I'm sorry to say that when my friend tells me he's going to start working out, I laugh at him. "You? Lifting weights with a bunch of meatheads? Don't tell me you're going to start posting shirtless selfies on Instagram and all that."
A husky, awkward guy with a big Greek nose and patchy facial hair, my friend rubs the back of his head with a cringe. He has to be remembering an incident a few years ago, when we'd realized we were both into guys and immediately started comparing who we thought was hot, showing pictures to each other online—famous actors, nothing unusual. Then suddenly he randomly showed me a picture of some bodybuilder in blue posing trunks, all oiled up and striking an abs-and-thighs pose on a beach.
Unlike the more classically attractive guys we'd been looking at, this was like a sudden visual assault, something so extreme and explosively masculine that it punched me in the gut. It had to be some kind of joke. "That's sick!" I remember saying. "It's like he's got worms crawling all over him. Who would do that to their body? What a waste of time." I remember getting this deeply unsettled feeling, staring at that sweaty hulk grinning like he was so proud of his body. My friend laughed and lamely agreed with how gross it all was and quickly closed the image.
There was no "X" to click to remove it from my mind, though. And I certainly never admitted this to my friend, but a few months later I found myself idly searching for it online, Googling descriptions that might possibly work, with no idea what the guy's name was. The day when I finally found it is seared in my memory.
But that was years before my friend finally admits that he himself wants to get into lifting weights. Turns out that incident with the picture hadn't been so random for him. Instead, it was part of an obsession he was too embarrassed to confess for too long. The fact that I laugh at him when he actually does confess it fractures our friendship in ways I can't see.
This is shortly after our high school graduation, and there are plenty of other reasons why I don't see him very often in the following months—different colleges, different jobs. But when I do meet up with him one day, a few months after I said those things to him, there's a moment when he leans back and puts his arms behind his head. The sleeves of his T-shirt ride low next to his pits, and the newfound definition in his triceps is undeniably visible.
Muscles deep in my abdomen tense. He notices me looking and there's an awkward pause. I force myself to quickly laugh it off and say something like, "Guess you really have been hitting the gym, hey?" An embarrassed compliment, partly an apology and partly an attempt to hide the fact that my heart has to be audible even to him, even from something so slight—just a little extra toning, the shadow of newly-developed brawn.
And it works. He focuses on his own progress becoming noticeable rather than the fact that I was staring. He even grins, flexes to make his arms jump and tense even more, totally unaware of the effect he's having on me, the way the blood pounds through my body and my legs start to shake. "Okay, okay. I didn't ask for the full gun show." Making him embarrassed to cover up my own embarrassment. I'm ashamed of it just moments later. But he quickly stops and I'm able to recover my composure.
And it only gets worse as the weights stack up on the barbells and the muscles stack up on his arms, his chest, his legs. At first it isn't such a big problem, but the years pass and he moves from "fit guy" to a full-on massive musclegod. The kind of jacked guy that draws everyone's eyes when he walks down the street. A stud who can't hide his massive physique no matter what he wears.
Try to imagine what it's like for me. Every time I see him after a gap of a few months, my eyes are invariably drawn to the new details, the new definition, the new size, thinking, "Are his arms bigger ALREADY?" and "Those shorts used to be baggy, but now they're definitely hugging his thighs," and seeing how his favorite grey T-shirt is getting tighter and tighter every week, going from loose across his arms and chest to stretched, the sleeves riding up higher over the bulging peaks of his biceps, the clear cleft forming between his pecs as they swell and firm up, and, "Holy fuck, I can actually see his abs through his T-shirt now—"
And then one day I never see that shirt again. He trades it in for sleeveless tank-tops that show off his arms to spectacular effect and allow me to see the curves of his chest. But still I can't help wondering about that old grey shirt. He must've realized it couldn't fit over his new muscled frame. Maybe it even tore right in half after flexing at home when he's pumped up from the gym, splitting up his broad back. He laughs and tears it the rest of the way off, stands there bare-chested with the torn shirt in his hand, looking at how massive he's gotten, feeling the weight of his gains with his hands until, before he knows it, his dick's gotten hard and he's had to whip it out, wrap his fist around its veiny, rigid length, and he starts jerking himself off rapidly till he blows a thick load into that shirt, his semen leaving wet sprays all over the grey material. It's no wonder he had to throw it away.
I'm doing it again! Treating him like he's nothing but a temptation, a constant invitation to sex. He's not trying to get me hard. He doesn't want me fantasizing about him, imagining what it'd be like to feel him, taste him, smell him. He has no idea he's having this effect on me—certainly not after the way I insulted him at the start.
And the thing is, I don't want to feel this way about him. I KNOW him; I'm friends with him because I LIKE him, not because I want to ogle his muscles. But I can't help noticing every time they jump and flex—and, understandably, he's started to want to show them off. I stopped making fun of him long ago, and he's gradually gotten more and more willing to show off for me. "You sure you don't want to feel this? I swear I've gained another inch this month," as he grins with pride and newfound confidence and my hands sweat and tremble as I force myself not to give in.
How can I possibly explain it to him? I can't tell him that even just the thought of wrapping my fingers around his massively-flexed arm means I instantly have to worry about hiding my growing hard-on. I don't want to be placed in this position, unbearably turned on by him, unable to take my mind off him or stop noticing his body. I'm trying to reconcile this new intensely physical image of him with the friend I've always known and want to keep knowing, and I'm failing miserably.
It gets worse when I discover he does indeed have an Instagram account that he's posting photos on. No doubt he was too embarrassed after what I said to tell me about it. Looking at him posing shirtless, I get such a hard, insistent erection that it's impossible to keep my hands off it—and then suddenly I come across a picture that, whether by chance or not, perfectly mirrors the one he showed me so many years ago, from the pose right down to the colour of his posing trunks, and my cock explodes so suddenly that there's no time to even clamp a hand over it, the hot sperm shooting out onto my laptop's screen, then filling my fumbling palm. Looking at the mess I've made all over his grinning face, I'm filled with a sense of shame strong enough to keep me from visiting his account again, even though I know it'd wring one mind-blowing orgasm after another out of me.
The breaking point comes one summer, during a "cutting" phase when he's dieted to get lean and shredded. Just making casual chitchat, I ask if he's finished cutting for the year. "Yeah," he responds, "I've been really working on my abs." And he casually lifts up his shirt and exposes the kind of abs that make your dick rock hard in three seconds flat, begging to spray torrents of spunk all over them so you can watch it rebound off that drum-tight skin. The cliché washboard abs that would massage your dick as you thrust across them. And he's just casually showing them off, totally unaware of how I'm feeling. I'm still overcome with envy at knowing that every day he can go home and see that ripped eight-pack in the mirror, rub his hands over those hard swells of muscle.
But he's just looking for shared admiration and pride in his accomplishments, not trying to turn me on. I'm changing his hard work that deserves praise into a source of my own lurid enjoyment.
