I'm still not quite sure how I let myself get suckered into a masturbation contest. There had been multiple opportunities to make an exit out of the mess, not all of them graceful to be sure. But "graceful" has never been my middle name. I had had chances.
It more had to do with dumb stuff - my stubborn male pride, an unwillingness to even appear that I was considering a retreat, maybe my ingrained defiance in the face of a challenge - something along those lines.
But here I was, with just a tee-shirt on, my penis out erect in front of me, standing in front of an audience of four other guys, right next to my "competitor." A glorious, stupid, fucking catastrophe.
At the very least I had insisted on no photos, no cameras, everyone had to leave their phones in the next room. And luckily Steven insisted too, for at least that I had to be grateful.
Steven - all six feet plus of dirty-blond, dopey surfer-boy - was standing slightly to my right, his skinny, long penis also hard, it looked uncomfortably so, poking out straight but curved slightly upward at the end. Scuffed, coffee-stained carpet lined the floor of John's student housing apartment. The other guys were all lounging on a beat-up sofa against one wall, except for big John, standing and leering at us from one side of the room. Fucking John.
Officially this red-bricked set of buildings here in Boston was known as Dempster House, named for some famous rich alumni of the college, but of course it had almost immediately been dubbed "Dumpster House."
Our spectacle was being held in what passed for the living room. John's third-floor flat as an upper-classman was shared with his roommate Ron, a slender, dark-haired, dissolute finance major with long calculating fingers and a perpetual smirk.
It was late spring, the windows open, the late-afternoon sun streaming in. I was hoping we were far enough away from the windows that no one would be able to see us from anywhere outside. At least it wasn't a basement or ground floor apartment.
I tried to think back to the last time I had masturbated with a witness around. It had to have been with my buddy Lenny, maybe six years ago when we were fifteen, before we had managed to hook up with our first girlfriends. We spent our lives with perpetual hardons back then.
My penis was now in that twitchy, expectant stage just short of full arousal. It was hard, not impossibly so, but close. The veins on my shaft stood out clearly, like blue rivers on an old map. The head of my prick had gotten a reddish color. It was engorged, aching for attention. The nerve endings on my cockhead were alive, sensitive to any touch at all, even the slight humid breeze coming through the windows.
Officially Steven and I were in our "warm-up" phase, getting our cocks ready before John issued us the rules of engagement. It appeared that the contest couldn't begin until we had decent erections.
I like my penis. It is attached to me. It has done its share of good things. Never enough, to be sure, but I was twenty-one, the whole world of sex still in front of me. Plenty of lascivious experiences still to come. I watched my noble rod twitch stiffly with excitement in the spring air.
Despite valiant attempts at training, I had not found a single girl, not even Melanie Russell with her smooth talented fingers, who could play my penis - my Magic Flute, my Kosmic Kazoo - by hand as well as I could. My fingers knew my prick better than, well, the back of my hand. I knew all the best ways to tease my supreme appendage close to a climax, build my testicle-pressure to bursting, prolong the arousal and then launch a pleasure-sodden load of semen. I didn't even want to guess how many times sperm had coated my fingers up til now, it was surely well into the three-digit range.
My balls were drawn up, their pressure had been building slowly. There was a climax around the corner, and the deal today was going to be connected to how impressively my orgasm was launched.
It's just that I'm not used to having my erect prick on display, at least to anyone other than my immediate, proximate lust-interest - the girl at hand, so to speak. I thought back to those earlier times with Lenny, although they were quite different than my current situation.
Lenny and I had done all manner of what we had felt obliged to call "experimentation." We wanked a lot together, dropping our drawers at the slightest provocation, often more than once a day.
He was one competitive bastard, and we had conducted contests of every variety: how long we could prolong a climax, how quickly we could erupt, how far we could shoot our semen, whether we could hit a "bulls-eye" drawn in chalk on the inside wall of his family's barn while keeping our toes behind a line two feet from the wall. At least the straw on the barn floor would absorb our semen.
I looked over at Steven's tool, his arrow-shaped cockhead emerged from his foreskin all smooth and anxious for release. The other guys had gotten shit-stupid grins on their faces while Steven and I each had gotten ourselves "ready" for our challenge, our hands and fingers pressing, stroking, manipulating our tools. The band of voyeurs' eager eyes had been riveted on our pricks as we coaxed them into warrior stiffness.
And of course, even that preliminary phase had been dicey too. Steven and I had jockeyed for an advantage, trying not to get to that impossible-hard state that would mean a quick ejaculation, trying to let the other guy get there first.
But damn, I had enjoyed watching Steven's nice tool go from entirely limp and dangling like a discarded sock on a chair-back, his cockhead hidden beneath his foreskin, to hard and stiff, the head poking out all red and menacing-like. The way he fondled his balls, with their thin blond hair thicket, and worked them, getting ready.
Steven didn't look like he was enjoying himself. He had a tight, tense expression, his surfer-boy face with a three-day stubble revealing some of the same thoughts crashing around in my own head - how the fuck had we gotten stuck wanking off in front of a crowd of these guys?
Ron was there since he shared the flat with John. Mike and Roger were just there, well, just because they were buddies and added to the spectacle. But they were just spectators, along for the ride. Or so I thought.
John was the cause of it all.
It turned out John, the bastard, had within the same week, managed to catch both Steven and I, independently, in the act of wanking.
I had been in the gym Friday night. I thought I was alone in the shower after lacrosse practice, I'd already had an extended whirlpool session in the trainer's room for my aching knee, but the trainer had locked up the room afterward and gone home and I assumed the rest of the gym was mine. I was standing under the shower, letting the hot water soothe my shoulders and the rest of my muscles.
Of course it wasn't the first time I had ever wanked in a shower, and I would have guessed that it would have been difficult to find a guy on the team who hadn't done so, one time or another.
But my timing was lousy. John had been watching me, probably most of the way, since after an initial look around to make sure I was alone, I had had my eyes closed while I attended to business. My sperm had erupted in a good blast, one hand on my cockhead squeezing out the last drop, my other hand on my soaped-up, slippery balls.
And I opened my eyes to see him at the entrance to the shower room, fully clothed with his gym bag over his shoulder, big smile on his wide Polish face. He had returned to the gym to fetch some forgotten piece of clothing or equipment.
"Nice work," he had said drolly, while my face turned red.
John played defense on the team, over two hundred pounds, beefy and strong. He was big, dumb as a rock, and a bully who had one of those buzz-saw calculating minds always looking for his own personal advantage or, barring that, a chance to humiliate someone else. I never liked him but he was on the team and he played good defense. He swung his lacrosse stick with authority, and he had whacked me hard on my arms more than once in practice, trying to jar the ball loose from my stick. I played attack, small and fast, and was maybe half a head shorter than him.