This story involves acts of both sex and romance between consenting adult males, so if that's not allowed where you live then you should march in the streets. If you enjoy the story, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for reading.
* * *
It wasn't the explosion that alarmed him. It was the silence.
In the aftermath, as the dust--and metal, and body parts--settled, he heard nothing. Nothing at all. Not even a muffled, muted facsimile of the screams and sirens and shouts that surrounded him, surrounded them all.
Silence.
The explosion had ruptured his eardrums and so shocked his auditory nerves that he wouldn't hear for days, and never again as well as he had before. As he looked around, trying to sort out what had happened, trying to move, he saw a silent film of devastation. Grizz, who had been at the big gun, took the worst of it. There was little left to be sent home; the biggest parts were still gripping the handles of the gun. A pink mist descended; he looked up to see where it came from, and knew that it was all that was left of Grizz and who knows how many other guys--he wasn't sure who had been closest to the IED when it detonated.
He could smell burning. Oil, fabric, flesh.
Someone touched him on the leg, shook it hard. He couldn't hear them shout his name, he couldn't feel them pulling his legs to get him out of the burning remains of the transport. He felt himself moving, then spinning, and then darkness came as if his eyes had given up too.
Silence.
* * *
"Will? Will, can you hear me?"
Light. Too much light. And what was that? A voice?
"Will, I need to you to focus. Can you hear me?"
It was a voice. He could hear, a little. One side, anyway.
"I ... ah--"
"No, no, don't try to talk. You sucked in some bad fumes there. Your throat's going to be a bit rough for a while. Can you open your eyes for me?"
He tried, but they were stuck. He felt a warm, wet cloth swab over his eyes, and then he could open, and blink, and try to focus.
"Good. Can you see okay?"
He nodded.
"Do you know where you are?"
He smiled weakly. Where else in the entire world would something like this happen to somebody?
"Afgha--," he croaked out, painfully.
The nurse nodded once, and made a note on the clipboard.
"Well, you were, until about 5 days ago. You were brought here after the attack, and we've been waiting for you to come around. Welcome back, soldier."
"Thanks," he coughed, and then fell silent.
"I'll let you rest. You have some work ahead of you, Will. But we'll get you patched up and on your way as soon as we can."
He lapsed back into unconsciousness, to experience an endless, silent replay of the explosion, as he had non-stop for the last 5 days.
A few hours later a buddy from his unit stopped by his bed. Their conversation was a simple one.
"Grizz?"
A shake of the head.
"Peters?"
A slow shake.
"Donnelly?"
A tear ran down the cheek as it rocked from side to side.
Silence.
* * *
The next morning, he was better able to hear, more willing to see, and eager to talk. He waited until the same nurse came by to check on him, and then he tried out his voice again.
"Excuse me, ma'am?" he said, his voice sounding scratchy and higher than he remembered it being.
"Yes?" she asked, coming close to him, her head cocked, smiling.
"Juliet." He said the word like a prayer, like a wish.
She squinted at him a moment, and then realized what he meant.
"Oh, your wife! Yes, of course. The doctor spoke to her the first night you were here, and then again after the surgery. She's aware of your condition. In fact," she leaned closer to him, speaking more quietly, "He said that she's taking it real well." She smiled, as if she knew this was something he was worried about.
He fixed her with a puzzled gaze. She paled.
"Oh--oh my. Has the doctor spoken to you? Oh, honey, I'm so sorry. I assumed that--I marked on your chart that you were conscious and responsive, and when they see that they always come by to talk with you. Oh, I'm so sorry."
"What ... is ... it?" He pled with his eyes to be told, to know what it was that his wife of only a year was taking well.
"Let me get the doctor, honey," she said, and in an instant was up and gone.
Advances in surgical technique have revolutionized battlefield medicine, but every human endeavor has its bounds. There was nothing the doctors could do to reverse the paralysis that would leave Will's legs useless for the rest of his life. The considered him extremely "lucky," however, in that his paraplegia did not seem to have completely disabled his lower abdominal systems. He was continent, could control his bowels, and there was a chance, his urologist assured him brightly, that he might someday regain sexual function.
Will did not feel lucky.
Heaped with bad news, he was shipped home for several months of rehab at a VA hospital near his hometown--if you consider two states away to be "near." Juliet joined him there, and was involved in his treatment, at least at first. She had been relieved to see that he looked pretty much the same as when she saw him off for his tour 6 months earlier. He had always been the most handsome man in the room, any room, and he still was: a shock of brown hair, clear golden-brown eyes, the wide smile and the broad shoulders. Just that now he was in a wheelchair. Forever.
He worked as hard at physical therapy as he worked at everything he did in life: school, jobs, the service. If he was going to be in a wheelchair, he was going to go strong. He lifted weights every day, building what had been a lithe and defined torso into a sculpture of muscle and tendon. He built up his endurance in the wheelchair, until the staff, inspired by his dedication, took up a collection for a racing chair so that he could rack up the miles smoothly. And his legs remained still.
As Will worked to regain his strength, Juliet's focus turned to the family she had hoped to start. She pushed the urological team to come up with new options to restore his virility; surgery failed, Viagra left his heart fibrillating, an implanted pump would be useless without the muscles for ejaculation. She pushed and pushed and when that came to nothing she nagged and cried. Finally the team made one more suggestion: that she manually stimulate his prostate in order to encourage an erection and jump-start the ejaculatory system. It was a somewhat unlikely prospect, but it was the last thing they could offer.
"You want me to what?" she asked in a flat monotone.
"Mrs. Patchett, it's a very simple procedure. You simply lubricate and insert your finger--"
"Oh my god you cannot be serious. Did you just use the word 'insert'? He's a man, for god's sake!"
"Yes, Mrs. Patchett, he is. And this may help him feel even more a man. Once you have inserted your finger, you simply locate the prostate gland by--"
"I'm going to be sick! There's no way I'm going to diddle my husband like a prom date. You people are out of your minds."
"Please calm down. Now, if manual stimulation is out of the question, you can also use an electrical stimulator that you simply insert--"
"A dildo? An electric goddamn dildo? I can't listen to any more of this. I'm leaving."
And she did, leaving the urological team--and Will--out of options.
That night, the nightmare replay of the explosion was replaced with a new horror. Will found himself, in his chair, naked, surrounded by people he knew. As he focused in on them, he saw that they were friends of his from the army, from college, all the way back to high school. Then he noticed they were all naked, and sporting enormous erections. They laughed and pointed at his tiny, shriveled member as they stroked their own grotesquely large cocks. Meanwhile, Juliet made her way around the circle, pausing to lick or kiss or suck each prick, sighing and moaning as she went. Suddenly, the heat and noise rose to an unbearable pitch, and Will saw the cocks start to shoot. Long, flowing streams of white jetted out of every one, arcing high in the air and landing on him, covering with smelly, sticky spunk. He sat, soaked, in the middle, knowing that he would never experience sex again. He awoke in a sweat--a flaccid, panting sweat. He realized then--felt the truth of it in his gut--that he would never again experience sex.
Will eventually settled into a long-term rehab routine with a new therapist at the VA across the city he called home. Lucas was Will's age, and they hit it off immediately, both as therapist and patient and, soon, as friends. After working in the clinic for a couple of weeks they started running together, Will in his racing chair and Lucas running barefoot alongside.
For the first time Will started to feel as strong as he had been before the explosion, and he sometimes could go hours without remembering that he was a paraplegic. His spirits were lifting. He felt it was time to push on something that Juliet had been unwilling to do.
"Come on, hon, just give it a try. For me?"
"No, Will. It's disgusting."
"But if it works, we could start a family. Do you really want to give that up?"
She looked at him, unconvinced.
"Look, it'll be easy," he said, as he lifted himself off of his chair and onto the bed. He pulled his sweats off, as well as his shirt, and he sat before her, naked. He moved his legs apart, and lay back a bit.
His body still had the power to move her. From his head down to his waist, he was completely normal--more than normal, in fact. The wheelchair work had built his upper body to a steely strength that was breathtaking; his pectorals were slabs of pure muscle, and his abs were tightly cut into an eight-pack. His cock, of course, he had not been exercising, but it was still the long, silky wonder that it had always been. She started to think that perhaps she could figure out a way to make this work.
"Just give it a go, okay?" he pleaded.
"Oh, all right," she finally said. "But I'm going to stop if it gets too weird."
"Okay. Whatever you say," he assured her.
She took the bottle of lube from him, and greased up her finger. She brought it to his anus, and began to push. Her finger suddenly slid in, all the way. He gasped and jumped a bit, and she panicked and pulled out.
