I met my best friend when I was only five years old. Myself and Ash were in the same reception class and while I don't remember it all these years later, my mum always tells me that when she came to pick me up that day, we walked out of the school doors hand in hand, already the best of friends. Maybe it was an early sign of what was to come for us later in life, but no-one could have predicted it back then, least of all me.
Over the years we got closer and closer, a shared love of comic books and sports bonding us until the point that we were virtually brothers. Ash had a troubled home life with an absentee father and an on again, off again alcoholic mother meaning that he spent as much time in my house as he did his own. My parents treated him like a second son, ensuring he was well fed and taken care of, even when his biological parents were unable to. At first we had to share a bed if he needed to stay the night and it wasn't uncommon for us to wake up cuddled next to each other for warmth, especially during the winter months when the windows would ice over in the mornings. Most guys would find it weird being so physically close to their friend, but for us it was totally normal and I can still recall the nights I held him close in my arms as he cried after being screamed at or flat out abandoned for days at a time by his mum. He told me I made him feel safe and loved in a way that she never could, something that brought tears to my eyes and that fills me with an immense sense of pride to this day.
As we entered our teenage years, we became the targets of school bullies who loved throwing homophobic slurs at us and claiming that we were secretly a couple. Of course it wasn't true and we largely ignored it, but I could tell that it upset Ash a lot more than myself. I didn't think much of it at the time, he'd always been a sensitive guy and so it was what I would expect from him, nothing out of the ordinary or peculiar by and stretch. Being a teenager is hard enough without worrying about being insulted and harassed every day, so it was a real rough time for both of us and it brought us even closer than before. We were both overjoyed when we finished our exams so that we could move onto college, safely away from the boys that had spent years victimizing us as they went straight into work, or onto benefits as we continued our education. Life got easier as we studied for our A Levels and we remained as close as ever. When selecting Universities, we made sure to pick the same ones so we wouldn't be separated and even managed to arrange to live together in the same flat, just the two of us, which was when things started to change.
It was fair to say we both grew into different people over the years, Ash becoming borderline obsessed with anime whereas computer programming became my own personal passion, but these differing interests didn't drive a wedge between us, in fact, they only made us closer. We would snuggle up on the sofa to watch whichever show had captured his interest that week and he would always keep me well supplied with drinks and snacks when I was knee deep in a coding session. It was the perfect living arrangement, but it couldn't go smoothly forever as one fateful day, Ash's laptop suddenly stopped working without warning. He walked into the living room looking distraught, tears forming in the corner of his eyes as his lip trembled. With his family being so poor, his second hand laptop had been a gift from my family a few years earlier, something he relied on for his studies as well as watching his precious anime and the thought of it being broken had scared the hell out of him. "Bruce, please, can you fix it?" he pleaded with those big adorable brown eyes of his staring up at me, all his hopes riding on the one person that had never let him down.
"Let me take a look," I replied, taking it from him and opening the lid to take a quick look. "I have a lecture in a few minutes, but I can try and see if I can fix it when I get back?" I offered hopefully.
"Oh my god Bruce, thank you so much!' he exclaimed as a tear rolled down his cheek, quickly wiping it away so he could give me a huge hug as I stood up to meet him. He held me tightly, his small frame against my much more muscular body, skinny arms wrapped around my waist, face buried in my chest as I stroked his hair softly. As much as we had changed in terms of our personalities, we had also changed physically too, him remaining slender and petite while I had grown taller and broader which was only emphasized further when I'd started weightlifting a couple of years earlier. I told him not to worry about the laptop and after grabbing my bag and jacket, I said goodbye before heading out for my day of studies.
Returning to the flat in the late afternoon, I found it empty and after grabbing myself a drink and some food, I turned my attention to his broken electronic device. The first thing I tried was plugging in the charger, quickly confirming the problem was power related as the charging light didn't come on. Retrieving my set of tiny screwdrivers I used on my PC set-up from their place in my bedside table, I took to work loosening all the screws to take a look under the hood. My initial suspicions were correct, the fixings holding the battery in place had come loose and after some quick twists with the phillips head to get the connections back in place I was ready to reaffix the back of the machine and see if my handiwork was a success. Upon plugging in the charger, the little orange light on the side lit up and I was able to power on the machine, smiling to myself, satisfied at a job well done. Fixing techy things was one of my favorite things to do and I was usually tinkering away with something, so this was less of a chore and something I reveled in. I knew Ash would be so happy and relieved when he got home, but as it booted up to check there were no other issues with the laptop a sudden, strange temptation overtook me.
Without even thinking I opened the internet browser and a message popped up. "Do you want to restore your last session?" My finger hovered over the trackpad for a second, debating what I should do. It would be an invasion of privacy to do this, but it was Ash, my best friend. There were no secrets between us and whatever he had been browsing before the issue would probably be completely innocent. Throwing caution to the wind, I pressed downwards and several tabs suddenly appeared, each loading one by one via our cheap, slow as fuck student WiFi. The first one was what I had expected, the anime streaming page he used to watch his shows, but as I clicked through each of the open windows, things got more and more surprising. A lingerie website? Maybe he'd met a girl and he hadn't told me? But why would he keep a girlfriend a secret? It didn't make any sense. The next tab was some kind of comic strip with a main character that bore a striking resemblance to Ash. In the panels he was debating what to wear for some kind of date, choosing through a selection of stiletto heels before applying some makeup. The next several tabs were all from a porn website, one I had frequented numerous times myself and I once again hesitated before opening them. Hadn't I already gone far enough? A little curious voice in the back of my head told me no. I needed to know what he'd been looking at. Loading up the first page, I realized that I'd never seen this type of adult content before, it was femboy porn, each and every tab. Pretty, effeminate guys dressed up like girls, wearing makeup and sporting various shades of brightly coloured hair, stroking their throbbing cocks, giving soft, wet blowjobs and getting their arses pounded as they moaned and whined pathetically.
