Shift
by Xyggurat
"Seven... eight... nine... ten!" I gasped. I slackened my hands, and the weights fell to the ground. They smacked the gym floor with a satisfying thud. For a moment, I closed my eyes, and they were 90-pound dumbells. In my mind, I was a swollen mass of muscle, almost large enough to be a professional bodybuilder but far more cut than most could dream of being, and everyone in the gym was staring at me.
Sweat plastered my black workout wifebeater to the sloping mountains that were my pectorals. The tapering mass of my back formed a broad canvas to showcase the masterworks that were my eight-pack abdominals. Hot sweat trickled in tantalizing streams down the glass-sharp cuts of my arms, mimicking the blue run of veins pushed up by the swollen muscle beneath my skin.
I turned toward the imaginary mirror. Its edges were hazy and indistinct. That wasn't so important; the gym in my mind was never finished, because I always needed new equipment to excercise with when I was there. The mirror reflected back the perfect V-shape of my body.
My sheer width filled the glass's surface as I brought my biceps up into a slow, controlled flex. The biceps swelled, bulged, and leapt to attention as I completed the pose. After holding the pose for a few heavy moments, I brought my arms down into a most-muscular. The pectorals leapt outward from my chest, threatening to snap the strings of the black tank top.
Six feet tall and two-hundred twenty pounds of solid, ripped muscle. I was the center of attention, and those who did not want me wanted to be me. I was a masculine image of perfection. The face in the mirror was mine, but with all the tiny flaws filled in. No scars on my cheek from my teenage acne. Ruddy lips and cheeks, with high cheekbones that made me look constantly pensive. Thick black hair that curled ever-so-slightly over my brow.
I was a vision of beauty, an angel given mortal form. The aura of confidence about me was almost a palpable thing, crackling with golden power. I was radiant, glowing--
"I think the little shit's starting to get a chubby," someone laughed from nearby. I wouldn't have heard the whisper had I not been spacing out, but my ears honed in on the words, filtering them out of the music of the gym, the gasps and grunts of bodybuilders straining to make their final reps.
My eyes snapped open. Brent Thomas and Reagan Fitzgerald were at their usual Monday stations by the bench press. It was the bench closest to the mirrored wall of the San Cristobal State gym. The pair was a customary decoration at the bench station, typical former high school jocks who had come into college without a workout plan or a brain in their heads. They put their time in at the gym, and genes and hormones had done the rest. There was no skill to their workouts, little organization, but they lifted hard and consistently, and so they grew. They were three years my junior and I had been a senior at El Paseo high school when they were just sophomores.
I forced my gaze not to linger on them, and instead caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was only a shadowy wisp of the me in my mind, pale where he was bronzed and short where he was tall. I had some sparse muscle on my frame, enough to fill out my black tanktop decently, but no one would call my build muscular. I worked out, ate properly, and took all manner of supplements, but calling my physique a swimmer's build would be generous.
I was handsome enough, not gorgeous, but the goatee I wore lent my face a rakish cast that some guys found attractive. Yes, I'm gay, but not a flamer, even though some guys seem to think I'm a twink. The irony of my goatee and physique is that they seem to attract more girls than guys.
Despite all the work I put into my appearance, I was nothing compared to the painful hotness of Brent Thomas and Reagan Fitzgerald. Their faces had been seared into my fantasies for months now, even as their names sparked panic in my heart.
Brent and Reagan had barely registered as bleeps on my radar until my senior year of high school, when I had begun tutoring both in Chemistry. Both had proved to be indifferent students, but their ire at their failing grades had been of little concern to me: I was on the cross country team, not precisely a jock but of average strength for an 17-year-old. At 5'7 and 125 pounds, I wasn't big in any vagary of the imagination. They'd cursed up a storm when they'd both failed Organic Chem, but I hardly felt threatened by two 5'2 14-year-olds, however athletic. I told them that I couldn't tutor them any more, they had gone into conniption fits of cursing my name in several languages, and that had been that. After all, they had no big brothers to threaten me, no friends my age. In retrospect, it had been the wrong way to deal with them.
Little jocks become big jocks. The next time I saw Brent and Reagan--after graduation, of course, where I was salutatorian because Marcos Gallego finagled an 'A' in a class he should have failed--was at orientation at San Cristobal State. I had been on the O-Team for two years and was standing out by the libary. I was still 5'7, and a little less svelte at 140, but I had been keeping in shape. So, apparently, had Brent and Reagan.
The memory was etched into the fabric of my brain.
"Holy shit, it's Johnny Ford," a baritone voice had boomed from nearby.
I looked up. And up. My eyes widened. It was Brent Thomas, but he had somehow metamorphosized. He was no longer 5'2, nor could he be called a kid. Tense muscle strained every fabric of his polo shirt, which was pale turquoise and several sizes too small for the 6-foot-something frame it struggled to cover. Brent's pectorals were overlarge, slightly out of proportion to his body, as were the baseball biceps that exploded from his arms as he folded them under his chest. Worst of all, he was at least half a foot taller than I was, and gorgeous. I barely recognized his face from the boyish features that had raged at me a few years ago. A hot flush roared through my veins. It wouldn't be the last time that I would get a boner from being in Brent's presence, or Reagan's.
Brent turned to the guy next to him, who was taller by a good two inches and far more muscular. Reagan's face had achieved square-jawed maturity, with the sort of good looks that only models could aspire to. He looked like he had been playing football, and not on some high school team, either. He was Brent built on a larger scale, massive hands clenched powerfully at his sides, his polo shirt--this one was the same salmon pink that thousands of fraternity jocks worldwide, Delta Nus, Sig Alphs, and any other combination of Greek letters you could imagine, used to proclaim their metrosexuality. Reagan made the ordinary shirt extraordinary. It would have been the right size for most guys his height, but he was forced to wear it completely unbuttoned due to the breadth and depth of his chest. The width of his body entered into an astonishing taper from shoulders to waist, and the shirt hid none of his musculature.
Reagan also had something Brent didn't. A massive bulge was encased in his ragged-edged khaki shorts, begging to be let out and manhandled.
I shuddered with desire, but I kept my eyes steady and stared back at them, unspeaking. Sure, both of the guys were legal, but I had a feeling that sex with me was the last thing either had in mind. No, I was certain of it.
"He looks scared," Brent continued, loudly enough that some people were turning to look.
"Guess he didn't think we'd get out of high school," Reagan quipped.
Brent smirked. "Guess we did, no thanks to him."
Reagan took a step toward me.
So I did what any brave, upstanding man would do to confront two superior specimens of manliness. I flinched way and otherwise pretended not to notice them. Laughter boomed behind me, from more than two voices. My ears flushed at the sound, and that was an admission of weakness enough for the two of them.
From then on, I'd tried to avoid them as best I could. So far, there had been only a few problems with the boys, but coexisting on the campus was a constant strain at my nerves.
They acted like they were still in high school. Brent acted against me alone; Reagan, never. I passed them in the halls, and they pretended not to notice where they were going just so they could body check me. I cannot say how many times my face came into contact with Brent's taut biceps or Reagan's pectorals. Always, they pretended not to notice I was there, and made it difficult for me to escape without precisely restraining me.
They occasionally wrote messages on the white board on my room door inviting me to gay sex parties or advertising sexual favors I would provide. I couldn't prove it, but I recognized that sloppy handwriting from our high school lessons. Their insults stung, even though neither of them had an inkling as to my true sexuality.
The most humiliating thing they had done yet was wiring one of the communal shower stall doors shut when I was washing. I'd hurled myself against the door several times, and had finally come crashing, nude, out into a gaggle of baseball jocks getting ready to wash up.
One of them, Ryan Tanner, had hooked up with me in the past, and he had joked the loudest about how I must have been desperate for some action.
Now Reagan and Brent had pointed out the inexcuseable; an unconcealable erection in the weight room when only guys were around. Brent was sniggering at this point, Reagan looked slightly uncomfortable and embarassed at seeing my face turn scarlet, but eventually his follower's nature won out and he joined Brent in laughing.
I reached down and gathered up both of my 20 pounders, turned away, and began trying to curl them while sitting on my nearby bench. I couldn't quite make it to 10 with my left arm, but my embarassment was at least killing my erection. Adjusting it, I figured, would be admitting it existed. I could still hear Brent snickering in my mind even though he had long since stopped.
"Eight, Nine..." I was trying hard, but the ninth just wouldn't go.
Something yanked the weight out of my left hand. I stumbled.
"Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen," Brent's voice chanted out the numbers as he pumped them. His left biceps was right near my face, and I watched it swell and explode innumerable times before he finally stopped. His skin was glistening with sweat, and my nose caught the unimistakable scent of jock: that faint odor that rises from clean sweat commingled with deodorant.
"Dude, Reagan, can you believe this guy? I was curling these when we were sixteen."
Reagan grunted.
"Eloquent," I muttered under my breath.
"What's that?" Brent stared down at me. He edged his crotch closer to my face. "You can't suck it now. I'm trying to lift weights." With that, he twisted to show me the weight he carried in his other hand. Seventy pounds. For one-armed curls.
He brought his right biceps up into an incredible flex. His biceps were large for a seasoned athlete. For an 18-year-old, they were gargantuan. The weight seemed not to faze him whatsoever. Sweat gleamed on his skin, turning the muscled expanse into a bronze effigy of masculinity that I could never possess, damned by my inferior genetics.
I couldn't stop my boner from rising, thrusting up out of my shorts. It was not a huge piece of meat, maybe five and a half inches, but it was clearly visible beneath the fabric. I should've worn briefs.
Brent looked aghast. He started to say something else, but I was already on the move. I dashed for the door of the gym so fast that it took him by surprise. Clumsy with humiliation, I tripped once over a mat someone had left lying out, and burst back out into the main hall of the gym. Neither Brent nor Reagan followed, but I heard several guys laughing at my back.
The world blurred by until I'd pushed myself out the gym's front doors. It hadn't stuck since it had been replaced, or I might've lost my composure in the middle of everything.
Outside, I fell against the side of the building. My eyes stung, and suddenly I was crying.
The harassment had gone too far, I knew. I should have gone to the Dean's office or the Campus Police. Instead, I walked back toward the dorms, ignoring the stares and strange looks I received. When I made it back to my dorm room, I locked the door--I was one of a few fortunates in my area to have my own individual room--and proceeded to jerk every last milliliter of cum out of my balls. The swelling mass of Brent's biceps leapt in my mind, along with the massive package that Reagan could not hide. All the while, I was sobbing. I was a mess.
I fell into sleep fraught with feverish dreams. Nightmares paraded through my mind. Massive men laughed at me, staring me down as they grew and swelled, their muscles becoming yet more perfect. All throughout, I remained at my unimpressive stature, praying that I could somehow balance the scales. I awakened from my misery only once as someone knocked on my neighbor's door fiercely.
Try as I might to filter out the sounds of struggle next door, I failed miserably. The Jason kid who lived in that apartment--he was another of the campus jocks, it seemed, although I'd never taken the time to get to know him and hadn't really noticed how big he was until recently--was always boxing around with someone. Finally, the sound stopped, and I resumed my wretched rest. Tomorrow, I thought, I would skip class and go out into town. Maybe I could buy some protection. Or maybe I'd get hit by a bus.