, the cafeteria and hallway taunts motivated him to give it a try. He began with an occasional stroll. First twice a week, then every other day, and finally daily. He bought a 10-pound medicine ball and started tossing it as high as he could and catch it. Miraculously, the pounds melted—glacially.

  To completely transform his body Adrian had to step up the intensity and reinvent himself. All those things he secretly wanted to do but hadn’t even tried, he made his exercise routine. He started lifting weights. He walked everywhere until he was able to run long distances. Eventually, he began to play a sport. Several sports. He even scaled his calories back by half. And though it was rough and he’d had a lot of false starts, by the following summer he had managed to develop a regimen he could stick to.

  When he started his junior year he had lost enough fat to gain positive notice. There were still jokes. The most common suggested he’d spent the summer at a fat camp. Yet for the first time, he detected envy behind the jokes rather than pity or disgust. A year later he was being approached by all the girls that had turned up their noses and the ones who had abandoned him in the friend zone. The best part was that the more active he became, the more he could eat.

  Win/Win.

  Except for the fact that he didn’t lose or transform the sense of shame he felt about allowing himself to become obese. He imagined sometimes that people who never knew him during his blob years would be able to tell anyway. So he worked even harder at preventing himself from ever becoming another fat joke, going to the opposite extreme and building dense muscle that made his veins pop.

  He was healthier and better looking.

  Still, he lacked real confidence and sexual allure.

  Not like Pete.

  Or Dale.

  Adrian glanced from Pete’s dangling member to his animated face and was surprised to meet Pete’s gaze.

  Pete smirked. “Want a photo, hotshot?”

  Adrian blushed but shrugged. “Yeah. I’m marketing a new penis enlarger and I need a realistic before shot.”

  Rudy piped up with laughter. “Ooh, he burned you, Pencil Dick!”

  “Shut up, you piss-poor catcher! If it wasn’t for Adrian, we would have lost.”

  “I for sure thought we were fucked,” chimed a guy waltzing in from the shower. "The stands were as dead as a cemetery. Good save, Hulk." He fist-bumped Adrian, who was still clothed in his undergarments and waiting for the shower to clear.

  "A dead zone," Rudy parroted in agreement, but the guy had already vanished around the corner of the lockers. Rudy turned back to Pete and Adrian. “Especially during the final pitch. I swear I could hear their hearts pounding in their chests, waiting to see if that ball was fair or foul.”

  “That was your own fear, dipshit.” Pete finally wrapped the towel around his waist again.

  “No way.” Rudy thumped a fist into a pretend glove. “I knew right away.”

  Pete jabbed a finger at Rudy. “Bullshit. I saw your eyes. They were shifty.”

  “How in the fuck could you see my eyes from third base? Man, shut up!”

  The verbal match Adrian had interrupted reignited and he used that moment to slip into the empty shower. He stood under the hot water and let it sooth his worries as it sluiced through his short, black hair. It washed the sweat away from his body and those pitiful memories from his mind.

  Well, not all of them. He trailed his finger down one of several permanent reminders not quite buried beneath his mounds of muscle and a slew of tattoos. He’d had surgery to cut away excess flaps of skin left behind from his extreme weight loss. The scars felt like scabbed-over welts. This was the real cause of his insecurity, the reason he avoided relationships and settled for encounters that didn’t require him to strip naked. From blow jobs to quickies in the stalls, even sometimes anonymous glory hole action, he maintained emotional and physical distance. He looked good in his clothes now, but that was, in part, a facade.

  He hadn’t had enough money to remove all the sacks o
f flab hanging off his frame. One couldn’t tell it when he was clothed, but naked the gelatinous folds hung from his inner thighs, his obliques, and even a little still on his chest. He was ashamed of these flaws, even if they were manageable with compression-wear as his skin tightened a little more with each pound of muscle he packed on. Girls expected perfection to go along with his muscles. Everyone did. Nothing could change that.

  Adrian pushed the pity from his mind and thought instead about the night at the pub later. He was going to get trashed. If he had lost the bet, he would be stuck footing the bill for the entire opposing team. Now it was Dale stuck with what would surely amount to hundreds of dollars for a bunch of practicing lushes. Adrian could knock ‘em back, for sure.

  Yet, he was feeling less ecstatic about winning the wager than he expected. He knew why, of course. If Dale had won, he wouldn’t have made Adrian pay. Not if their previous bets were any evidence. Dale was pretty damned generous and forgiving of debts. Almost like a schoolboy paying the cool kids to be his friend. This made Adrian feel a bit sorry, yet not enough to sandbag his victory. He wondered why he’d given Dale such a hard attitude on the field. Sure, Dale had cranked the obnoxiousness up, but he’d behaved worse before and had never struck a nerve so deep.

  So what the hell was aggravating Adrian today?

  Chapter 3: No Strings Attached

  The scalding stream of water had turned cold by the time Adrian stepped from beneath the nozzle. He turned off the shower and listened for chatter. The place was silent. No surprise. This wasn’t the first time he’d had the whole locker room to himself. He was always last to enter, last one out.

  From outside came the faint sounds of Pete and Rudy still bickering. Then boyish laughter that sounded as if it had roared up from the belly and was choked off before it left the throat. Dale’s laughter. Also, not a surprise. For all his apparent super strengths, subtlety wasn’t a skill Dale had mastered. He hung around after every game like a puppy yapping at anyone who might be willing to take it home.

  Adrian made his way to his locker and dried off. He sat with the towel resting on his lap, covering the burgeoning hard-on that sprouted out of nowhere. He thought about jacking off rather than save himself for home but decided against it. It was sure to mean nothing, but his cock seemed to wake up the moment he’d heard Dale laughing in the dugout. Doubtless, his body was reacting to the sudden warmth of the room after standing under the cold shower. Still, he didn’t relish the idea of masturbating right after thinking of Dale. It was just too weird.

  So he dropped the towel, pulled on a pair of Andrew Christian briefs that lifted his ample bulge for onlookers to admire, and then slipped on his compression gear, sweats, and a hoodie. He was bent over, putting on his high tops, when he felt a pair of fingers reach between his ass cheeks and goose him.

  Adrian swiveled, expecting Dale to be grinning behind him. But the grin belonged to someone else.

  "Damn it, Pete! I thought you were Dale."

  “Don’t you mean hoping?” Pete dodged Adrian’s fist and stuck out his tongue. “Missed me!”

  Adrian flipped his middle finger. He was about to roast Pete with a sizzling barb when he noticed the look on Pete’s face. It was stuck somewhere between a grin and grimace. Like the cartoon cat Sylvester had swallowed Tweety Bird alive and was trying to hide the evidence while the yellow canary kicked and punched at his cheeks. Or someone dying to gossip about a topic sworn to secrecy.

  “What’s up, Pete?”

  “You know how good I am at blending in, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Adrian with dwindling patience. “The last American Ninja.”

  “Last African American Ninja,” corrected Pete.

  “Whatever. What’s wrong?”

  “Guess who just had a chat with Coach?" Adrian tried to hazard a guess, but Pete barreled on. “Your music professor. Shit wasn't pretty. They were arguing about budgets and shit. He blames Coach for the music department cuts. Then he told Coach that you have a final essay past due. Says he gave you until after the playoffs and he’s expecting gold on his desk first thing Monday morning or he'll flunk you. Then it’s bye-bye star player."

  Adrian grimaced. He’d forgotten all about the paper. “No worries. I’m on it.”

  “On it?” Pete was incredulous. “Haven't you finished it?”

  “I haven’t started it.”

  “Haven’t—” Pete crossed his arms and shook his head. “Do you think Coach is gonna be able to pull strings to save your ass? Those two hate each other. A pansy versus a homophobe. He'll flunk you to spite Coach.”

  “Save my ass from what? It's an elective. I'll just take something else next semester."

  “Did it slip that pea-sized brain of yours that if you don't pass this final, you do not pass? No passing GO in music means your GPA falls below satisfactory. You’ll lose your financial aid."

  Adrian slammed a fist against his locker. “Shit! I’m no fucking music major. I chose sociology for fuck’s sake. And the math in that is kicking my ass already. Who would have thought being a sociologist required statistics for Pete’s sake! Now my career depends on a shitty elective?”

  “Hey, don’t throw my name around in vain, mofo.” Pete leveled him with a no-nonsense stare. “Pay someone. Like always."

  Adrian sighed. “No can do. Professor caught me last time and warned me if I turn in one more plagiarized paper, it's an automatic fail and disciplinary action. Pretty much the reason I'm in this situation.”

  “Well, write the paper.” He raised his eyebrows when Adrian sighed. “Now what’s the matter?”

  Adrian rolled his head back and chortled. “Problem is I don’t know shit about music!”

  “So get a fag to do it,” said Pete with an air of unconcern. “They know all about music. But don't try to ace it."

  "Brilliant," said Adrian dryly. “Pay someone to do it as bad as I would. I’ll still fail, numbnuts.”

  “All I'm saying is to dumb it down a bit. Then the ballerina won’t notice you cheated,” reasoned Pete. “And if he does, he might not give a damn. Especially if you let him suckle on the teat between your legs.”

  Adrian laughed. “How come you talk about the professor like that? Your buddy Dale is one of them, you know."

  Pete scoffed. “Dale's nothing like that poofter. Dale's good people. You know that.”

  “Humph," groused Adrian. “He's only good for getting on my nerves."

  "Yeah? Well, I'm not getting between you two and your love-hate bromance," quipped Pete. “All I know is you’d better wow your professor. Either with a bangin’ paper or your cock bangin’ his throat.”

  “Maybe,” Adrian said, considering. “I could get a gay guy to do most of it in an outline.”

  “You can get them to do whatever you want,” replied Pete. “Just dangle your dick like a carrot. Fags love converting straight guys.”

  Adrian pointed at him and shook his head. “Pete, you are a shady bastard. Wonder what you say about me behind my back?"

  "I call you a closet cocksucker." Pete laughed at his confused look of disbelief.

  “You’d better be joking,” Adrian said without mirth. “Seriously.”

  Pete waved his concern away. "Speaking of cocksuckers, bro, I have someone in mind to help you if you wanna go that route."

  “A gay guy?”

  "Yep."

  Adrian fixed him with a steely gaze. “Not Dale.”

  “Not Dale. I told you, a real fag. He does a lot of my papers. Interested?"

  "Not much choice is there?"

  "Always a choice," said Pete. "But this one will cost you. He’s pretty demanding.”

  “I’ve got 50 bucks.”

  “He won’t want money. He barters in human capital.”

  “Oh hell. What soul-crushing pact does this devil demand?”

  Pete smirked. "He loves a dick in his mouth. He sucks my bratwurst once a week. And I get straight A’s."

  "Don’t you mean yo
ur weenie, you disgusting pig?"

  Pete fondled himself, shaking his package speculatively, perhaps to judge the veracity of Adrian’s claim. Then he shrugged. "You want me to hook you up or not?"

  Adrian sank onto the bench and buried his head in his hands. “Nah, I'm good. Keep your cocksucker for yourself. I’m not a degenerate like you.”

  “You think I give a shit? A mouth is a mouth. And my boy don’t scrape like my girl does. Gets me cummin’ in like five minutes flat. If I really wanna enjoy it, he’ll worship my cock for twenty or thirty minutes, non-stop. No shame to my game, bro.”

  “You don’t think I know your ass is nasty?” Adrian shook his head in mock disgust. “You’d fuck your mother if she wasn’t related to you.”

  “Been there. Done that.”

  “Ewww. That’s foul. Even for your perverted ass.”

  “Who you callin’ a perv?” Pete hunched his shoulders and tossed his hands up in a boxing stance. He threw an imagined punch with his left, then right fist, rocking from side to side. “I’m gonna hafta knock you out, playa.”

  Adrian dipped back and then hopped to his feet, blocking the fake punches. The shadow boxing evolved into a real bout of slap boxing. Though Adrian could have overpowered him had he got close enough, Pete’s reach was greater because of his long arms. He boxed Adrian backward, tapping his arms and head in quick succession, until the bench pressed against Adrian’s knees and he was forced to sit again.

  Adrian swung his legs around, showing Pete his back and put an in end to the match. “Quit playing, man. I’ve got to figure this out.”

  Pete placed a hand on Adrian's shoulder and squeezed. “Don't flunk out due to pride, bro. Go gay for a day. No shame.”

  Adrian shook the hand off. But he raised his fist above his head and gave his teammate a friendly bump. This wasn't Pete’s fault. As crazy as his idea was, he was only trying to help.