Everyone depicted in the story is over 18. All the characters are fictional; if you think you recognize yourself you're mistaken.
The story is fiction is fiction of course but I hoped to capture some of the confusion and anxiety of discovering something new about yourself, especially in a small town.
The story takes a dark turn. Not all first times end like movies would have us believe. At some point I may offer an alternative ending. I indicate the point where some readers may wish to stop.
I need to thank LarryInSeattle for his help in editing. In mistakes remaining are entirely of my own doing.
I always appreciate helpful feedback. To be clear, "You suck" is not helpful.
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There is a first time for everything. A fucking cliché? Sure. That doesn't mean it isn't true. As with stereotypes, all clichés are anchored to a nugget of truth. That is what makes both useful mental short hand.
There is always a first time.
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The first time Nick became aware that someone was watching him piss he felt nothing but surprise. What could possibly be interesting about watching someone take a leak?
Nick was a bright kid, but a bit of a loner. He didn't fit into the simplistic, yet all too real, schematic of high school cliques. He played sports but sports were neither his passion nor was he a star. He wasn't a jock. He grew up on a farm but he didn't farm, had no desire to farm, took not a single Ag class and did not join the Future Farmers of America club. He wasn't a Farmer Ted. He didn't smoke weed. He wasn't a stoner. He jostled for first in his class. He took the "hard" classes, calc, and chem II, physics and advanced biology. He could have been a brain but the other brains could not overcome their distrust of someone who played baseball and ran track. They had suffered too many wedgies, locker stuffings and towel snaps for them to drop their guard.
He was a bright kid but a sheltered kid. The school district he lived in was primarily rural but encompassed a part of the county that was growing exponentially as the middle-class fled across the Mississippi to escape St. Louis. He had never heard of HBO, not that it was available in his little slice of heaven. He had never eaten Chinese and never ordered delivery pizza.
So, it isn't hard to imagine his confusion when he realized someone was watching him pee through a quarter-sized hole in the stall partition.
He was at the mall, looking to spend his birthday money on something he wanted but that would pass his mother's "is it practical" standards, something he would need when he left for college in a few months. They weren't actually all that poor. His mother simply believed in being cautious. His parents were older, his mom a teenager during the Depression. A cautious person understood it was best to plan for the worst.
Nick grew up sheltered by a woman who was certain catastrophe waited around every corner. This was especially true after his father, who he barely remembered, had manage to come in contact with a live power line while working in the barn. They weren't really poor but his cautious mother wouldn't have paid good money for cable TV, even it had made its way to the boonies.
His aunts and uncles over-compensated for his lack of a father and his cautious mother. He had racked in what to him was a small fortune on his eighteenth birthday. In his family, cash was the best gift of all. His birthday was only three weeks before graduation. The proximity of his birthday to graduation had diminished the loot he received for graduation. His relatives were generous not flamboyant. Still, between the two he had a little over $300 to add to what he'd saved from working at the A&W out on highway 77.
He was at the mall to buy some clothes, maybe some stuff for his dorm room. The mall, according to the transplanted city kids, was a joke. It was too far from a real city to have any big stores. A Montgomery Ward store had been the mall's anchor but it closed a couple of years ago. There were still a few stores clinging to the edge of profitability but no name brand stores, unless you counted the Taco Bell in the food court. He had been trying to find jeans in his size when the giant Mountain Dew he'd gulped down with his burrito supreme caught up with him. The closest bathroom was the one by the gated and trashed-strewn "Monkey" Ward.
For a moment he had worried he wasn't going to get his zipper down fast enough. When he finally freed his dick and let his bladder go, a shudder of relief washed over him. He hadn't noticed that someone was peeking at him at first. He had been absorbed in wonder at how good taking a piss could feel.
The idea was so strange it took him a moment to convince himself. There was no doubt that there was an eye peering through the hole. Nick wondered if that ever had happened before and he had failed to notice it. He didn't use this restroom very often. He didn't come to the mall very often.
He was finished pissing. He should simply shake, zip and go. He figured if he didn't flush, he wasn't touching anything gross so he didn't need to wash his hands. Besides, the sinks appeared to be almost as dirty as the urinals. He hesitated, unsure why.
He could tell the eye in the hole was now looking at his face not his dick. He looked back. The eye in the hole dropped back to look at his dick. To his surprise Nick felt his dick start to get hard.
He was a sheltered kid and a loner but he had a girlfriend. She was still a wonder to him. She had taught him how to kiss. She had let him touch her breast, through her clothes of course. She had even pressed her hand over his hard-on once. He was a sheltered kid but he knew what was happening to his dick. He was simply surprised it was doing it now, over nothing more than being spied on.
He reminded himself he could pop a boner almost anytime, often for no apparent reason. He was a sheltered kid but it didn't take long in a locker room to discover there existed in this world men who did perverted things with other men. Such men were fags and fruits, queers and homos. They were pussies but yet should be feared.
That first time, standing there holding his dick as it grew hard from another man looking at it, it did not occurred to Nick that the man in the stall might be such a man. It certainly never occurred to him that he himself might be such a man.
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He zipped up and left the bathroom, left the mall. He did not bother trying to shop further. He went home, told his mom he wasn't feeling well and went to bed after supper. His room was hot. It was one of two rooms upstairs. The other, a guest room, was empty most of the time. His mom's room was downstairs. She hated stairs. That was fine with him. Most of the time he had the upstairs to himself. As long as they didn't have company staying with them, he had his own bathroom as well. The old tub didn't have a shower but he didn't care. The old farmhouse did not have air conditioning. He had his window open, listening to the sound of the trucks passing through the night on highway 77, on their way somewhere that wasn't here.
He lay on his back and the breeze blew the sheer curtains over his belly, over his dick. Bless him, he was eighteen with an eighteen year-old's cock and hormones. He got hard as fast as his eighteen year-old heart could pump his cock full of blood. He jerked off. He jerked off thinking, not of the feel of his girlfriend's breast under his hand as he usually did, but of the eye in the wall. He jerked off for the eye, knowing the eye wanted him to but not quite knowing he want to as well.
He wiped his spunk off his chest and belly with a tee shirt. He did his own laundry. It was easier that way. As he wiped up the jizz, it finally occurred to him that maybe the guy in the stall was a queer. He found the idea vaguely exciting. He'd always thought queers were something confined to New York, California, and Europe. The idea that there might be one living and breathing right here in this ass end of the Illinois made the place feel, for lack of a better word, sophisticated.
