2
The trip had been Chase’s idea—one last thing for the three of us to do together before we split up and scattered to different colleges.
Josh was headed to Washington State. Chase to Oregon. And me—I was staying in California, but barely.
UC Santa Barbara had offered me a full ride, and in three weeks I'd be trading Sacramento's flat, sunbaked sprawl for the beaches of Southern California.
I'd already spent the past eight weeks down there for summer training, getting dark and salty and leaner than I'd ever been, and the tan I'd brought back made my blonde stubble look almost white against my jaw.
We'd all played soccer together since freshman year. Different positions—I was a center-back, the big guy in the spine of the defense; Chase played midfield, all engine and vision; and Josh was a winger, small and quick and impossible to catch in the open field.
We'd won a section title junior year and lost in the state semis senior year on a bullshit penalty call that I still couldn't talk about without my blood pressure spiking.
Soccer was the thing that had made us like brothers.
Four years of two-a-days, bus rides, hotel rooms with beds that smelled like chlorine, and postgame meals at the same terrible Mexican place on Folsom Boulevard.
We'd talked about everything in those years—girls, mostly, because we were teenage boys and that's what teenage boys talked about.
We bragged about who we'd hooked up with.
Who we wanted to hook up with. The kind of exaggerated, competitive storytelling that happened in every locker room in America, where every guy claimed to have gone further than he probably had and nobody called anybody on it because the lie was part of the fun.
Personally, I'd done pretty well with girls.
Better than well, honestly. I was six-three, a hundred and ninety-five pounds, with the kind of build that coaches kept trying to recruit for basketball and football before I told them soccer was the only sport I gave a shit about.
Blue eyes, square jaw, shaved blonde hair that I kept almost military-short because it was easier than dealing with it.
Truth be told, I looked like a lifeguard or an off-duty Marine, depending on who you asked, and girls had been a consistent “benefit” of my high school experience. Not a parade or roster—I wasn't that guy—but enough that I'd never once had to wonder whether I was attractive.
Chase was a different story.
He was five-eight, a hundred and fifty pounds, with dark hair he kept meticulously styled—the kind of cut that required product and a mirror and gave the impression that he cared about his appearance slightly more than a straight eighteen-year-old probably should.
He had these bright green eyes that girls always noticed first, and a face that was smooth, almost pretty, without the stubble or the hard angles that would've pushed him into “panty-dropper” territory.
He was lean and sinewy, built like a distance runner, and he moved with a quickness that made him electric on the pitch and restless everywhere else. Honestly, he was like an alpha trapped in a beta’s body; cocky and brash, but too short and skinny to really back it up if needed.
But Josh was by far the smallest of the group. Five-four, a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet, with shaggy sandy-blonde hair and big blue eyes and a complexion so smooth it looked airbrushed.
He had one of those faces that adults called sweet and girls called cute—never hot, never sexy, always the diminutive version—and a body to match: slim, compact, with narrow hips and a small, round ass that I'd caught more than one girl on the sidelines staring at during games,
and looking more envious than attracted.
Josh was the kind of guy who'd probably get carded at bars until he was thirty-five.
Even riding together in the truck, it was obvious how much bigger I was. They had all the headroom and legroom in the world, while I had to contort myself just to get comfortable.
The Tacoma crested the final ridge, and Chase killed the engine.
"Told you," he said.
I climbed out and the view hit me like a fist.
We were standing on a flat, grassy plateau at the top of the mountain, ringed by pines on three sides and open on the fourth to a panorama so wide it made my chest ache.
The lake valley spread out below us in every direction—Tahoe to the east, massive and darkening; the wine country ridges to the west, backlit by the last bloody stripe of sunset. The sky above was going from gold to violet, and the first stars were already punching through.
The campsite was exactly what Chase and Josh had described.
An old fire pit ringed with stones and a few massive logs dragged into a rough circle around it.
There was the concrete shower building, squat and ugly, with a rusted metal door that hung half-open, and maybe thirty yards down a gentle slope, a small, dark pond with a wooden dock jutting out over the water, its planks silvered with age.
No people. No cars. No sound except wind in the pines and something hooting in the trees.
"How'd you two find this place, anyway?" I asked.
Chase and Josh exchanged a look. One of those looks—quick, encrypted, carrying information I wasn't authorized to receive. Then they both sort of chuckled, and Chase shrugged.
"Just stumbled on it," he said.
"Stumbled on it," Josh echoed, as if they were happy to shut down the conversation.
Right.
I let it go. But I filed it.
Surprisingly, Josh was the first one to break from the long and unusually hot day.
"Fuck this heat," he announced, and before I could respond, he was pulling his shirt over his head and shoving his shorts down his legs, kicking them into a pile by the truck.
Suddenly, he was standing there in nothing but a pair of tight white briefs—the kind that hugged every contour of his body and left about as much to the imagination as a coat of paint.
I'd never seen Josh in anything less than soccer shorts and a t-shirt.
In four years of friendship, we'd somehow never crossed that line—never changed in front of each other, never been in a situation where underwear was the dress code.
We bragged about pussy, talked about getting laid, and made dick jokes constantly, but we’d never actually seen one another’s dicks or balls—or anything close. In fact, for all the shit we talked, we’d never once had a real conversation about our own.
So, seeing Josh now—his slim, smooth torso bare in the dying light, his narrow hips cocked to one side, those tight white briefs clinging to a compact small-but-defined bulge in the front and riding up the round, firm curve of his ass in the back—was jarring in a way I wasn't prepared for.
Okay, so high school is definitely over, I thought, realizing Josh might start acting differently now.
Before I’d even finished the thought, Chase followed without hesitation, stripping down to a pair of plain white boxers that looked half a size too small.
They rode low on his hips and tight across his thighs, and as he moved around the campsite—grabbing the guitar case, pulling the cooler from the truck bed—the front flap gaped open for half-second flashes that kept catching my eye against my will.
I never saw anything definitive, but the suggestion was there—dark hair, a shadow of movement—and every time it happened, I looked away a beat too late.
It was becoming clear that the two of them were changing—and that I might be the last one to catch up.
That was the only word for it.
All summer, while I'd been down in Santa Barbara getting tan and running drills, Chase and Josh had been up here getting brave, getting reckless, and getting comfortable with something I hadn't caught up to yet.
But I wasn’t about to be the only guy still wearing clothes. I’d spent all four years as the trendsetter—the leader of our group—and I wasn’t about to let Josh and Chase outdo me just because high school was over.
Again, I was the biggest of the three of us by a wide margin—six-three to their five-eight and five-four—and that had always made me the alpha of the group by default.
The one who led, who decided, who set the tone.
I wasn't going to cede that position because two pretty boys beat me to their underwear.
So, I pulled my shirt off and stepped out of my shorts, standing there in my blue-striped boxer shorts.
"Last one in has a tiny dick!" Josh shouted, already sprinting down the slope toward the pond.
"That's you either way, bro!" Chase yelled, rushing after him.
I took off running, too, and I watched their bodies bouncing ahead of me in the twilight—Josh's small, tight frame, Chase's lean, angular one—and hit the dock three steps behind them.
Two cannonballs launched off the end, and I followed, the water swallowing me in a shock of cold that turned my skin to gooseflesh and drove every complicated thought straight out of my head.
We wrestled in the water for ten or so minutes—dunking each other, talking shit, laughing the way you only laugh when you're eighteen and half-naked in a place where nobody can hear you.
There was no fear, no insecurity. It was just the three of us, and it was great.
“Looks like Dylan has the smallest dick,” Josh laughed, splashing water at me.
“Yeah, sure,” I said with an easy grin and a nod.
That was all they needed to see to know I wasn’t insecure about my dick size—which, to an eighteen-year-old guy, could only mean one thing: I was hung.
Even guys walking around with seven-inch dicks worried they were too small. You had to get into “two-hand” territory before that fear finally went away, and, truth be told, I was closer to being long enough to fit three hands on my shaft.
I’d heard enough girls tell me how “massive” I was that, by then, it wasn’t even a question.
When I finally worked up the courage to measure myself one afternoon, I was pretty happy to find I was around eight and a half inches long—closer to nine if I pressed the ruler firmly against my base.
When the three of us hauled ourselves out and walked back up to the fire pit, dripping and shivering, Chase squatted down to start the fire.
His wet boxers had gone nearly transparent, and even in the blue dusk I could see the dark shadow of his ass crack through the soaked white cotton, the fabric clinging to each cheek like it had been painted on.
I noticed. I didn’t know why I was looking, but I was—and the realization made something shift in my stomach. Not quite arousal, not quite discomfort.
Just… awareness. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
It was a bit like a door cracking open in a room I hadn’t known existed.
Then I looked at Josh, and the door blew wide open.