For John, without whose suggestion this story would never have been written. Another story in a series about the pleasures of youth and the fun had during those glory years....
Story Ten -- Everybody's Hero
That night, Toby was everybody's hero.
He was golden. Nobody could touch him. The ball kept sailing towards him with remarkable alacrity, thrown by the powerful arm of our quarterback. And each time he somehow managed to evade the defensive lines of the opposing team with an ease that bordered on miraculous. I swear I'd never seen anything like it. It was as if God himself had arranged the players on the field, all to contrive a clear path for Toby to charge down the field like a victorious general. He made touch down after blessed touch down. We had so many points on the board; we were unbeatable before the first half of the game was over.
Toby was literally carried off the field on our shoulders.
It was like I hadn't even been there. Ordinarily I was one of the stars on the field, but I may as well have just sat on the bench the whole game for all the use I'd been. I didn't mind though. I recognized it was Toby's time. And I was prouder of him that night than if he'd been my own brother.
He could have had anyone he wanted. It turned out though that the only person he wanted was me.
"Great game man," I said to him later in the locker room after we'd showered.
Usually I have plenty of opportunities to talk with Toby, but he remained a bit of a loner. Off the field you might take Toby for one of the grungy stoner types, with his tattoos and blue, spiked hair. He had a way about him that just didn't fit our home town. But on the field he was a competent player who earned the respect of the fans and his fellow players alike. Toby was widely admired. However, because of his reputation as something of a fag, or at least a bisexual, most of the guys gave him a lot of space. Not that anyone would have said anything to his face. Toby would have kicked the shit out of anybody who had the balls to cast any aspersions his way anyway. It's just that no one wanted to be considered guilty by association. Except me, of course. I didn't care one way or the other. Damn all if I couldn't hang around with whomever I wanted to. I liked Toby. He was a good friend. And I dared anyone to question my sexuality.
Everyone knew I'd deflowered half the girls in my grade.
I was one of the few people who knew for a fact Toby liked boys as well as girls. But it didn't make him a bad guy. And it didn't make me a bad guy if I'd sucked his cock one drunken night a month ago when we'd been banging chicks together in a hotel room. Or again a few weeks later at the apartment of Toby's friend, Brett.
Shit happens, as they say.
"It wasn't bad, man," he said, with a sense of satisfaction and pride thick in his voice, "Not bad at all."
He was standing at his locker next to me getting dressed. After he took off his towel he was as naked as a jay bird, and I don't mind saying that it was one of the few times in my life having a naked man next to me was an intensely erotic experience. Toby glowed with an internal light, and I bathed in the rays he cast off.
"Going out with Katie tonight?" he asked me with a touch of macho bravado, "Taking her out for a victory lap?"
As he said it he mimed a hip thrusting, fucking motion in the crudest possible manner. Ordinarily I would have laughed, and said something equally crude, but instead I just groaned.
"You haven't heard then?" I replied, with a pained tone, "She dumped my ass this morning."
The memory was still somewhat painful. Katie was one of the few women I'd ever actually tried to date, rather than merely have lots of casual sex with. We'd gone out for slightly less than a month, but I had known for most of that time that we were doomed to failure. I had too much of a roving eye, and Katie was too jealous to allow that to go on. Some women view men as a kind of repair project, and therein lay the principal attraction. She thought she could change me. But she was wrong. And I wasn't about to act like some pussy whipped asshole just to get some when she was in the mood.
Not me. No sir.
The only thing that really smarted about the way it went down was that Katie had dumped me before I'd dumped her. And she'd been real mean about it too. Fortunately, my reputation was too solidly cemented with most of the girls at school for that to be much of a worry. I might take a small hit with some of the younger girls, but I'd get through it.
I was just surprised Toby hadn't heard about it before now. Or maybe he had?
"No worries, man," he said, stepping into his tighty whities and pulling them up over his ass.
I couldn't help but watch, out of the corner of my eye, as he did so. And I thought, not for the first time, what an amazingly sculpted ass it was. He had a firm, hard body like my own, built from hours spent in the gym. His figure reminded me of one of those statutes you saw in museums of ancient Greek heroes carved from snowy white marble. Except that unlike that cold white stone, Toby's tanned body radiated an intoxicating outward warmth. I could feel his heat in the close proximity of our positions.
"I'm sure you'll find something to occupy your time at Jameson's," he continued, by now pulling up a pair of tight, ripped blue jeans.
"Not sure if I feel up for it," I said abruptly, surprising myself.
"Well," he said, "I'm not going. You can come over to my place and hang if you want."
It wasn't unusual for Toby to skip a party like Frank's. It was a little too crowded for him, and maybe a step or two upscale. Toby seemed to find enjoyment in the company of a much rougher, less popular crowd of people. And it wasn't unusual for him to find his women by trolling through the bars that he was too young to legitimately be found in.
"Oh, man," I said to him, "You know you're going to deprive your fans of their hero tonight."
"They'll get over it," he said matter of factly, and then clapping a hand on my shoulder, "I've got a buddy in need. That comes first."
"Thanks, man," I said, not wanting to let the mood get too serious, "I'm really touched. I think I might cry."
Toby broke into a huge smile and started laughing then. The mood was back to the kind of masculine camaraderie that you'd expect to find in a locker room.
"C'mon dude," he said finally, as we finished getting dressed, "There's a couple six packs at home with our names on them."
We snuck out of the school by a side door to avoid the rest of the guys who were heading off to Frank Jameson's place for the usual Friday night party, and I followed Toby in my truck back to his house. Despite his preferred choice of apparel, Toby's parents were not poor. His father was a doctor. And they lived in a very nice home on the edge of town not far from my own. I imagined they did lay awake at nights wondering how their son had turned out the way he had.
As we went inside the house, Toby was all swagger.
"My parents aren't home," he said, throwing off his jacket and heading for the fridge.
He grabbed a beer and tossed it over to me. Taking another for himself.
"Bottoms up," he intoned, as we both took a swig and settled in to the business at hand.
We were just a couple of dudes hanging out together in the typical uniform of our age group: jeans and t-shirts. There was a lot to occupy two football heroes who had decided to forgo the weekly party. There were video games that needed playing, movies that needed watching, weed that needed smoking, and the angst filled music of youth that needed listening to. But after that, sometime during the early hours of the morning, I came back to myself, from that brief descent into youthful indolence, to find that I was sitting together with Toby on his couch in his living room, with our respective choices of reading material arrayed on the coffee table before us. The remains of our evening's excess lay scattered around us, including beer bottles, a few half eaten bags of chips and an empty pizza container. Toby had picked up a comic book after putting down Sports Illustrated and I was looking through a copy of that month's Playboy.
The centerfold had the most amazing tits. I was genuinely trying to read the articles, but the weight of the day had limited my attention span and my eyes kept floating back to the pussy shots on the pages. I don't care if they were airbrushed, they were a thing of beauty, and, as my father often said, true beauty is a joy eternal.
It had given me a boner that I was absent mindedly rubbing through my jeans.
"She's hot," said Toby's deep voice from beside me, "Don't you think?"
"Yeah," I mumbled in response, feeling suddenly uncomfortable sitting next him.
A guy with whom I'd shared something very unexpected, and very confusing, several times before.
