Pictures & Stories

Murphy had an attic room he could lock from inside, so we went there to examine what we'd found in the dumpster. We'd also hear anyone climbing the attic stairs, so there'd be warning.

We put down the backpack between us, sitting on the floor facing each other. I held down the backpack while Murphy lifted out the stack of magazines. Ditching the pack, I made a space for them.

"How many are there?"

Murphy shrugged. "Few dozen at least, huh?" He started sorting them into stacks. Playboy, Penthouse, Forum, Hustler, Screw, Velvet, Stag, Jugs, and others, some in other languages, made more or less even stacks.

We trembled, breathing shallow, eager to start looking through them. Taking one off each pile, we systematically went through them for the pictures. Each image jolted us. We quickly realized some of the magazines showed a lot more than others.

Silently, we went through them all, breathless with a thrill of discovery and, in some cases, puzzlement. We didn't know what to call some of what we saw, nor understand why it was so stimulating.

Murphy unbuttoned his jeans, unzipped, and pulled his underwear down in the front. He squirmed a little, said, "Ow," and stood to let his pants and underwear fall to his ankles. He kicked them off.

I gaped at him and, when he saw my expression, laughed. "Gonna take care of this boner. I get 'em all the time, don't you?"
 "But." I got them all right, and handled them alone. In private. "I mean, you think it's ... okay?"

Already gripping and stroking his erection, he sat back down and flipped open some of the magazines. After holding his breath a couple times, he gasped and smiled at me. "Go ahead, go for it."

Standing, I took off my clothes, tee shirt and socks and shoes too. Stark naked, I sat down on my pile of clothes and, heart hammering, opened a few magazines for myself.

"Don't ruin the pictures." Murphy, caressing his balls, had his eyes half closed. He leaned back on one arm.

It looked like he was making sure I could see everything, I thought. My own sensations rose and fell in tidal surges, each reaching higher, taking me closer to spilling, to splattering. I eased back, milking the feelings.

When he came it shot up his belly to his chest three times. He moaned and fell back, flat on his back. Rubbing the stuff all over him, he lay catching his breath, his erection subsiding with his pulse.

Watching it diminish sparked me somehow.

This sent me over the dam. I overflowed onto my thighs, my gaze locked on glossy pictures, imagining what it must be like for real.

I got dizzy, swayed, and braced myself.

We caught each other's gazes and laughed. "Whoa. That was good."

"Yeah." Murphy sat up and wiped his smeared hands on his tee shirt, which lay wadded beside him like a rag. He glanced down at one of the magazines, frowned, and picked it up. "Hey. Listen to this."

He started reading a confessional story, written in letter form, about a guy who watched a German girl at Oktoberfest stuff her breast into a beer stein. For some reason this made the guy come.

"Seems pretty weird." Although I didn't get it, my erection, along with Murphy's, had begun twitching toward recovery. A giddy feeling low in my belly told me I wanted to come again soon.

"Read another one."
 Murphy shook his head. "Your turn, man. Find a good one."

By random chance I found one about a woman who let twelve guys fuck her, one after the other, as she lay on a swimming pool's springboard. Each guy would finish, then jump into the water to make room for the next guy. Told by the woman, it discussed how greedy she was for more and more. No amount of cocks satisfied her even though she kept coming and coming.

This one got us hard, neither of us sure why.

We weren't speaking the language but got the message loud and clear.

As I put the magazine down, Murphy scooted over to sit beside me. Before I knew what he was doing, he reached across my right thigh and grabbed my cock. "You do mine." He said this in a husky whisper.

We found out how another person's touch made things much more intense. Cascades of new feelings swept us away for awhile.

Sucking on each other's cocks seemed only reasonable, given how many pictures we saw of women doing that to men.

The next time, which came the next day, we tried rubbing our cocks together, which worked even better. We lay in the woods that time, on a hot summer day, on a blanket Murphy brought in his backpack.

During that experiment, Murphy pulled on my nipples, surprising me with electric stabs into my crotch. Soon we were sucking and biting each other's nipples as we rubbed, and naturally one of us drew back a bit far and pressed forward under the other's scrotum, along the perineum, and into a tight pucker of heat that felt incredible.

We didn't even know to call it being gay, or queer, or any of those judgmental words. We didn't hold hands or smooch or give goo-goo eyes across classrooms. We kept our fun secret, otherwise remaining the same roughneck ram-rodding boys we'd always been.

If a few years later both of us moved on to pursuing girls, dating, courting, and eventually marrying women, it didn't lessen the importance of our pictures and stories. They taught us to go ahead, explore ourselves, to be free with sharing pleasure, and that categories, which we learned later, don't matter and aren't even accurate.

Neither of us ever "came out" and we feel no need to. We still know each other, as adults, and once or twice have indulged in the old ways of finding joy and release. It's no big deal and doesn't threaten anything or anyone.