Caught

"Paul!" the younger man called to me, voice raised so it could be heard over the small din of the shower. "You can't be here! Didn't you see the sign? The floors are wet. You could slip!" His voice was accented heavily. He was from some eastern-european country or other. But it was nothing in comparison to Pater's.

"Paul, we are cleaning now, yes? It is not shower time. You...you are in the ways, yes?"

Their words were serious enough, but both men's eyes were alight with laughter. I immediately turned back away from them. What the actual fuck! I breathed a sigh of relief; thank god I was facing the wall. All they had seen was my bare arse; a bit pale, perhaps, but my trips to the gym and my squats in particular meant I had nothing to be ashamed of there. Doubtless better than whatever flab they were hiding in their overalls.

I turned the shower off at the wall, and without turning around, tried to put a tough spin on my voice. "What are you doing? I'm naked lads, I need to finish my shower!"

Pater's voice answered, and I turned my head over my shoulder again to look at him while he spoke. "Paul, no, it is cleaning time. We need to mop, yes? You can finish while we clean."

My expression went dark. Who the fuck were these fucking cleaners, telling me what to do? They were here to make my life easier. I made the damn computer parts in this factory. I practically paid their salaries. And here they were, ordering me around?

I cupped my dick and balls in my hand and turned around.

"I said, I need to finish my shower. Get out!"

Or at least, that's what I would have said. But as soon as I turned around, bent over slightly at the shoulders, hands clapped over my little fella and my ghoulies, Pater and Ionis burst into laughter. Proper, full-stomached, uproarious laughter. They even shared a little look, like "Can you believe this guy?"

I felt instantly transported back to that fateful day in the changing rooms in Wexford. I felt the embarrassment as a physical thing, like someone had cracked an egg of pure mortification on my head and I could feel it sliding down my neck and back. Or was that just the water dripping?

"I-I, I'll j-just-" I was stumbling over my words now, the humiliation was so intense. This just had the cleaners laughing even more. I reached out with one hand for the towel, and they laughed even more; Pater began to literally cry, and Ionis bent double, a low, halloring laugh. I started and looked down, afraid I had let my secret spill, but my dick and balls were easily contained by my left hand. Nothing had slipped out; what on earth were they laughing at?

I took a step closer to the towel, and Ionis picked it up for me and took a step towards me, about to hand me the key to my dignity. Just as I was about to grasp the garment and retain my modesty, he snatched it back. I was so surprised I almost slipped on the wet bathroom floor, and at first I thought it was a nasty joke, but I saw only confusion in Ionis's eyes.

"*This* is your towel?" he asked, puzzled, and I saw instantly why he was perplexed; in my haste to get to this shower, I had opened the wrong bag. These weren't the shower towels at all; he was holding a one-foot by one-foot hand-towel in his hand.

"I....I must have-"

But I couldn't even finish. The laughter reached a level that I had never seen in a real person before. Real tears were in Pater's eyes, and Ionis overbalanced backwards, almost slipping himself, gripping the fabric cubicle for support. The whole thing shook dangerously, and I thought for a terrible moment it might come tumbling down, but it held.

After a few long moments of laughing, pointing, and slapping each other on the shoulder, they collected themselves. "You were in hurry today, yes?" Pater smiled, panting heavily, and his eyes more alive with humour than I had ever seen them.

All I could do was nod meekly. The embarrassment, the sheer humiliation, hit me like a physical thing. What could I do to get out of this situation before it got any worse?

At this point, the two men looked at me a little more soberly, and began to look a little concerned. "I'll get you a real towel," Ionis said, and off he went, walking across the room to the bathroom door, headed for the locker room.

I breathed a sigh of relief that was short lived. As he headed for the open door into the locker room, I could see past it into a row of lockers that lined the wall. If I could see the lockers, then anyone who came in and needed to use those lockers could look towards the bathroom and see me. With my hands still clasped firmly over my willy, I took a few awkward, waddling steps to the right, trying to get Paters massive body between me and the door.

He looked over his shoulder to see what I was looking at, then turned back to me. The older man then pointed directly at my crotch.

"You are shy, yes?"

There was no malice or venom in the words. Almost a gentle sadness. I shrugged as best I could while not revealing my little secret.

"Why? We are all men in this...man locker room. We should all be proud of what is given to us by god, no?"

I cringed internally. Both at the mention of god, which as an atheist, I don't believe in, and at the idea that I could ever be proud of anything that was hiding in my hands right now. Somehow, Pater seemed to pick up on that.

"Maybe some of us have more to be proud of than others, yes?" he said, and this time there was a hint of something in his voice; schadenfreude. I raised my voice to protest, when Pater pointed at my bag. "Strange. When we clean bathroom in man locker room, we find bag unattended. Must be lost. Where should I take it? Maybe to lost and found?"

A certain mischievous delight came to his eyes. I knew what was going to happen if I let him pick my bag up. I could see it all clearly. He would leave me trapped here with no towel and no clothes, forced to...I could barely think of it. If anyone in this building saw my twig and berries in their current shrunken state, I could never look them in the eye again.

I leaped into action, lunging for my backpack. As soon as I went for it, he burst out into yet more laughter. Clearly, he had been joking; Pater had no intention of swiping my clothes. He took a step towards me and gave me a huge clap on the back. I had never felt more vulnerable, standing here, desperate to cover up, with this huge balding oaf of a man taking such painful joy at my expense.

"You worry too much," he said, shaking his head. "Nobody cares about your maža paslaptis, eh? You look like frightened schoolboy. When I was young, we boys would swim in Nemunélis all year around. Even in winter time. Think we had a big bybis to show off then? But we did not care. We were men!"

At this, Pater suddenly stood up straighter, beaming with a strange masculine pride I had scarcely seen before. I could imagine it so clearly...friends, brothers, classmates, teammates, all pulling themselves from the surface of a frigid February swim, all cocks rendered tiny by the overwhelming cold, each man comforted in knowing that the reduction of his manhood was common, everyday, expected; another thing that tied him to the young men around him.

Again, Pater gestured to my crotch, still tightly covered by my grasping hands, and he spoke. "What are you? A man? Or a boy?"

I couldn't even meet his eye. I wasn't a Lithuanian teen, naked with fellows in a river in February. I was in Ireland in november, I was alone with a man ten years older than me who could barely speak my language, and he was clothed while I was naked; he was protected by dignity, while I was closer to true, pure humiliation than I had been in a decade.

"You Irish boys..." Pater lamented. "So modest. Is it the Catholic in you, yes?"

At this time, Ionis returned, giving me a small start. He held a proper, full sized towel in his hands. He looked at me, in my ridiculous state, still stubbornly clinging to what little dignity I had left with my hands over my little willy and frozen nuts, and laughed quietly to himself again.

"You want this?" he asked, smiling wickedly.

"Please," I said, surprised to hear how earnestly and pathetically I was begging.

Ionis shrugged. "Here you go!"

He tossed it to me, but it was a bad throw; he tossed it too high, so that it would sail right over my head. As it travelled in its high arc, it began to unfold; I reached for it instinctively, desperately, so eager for my embarrassment to be over, so hungry for the protection the towel would give me. Without thinking, I stretched on my tippy-toes and caught it with both hands.

I knew instantly what I had done.

Pater and Ionis' jaws dropped as they saw, for the first time, my cock and balls.

I looked down to see what they had seen.

My mickey was the smallest I had ever seen it before. My shaft, which I was proud to say reached a prodigious five inches when I was in my full form, was nowhere to be seen. My dick was almost entirely inside my body, not its usual inch, not the half-inch it could shrink to when I was cold, but truly negligible. My circumcised head and piss slit emerged, barely, to sit upon the base of my scrotum, pulled so tight by the cold you could see the small eggs that were my nuts clearly.

I had never even seen a clitoris so internal. There was basically no penis there at all.

I stood, frozen in shock for a moment, expecting laughter to come, but it didn't. Ionis and Pater looked at me like they might look at a leper, or a war survivor. Ionis whispered something under his breath that I didn't catch, and a wide smile crept across his face. "Poor fella..."

Pater clapped a hand on my shoulder again. "None of us can choose how much of a man we are, yes?"

I couldn't argue with that.

He laughed, not the belly-laugh he was caught up in a few minutes ago, but a resigned, relieved laugh. It seemed to say 'Thank god that isn't me.'

"Thank you for the show," he said, and Ionis chuckled at that. They turned to leave, walking out of the fabric cubicle without bothering to slide the shower curtain shut. Pater caught my eye just before he turned out. I was standing there frozen; I hadn't even tried to cover up yet. I saw him take one last pitiful glance at my small, small cock, and he met my gaze with a shit-eating grin.

"See you around, little man."

The words caused a shudder at the base of my spine. No one had ever called me 'little man' before. I stood there for a moment or two, naked in the cold shower room, clutching the towel to my chest. Pater and Ionis pulled the wet floor sign out with them, and for a second, I just stood there, shocked, dripping, not even knowing how I felt. Then I heard a "finally!" and a march of footsteps, as a gang of my coworkers who had been waiting for the bathroom to become available made their way in.

I barely managed to close the fabric curtain in time to avoid even more people seeing my secret shame. My hands struggled with the curtain, I was so confused and humiliated I felt almost drunk.

They knew. These cleaners, two masculine men, one younger than me, one older, they were more men than I would ever be; and now they knew it, and I knew they knew it. How would this change things between us? Would they tell their friends? My coworkers? Would they smile those knowing smiles when they saw me in the corridor? Would I walk by, only to hear that belly-aching laughter behind my back?

Looking down, I was surprised to find that my lad was standing up to attention, all five inches pointing directly away from me. A thick bead of precum had descended half way to the floor before I even noticed I was aroused.

I couldn't begin to put a name to the feeling, couldn't begin to explain the intensity of the humiliation I had just experienced, couldn't begin to fathom how I could have loved it so much.

A strange idea entered my mind.

Tomorrow, I would be coming in early.

I would go to the open showers of the workplace gym.

And I would turn the water cold as it would go, step under the icy jet, and show every other guy showering in the place exactly how much less of a man I was than them.

I wrapped my fingers around my dick and started tugging.

That day, I would be ten minutes late walking onto the production line.