Best self

by BRK

“Viral video” doesn’t always mean what you think it means.

2 parts 4,420 words Added Apr 2025 Updated 24 May 2025 11k views 4.6 stars (8 votes)

This story was commissioned via Patreon Vignette Party and Patreon Story Commission.

M/M

BRK

Part 1 “Viral video” doesn’t always mean what you think it means. (added: 19 Apr 2025) Part 2 T.J.’s Nordic friend from the concert gets the text and finds his own path to self-actualization. (added: 24 May 2025)

Vote on this story Jump to comments Suggest tags for this story Print / PDF Share / Reload Update history More like this Symbols Unit conversion Report a problem

Part 1

Terrence Skynner grimaced as he felt his phone buzz in his back pocket. He reached back to retrieve the battered device, clumsily elbowing one of the topless, sweaty moshers seething around him to the deafening music the neo-emo queer-punk cyber-fit boy band was grinding out on stage loud enough to loosen the rivets on the college’s multipurpose indoor arena as he did so. He really hoped it wasn’t a text from his mom telling him to come home and wash her feet or something. Or his aunt wanting him to cover another diner shift for that lazy cousin of his who’d called out three times this week already. He hated being here, but getting out of the venue now at the height of the concert, especially from where he was in the packed primo “seating” area right up by the stage, would be even more of a pain than staying in for the duration would be.

Why had he agreed to cover WhyZone for the campus student daily? He did news and politics, not this. He was skinny and unprepossessing and entirely out of place here. He wasn’t gay, he wasn’t a glitter-abbed twunk, he liked wearing button-up shirts, and the only music he listened to was Lofi Focus playlists when he was studying for his engineering tests. He was as far from being this band’s target demo as Azaz the Unabridged was from Lady Gaga. And so much for his “noise canceling” earbuds! They might as well have said “now with extra ear canal resonance” on the box.

He sighed as he thumbed at the pitted screen, trying to wake the curmudgeonly old phone. Maybe it was his editor, Seth, telling him he didn’t have to bother with the WhyZone review. Which would merely mean that the whole evening was a write-off and he’d risked contracting tinnitus for nothing.

Okay, you’re being a little cynical there, Terr, he admonished himself with a wry smirk. Dial back the pretty-boy jealousy a bit. Terrence sighed. He wasn’t above admitting it wasn’t the music he hated so much as the fact that everyone here was hotter than he was.

The screen lit and he squinted at the message.

Hell, this is Macrosoft Tactile Support. We have diagnosed a problem with your, self. Are you experiencing your best self? We have detected many errors. Your security tactile self-errors can be replaced! Do not hack or be hack. Resolve immediately download video https://dub.sh/9X3nNw4

Terrence wanted to laugh. Even here in the middle of shirtless pandemonium he’d gotten a classic MTS scam, misspellings, weird grammar, and all. There truly was no escape! Though it fit that the message was addressed to “Hell,” at least.

His eyes drifted to the WhyZone member currently singing lead, the platinum blond with the big pecs and the barbell nipple-piercing just visible through his tights. He really felt drawn to him. Not that he was hotter than the rest—each of the six took turns taking lead, and each drove their fans nuts to equal sexy-lust frenzy. They were all ridiculously handsome, openly gay, and built like an all-male Olympic gymnastic team. Even the generous bulges in their skintight white costumes were a common feature to the whole group.

Terrence had to admit, though, if he were gay he’d go for the blond. And if he were the blond, he’d go for—

Thus distracted, he was trying to delete the message when the song WhyZone was performing, a racing techno cover of One-D’s “What Makes You Beautiful”, hit a sudden “Whoop!” in the chorus (probably not there in the uptempo power pop original, Terrence thought, unimpressed) made the entire crowd throw their arms up and yell “Whoop!!”—including the hot Asian guy on Terrence’s other side, the one Terrence hadn’t elbowed yet. Even so, hot Asian guy got accidental retribution for his unknown compatriot, the one on the other side who looked like a Viking rent boy, and obliviously clocked Terrence in the ear with his fist as it shot up toward the rafters with all the others. In the pain and confusion Terrence’s thumb must have slipped from the “delete” button to the highlighted link in the suspicious text, because a moment later someone was speaking in his earbuds and he realized there was a video playing on his phone. A scam video!

Frantically, Terrence tried stopping the playback, but his phone—or the video—was happily ignoring him. On his screen a well-built shirtless guy was walking slowly along an empty, idyllic beach. He had warm medium-brown skin and tight blond curls, and came across well-lit and earnest, like a spokesmodel in an expensive prescription drug ad. He was, in a word, beautiful.

Terrence made a noise in his throat. He really was surrounded.

The sound was surprisingly clear, and at last the din of the concert obligingly squelched under the audio playing on his phone. The earbuds’ noise cancellation must have finally kicked in, he thought.

“You clicked on this link because there’s something wrong with your existence,” the spokes-hunk said confidently in a smooth tenor that seemed to sink deep into Terrence’s chest. “That’s pretty brave!”

Terrence goggled at the offhandedly callous spokes-hunk, even as around him everyone yelled out another ear-splitting “Whoop!” in time with the chorus reprise. Something wrong with his existence? Seriously?

At this point, Viking Rent Boy noticed Terrence on his phone and gave him a berserker scowl of disapproval, as if Terrence were deliberately sabotaging the whole concert where he stood. Terrence ignored him. Viking Rent Boy was bad for his ego, and not just because the tanned, rippling abs and chiseled jawline were such a contrast to the flat, pasty, and uninteresting versions Terrence possessed. Unless he had a sock stuffed in those skinny jeans, junk-wise VRB was the luckiest dude Terrence had had a run-in with in quite a while, and that included the famously bulging crotches of the sleekly muscled and universally wet-dreamy boy band currently harmonizing their lungs out on stage not twenty feet away from him. If he didn’t know better, from tonight’s evidence Terrence would be inclined to think that all gay young men were hot, horny, and hung like everyone here appeared to be.

He hmphed to himself. Maybe he’d try making that his headline. Not that Seth would go for it, but it would be fun to have a go.

He looked around. It was kind of eerie. If anything, everyone had gotten hotter just in the last minute. That had to be his paranoia kicking in, though.

“So tell me,” the spokes-hunk was saying in his ears, a brief zoom making it seem like his eyes were boring into Terrence’s, “what’s getting in the way of you being your best self? What are you missing?”

“Are you kidding me?” he cursed at the phone in a kind of muttered shout. “I don’t know, abs, fucker! I’m missing abs!”

Viking Rent Boy turned and gave him another death glare, but Terrence’s focus was all on the video. The latte-skinned, gym-rat-muscled spokes-hunk was nodding sagely. “And does that make you happy? Does it really fix what’s missing in your best self?”

Terrence pursed his lips, wanting to grumble. He glanced down at the loose hockey jersey he was wearing, a hand-me-down he’d gotten from his athlete brother ages ago. He knew the sculpted six-pack and defined muscles hidden away underneath had never been his ticket to popularity or self-satisfaction. Everyone had so much more. Even his natural predisposition for washboard abs, honed by rote since puberty with the minimum number of daily sit-ups, didn’t seem like enough.

His eyes drifted to the perfectly muscled, excessively handsome, redonkulously equipped platinum blond singing aggressively to the audience—seriously, had he gotten hotter, hunkier, and more hung in the last thirty seconds?—and was suddenly fuming.

“So what is it?” the spokes-hunk pressed, another slow zoom making their interaction more intimate and urgent. “What’s your best self?”

“Like him!” Terrence gritted out to the phone, low and angry. “I need a ‘me’ who’s hot, hard-muscled, shirtless all the time, hung beyond belief, gay as fuck, and confident enough to—”

Suddenly T.J.’s top-of-the-line foldable phone was knocked out of his hand and Viking Rent Boy was in his face. If the trope had played out the way it normally did in films, his sexy assailant would have been grabbing the front of T.J.’s shirt and hauling him up to his own eye level. But the joke was on him—T.J. didn’t wear shirts, and he was already face to face with the Nordic bad boy.

Instead, VRB had grabbed the waistband of T.J.’s jeans, right in front. Dangerous, T.J. thought with a smirk. You might wake the beast.

“You’re being a real dick, you know that?” roared Viking Rent Boy.

T.J. grinned like the roué he was. “I am a dick, aren’t I, Sven?” he shouted back, pulling a random Scandinavian-sounding name out of the air. As a challenge he added, “Why don’t you kiss it out of me?”

VRB’s sky-blue eyes blazed, and then he dove in and kissed T.J. fiercely, his free hand reaching automatically for T.J.’s six-inch-thick pecs and the U-shaped piercing adorning his down-facing right nipple. The man’s other hand gripped T.J.’s waistband even harder, and the Nordic hottie groaned into the aggressive kiss as T.J.’s beast sprang to life, pushing along VRB’s knuckles as it grew.

The song ended and the entire crowd cheered and screamed, and T.J. was happy to pretend it was all for them and their ferocious, tongue-wrestling kiss.

They broke apart, panting as they stared hard into each other’s eyes like horny predators. The situation was dire. The two of them might have descended into animal fucking right then and there, if a 6-foot-6 bouncer with enough muscles for three men poured into a skin-tight black tee shirt with SECURITY in white letters across the front hadn’t appeared just then at T.J.’s shoulder.

“Sir, there you are,” the security guy said, his voice so deep it was almost beyond the registers human ears were capable of discerning. He looked serious and capable, like he approached his celebrity-wrangling gig with the same intensity as he had all those black ops missions back in his Navy Seal days. “What are you doing down here? Austin says you’re on after the next number. He sent me to find you!”

T.J. blinked at him. Belatedly he recognized his personal bodyguard, Malik. He tossed the big guy a crooked grin—it was true, he was pushing the timetable a bit. “C’mon, Mal, you know Austin’s a great manager but kind of a worrywart,” he said, throwing an arm around the hulking bodyguard. “Take me back to where I need to be, will ya?”

“Always,” Malik said.

One of the members of WhyZone was announcing the next song and naming the backup instrumentalists, giving them a little aural and temporal space before they had to be backstage. T.J. glanced up to see Viking Rent Boy staring hard at him, his look more savagely possessive than ever. “You’re T.J. Skye,” he said, voice dripping with lust. Then, unexpectedly, he handed T.J.’s phone back to him—he must have picked it up from the floor while T.J. was interacting with Malik.

Arm still around his well-muscled shoulder, T.J. unlocked the device one-handed and wordlessly passed it back to the shirtless fan. VRB grinned and took it, adding an entry into T.J.’s contacts and handing it back with a wink. Without looking, T.J. folded the phone and stuffed it in his back pocket. “See you soon, Sven!” he called, making the Nordic hottie smile salaciously at the little pet name as Malik started guiding him with steady expeditiousness through the tightly-packed crowd.

As he moved away, T.J. was sure he heard “Sven” say, “Fuck, I wish I was as hot as him.” A warmth flared in his muscular chest, and he smiled the biggest smile that week. This really was his best self, no question about it.

Meanwhile, in his pocket, an unauthorized recently installed app on his phone found the new contact and quietly sent the recipient a very suspicious-looking text…

Part 2

Erik left the concert buzzing with excitement, only some of which was down to up-and-coming neo-emo queer-punk cyber-fit boy band WhyZone blasting the doors off their latest gig in the campus’s packed James J. Seleucus auditorium. He pulled his short-sleeved button-up top out of the back of his jeans on autopilot and pulled it on loosely without doing it up, his entire being, physical and mental, still completely wrapped up in everything that had just happened. He’d been moshing next to T.J. Skye, every gay dude’s walking, breathing wet dream—even big, butch, RBF prettyboys like Erik. T.J. Skye had spoken to him! Hell, T.J. Skye had kissed him!

Man, he could still feel the twist of that impressive tongue around his own. Like two heavyweight wrestlers taking it to the mat and getting off on it, too, right there at the meet in front of the whole crowd. He didn’t want any sensations to ever intrude on his mouth and wash the lush, cock-thickening living experience away. If swearing off eating, drinking, and oral sex was the cost of keeping this thrum of tongue-pleasure forever, it would be worth it.

Fuck, I wish I was as hot as him, he thought, really feeling the raw ache of unfettered desire tugging at his innards. He shoved his abnormally hefty, bunched-up hard-on in a more comfortable position with the heel of his hand, barely noticing the gabbling crowd of tanned, tinted, and spangled hotties around him. Everyone was breaking free of the venue and dispersing in couples and groups toward dorms, parking lots, and bus stops, an adoring crowd of a couple thousand dissolving into knots and bunches.

He was soon walking more or less alone in a loose stream down the main campus pedestrian-only road, other pairs and man-clusters nearby tracing the same path across the bricked-over street and sidewalks. As they walked a few surreptitiously glanced Erik’s way, quick-scoping the forbidding, lanky, 6-foot-3 Nordic strawberry-blond with the sky-blue eyes, the clean-shaven cut-glass jaw, the open button-down showing off his firm chest and long rippling abs, and of course the very obvious bulge in his N&F Forever Black Selvedge jeans.

Erik didn’t notice. He was too caught up in replaying his brief but vivid, wild, and possibly life-changing encounter with the eye-fucking, ridiculously sexy pop star with the bright eyes and the heartbreaking smirk and that generously muscled, exquisitely sculpted no-shirt-zone body so obviously made for worship by hands, tongues, and precum-smeary dicks.

I gave him my number, he gushed to himself in a warm, dick-throbbing haze as his feet took him through campus on autopilot. He called me “Sven” and I gave him my number!

He wanted to giggle a little at the little pet name. I could be a “Sven,” he thought happily. How hard was it to change names, anyway? It would be worth finding out. Just for fun.

Fuck, I want to be that hot—hot enough guys will change who they were for you. He snorted, knowing it was silly, but the desire was real and he couldn’t quite shake it.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and his heart skipped a beat. Was it him? He fumbled his phone free and checked the screen, finding a text notification from an unknown contact. He ground to a stop, gaping at his phone, the sudden halt forcing an annoyed trio of body-painted, tattooed redheaded twunks in ripped jeans with their arms around each other’s sweaty shoulders to veer around him. Was it a party invite? Booty call? Gushy words about their primo kiss and the athleticism of Erik’s tongue?

Pulse quickening, he thumbed open the message app. Sure enough, there was a text from a number he didn’t recognize. All it said, though, was “Watch this! It worked for me,” followed by a link.

Erik frowned a little. The message was more… impersonal than he’d hoped, he had to admit. If it was from anyone else, he’d have thought the language was kind of scammy. It was a message, though. From him. It had to be! Who else could the “me” be, right after he’d given T.J. his number? That was how it worked. You got someone’s number, you texted them back. T.J. was just keeping it cool. For now.

Maybe it was his latest video? That would be awesome. “It worked for me” sounded like marketing bullshit, like the clip was some smug spokesmodel touting off-brand Cialis or something, but (he felt a flutter of excitement) it could mean “I thought it turned out good.” Right? If it was T.J.’s latest video and he’d just finished putting it together, that’s totally what it would mean.

An arm slid around his shoulder. “Erik, bro, you’re blocking the road,” purred a baritone voice in his ear that Erik recognized as his coworker from their shifts at the Campus Beanery, the tall, skinny one with the dark eyebrows and the buzz cut and the deep, unrequited crush on him. His name was Ricky, and he’d started flirting on their first day working together, joking about how the way their names overlapped was a sign they should be doing the same thing with their bodies. “Whatcha you looking at?” he asked, leaning in to peer at his phone. “Who’s texting you?”

Erik grinned, not looking up. He felt the flutter again as he said the name. “T.J. Skye.”

“Get out,” Ricky scoffed.

“It was him, man,” Erik retorted fiercely, finally looking up at his friend. His eyes were brown but an unusual tone—there was a hint of red in them, like russet or cognac. “He was right next to me,” Erik said. “Right there in the crowd, dancing away and singing along and everything! They had to come get him for his big number with the band!”

“And he’s texting you?” Ricky sounded half-awed, half-skeptical.

“Dude, he kissed me! I knocked his phone out of his hand by accident and he confronted me and then we were making out like banshees!” Erik’s mouth reveled again in the memory, his big hard cock trying to stretch even bigger and harder in his tight-fitting elite-brand jeans.

Ricky glanced up at him, his brow furrowed. “Do banshees kiss a lot?”

Erik gave him his fierce face. He belatedly noticed that Ricky looked pretty good tonight—hotter than usual, he thought, a little surprised. His simple white tee and basic jeans suited him, and the small onyx hoop in his left ear effectively accented his cuteness. Erik didn’t really want to notice Ricky’s cuteness, though, and the diversion from his T.J.-fixation annoyed him a little. “The point is,” he said, “it was fucking hot. I even got his number.”

“And he sent you a spam ad?” Ricky said, looking at Erik’s phone. People still streamed casually around them, though the concert crowd was starting to thin out and some of the strollers were ordinary late-night campus traffic, students headed to the overnight library or the 24-hour café the school ran from Heep Hall, the one with the greasiest burgers for a hundred miles.

“It’s from him,” Erik said stolidly. “I think it’s his latest music video or something.” He dug out his airpods and gave Ricky one, putting the other in his ear. “Look.”

Erik tapped the link with his thumb and a video opened. He turned his phone and it filled the screen. The clip didn’t immediately show any signs of being a T.J. Skye alt-pop dancefest, though. Instead there was an attractive guy in loose white pants walking through a lush forest somewhere. The guy was shirtless, brown-skinned, and really buff, with well-trimmed yellow curls and a warm, inviting smile. Calm, anonymous music played in the background.

“You clicked on this video because there’s something missing from your life,” the guy said as he walked, his eyes locked magnetically on theirs through the lens as the camera receded smoothly before him. “Something about how guys respond to you that doesn’t measure up. And you want to do something about it.”

Ricky sidled closer, unconsciously giving Erik’s shoulders a squeeze. “Dude, I don’t think this is a music video,” he said distractedly, eyes riveted on the screen.

“Shh,” Erik said. He was confused by the video’s contents and its connection to his recent fame-adept makeout partner; but the guy in the video seemed to be making sense at some deep, primal level, like there was more going on with this clip technologically than basic, professionally shot 4K video and a clean, well-produced soundtrack.

“You’re already super attractive,” the guy in the video asserted confidently, the shot slowly creeping toward him in a gradual zoom as he strolled the most picturesque rainforest ever. Erik felt the guy was looking at him, assessing his looks and judging them in the high numbers, but Erik himself had his doubts. He was attractive, but not T.J. Skye attractive. Next to him he heard Ricky say, “Eh,” as if his self-assessments were paralleling Erik’s. The phone was in his right hand, leaving his other arm free to snake around Ricky’s waist in an expression of hot-but-not-hot-enough solidarity.

“You’re super attractive,” the guy insisted, as if he’d picked up on their internal objections through the small pane of glass separating real life from video. “You turn guys on constantly, everywhere you go. But it’s not enough, is it? You’re not your best self, are you—the self you yearn to be?”

No, Erik agreed. There was something missing. That power that T.J. had, that made him want to be what made the star heat up with desire. He wanted that.

“No,” whispered Ricky at the same time. Though he remained focused on the video, subconsciously Erik felt a twinge of surprise—Ricky was the sexiest, most mesmerizingly alluring guy he knew. Or he had been, until Erik had locked lips with a certain somebody. What was Ricky missing? Apart from his infatuation with Erik, which—oh, yeah, okay. That was probably it.

“You know what it is that you desire,” the guy in the video told them. The shot had closed in enough that it was showing just his handsome face and the hard curves of his gym-honed shoulders. Sunlight streamed through the canopy, warming the old-growth tones behind him.

“Choose it,” the man urged, his calm intensity almost palpable. “Be your best self. Be that fantasy. Nothing is holding you back.”

Erik grinned. “‘Nothing’ is right,” he said. Stopping the video he turned to face Ricky, sliding the phone negligently into his pocket so he could slip the other arm around him too. He favored the tall hottie with a smug look.

Ricky’s eyes were rolling even as they turned sky blue, matching the transformation of his face and body into a familiar form.

“Dude, I’m turning into T.J. again, aren’t I?” he said in mock exasperation. He slid the pop-star’s corded forearms around behind Erik’s long, tapered back, bringing the six-inch-thick chest now straining his formerly loose bright white tee shirt closer to Erik’s sculpted bod. “You know,” he protested with a crooked megawatt smile, “just because you have the power to let guys remake themselves to look like what turns you on doesn’t mean we always have to be this guy.”

Erik sighed and gave Ricky a brief, soft kiss. “Come on, babe, you’re my soulmate. I crave you no matter what you look like.”

Ricky smiled. He knew it was true, but he liked needling his inseparable other half. “Uh huh,” Ricky teased. “You could mix it up a little, Nordic Boy.”

For an answer Erik smirked and rocked his crotch sinuously against Ricky’s, his big hardon making contact with the hard meat now packing Ricky’s crotch. Ricky caught his breath, and his cheeks flushed a little. “I mean,” he said breathily, “I can’t complain about the cock.”

Erik grinned and moved in for a kiss, Ricky eagerly diving in to join him. They made out as they gently rutted, right there in the street, both of them enjoying the feel of T.J. Skye’s huge, hard dick between them. It might even be bigger than T.J.’s, Erik thought lustily. His power wasn’t simple shape-modeling, after all. It was all about desire.

After an undetermined amount of time, the kiss broke. Erik felt flushed with pleasure, resting his forehead against Ricky’s. Just like every time he and Ricky made out, he felt as though it was the best kiss he had ever had. He beamed at his lover, enjoying the mix of T.J. handsomeness with the onyx-hoop marking him as still Ricky. Still his guy. “I gotta get drilled with that big beautiful tool of yours,” he murmured against his lover’s lips.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Ricky said with a smile. “But I’ll let you go first. After we stop for burgers.”

Erik whined a little. Laughing, Ricky stepped back, his T.J.-blue eyes flickering with mischief as he grabbed Erik’s hand. “C’mon, think about The First Avenger for a bit. I want to watch you turn the two counter boys into twin post-transformation Steve Rogerses again.”

“Whatever,” Erik said, chuckling as he let Ricky lead him through a crowd of guys toward the café, those paying attention to the couple becoming a bit hotter from the latent effects of Erik’s abilities as they passed.