Working out's always had a strange fascination for me. I remember looking at pictures of bodybuilders as a teen and feeling a dangerous nervous chill that made my hair stand on end and settled deep in my gut in mysterious ways. It made me shut down my computer and vow not to look at them, but I always returned.
And when I started working out after graduating from high school I always used to find my cock rock-hard by the end of each set. It's the feeling of power building up in my body, the increased circulation, "getting pumped," I explained to myself. "These other guys must get it too"—those other guys in the gym who I found myself glancing sidelong at during my sets, the ones with muscles I dreamed of having, thinking about what it'd be like to feel those muscles flex all over your body when you walk, pump iron—jerk off.
But I didn't let myself look at them for long because there was something strangely invasive about it; not invasive in the sense of invading their privacy—they were just working out normally in a public gym, grunting and roaring as if they WANTED to be looked at anyways—no, invasive in the sense that they somehow got under MY skin, made me feel sick and strange. A weird sensation unlike anything else I knew. I knew what it was like to look at a woman and masturbate. Sure, you looked at a picture of a woman and stroked your cock until it exploded. That was simple. You could do the same thing even without the picture, of course, with just one hand wrapped around your cock and your mind blank.
But looking at those guys' muscles, thinking about them, wrenched me deep inside, filled me with a strange dread that I thought I couldn't understand, that I could only relieve by pumping iron. And when my dick got hard during a workout it was from the blood pounding through my body, not the thought that my muscles were expanding and tightening like the musclestuds flexing their massive arms and feeling the ridges of their abs around me as their workout burned into them, standing in front of the mirrors, lifting their shirts to check out each others' six-packs, brushing a hand down each others' stomachs to feel their firmness—
I wanted to become them, and over the years gradually I did. I'm twenty-one now and I'm one of those guys lifting his shirt to check out his ripped six-pack in the mirror, flexing my arms to see how the veins bulge after an intense workout, feeling the swollen burn as my muscles get pumped practically to bursting. I keep to myself, though, headphones in my ears, avoiding conversations. I've exchanged a few words with some of my fellow bodybuilders, but that strange gut-twisting dread starts to build deep inside me so I do my best to avoid them.
There's one guy I can't help staring at every time I see him, though. My idol. An absolute muscle god. He's in his mid-thirties and those extra years of training have swelled his muscles insanely, a tight torso flaring out to broad pecs and lats so thick they prop up his tanned massive arms packed with muscles that flex at the slightest movement. His head's shaved and his jawline's dark with stubble. He grits his teeth and contorts his virile face as he blasts out his reps, broad neck thickly corded. His shorts keep rolling up over his wide thighs. When he's in the gym, I always find my eyes drifting to him. Sometimes he's noticed and we've briefly made eye contact, but I shift my gaze away guiltily.
Then one day, I'm checking myself out in the mirror after a workout, seeing how swollen my veins have gotten, how pumped up the hard bulges of my biceps and triceps are, when I see him saunter up beside me, a grin on his face. "You've come a long way, man," he says, and suddenly I'm in that situation I've seen before but never let myself watch head-on. Two muscle freaks checking out each others' gains. He can see I'm caught off-guard and explains, "I've been seeing you here over the last couple of years. Talk about a transformation!"
I can feel the heat rush to my face. "Uh... thanks," I stammer, thinking that I must be coming across as a total idiot. What kind of man looks like me and then freaks out when someone compliments him?
"I'm Shawn by the way." He offers his hand and I shake it, tell him my name. His palms are rough and his grip is strong. Hard veins are scrawled across forearms the size of most guys' calves; my eyes automatically follow them up his arms. "Do you compete?" he asks, and when I tell him no, "You could. You'd do well. Might even win. Let me know if you need any tips, OK?"
"So you compete?" I wince. Duh, that was obvious.
"Sure. The gym's my life, man. It's how I make my living."
"You work out for a living? I didn't know you could earn that much from competitions."
He grins. My stomach turns a flip and that strange sensation fills me with a confused mix of wanting to both run away and hear as much as I can from him. "Most guys can't earn that much from competitions, no, and I can't either." He glances around, drops his volume a bit. Speaks confidingly, "Listen, there are other ways to make a buck when you look like we do. Go on, let's see those guns. Yeah, like that." He grins at the size of my baseball biceps bursting up from my arms, which makes me want to flex even harder. "Plenty of guys would pay a lot of money to watch you do that, you know."
"You mean, like, online?"
"Yeah." Then slipping it casually into the conversation: "And I'm sure I don't need to tell you they'd pay three times that if you were willing to show them even more."
Gaping at him, I blurt out, "You mean like jerk off?" A sudden thought twists my lower gut, makes the blood throb in my head. "Do YOU actually do that?"
"Sure, why not?" speaking low, but without a hint of shame or reluctance. "I work this hard, I might as well get paid for it. And it's a fuckin' turn on too sometimes."
I glance around the gym, but nobody's watching us. Just two guys having a private conversation. I'm only going to ask this out of curiosity: "Uh... so how does a thing like that work, exactly? You just use your webcam or..."
