3
He was standing next to Chase, watching the fire catch, and the light hit him at the exact wrong moment.
His white briefs were soaked and clinging, and the cotton had gone from opaque to essentially transparent.
I could see everything—the clear indentation of his dick-head pressed against the inside of the front pouch, the soft bulge of his balls beneath it, even a faint wash of color through the wet fabric, pale pink and mauve, the actual hue of his skin showing through. He might as well have been naked.
I sat down on one of the big logs, angling my body away from them, and leaned to the side like I was just getting comfortable.
But what I was really doing was stealing another look at Josh's ass—that small, round, perky thing that curved out from his lower back in a shape I'd seen a thousand times…on girls I'd jerked off to.
If that ass had been attached to a girl? Well, I wouldn't have thought twice about wanting to fuck it. But knowing it was on Josh made me feel something I really didn't want to feel.
I straightened up and stared at the fire.
Something was changing between the three of us. I could feel it the way you feel the weather shifting—a drop in pressure, the stillness before the wind picks up. The charged hush before the first snowflake falls, or the way a bad storm can suddenly darken a pristine afternoon sky.
Chase and Josh were orbiting closer together, sharing a gravity I no longer seemed to be a part of, and every time I caught one of them looking at the other with that little smile, I felt a pang of something that might have been jealousy, or might have even been loneliness.
Chase dug a six-pack out of the cooler—cheap beer he'd swiped from his dad's garage fridge—and tossed one to each of us. Then he pulled the acoustic guitar from its case, settled it across his bare, wet thigh, and started strumming.
He wasn't very good, to be brutally honest.
He knew maybe four chords, and he played them in the same order every time.
But the sound was warm and loose in the mountain air, and when he started making up lyrics—a terrible, off-key ballad about how much he loved pussy (how poetic, right?)
delivered with the theatrical sincerity of a guy performing at an open-mic night for an audience of owls.
But Josh and I cracked up so hard I nearly spit beer into the fire.
"I love pussy in the morning!" Chase sang, strumming wildly. "I love pussy late at night! I love pussy on a Tuesday… and I'll love it till I die!"
"You've never even seen a pussy in real life, I bet!" Josh howled.
"I've seen plenty of pussy! I'm basically a gynecologist!" Chase said, turning his nose upward.
“Gross, bro,” Josh laughed. "You can't even spell gynecologist!"
I laughed until my ribs hurt, the beer buzzing warm in my chest, the fire popping and sending sparks spiraling up toward the stars.
The moon was rising over the ridge—huge, white, close enough to touch—and the owls were hooting in the pines like they were providing backup vocals for Chase's terrible song.
It was perfect. The kind of night that already felt like a memory while you were still living it.
But underneath the laughter, underneath the warmth, I could feel that hum again—the bass note, the frequency I couldn't tune into. Chase and Josh kept catching each other's eyes across the fire, and every time they did, something passed between them that I wasn't part of.
I drank and watched the sparks rise, and told myself it was nothing.
But it wasn't nothing and I knew it.
Chase was two cans deep when he decided we needed a game.
"Never Have I Ever…" he announced, setting the guitar down against the log and cracking his third can. "Classic. Simple. You say something you've never done. If somebody else has done it, they drink. If nobody drinks? Well, you're boring and you wasted everybody's time," he laughed.
"We know how it works, bro," Josh said, pulling his knees up to his chest on the log across the fire from me. The flames had settled into a steady, popping glow, and the light played across his body in ways that were becoming increasingly hard to ignore.
His briefs still hadn't fully dried.
The white cotton clung to his thighs and his dick and sack with a transparency that bordered on exhibitionist, and every time he shifted on the log—crossing his legs, uncrossing them, leaning forward to grab his drink—I caught another flash of what was underneath.
The round impression of his dickhead pressed against the fabric.
The soft, gathered shape of his balls sitting in the pouch below it and stretching the fabric around it.
Even color—a faint blush of pink and mauve showing through the wet cotton, the actual pigment of his skin visible in the firelight like a watercolor bleeding through tissue paper.
I didn't know why I kept looking.
I knew I was straight. That wasn't a question, wasn't even a conversation.
I'd spent the last four years of high school chasing girls with the single-minded focus of a heat-seeking missile—texting them, flirting with them, hooking up with them in backseats and bedrooms and once, memorably, in the equipment shed behind the soccer field after a home game.
I loved pussy and thought about it endlessly. It was the background music of my entire existence, and I'd never once—not one single time—looked at a guy and felt anything that registered on the same frequency.
So, then, why couldn't I stop glancing at Josh's wet underwear bulge?
I guess part of it was the novelty and the shock of it.
I'd been in locker rooms my whole life—soccer, basketball tryouts, PE—but I'd never actually seen another guy naked.
Not once.
Everybody was always guarded, hiding themselves—and so was I.
You’d always change clothes while facing your locker.
You wrapped a towel before you dropped your shorts.
If you had to shower? You sure as shit kept towel on until the water was pouring on you, and you kept your eyes locked on the tile wall straight ahead and your business to yourself.
The unspoken code ran so deep that breaking it would’ve felt like sneezing in church. I’d never seen another guy’s bare ass, let alone his dick. No one else dared to look, either, for fear of being branded a “homo” and ostracized by a bunch of jeering teenage boys.
And now here was Josh, sitting eight feet away from me with his entire package practically on display through a layer of cotton so thin it might as well have been cellophane, and the sheer novelty of seeing what I'd never seen was doing something to my brain.
It felt naughty. Not so much in a sexual way—or not only in a sexual way—but in the way that anything forbidden feels when you first encounter it.
Like sneaking a beer at fourteen. Like driving too fast on an empty road.
Like sneaking out of the house at midnight.
The thrill of I'm not supposed to be seeing this, but I am, and nobody's stopping me.
Chase wasn't much better.
His white boxers had plastered to his legs from the pond, and the thin fabric traced the outline of his junk with an honesty that the garment's designers had clearly never intended.
I could see the ridge of his dick pressed against his left thigh, the rounded shape of his balls gathered at the base, the whole assembly shifting and adjusting every time he moved.
It wasn’t as defined as Josh, since Chase was still wearing boxers instead of tight, stretched fabric.
But between the two of them, it was like sitting across a campfire from a risqué cologne ad that had gone slightly off the rails.
Meanwhile, I was safe in my dark-colored boxer trunks. The navy fabric hid everything the wet cotton was advertising on Chase and Josh.
But then I also felt that familiar pang again—left out.
Excluded from whatever reckless new energy my two best friends had tapped into this summer while I was away.
They were out here in public, practically naked and showing way too much through their wet, thin white cotton undies, and I was sitting in the dark with my secrets still tucked away.
Except my body was making its own decisions.
The excitement—the taboo of my own thoughts, the thrill of the night, the sight of my friends' bodies illuminated and half-exposed—had been working on me since the cold water of the pond vanished, and I could feel the result with a clarity that was becoming difficult to manage.
My dick was hardening against my thigh, the head inching along the inside of my boxer trunks in a slow, inexorable slide toward the leg opening.
Again, I’m not bragging, but I have a big dick—and when I start getting hard, keeping everything contained becomes a serious problem.
And in that moment, my dick-head was creeping toward the cool mountain air just beyond the hem of my left leg.
But I didn't adjust. I didn't tuck. I didn’t cross my legs or shift to hide what was happening.
Some part of me—a part I wasn’t ready to examine—wanted them to see.
I wanted Chase and Josh to notice what they were doing to me, even if none of us could explain it.
I knew it should’ve been embarrassing—shameful, even—but I wanted them sneaking glances at my junk the same way I’d been stealing glances at theirs.
"All right," Chase said, settling back on his log with his drink raised. "I'll start. Never have I ever... fucked a girl under stadium bleachers."
He looked at me expectantly. I looked at Josh. Josh looked at Chase.
Nobody drank.
"Boring," Josh declared.
"It's aspirational," Chase defended. “And if it’s so boring, why haven’t you done it, either?”
"It's pathetic. Anyway, it’s my turn." Josh sat up straighter, his briefs pulling tight across his lap with the movement. "Never have I ever... pissed in the shower."
Chase and I looked at each other. Then we both raised our cans and drank.
"What the fuck, bro? You're both disgusting!" Josh said.
"Bro, every guy pisses in the shower," I said. "It goes down the drain—who cares? What’s the point of having a dick if you aren’t going to take advantage of it?"
"It's efficient," Chase agreed.
"Right?" I nodded.
"It's piss! In the shower! Where you're supposed to be getting clean!" Josh said.
"Well, it’s two against one, so obviously you're the weird one for not doing it," Chase said, pointing his drink at Josh. "I say not peeing in the shower as a guy, is unnatural. It’s suspicious behavior."
"I'm suspicious because I don't pee in the shower?" Josh said.
"Deeply suspicious,” Chase said, turning his nose up.
Josh rolled his eyes, but he was laughing—that high, bright laugh that always made him sound younger than he was. I took another sip and felt the warmth of the yeasty drink spread through my chest, loosening something that had been wound tight since we'd arrived.
"My turn," I said. "Never have I ever... pissed in front of anybody else."
“Again with pissing stuff?” Chase rolled his eyes. I shrugged.
Chase and Josh both went still.
They looked at each other—another one of those encrypted exchanges, quick and loaded—and something wild flickered across Chase's green eyes.
“Fuck this,” Chase said, standing up. “I want a drink already, and I have to piss anyway.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes when Chase then stepped toward the fire, hooked his thumb into the waistband of his boxers, and tugged the front down.
My breath stopped.
Chase's dick flopped out into the firelight—thick, flushed, unmistakably half-hard, bouncing once against the elastic before he gripped the base and aimed it at the flames.
It was beautiful.
That's the word my brain supplied before I could censor it, and I let it stand because there was no other word that fit.
The head was a perfect helmet shape—smooth, pink, shiny in the flickering light like it had been glazed.
The shaft was pale with a faint network of veins, and it sat heavy in his hand, bigger than I'd expected, probably six or seven inches if it got all the way hard, which it curiously looked close to being.
Then the stream hit the fire.
A hissing, sputtering arc of clear yellow that sent steam spiraling up into the night air and made the flames dance and pop.
“Don’t put out the fucking fire, fuckwit!” Josh blasted.
Chase just stood there, unfazed, with his hips pushed forward and his chin up, pissing into the campfire with the casual bravado of a guy who'd been waiting for an excuse to whip his dick out all night.
And I couldn't look away.
The light bounced off the wet, big head of his cock. The stream caught the glow and turned golden. His balls hung below, full and drawn slightly forward by the angle of his stance, and the whole display was so flagrantly, absurdly naughty that it made something inside me clench.
"Bro," Josh said, and his voice had a weird, breathy quality I'd never heard from him before. "Why are you hard while you’re peeing in front of us? You like the attention, huh?"
Chase simply ignored this and shook the last drops off with a practiced flick and glanced down at himself.
His dick was definitely more than half-hard now, curving slightly upward as blood continued to fill it, the head swelling visibly in the warm light, maybe looking even pinker than it was thanks to the orange glow on it.
"And you know you wish you were sucking this right now," Chase finally responded, tucking himself back in with zero urgency.
I laughed. Hard. The kind of laugh born as much from shock as humor.
It was the only response I could manage to the sheer absurdity of seeing my buddy’s dick for the first time—and being shaken to my core by how hard it was.
Something about seeing him like that, doing something as lewd and biological as pissing right in front of me, made my own dick harder than it had any right to be.
Curiously, Josh didn't laugh. He chuckled—soft, low, almost private—and shrugged. Just a small, one-shouldered shrug that could've meant anything yet, somehow, felt like it meant everything.
Like Chase had said something true, and Josh wasn't even bothering to deny it.
I looked between them. The encrypted channel was wide open now, transmitting on a frequency I was finally starting to pick up, and what I was hearing made my pulse hammer against the side of my neck.
My dick slid another half-inch toward the leg hole of my boxer shorts, which were becoming dryer and more loose, again.
I felt the ridge of my cockhead graze the hem of the fabric, felt the first whisper of cool night air touch the exposed tip, and I still didn't move to fix it.
I could even feel the breeze against something cold on the hair of my thigh—pre-cum.
There was no denying that I was aroused.
Chase sat back down, took a long pull from his beer, and gestured to Josh. "Your turn, bro.”
Josh was quiet for a moment. He stared into the fire, and when he spoke, his voice was steady but careful, like a guy placing a bet he'd already calculated.
"Never have I ever... sucked a dick…while another person watched."
Chase and Josh both drank.
The night went very quiet. Even the owls shut up.