Wrestling This
Authors: Dan Sexton
WRESTLING THIS
By Dan Sexton
Copyright © 2015 Dan Sexton
All Rights Reserved.
Cover Design: SelfPubBookCovers.com/BeeJavier
This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: Contains strong sexual content between consenting male adults, including but not limited to mutual masturbation, oral sex, and anal penetration. Safe sex should always be practiced. The acts that occur in this story are not meant to encourage sex in a non-committal fashion. Any such behavior in this book is only used to illustrate a story.
Chapter One
W
hen I first met Eric, I had no idea I would fall in love with him. I guess that’s how the coming out process works for some of us who’ve struggled with our sexuality.
Sometimes it’s a curse when you think you’re so straight.
Until the spring of my sophomore year at FSU, certainty reigned true that I liked girls. I believed it like I knew how I could be best in the wrestling squad. Not that I’m cocky—well, let’s save that for later—it’s just that I’m focused and determined in my pursuits. Liking—let alone
loving
—another man seemed unfathomable.
I’ve dated good-looking girls, lost my virginity at sixteen, and while I’d had thoughts of other guys—yes, even
that
way—I thought everyone occasionally did. “You’ll grow out of it,” I told myself. I just needed to find the right woman. “Two men couldn’t make a home,” I remember saying one time, long ago, to a friend.
Boy, was I wrong.
I found the right companion, but not the one you’d bring home to Mom. That is, if my mother were still alive.
“Quin,” Tamara, my sister, would say, “someday you’ll find the perfect one. She’ll knock that Red Sox baseball cap right off that gorgeous, sandy-brown haired head of yours.” She tried to console me every time I broke up with someone—six months had been the longest I’d dated anyone.
As far as I knew, no one suspected Quintin Lee Flynn liked guys. Not even me.
I’m also a big sports fan: baseball, football, soccer, and, of course, wrestling. “It’s not normal for someone like me,” or so I foolishly thought, “to be gay.” I don’t mean that to be stereotypical—that gay guys don’t like sports. I’m learning my assumptions about people are sometimes flawed.
Life has a way of smacking reality across your face.
While Aalam Eric Palak—only his mother called him by his real name; everyone else chose his Americanized middle name—made my heart throb, Dylan McCormick, my roommate, brought us together. Dylan
should
be a junior, if his grades weren’t so friggin’ bad—at this rate, my sixteen-year-old sister will have her master’s before he ever gets out of undergrad.
I shouldn’t give Dyl any shit. He’s a good guy, most of the time. Though, he has a tendency to get the dudes on the wrestling team to do all sorts of shit that would make our upper-middle class parents fender-bend their BMWs if they’d heard. For instance, one time we stole a bunch of campus police uniforms from the guard shack and busted a sorority party. Another time, Dyl dared us to play strip poker and nude wrestle. Twelve drunk, straight, macho guys paraded their junk about. For fifty bucks, Dyl got his dick hard and rubbed against another guy’s ass.
A week later, Dylan and Henry had a contest—amid another all-male beer party—to see who could shoot their wad the farthest. Dyl lost one-hundred dollars when Henry’s spunk hit the wall.
Dylan would do anything on a dare.
Unlike a lot of us, he wasn’t raised wealthy. I like that about him.
He’s simpleminded, comes from a small town south of Boston—I can never remember where, though I should being I’m from neighboring New Hampshire. From what he says, his parents sound like good folk: Dad works construction and Mom waits tables.
Dyl’s lucky he still has her. My mother’s death in a car crash five years ago still haunts me.
Apparently, the university bunked Dyl and me together, figuring two New Englanders would bond. For once, they got something right.
Dylan’s good for me, in a strange way, pushes me to do things I’d most likely not do on my own—and not just things like “borrowing” my ex’s Mustang, by “accidentally” happening upon her spare keys, while she vacationed with her parents in Mexico. I had it for a week and wound up having to have it detailed because Ted, the FSU quarterback, had one too many beers one night and blew chow all over the backseat.
No, I credit Dylan as the reason Eric and I got together. He also encourages me to open up to him about my mom’s death.
In return, I try to help him with his grades, but the kid’s fucking hopeless. I wrote his American Lit paper for him last semester. Otherwise he would’ve failed.
Enough of Dylan. Eric
. Fucking Eric
.
Eric came to FSU, on a transfer from Georgia Tech.
Strange, I initially hated him. And he despised me.
But I’ve since realized our aversion to each other masked the struggles we felt inside.
God, I’m a mess—a “hot mess,” as Tamara would say.
Disdain for this hot-as-fuck Middle Eastern kid initially trumped my true desires. I pushed down my feelings like you would a bagel that won’t crisp in the toaster the way you want it—over and over, I’d press down the lever. Yet I had to agree with my coach that Eric’s skill could help the team get to the state championships.
While mostly Pakistani, Eric has skin fair like his Parisian mother. He’s been in the States his whole life—all twenty of them. I’m five months younger than he. Something about him being older, even just a tad, warms me. I know it’s silly, but I like that he’s more mature. Or maybe, it’s in how he acts.
The kid’s got some good genes. Mother’s smart as a whip, and his dad’s a chemical engineer—runs an Atlanta-based biotech firm.
I’m going to allow myself to swoon, and let the tingles inside me out. Otherwise, they fester, and I can’t think straight.
Honestly, Eric looks like he stepped off a photo shoot for one of those fitness magazines I’d buy at the grocery store—the rags I’d tell Dylan I got for exercise tips, inspiration for the gym. (He ignored the times I rolled it up, shoved it under my arm, and took it into the bathroom.)
Distilling Eric’s description into mere words doesn’t do him justice, but I’ll try: soft black hair, dark eyes, lightly tanned skin, tall—about my height, five eleven—and thickly muscled, but not overly so, and those soft-red lips of his...God, they just drive me crazy, especially how they darken when we make love or when he’s horny, and how when he’s unshaven they look even more amazing. I could just kiss them, and him, all day.
One step further, I can’t get enough of his...you know...all right, his cock.
Fuck!
Just thinking about it now makes my own dance with need. While I’d given my own penis a run for its money since discovering masturbation way back when, gripping his is like holding onto a can of beer. Talk about girth. I’ll save the details of how I’ve managed to satisfy that thing, without injuring myself, for later.
But allowing myself to get to know him took some time. Initially, my competitive hatred toward him coursed through my blood like wildfire. The fact that he could run faster than me and do more push-ups than I could pissed me off to no end. The now seemingly obvious, sexual tension between us went over my head like a football to a bad wide receiver.
Also, jealousy fed my flames. I wanted his perfectly rounded biceps, his no-more-than-thirty-one-inch waist—not that I’m all that far off from him. He just looks better. Even that flip of his damn black hair that swooped down over his right eye, looking like it’d tickle his forehead—for he’d persistently push it back, only for it to fall forward again. I tried to tell myself I hated him. The stress of suppression hurt. I didn’t understand.
I resisted him as best I could, but eventually I couldn’t hold back.
One time, when Eric and I were still masking our attraction toward each other with hate, Coach had us spar in preparation for regionals—blue spandex to blue spandex, my green eyes locked onto his black pearls, grunts and groans that eventually turned into curse words, from me, not able to deal with the emotional currents firing off inside. “What the fuck!” I pushed him, and we tussled with all-out masculinity.
Coach had to pull us apart at the end. “Break it up! Break it up, you two,” he yelled.
Thin Dylan weaseled his way between us. “Jesus, guys. Lighten up.”
Anyone who teetered between the middle and heavyweight divisions—as Eric had—I knew would be tough to win. I wanted to pulverize him.
What I didn’t know, back then, is that I wanted to be in him, and him in me.
I thought Eric as someone to beat. Not
beat off
, like Dylan, and his brilliant idea, eventually had us do.
I worked out harder to be better, to be like Eric.
Months passed with us barely communicating.
“Bring it on,” I told myself. My competitive nature most likely came from my dad. Even as a kid, no matter how much I tried, no matter how much I bench-pressed or how fast I covered the fifty-yard dash, it never satisfied my desire to improve.
Ultimately, my compulsion exhausted me—as it always did.
I’m my own worst enemy.
“Body-dysmorphic disorder.” That’s what my shrink, calls it. He tries to convince me that the love handles I see around my waist are just a form of anxiety—that there are none. And I’ll bite back with some sarcastic quip about not wanting to wind up like him when I get old, yet the prick won’t even flinch.
This whole psychologist thing is my coach’s fault. Last year, when he found the weight-loss pills in my locker, I told him my striving for perfection kept me leaner, stronger, and firmer for the team. My striving would help get us to the state champions. “They’re just supplements,” I told him. I could choke down a fistful of vitamins faster than a dieter scoffing burgers on a cheat day.
The fuck didn’t buy it, so what does he do but go and refer me to the friggin’ school psychiatrist.
I tried to tell Coach and the doc that I just didn’t want a lard ass from a weekend of eating ice cream and drinking beer—like my old man with a butt as big as the tail section of his goddamn Porsche.
The coach said he’d cut me from the team if I didn’t follow through with counseling.
It’s nothing really. I just like to keep fit. The rational part of me knows the pinch around my waist, when I hold it to the calipers, measures lean, but in the mirror, I see someone different.
I’m not crazy or anything. I’m just real. I just want to look good, like millions of other Americans. And, from what I’m told, I guess I do. It’s just hard to let myself be me sometimes.
Not to be conceited, but the girls hadn’t seemed to mind my looks. Margie, the Phi Beta Kappa president I’d dated, called me her hottie. She had a rack that, as Dylan said, “Could make you cream your jeans.” At least some guys. Not me.
If I worked at it hard enough, I could get turned on by her. But I just got so tired of trying.
Eric, and even Dylan, made me want to change all that.
M
y move from hate to lust and ultimately to love toward Eric advanced a notch one afternoon following a tough wrestling practice. Working out made me horny as hell, and doing so next to Eric wound me up bad. Fighting him—both physically and emotionally—for two months grew weary.
After showering and closing the gym, Margie—my sorority-president girlfriend, at the time—picked me up in her Mustang. We were going to meet a group of friends at Roddy’s, a bar and grill, over on Gaines Street for some cheap eats and a couple of beers—aided by a flash of our fake IDs, thanks to Dylan.
But, before we got off campus, the pent-up sex in me needed release.
“Margie, wanna fool around?”
A few minutes later, she parked under an oak tree on the west side of campus, our usual spot, and hopped in the backseat. Often, the car suited us fine. Her dorm had rules, and Dylan would just get in the way—or want to join in, knowing him, if we messed around at my place.
This time when Marg kissed me, and our tongues flickered against each other, I couldn’t help but stiffen. With her, it usually took awhile but maybe because I’d just spent an hour and a half trying not to throw a bone—rolling all over Eric, on top of him, penned under him, pressing my cock against his taut spandex-clad ass—I couldn’t contain myself.
“God!” I yelled, frustrated. Avoiding my true wants got harder and harder.