Just for Fun

Jeff was the class clown, never ashamed to disrupt order, never afraid to blurt his thoughts louder and more clearly than the "authority" figures dared.

His bravado annoyed me only slightly less than his drive to make sure that all of the other students could hear his daily assaults on the broke and broken public education system masquerading as "Authority."

The multi-colored pajama pants that he wore instead of jeans or slacks annoyed me.

His anti-logo logo shirts annoyed me.

His "I put effort into not giving a fuck" hairdo annoyed me.

The strain on his face as he feigns interest in what others had to say was annoying.

Revealing his own narcissism in response to what was said was annoying.

But I liked him, and I pursued his friendship.

Under layers of annoyance I could see the root of the annoyance, and its name was Jealousy. Everything he did I wanted to do, but was too afraid. Everything he said in protest or in mockery were the very things I wished I had the courage to say. He wore the clothes that I couldn't afford, and wore his hair longer than my parents would tolerate.

Jeff was who I wanted to be, but I couldn't "become him." I knew that even in imitation I would drown in his shadow.

I chose instead to befriend him, to learn from him, to siphon whatever I could from him. I chose to let him change me. And he did not disappoint.

My neighborhood and Jeff's were just close enough to allow us hang out on weekends and holidays by riding our bikes between our houses, backpacks stuffed with overnight necessities, and just enough cash for bad food and cheap entertainment.

Although we were both eighteen, neither of us owned a car, nor were we motivated enough to complete our requirements for obtaining a driver's license. Our interactions were thus limited most evenings to our homes, which was exactly what was needed, and wanted, by us both.

Jeff's contempt for society's values and his "do what feels good" moral compass, made it especially easy to let go of the "me" that I had been pretending to be for my entire life, and to begin experimenting with the possibilities of who I could potentially be if I so chose. I found myself opening up to Jeff more authentically and more deeply than any friend before.

In so doing, Jeff's facade began to melt away, his own confessions revealing a young boy just as confused and desperate as I, both of us waging war with our former selves, and both of us winning.

He began to seem more and more like a real person, rather than a crutch to hold my frail ego-body up.

On top of natural charisma and a sociopathic ease in manipulation, Jeff possessed an innate yet honed ability to read others, and to phrase statements and questions in such a manner that the only conclusion possible to arrive at would always be exactly where he wanted me.

"I prayed to God about a year ago, the last time I was in a church, and asked him to make a deal." Jeff told me one night. He paused whatever horror flick we had rented and switched the living room lights on, illuminating his mother's manicured and weekly scoured home littered with soda bottles, candy wrappers, popcorn kernals crushed to crumbs, and the two of us, shirts stained with spilled soda, remnants of nearly every sort of junk food available.

"You know masturbation is a sin, right?" he asked, leaving me waiting for the details of his pact with the Almighty. I shook my head in the affirmative. "To be honest," Jeff continued, any small gesture of cooperation likely able to suffice for his pacing of the narrative, "It's the one sin I can't control. I mean, I don't feel the urge to kill anyone, I don't worship pagan gods, I've never raped anyone and I'd never want to. If you think about it, you can obey most commandments just by default! But, lust and the "Sin of Onan" are literally impossible to not do. Believe me, I tried to stop, but it's like my body wants it so much that it just starts touching me without my control. In the middle of a long stretch of feeling like a worthless sinner, I was in church and I could feel some kind of connection with something BIG, so I prayed and asked God to provide me a path to follow when it comes to this specific sin. If it really was important, then I asked God to give me the strength or will or self-control or whatever I didn't have so I could beat this sin. If He really didn't care if I beat the meat from time to time, to help me ease up on my self-condemnation."

"And?" I pried, leaning even further forward on the sofa, knowing that the eternal salvation or endless damnation of not only Jeff and me, but that the salvation of ninety-nine percent of all boys out there hinged on Jeff's divine prophecy.

"I got my answer almost right away!" he proclaimed. "While I was finishing my prayer, silently, of course, Reverend Ballard had already begun moving through the steps to dismiss the congregation: final announcements, weekday bible class schedules, and that sort of thing. I was so caught up in my conversation with God that I didn't even notice the whole hour had flown by. When I stood up in the pew at the conclusion of the benediction prayer, I had to sit back down right away, because for some reason unknown to me, I had a hardon the size of Texas!"

I nearly fell off of the couch, I was laughing so hard at the idea of getting an erection while praying, in the middle of church, and then standing up and having a boner stick straight ahead, the soft, thin material that slacks are made out of doing nothing to provide resistance.

"So what?" I asked, my laughter dying as I thought again to his proposition for God. "You took that as a sign from heaven?"

"Ha, not just that," Jeff pitched back in, anticipating that the gap of silence he had placed in the story would prompt that very question. "It wouldn't go away! I sat there and thought about folding socks, doing homework, I even tried to imagine crusty old Mrs. Taylor, the algebra teacher in her underwear (yuck!), but nothing worked. So, I put my bible over my raging-hard dick and walked as fast as I could to the restroom to take care of business."

"Wait," I interrupted, feeling like he was pushing his own plot further than could even be plausible. "You're telling me you jerked off INSIDE of church? Just because people shit in the restroom doesn't mean it's not sacred."

Jeff leaned back in the sofa, bringing his hands up behind his head as if he was telling the story of the time he saved a village from a volcano or something. "My friend," he chuckled as he spoke, "Not only did I flog the dolphin inside the sacred walls of the house of the Lord, I was guided by some kind of inspiration to do things I'd never even thought of before. Different positions that make my dick spring out in different ways, using my left hand on my balls... or even other places. All kinds of stuff, man. It was hands-down the best jerkoff session in my life."

Jeff had stopped talking, but I waited as long as I could stand, knowing that he knows, from having the same English Composition class together, that his story needed a conclusion, because I had no idea what he was drawing from all of this. In return, Jeff squinted at me, furrowing his eyebrows, appearing both frustrated and amazed that I didn't naturally see where he was going with this.

"Dude," he said, departing from his narrating voice and returning to his regular goof-off tone, "God or the Holy Spirit or whatever you call it not only doesn't mind if we use our bodies for pleasure, but He or It actually encourages it. It's like, God wants us to experience as much pleasure as possible. So, I quit going to church, and you can imagine what the freed-up time is going towards now!"

We both snickered, and then fell into awkward silence. Everyone masturbates, and if they don't, that's sad. But, at 18, NO ONE ever talked about masturbating. Jeff had just crossed that line, and in doing so, he had placed into my mind the scene of him cramped in a church restroom stall, trying to get into pretzel positions while jerking his dick and cupping his balls with his other hand. I would have burst into another fit of laughter, but instead I was silently ashamed when I realized that my own erection was rising, inspired by the image of my friend, my buddy, lost in orgasm, his hand sliding up and down his shaft, his fingers swirling his tip, and then pounding all the way down again.

Needing to break the spell before my hard-on was undeniable, and irreversible, I said the first thing that came to mind, "I like that idea - your prophecy." Jeff's eyes lit up and he impatiently waited for me to tell him specifics. "I mean, it makes sense that God would want us to have all good experiences, and busting one off is never a bad thing. That makes a lot more sense than a God who creates us with dicks that can turn rock-hard in seconds, but then tells us that we can't touch it or we'll go to hell!"

His smile was, probably for the first time that I had ever seen, authentic.

Jeff shifted attention away from flashbacks of his painful hardened cock throbbing, his hands frantically exploring every part of his body, his Nordic blonde body hair only thick enough to catch beads of sweat and disperse them over the surface of his skin into a glowing sheet of lusty perspiration.

"Hey, will you help me get this place cleaned up real quick?" Jeff asked, pulling me back from the fantasy that had so unexpectedly snared me. I had never thought about another boy in a sexual way before, but I couldn't escape the fact that at that moment I wanted to touch him and taste him and experience him totally.

Instead of leaping across the sofa and shredding his clothes off of his perfect, slim body, I took a deep breath and commanded myself to stand, resolving to help my friend clean up before doing anything drastic.

Dorothy wouldn't be home for two more days, but the chores would be unmanageable if we just let the mess build on itself until the final minutes before her return. Working together, we finished cleaning in minutes, both of us seeming to exorcise unspoken frustration in the process, tearing through the house as if on a quest for ultimate cleanliness.

With the last pieces of trash in the baskets and the last dirty dishes loaded in the washer, we plopped down on the sofa. I landed in the same place I had sat throughout the movie, and Jeff sat much closer than before, the sides of our legs and knees touching.

Jeff gave a gentle, drawn-out sigh, his body following in the relaxation, sinking into the sofa a bit more, shoulder falling into slacked release, and legs falling open, his whole left leg leaning against my right. His expression softened and deepened as well, and he looked at me for much longer than ever before. I noticed that, in normal situations and settings, that long of a gaze would have made me quite uncomfortable, but in that moment I simply fell into his gaze and returned it.

Without breaking from his gaze, without even breaking from the manifest serenity in his expression, Jeff asked, "Do you think that I could be right... that God wants us to experience everything that brings us pleasure?"

It was the first question that I think Jeff had ever asked with the sincere desire to hear the other person's opinion. I sat with the question for several moments, not thinking about it, but instead feeling it out. "I think that God speaks to us through our feelings more than anything, and I feel like God would want us to feel good on all levels." Our voices had lowered almost to whispers, our breath and our words the only sounds in the empty home.

Jeff sat up, still looking into my eyes, and pulled his shirt off. "If you want, you can take yours off too," he suggested. "It's a bit hot, and the air feels really good on bare skin."

I pulled my shirt off over my head as well, dropped it to the floor, and sank back into the sofa, sank back into our mutual gaze.

I reached out and and my fingers fluttered on his bare chest. I hadn't meant to do that. In fact, I wasn't aware of what my hand was doing until it was done, but neither of us were shocked by the touch. It felt natural. It felt good.

My fingers pressed onto his skin and brushed over his pink nipples, each one tightening and hardening under my touch. Through my fingers I could feel the tightness of his skin, the smoothness of his hairless chest, the young muscle beneath the skin, and his throbbing heartbeat beneath all of it, sending rhythmic tremors through his whole body as it thumped in his chest.

I gasped when I felt his fingers touch my chest, the returned contact opening a looped current between us, my touch feeding myself into him, and his touch pressing himself into me. I felt like I was spinning, like the floor had dropped out beneath us, like the sofa was floating in nothingness, like the only thing left in existence was him and me and our need to feel each other.

Our fingers drifted along each other's chests, and mine moved lower, touching his stomach, hard muscles covered in tight skin. The difference between how his body felt and how it felt to touch a girl's body, and how different his body felt than my own, was captivating, the drug of the reciprocal touch getting me higher than any drug could offer, and the need to touch and to feel more of him would soon be impossible to fight.

Jeff must have felt it too, the pressing need to go further. He sat up and swiveled himself to the floor, kneeling in front of me. Both hands returned to my body, running over my stomach, up to my chest, fingers flickering on my nipples and moving downwards again. I reached down to touch his chest from this new angle, and was surprised at how I could feel his pec muscles much better.

He looked up at me, looking into me, his eyes asking my eyes a question that my conscious mind couldn't make out, his eyes asking me for permission as his hands moved lower than my stomach, onto my belt buckle. He paused, allowing me a moment to protest, but the only thing in that moment that I could object to was the momentary halt. I smiled and cocked my head as if scolding him for delaying. He returned my smile with one that was steaming with guile.