The shower room was dark. Like uselessly dark. There were lights in areas where you could see the controls for the shower heads but the main area was so dimly lit you couldn't see much of anything.
Chris had warned me as much. This was his idea after all.
Let's put down the facts before I go any further. I'm straight. I've always been straight. I've never been into guys, never. I've never had a problem with gay dudes, never been uncomfortable around naked guys, just not my thing.
So I'm in a gay bathhouse. Why? Because I'd lost a bet.
A lot of guys might have backed out, but I'm a man of my word. Chris and I had bet on a football game, his alma mater against mine.
He leaned back against the picnic table where we relaxed during lunch. Our other coworker, Anne, sat on the top of the table fiddling with her phone, "OK, what's the bet then?" He asked. I was relatively certain I had nothing to worry about. We were rated #4 in the country. His was unranked.
I laughed, I had it in the bag. "You keep talking about how your grandma's linguini was the best thing on the planet. You have to make that for us for dinner."
He looked offended, "Really? Maybe the tortellini, but not the Linguini...not for you for just winning." He waved at me dismissively.
Without looking up Anne said, "Tortellini if they win, Linguini if they beat the spread."
Chris and I looked at each other. "Deal" he said. Then he looked around and said, "What do I get?"
"What do you want?" I laughed at him.
He grinned at me like lunch, "If we win you model for me."
I about fell off the bench. Anne guffawed. Chris had asked before, a few times. He had a fetish page where he sold some of his one-off leather creations to other gay guys and he'd tried to get me to pose in them for easier sale.
I'm in pretty good shape. Ex-college wrestling and weightlifting, still kept some of it up but mostly just keeping myself from going all soft like my family.
Why did I even question it? I had it in the bag, like I said. "OK, fine."
Anne, still looking at her phone and viciously typing said, "What about if they stomp you guys? Something more to lose, that's just fair."
I made almost the same noise as she had at the modeling comment. "OK, go ahead, hit me with what you got." I said.
He screwed up his face, concerned about something or other, not sure about what to say. Tapped his jaw before looking at me and saying, "If you lose by twenty one or more, you go to Steam Punks with me."
I looked at him. Anne lifted her face and looked at him, "What the fuck is a Steam Punks?" She asked.
Needless to say, sometimes an unranked team pulls it out of nowhere and my school had lost 7-35. I then learned 'Steam Punks' was a gay bathhouse.
Chris told me all about the place while Anne giggled like the funniest fucking thing on the planet had happened. We settled on our visit to the place being the following Sunday. I told him that I wasn't gonna 'do' anything with him. He said that was just fine, and that nobody was going to do anything with me I didn't want. I could just avoid anyone trying to be forward if I wanted.
Rules: I had to go there, I had to hang out with him...both generally and genitally, I guess...for a while, but spend no less than two hours in the joint. I figured I could avoid anything for two hours.
I found he'd paid my way when I showed them my ID at the door. A key on one of those stretchy wrist hangers and a little cubicle-style area about three feet smaller than my office in every dimension.
Now I was in the shower and I couldn't see shit. I hadn't seen Chris yet. In fact, the only person I'd seen was the guy at the counter, through a glass window like something off a gas station. He'd looked at me with all the interest of a person at a similar gas stop watching a lizard crawl across a pump.
There'd been maybe seven cars in the lot including Chris' Mini, so I wasn't sure if they were all congregated somewhere or anything. Chris had given me a sort of crash course in the layout while Anne continued to giggle relentlessly the Friday before.
The first floor, where I was now, had an entry area with lockers, a weight room, the showers. You passed through there and there was a hallway with a spa to one side and a steam room the other direction. A dry sauna was further down on the left, and if you went up the stairs at the end of the hallway to the right there was a massage area, some small cubicle-sized rooms...one of which was mine...a TV room, and 'another' room.
"You'll probably want to skip that one. It's a bit further out of your comfort zone I think." He said, to an even more raucous tone out of Anne as she almost fell off the table.
One thing the place did have was amazing water pressure. I used a mint-and-citrus soap they had in dispensers and soaped myself down. I'd come straight from the gym, figuring I'd treat this as just a stop over on my way home. No reason to make a big deal about it, right? Just a thing, just hanging out with a buddy. Just chilling out. No reason to be anxious at all.
I killed the water without seeing another soul. I glanced to my watch to see twelve minutes had gone down. One hour and forty-eight minutes left. Piece of cake.
I continued down the hallway I'd passed through earlier on my way to my room and glanced towards the jacuzzi. I'd been nude in a jacuzzi all of once in my life, drunk at a hotel in Puerto Vallarta during Spring Break. I put my towel on a hook outside and entered, emboldened by the just now vacancies.
The pool inside the tiled room was just to the left as you walked in, with a border some six feet or so in every direction. It was a pretty big tub, maybe fifteen feet across. Wooden benches, similar to what you'd see in a dry sauna flanked it on the far sides from where you walked in. I made my way around to the furthest side, like a gunfighter in an old west saloon, keeping my back against the wall.
The water was criminally hot. Particularly against the poor tender flesh of my ballsack as it hit faster than I planned. I winced but slowly lowered myself slowly in the rest of the way, finally settling in and relishing the comfortable heat and massaging bubbles.
Kinda wished my gym had one of these.
I put my head back and closed my eyes. If I snoozed for a couple minutes, that's more time, right?
