The Jock Next Door (Straight to Gay MM Romance First Time Short Stories)

The Jock Next Door

The worst part about being a closeted gay guy at a college in Alabama wasn't the loneliness, although that was a close second.

It was the wanting.

Wanting the exact kind of guy who would probably crack your jaw if he ever found out you'd been staring at him across the dining hall, imagining what he looked like without a shirt on.

Wanting the thick-necked, square-shouldered, protein-shake-pounding jocks who moved through the world like they owned it, because, in every way that mattered on a Southern college campus, they did.

Wanting the boys who high-fived each other after touchdowns and shot-gunned beers on fraternity lawns and said things like ‘no homo’ without a trace of irony, because to them, the concept was as distant and unappealing as a foreign country they'd never visit.

I wanted all of them.

And I couldn’t have a single one.

I guess it was just the latest in a long line of cruel jokes the universe had decided to play at my expense.

I was nineteen, a freshman, a track runner with the kind of build my high school coach had once described—with genuine admiration and absolutely no idea how badly it would haunt me—as having “an almost feminine grace.”

Five-foot-seven. A hundred and thirty-five pounds of lean, thin muscle, with shaggy blonde hair that fell across my forehead and into my eyes no matter how many times I pushed it back, and big blue eyes that everyone—everyone—called pretty.

Lucky me.

“Pretty” was a curse when you were a closeted boy at a university where football was a religion and the men who played it were gods.

High school had been hard enough. I guess I’d thought college would be different. But I hadn’t gone far enough away, because all I found was another, bigger version of the same thing.

Same girls who wouldn’t give me a second glance.

Same guys who would kick my ass if they caught me looking too long.

Same excruciating hormones making me want the very things I hated wanting: Not girls, but guys.

I grew up in Harmon, Georgia—a speck of a farming town straddling the Alabama state line, where Friday nights belonged to high school football and Sunday mornings belonged to church, and there was no room in either for a boy like me.

I went to a small high school where I lettered in cross-country and kept my head down and my mouth shut and told myself, over and over, that what I was feeling wasn't what I thought it was.

Then, senior year, I met Cody.

Cody Deffenbaugh—a tall, quiet pitcher on the baseball team who sat behind me in AP English and smelled like fresh-cut grass, chewing tobacco and cologne.

We'd both just turned eighteen when it started.

I don't even remember who made the first move. One minute we were studying for finals in his truck, parked in a field behind his family's barn, and the next minute his hand was in my lap and my heart was trying to break through my sternum.

“You like to fool around?” he’d asked me.

Of course I wanted to. But at that point, I’d never done anything. Maybe he could tell.

Cody, on the other hand, had done plenty—with girls, and with his baseball teammates, if the stories he told me were true. That night, he’d stolen a couple of beers from his dad’s garage fridge, and suddenly all the things he usually kept hidden behind those blue eyes started spilling out.

We were only friends because we lived on the same street, and in our town, that actually meant something. There were only two or three houses on any given road, each one surrounded by crop fields.

Otherwise, I don’t think he would have noticed me at all. A jock like him and a nerdy pretty boy who ran track? Never in a million years.

Maybe it was the one time the universe decided to do me a favor.

Or maybe it was just turning the screw, making the months that followed even more torturous once I finally knew, for certain, what I truly wanted.

Because guys like Cody—straight jocks who were willing to fool around with another guy—didn’t exactly grow on trees in the South.

We never fucked. We never even came close. And it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying on my part. I wanted it more than anything. I wanted Cody inside me, even if I didn’t fully understand what that meant yet—or how it would go.

I’d only ever fingered myself, but I knew I liked it. I liked it enough to do it every time I jerked off, because I loved the feeling of being stretched around something. Of being filled by something.

So while we never fucked, we did other things—hands wrapped around each other’s dicks in the dark cab of his truck; his fingers, surprisingly soft for someone who spent his days slinging curveballs, teasing the cleft of my ass while I shuddered against him; my fingertip tracing the tight pucker of his hairy hole while he bit his lip and whispered, “Yeah, right there, bro. Ugh, fuck… just like that.”

It was enough to confirm what I’d spent years trying to deny.

I’d feel his dick grow big and hard in my fingers—probably six or seven inches, based on my own size of just under five—and thick, too. I could feel his pulse every time he throbbed in my grip. That drove me fucking wild. I wanted to feel that heartbeat inside me.

It wasn’t love, but it was close enough to fool me the way first experiences can.

We only did stuff in his truck three or four times, right around graduation.

Only once did I get to suck his dick, and it was clumsy. I wanted more than anything to go back and do it over—especially after I practically choked on his cum when he shot it down my throat without warning.

It didn’t help that he came like a fucking fire hose.

But when he came, I came.

The moment I felt that hot, salty cum blasting against back of my throat and I heard him moaning deep and long, I lost control and shot my load all over his dashboard and the vinyl mud mat on the floor.

I wasn’t even touching my dick when it happened. Neither was he. I orgasmed simply from sucking him off and hearing him moan my name when he busted.

And that was when I knew I was gay. And I wanted way more than a few clumsy circle jerks in a pickup truck.

I didn’t even know Cody had left for college until after the fact.

One day, I heard it from his parents: he had already shipped off to Auburn, right at the beginning of summer, when I’d been stupid enough to hope we might have months of fooling around ahead of us. Maybe even actual sex.

Sometimes I wondered if his dad had known he was messing around with guys. He always glared at me whenever I was around, like he could see something on my face I hadn’t learned how to hide yet.

And once Cody left for college, that was it.

No text. No explanation. Nothing.

We never spoke again.

I think we both understood that what had happened in that truck was a door we’d cracked open just long enough to see what was on the other side, then slammed shut before anyone could catch us looking.

Maybe Cody went off to Auburn and remembered how much he loved pussy. Or maybe he found another guy like me to fool around with in the dark.

Either way, I knew I couldn’t just reset my brain and go back to who I’d been before him. Because those memories followed me to college like a scent I couldn’t wash out of my skin.

I ended up at a little private university in Alabama, which, for a closeted gay boy with a girlish frame and a face that invited the wrong kind of attention, was roughly the equivalent of a gazelle enrolling at a lion preserve.

In college, I did the same things I’d done in high school.

I ran track. I made decent grades. I kept my eyes on the floor, my earbuds in, and my dorm room door locked. I told myself the four years would pass, that I would survive them, and then I could move to Atlanta or Miami or anywhere that wasn’t here and finally breathe.

In the meantime, I had my spiral notebooks.

It started as doodling—idle sketches in the margins of my notes during lectures.

Art had always been my escape in high school, and now that I was in college, I hoped to study it more seriously. But something happened to my “imagination” shortly after I started freshman year.

Something... different.

It started with a jawline here. A forearm there. The suggestion of a thick chest tapering to a narrow waist—the same kind of superheroes I’d drawn back in high school.

But then doodling turned into drawing, and drawing turned into something I didn’t have a word for. Because the drawings got filthy. And the stories I started writing alongside them got even filthier.

I’d written little short stories in high school. Drawn dumb comics. But it wasn’t until freshman year of college that it even occurred to me, I could turn my sexual frustrations into something almost real by putting my dirtiest fantasies on paper.

So, I drew the same hot, hunky superheroes I’d always drawn.

Only now, I drew them naked. I drew them with cocks and balls—big, beautiful, shameless cocks, thick-veined and heavy, with helmet-shaped heads that flared proudly, and low-hanging balls that swung like fleshy anchors between their ripped thighs.

I drew the kind of dicks I’d only ever seen in porn and fantasized about holding in my hands the way I’d held Cody’s.

And then I drew multiple guys on one page.

Muscular bodies tangled together. I drew mouths on dicks and tongues on assholes and faces twisted with ecstasy.

All men—men who looked like the jocks from my fantasies, doing the kinds of things those guys would never actually do.

It was my secret revenge on a universe that dangled big, muscular hunks in front of me all day, then made them not only straight, but often viciously homophobic, too.

And then I wrote stories to go with them, because drawing them wasn’t enough.