Body and mind

by BRK   

Exasperated by college, work, and home life, Barry stumbles across an obscure app that might at least help make his insufferable, annoyingly sexy older brother Vince a tad easier to live with.

This story is a loose reimagining of an old story of mine, “Mind and Body,” with a new setup, new characters, and a plotline that will travel its own path. Hope you like.

Barry pulled up against the curb in his little gray Hyundai hatchback and yanked up the parking brake, the sharp ripping sound as always putting a final stop to his commute. He let the engine run a minute longer, letting the trepidation flicker through his belly as he stared out the passenger-side window at the house he shared with his big brother, Vince.

It was a nice little place. Two stories, white siding. Brick-red door with a small half-moon window for the door-to-door evangelists to peer through. The boxy, narrow feel of the house and the way all the neighbors were crowded a bit too close all down the street gave it a slightly squished feel, like some virtual architect had designed their out-of-the-way urban close, pondered it thoughtfully for a moment, then gone into the properties and set the horizontal scale to 90 percent.

Seeing his neighborhood this way didn’t help Barry’s feeling of overwhelming constriction in pretty much every aspect of his life. Nothing was going quite the way he wanted to. His classmates were tools. The list of required comp-sci courses he still had to complete was a joke. The part-time job he’d just left at the Grahamburgers downtown was a morass of short-sighted managers and short-tempered customers. His car needed transmission work. And somewhere in the enclosed space of that unassuming urban colonial he’d just parked in front of, very probably, lurked a glowering, grumpy, way-too-sexy brother that Barry did not feel fully equipped to deal with at the end of a long, trying day full of broken code and burger grease.

He flicked off the engine and pulled the keys free of the ignition with a sigh. That was the crux of his problem. He told himself he didn’t want to see his brother tonight, but he knew that was a lie. He wanted to see his big brother a little too much, if he were honest. Especially shirtless, which was always within a high range of probability. His surly, fractious ass of a common-ancestry cohabitor had been a classic case of looks 10, personality 3 from day one, and it had only gotten worse in middle school when Vince’d started working off his bottomless umbrage at the school gym, mercilessly honing his shoulders, arms, abs, and legs to a thick, cock-hardening perfection. As he laid on pound after delicious, angry pound, Barry could only look on in a helpless, silent agony of roiling hormones and grinding dismay.

Now 22 to Barry’s 19, Vince had matured into a 6-foot-3 Adonis of solid, sculpted muscle, sour looks, and bad behavior, leaving the smaller, twinkier, blonder, and generally more insubstantial of the brothers to fume at the untouched dishes, dirty laundry, and motorcycle parts on the kitchen table, all while nursing a constant simmering chub at the unavoidable awareness of Vince’s strong physical proximity.

As he looked down at himself in the driver’s seat, he felt his lips twisting in a kind of wry resignation. He was fit enough. Decent-looking. He had nice hair he was kind of proud of, and at 5-foot-9 was taller than a lot of guys he knew. Still, it was probably a blessing no one would look twice at him with his brother around, least of all his mostly straight brother. This baggy wait staff uniform is not exactly a pants-dropper, either, he thought wryly. Who thought orange pinstripes were a good idea?

Whatever his troubles, delaying things sitting out here was definitely pointless. Retaining the keys in hand, he grabbed the fragrant white bag of work-heisted booty from the passenger seat (two pepperjack double Grahamburgers, two extra-large waffle fries), got out of the car, and slammed the door. The venerable Hyundai’s engine settled quickly and stilled. Barry headed up the short walk with his loot.

After a few steps, he slowed, frowning. Fuck, he could feel it. Vince was definitely in there. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew.

His pulse quickened, and he immediately chastised himself. He’s a jerk, he told his junk firmly for the thousandth time.

Yeah—a hot jerk, his dick replied, treacherously thickening in giddy anticipation.

Barry pressed his lips in frustration and kept walking. Whoever the fuck was responsible for giving him this stupidly high, constantly racing libido deserved a good kick in the shins. Pushing down his annoyance, he mounted the steps, unlocked the front door, and went in.

The main door opened onto a large front room, simply furnished, with a dark blue rug, a coffee table, and a plaid couch and loveseat set Vince had inherited from the buddy he’d bought the house from two years into his first gig as a licensed mechanic. Huge vintage prints of studly mechanics fixing studly cars decorated the otherwise unadorned ivory walls.

He closed the door and stopped. As expected, Vince was there, seated on the loveseat in front of the window. He was shirtless and leaning forward, elbows on his knees, as if to show off his wingspan and manly two-inch shoulderblade merman tattoo to anyone coming through the door.

Barry immediately felt his blood heating up. I wish I could touch, he thought miserably.

Vince looked up, allowing him to stare into bright blue eyes, and Barry’s thoughts were so loud in his head he was almost afraid of being overheard.

Let me touch. You want me to touch.

Vince’s thick, perfectly shaped, handsomeness-enhancing brows lifted infinitesimally, as though he’d almost heard or sensed what Barry was thinking. His full, red lips parted, and Barry drew in a silent breath.

“And?” Vince growled, eyes flicking down to the bag of food in his hand. “I hope you brought enough for both of us.”

Confused, Barry started to answer something like “Of course I did, why would I not bring food for you and me both?” At the last minute, however, he registered belatedly that Vince was not alone. Next to him, on the near end of the couch, was Vince’s bestie, Brad—a man who (in Barry’s opinion) was even more of a piece of work than Vince. He was not quite as big or as tall as Vince but was incredibly ripped, as though the burning intensity of his assholery had seared away every milligram of body fat and sharpened his definition as far as it could go. He liked to wear tight tank tops that showed off the cut of his delts, his impossible intercostals, and his freakish lack of body hair below the neck.

Between them on the coffee table was Vince’s tablet, currently displaying a tech specs screen for a red Ducati Panigale. Was one of them buying a new bike?

Brad’s looking especially yummy today, too, his dick purred, plumping even thicker against his snug boxer-briefs. It didn’t care about the bike, apart from how sexy they’d both look riding one. Especially together, Brad riding all stubbly and leather-jacketed behind Vince like a power bottom eloping with his steel-bodied top.

Oh my god shut up, he shouted inwardly, his cheeks reddening despite himself. Thank god for ill-fitting work uniforms.

Fortunately, Brad’s m.o. around his bestie’s pesky kid brother had always been to ignore him completely and pretend he didn’t exist. Sure enough, he was staring resolutely at the motorcycle specs on the tablet as though they contained the secrets of undying happiness. Maybe they did, for him. That left him with Vince, who was now giving him a hard, penetrating stare.

“Well?” Vince said calmly. It wasn’t demanding or aggressive, just expectant.

Barry’s shoulders slumped fractionally. Giving up, he laid the bag carefully on the table in front of them, barely stopping himself from dropping it on the all-important iPad and setting it just next to the device instead. “Enjoy,” he mumbled resignedly, trudging to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich.

He felt Vince’s eyes boring into his back as he left the living room. It was almost like all of that had been deliberate, to see what he would do. Manipulative fuckwad. He was relieved to turn the corner into the kitchen, finally out of sight of his brooding bro. Finding the fridge he opened the door and peered inside, hoping the familiar action would shove all thoughts of his brother aside, though he was too distracted to see any of its sparse contents for a good minute or two.

Go ahead, jerk me around, he thought grumpily. See how you like it someday.

“Grahamburgers, nice,” he heard Brad gush from the living room as they started unpacking the bag. “These are great. You can’t even taste the graham crackers.”

“What?”

“Aren’t the buns made with—?”

“Of course, they aren’t.”

“Yeah? Then—”

“It was his name, dumbass.”

“Huh?”

“Ezekiel Graham. Ex-alderman. He was the one who founded the chain back in the ‘60s, yeah? Don’t you remember anything from the local history segment in social studies senior year?”

“Pfft. I don’t even remember what the inside of our high school looked like, man.”

Vince huffed. After that they got to work on the hot, savory food, their various chewing and smacking sounds interspersed with little moans of approval Barry tried not to imagine sexually.

“These are good though,” Brad mumbled eventually around a mouthful of beefy goodness.

“Yeah, Bar’s useful to have around sometimes,” Vince agreed, his tone flat and disinterested.

Barry shook his head. What the heck did that mean?

Finally focusing on his task, he got out the boysenberry jam, then retrieved a couple slices of thick white bread and a jar of superchunk peanut butter from the cupboard. He wasn’t too hungry anyway. Once he’d constructed the sandwich and put everything away, he took the plate and a can of Coke Zero up to his room, intended to closet himself as far away from his hot affliction of a housemate and his equally hot bro-bud as possible.

Maybe there’d be something on the code web to improve his situation, he thought jokingly. Keywords: fix my brother.

Snorting, he headed upstairs, grudgingly conceding he would first need to give precedence to his increasingly swollen cock over trolling the internet for nonexistent apps, though at least he was becoming a pro at beating off and scarfing down food at the same time. Being this horny required certain efficiencies, and Barry was nothing if not methodical, even when it came to his easily stiffened, constantly troublesome cock.

Eerily, his wise-ass search phrase had turned out to be more useful than expected. Browsing one of the more obscure app dev sites as he slowly finished his sandwich, his spent cock lolling contentedly in the cummy puddle it had made for itself along the crease of his left hip, Barry unearthed a disowned and undocumented app on one of the buried archive pages, listed under the nondescript, but for him attention-getting, name of “bro-fixer.”

Curious, Barry opened the listing, finishing the sandwich and licking his fingers as he read. The uploader, who called himself “sockboner” (do tell, Barry thought), had provided only the briefest description: “This helped us, it might help you.” Oo, cryptic. As noted in the archive directory it was sans documentation and without support or contact information. There were no other tags or any further indication of what it did or how it worked. Despite the listing having been up for almost two years, the number of downloads, very unusually, had remained stubbornly at absolute zero.

Barry drummed his fingers on the desk, intrigued despite the obvious warning signs. No doubt the very few devs-errant who’d randomly stumbled across this page at all had shrugged at its opacity of use and written it off as junk or malware—though those behind the dissemination of malicious apps usually tried to be more enticing than this. Barry wasn’t worried about any of that; he’d devised his own walled-off sandbox to examine other people’s code in without danger to the main hard drive or the home network.

His gut told him this wasn’t that sort of app, anyway. The lack of information was to him more suggestive of someone other than the dev having uploaded this thing on the downlow, hoping to instigate a bit more sneaky, chaotic change in the world after his own experience had turned out better than expected.

He drummed indecisively a few more seconds, then moved the mouse over the download button and clicked.

Within his virtual isolation chamber he unpackaged the app as best he could, but he didn’t glean much. Apparently there was something about the interface that unlocked something in the user. By staring at the flashes on the screen and listening to the low undertow sound files, something was supposed to be freed in the observer that might not have been possible before.

Barry hummed to himself as he explored, intrigued. Some sort of induced trace? A kind of highly focused hypnosuggestion? Or was there more, something this app accessed that went beyond what most people knew about the workings of body and mind?

Interestingly, though there weren’t any documentation or how-tos, he did find a brief set of extremely terse change notes. These were largely inscrutable, most referring cryptically to sections of the code inaccessible to Barry in its current compiled state. But the last entry noted a modification to allow, in addition to the original two-or-more-subject admin-guided mode, a second, self-change mode for the admin-user. Apparently, the group method was designed to change others using a convergence of screen, the subliminal soundfiles, and accompanying voice commands supplied in real time by the admin; but the admin-reflexive mode needed only Barry himself and a typed-in instruction, stored in a self-deleting dot-ini file, as seed for the process.

Barry smiled, impressed and intrigued. His theory that the app simulated a state of hypnosuggestion, and the earlier half-conscious sense of him staring deep into Vince’s eyes almost feeling like they were connecting in some sort of extrasensory link, gave him an idea.

He typed a brief command into a text file, saved it in the appropriate place, and launched the app.

Instantly the 24-inch iMac screen filled with a rich dark purple-indigo solid field that seemed still at first, except Barry started to feel like it was in motion, somehow, at a micro level below visual perception. Barry found this both promising and a little eerie, all things considered. At the center of the screen appeared a small, white-on-red button with the word “Start.”

Barry clicked.

Without compulsion or volition, Barry felt himself suddenly falling, leaving the weight of reality and self behind. The purple-indigo field swallowed him up, wrapping around him and his endless soul-universe as though swaddling him in the embrace of warm, strong arms. There were many arms. Many men. He was hard, and panting, and full of excitement. So many faces, so much powerful arousal. He saw people he knew. Vince was there, and Paul from school and Joey from work and that guy who always jogged in the park with his dog. Brad was there too, and more of Vince’s friends, and they all were blurring and melting together, a universe of naked and horny and hard as fuck men of all kinds and all levels of hotness.

Barry moaned loudly, like he was releasing something trapped inside him. The words he’d typed in the command file formed in the purple-indigo man-hunk space, flickering across shadowed and muscular bodies like a projection from nowhere. After a moment the scattered word-projections suddenly gathered in a rush and plowed into him, driving, it seemed to Barry, straight through his chest and into his heart.

He shouted, cumming without even knowing he’d been close to orgasm, careening back, euphoric and used, into the nothingness of the nowhere. His heart was pumping slowly now, one beat per age of humanity. He was alone now, his back arched and limbs splayed, drifting insubstantially through the infinite indigo. Nothing was to be seen, only a faint echo of Vince’s face, almost visible in the shifting color.

As Barry spun slowly in the void, he sensed the words of the impulsive, typed-up command he’d so violently subsumed into himself deliberately etching themselves into the very curves and recesses of his cosmic mind. With a few words… and simple… instructions…, the incisions read. So silly, and yet, thus chiseled, so seemingly momentous.

He read them again, tracing the cuts with his mind as though running fingers over a stone monument. With a few words and simple instructions, they said, I can make people do anything I want them to do…

A strong hand jostled his shoulder, wrenching him from the void. “If you’re passing out from jackin’ the beanstalk, bro,” a voice behind him said, “you’re probably overdoing it.”

Barry collected his scattered senses. He was naked in his desk chair, half-hard and spattered all across his tight belly with his own cum. Lots of his own cum—more than had been there before. Two rounds of it, at least, he remembered with chagrin, maybe more. It looked like a cum-bird had crapped on his belly.

He looked up at his scowling brother, his visage gorgeous enough even with mussed hair and a mighty frown of umbrage. Humiliation burned through him, but he sensed something else in his innards, too, something new but intrinsically him.

He rose, feeling suddenly defiant, until he was standing in front of Vince face to face, staring hard into those blazing blue eyes the whole way up. “You don’t mind. Do you, Vince?”

Vince was glaring down at him, aggressive but oddly unmoving. Another time he might have sneered and stalked off, Barry thought, maybe tossing a final jab over his shoulder, but Vince just stood there and said mildly, “Is that right.” Was he… inviting escalation? Elaboration?

Barry felt around that new part of himself. It was steel-hard and subtly rippling with what felt like some kind of raw, embedded potential. He felt a little intoxicated, or maybe high was a better word. It was as though he’d got metaphysically buzzed off of what this new core of power was offering him. His inhibitions had eroded, too, clattering away like track and field hurdles knocked over by clumsy runners. Barry stood straighter, straining to reach his full 5-foot-9. “Listen to me, Vince. Are you listening?”

Vince said nothing, but he didn’t move a muscle, not even to glower harder at him. Barry pressed on. “I’m going to hypnotize you now,” he said. Vince’s eyes narrowed, then visibly seemed to lose focus. Holy shit. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.

Barry told himself to remain focused. “You’re going to enter a trance, and then you’re going to accept everything I say.”

Vince’s eyes closed. Everything about him was utterly tense and, at the same time, completely and totally passive. Waiting for instructions. His lips parted, not to speak but to respond as necessary.

“V-Vince, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Vince said emptily, his voice without tone or inflection.

Barry was hard. He didn’t know how he could be hard—he’d just blasted two loads, maybe three—but it didn’t matter. In that moment, about to command Vince and maybe change both their lives, Barry was as achingly, unbendingly, shaft-strainingly hard as he had ever been in his life.

His hard-on, unfortunately, was insistent on derailing his thoughts, as always. He forced himself to remember what they had been talking about. “You don’t mind,” Barry repeated, and somehow he could feel the resonance of his hypnotic command in his voice, not in the sound but in something that lay beneath or around the words, an invisible infiltrator invading like a shadow among the cavalry. “You like me feeling good, Vince. You like being good to me. Making me feel good. Letting me make you feel good. Letting me be into you.”

Wait—where were these words coming from? This was not the plan. Damn hard-on! The plan was just for Vince to be nice to him, not for him to be, well, nice to him…

Vince spoke, his words sounding like simple autonomic repetition. “Feel good.”

Thrilled and scared in equal measures by the effect he was having, Barry couldn’t help pushing harder. He just had to focus. There was a purpose here. Vince was a pain, and here was his real and only chance to do something about it.

He needed to file down Vince’s tough-guy hostility toward him. Like, Vince was never happy to see him. What was up with that? “You like seeing me… my face, and… my hair. You like my hair. You think it’s… sexy.”

Fuck, he was too horny. Just looking at his handsome, mussed, half-naked brother was making him all feverish and confused. Where was he going with this?

“Sexy.”

“And my cock,” he blurted, freeing the word like it had been trying to get out this whole time. The words seem to take over, and Barry let them. “You like that I get hard for you,” he pressed. “You like guys getting big and hard over you. You get off on that. You’re turned on by guys getting all big and crazy hard over you.”

“Big and hard.”

Barry wallowed in the moment for a second, then shook himself, forcing down a sudden, nauseating rush of panic. This was all too out of hand. Instructions this extreme would create dissonance and confusion. He had to ratchet this back to calmness and acceptance—he needed to make this no big deal. Right now! Vince treating Barry well from now on would be casual, normal, everyday. No second thoughts. “Everything I’ve just said is going to seem ordinary and unremarkable to you,” he said in a rush. “Completely mundane. Nothing to worry or think twice about. Okay?”

“Mundane,” the entranced hunk said.

Now that he’d steadied himself, suddenly what he was doing felt weird and borderline wrong. Wrap it up, Bar, he thought anxiously. “Okay. When I… uh…” He was about to say “snap my fingers,” but he couldn’t help succumbing to years-old fantasies. “…when I touch your chest, you’ll snap out of this trace and not remember anything from after you walked in the room and shook my shoulder. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Barry considered the tanned, well-developed chest in front of him, embarrassingly close to what was, for Barry, eye level. The expanse of muscle was thick and firm, each mound swelling outward a little more at the bottom end but still thick and heavy all the way up to the collarbones. He’d overheard Vince talking to his buddies about the importance of doing all the chest exercises, building each stratum of pectoral muscle for the full and aesthetic effect, and he clearly knew from what he spoke, as Barry had been noticing with increasing awe over the last seven years of slow, steady, carefully guided growth. It was a vision of perfection: two slabs of sun-browned, symmetrical muscle sculpted into heavy, idealized swells of mass, beauty, and power. The scatter of soft, dark chest hair was the icing on the cake, furnishing the final proof, to Barry’s way of thinking, anyway, that these ponderous, dark, hair-dusted pecs were meant for tactile as well as visual enjoyment.

There was a little smudge of engine grease just along the side wall of his left pec, because of course there was. It was hot as fuck, just like the rest of him.

Reaching up, Barry splayed his hand across the center of the enthralling chest, arranging his hand so that his thumb, forefinger, and the heel of his palm embraced the left side, the rest of his hand the right. The feel of it made him shiver with long-suppressed need.

Vince blinked, then looked down at Barry with clear, blue eyes.

“Hey,” Barry said.

Vince blinked. “Hey,” he repeated, frowning slightly. “What—what were we talking about?”

Barry shook his head slightly. “Nothing important.”

Vince nodded. He looked down at Barry’s hand spread brazenly across his ponderous pecs, and Barry’s stomach did a nervous flip.

Then Vince popped his pecs playfully, the muscles pulsing under Barry’s hand. Barry held back a gasp, but he couldn’t stop the grin.

He met Barry’s eyes and looked happy and untroubled—no glower in sight, not for him. “How you feeling, bro?” he asked with a slightly fond, slightly mischievous half-smile.

Barry let out a breath. “I’m good,” he admitted.

Vince nodded, eyes still glinting. He lifted a hand and unselfconsciously slid his fingers through Barry’s thick, silky blond hair. Barry shuddered slightly with pleasure at the touch, and a pearl of precum formed on the slit of his ranging, never-harder cock.

Vince seemed to expect this. He glanced down knowingly at Barry’s cock and then up again. “I thought so,” he said, smirking smugly.

Barry stared at him. Vince was as cocky as Barry had ever seen him, but before now it had been a joyless, brutal arrogance. This Vince was having fun with Barry, and for the very first time it occurred to him to worry what that might entail that he hadn’t even tried to foresee.

Vince patted his cheek and took a few steps back from Barry, nodding down at Barry’s big, hard, turtlenecked boner. “Don’t jerk it too much,” he teased. Fuck, there was a lump in his jeans. Was he half-hard? Was he getting off on this? Of course he was. Fuck, he had told Vince to get off on this.

Vince spread his arms, putting his amazing body on display. “You want to take a picture?” he offered, smirk still firmly in place. “For your spank bank?”

Barry narrowed his eyes, gathering what pride a naked guy with a boner still had. “No need,” he said firmly. He’d meant it as a rejection, but it hadn’t quite come out that way.

Vince grinned. “Understood,” he said. “I’ll just leave you to your…” He gestured at himself. “…fondest memories.”

“Okay, get out,” Barry said.

Vince laughed and left, calling “Night bro” over his brawny, well-chiseled shoulder as he disappeared into his own room, just across the upstairs hallway and until now pretty much the other side of creation.

“Night bro,” Barry repeated back softly. He went and closed the door to his bedroom, then leaned against it, staring down accusingly at his tireless, straining cock as the sounds of Vince starting up the shower in his bathroom filtered through the cheap pine.

“You get me into so much trouble,” he told his hard, unrepentant peen, before resting his skull against the hard surface of the door and closing his eyes. He really, really hoped that in attempting to vanquish one monster, he hadn’t just created another.

Barry awoke to a low, mechanical burr thrumming steadily from somewhere outside. As his deepest neurons stirred in recognition, a familiar mix of anticipation and dread started slithering around the inner surfaces of his stomach.

He knew that sound. Vince was mowing the lawn.

This… was a problem. For two reasons. First, Vince always mowed the lawn in gym shorts, sneakers, and nothing else, as though the secret purpose of lawnmowing was to show off one’s chiseled form to the sun, the sky, and any random jets or vlogger drones that happened to be passing by overhead. Of course, his lack of attire wouldn’t be an issue if Barry’s big, oversized bedroom windows didn’t afford him a perfect, cruelly unobstructed view of their decent-sized back lawn, from which he could, and often had, gaze down at his brother as he slowly boustrophedoned the verdant patch, Barry keeping the bulge of his relentless hard-on carefully out of view as he sneakily drank in the recurring spectacle with a kind of acidic longing.

Worse, this was the first mow of the spring. It was as though he’d just gotten a package delivered, and inside was a brand new, factory-shrinkwrapped 18-pack of Saturday-morning crave-torture. Yay! Just like the one he’d gotten last year, and all the years before that going back to the very first time he’d noticed that guys were hot and shirtless lawn-mowing Vince was the proof, prototype, and demonstrative example.

With a resigned sigh, Barry got up and moved to the window, a familiar 7-inch, uncut, decently thick erection almost pulling the elastic of his red boxer-briefs away from his hip. Twitching aside the heavy, cream-colored curtain he looked down, stomach fluttering with enough excitement to match his tireless cock.

Fuck, there he was.

This was so unfair. On television, kids’ bedroom windows always had these big sturdy oak trees just outside that reached right up to the house, so wacky besties and illicit boyfriends could make impromptu visits and escape as needed. But no, he had to have nothing in the way of his irresistible torment. Where was the tree? He had no tree, just a surly hunk doing lawn care.

At the moment, Vince was pushing the lawnmower away from the house, maybe a third of the way done and moving at a leisurely pace. To Barry’s mind he was clearly enjoying the feel of the bright morning sun beating down on his heavy, bulging shoulders as he worked. A faint sheen of sweat had developed along the traps and delts, throwing a patch of soft reflected glare at him from just above the sun-loving merman tat.

Barry let his eyes trace over the swells of those wide shoulders, then slowly descend along the dramatic taper of his achingly perfect lats toward his narrow, tight waist. Fuck, those lats were his Kryptonite. He went back up for another scan, like a kid diving into the pool and then running around to climb up and dive again. He slid his gaze gently over the long, sloping arc of his right lats, then up the mirror image on the left, having to swallow the sudden overabundance of saliva he’d formed taking in this succulent swell of peerless proportions.

Everything about Vince’s body made him hard as cast iron, but the godlike proportions of Vince’s perfect back could probably make him cum all on their own.

The house was quiet apart from the muffled buzz of the lawnmower and the ragged sound of Barry’s breathing. This was stupid. He should just turn around and walk away, not look. Why did he do this to himself? It didn’t matter. His bare feet remained rooted to the thin, spongey brown carpet that covered his room wall to wall like a fallow field. Knowing that that body was down there, he strongly suspected he was too weak not to look.

He shuddered. There had to be a way out of this.

He’d tried. He’d made an attempt at eliminating the conditions of this particular means of torture by offering to take over the lawn-mowing himself. This had seemed like a sure-fire solution—a win-win. His brother was grumpy and domineering; surely he’d jump at the chance to fob off another chore on his brother, like he had the laundry, the dishes, and most everything else.

The problem was, the lawnmower had a fucking engine, and that meant it was the purview of Vince and Vince alone. Anything involving fan belts, lubricated gears, and smelly, flammable putt-putt juice distilled from dead dinosaurs drew his toolhead brother like Gollum to the One Ring, and became just as precious. Any engine in Vince’s possession had been taken apart, pored over, and put together again at least once, its inner workings improved where possible and its start-up purrs instilling enviable pleasure every time thereafter. If they’d had a driveway it probably would have had the half-dead corpse of a GTO or a late-60s Mustang in it, being slowly reanimated into a work of art well beyond the capabilities of mere assembly-line workers to create. (Instead, Vince’s projects were stored down at the upscale garage where he worked, there for him and Brad to tinker with off the clock whenever they had a spare afternoon.)

As Barry watched, grinding his teeth at his brother’s hotness and his own pathetic longing, Vince suddenly slowed and stilled—like a hunter sensing nearby game. The hairs on Barry’s forearms lifted as Vince stopped where he stood, mid-lawn. Then, letting the mower idle, he turned his head to look over his shoulder and gazed, unerringly, directly up at Barry.

Shit shit shit, Barry thought. He told himself to step back, out of the window, but his feet wouldn’t move and he stayed, staring down at Vince, self-conscious of his defined but comparatively scrawny nudity—apart from the obscenely tented (and, at this point, slightly damp) boxer-briefs he couldn’t be absolutely sure were fully obscured by the sill and the angle between his bedroom and the lawn below.

With a knowing grin, Vince rotated partway toward him, putting his protruding pecs in profile, the blue of his eyes holding Barry’s gaze starkly visible even from this distance. Making a show of licking his finger, Vince dramatically tapped the fingertip against his left pec before jerking it back as if scalded, his teeth mimicking a sizzle-like hiss as he shook his “burned” hand in an emotive pantomime. This guy, Barry thought, a little awed, was the cockiest cockster who ever cocked.

Unnerved, Barry tried playing it off, rolling his eyes so broadly and with such stagey melodrama Vince couldn’t help but have seen it from three streets over… even as his traitorous tool did everything but shout “me likey” as it throbbed in his scarlet underpants, the thing straining desperately as if the effort might somehow get it harder and thicker than it already was.

His faux disdain didn’t make the slightest dent in Vince’s grin, which if anything was even prouder and more insufferable than before.

This is so wrong, Barry thought frantically. He’s not supposed to like it. He’s not supposed to want it.

Finally getting his legs to move, Barry stumbled backward, out of view and onto the bed, falling across it awkwardly with his bare feet still brushing the soft rug beneath. Pushing his hair out of his eyes he lay there for several minutes, during which the thudding of his heart and the matching eager pulse of his cock became oddly reassuring. Like the sound of an engine probably was for Vince and Brad, he thought.

His brain teemed with uncertainties and recriminations. How on earth had he managed to make his brother more full of himself than before? Sure, the naked scorn that had always been there for Barry was clearly blunted now, which was as much of a sign this was an Altered Vince as the willingness to taunt Barry sexually. And—Barry’s cock lurched at the thought—he’d actually gotten to touch last night, which, with the old Vince, would have been literally impossible, not without Vince balling his fists and Barry having run someplace fast. Twisted Vince seemed to lap up Barry’s admiration, to the extent that ogling and groping—groping! Vince!—were both not just on the table but encouraged and sought.

He still probably wouldn’t let me kiss him, though, he thought. Would he? It was humiliating how much he wanted that. How crass and self-sabotaging could he be? He’d been allowed to touch, upending the entire universe as he knew it, and he still wanted more.

The trouble was he couldn’t be sure of Vince’s real motivations. This was, after all, the same brother who’d given him that cool second-hand remote-control car for Christmas when he was 8, only to go around and deliberately drain every AA battery in the house so he couldn’t use it. Could Barry trust these new behaviors? Was Vince pandering to Barry’s cravings, or was he rubbing his nose in them?

You’re pretending he’s the only one who’s different, he admonished himself, the silent reminder sparking another uneasy flutter of trepidation.

Barry’s attention went to that little walnut-sized knot in his chest. Cautiously, he felt around it with his thoughts, sensing the warm, indigo-purple energy and inexhaustible potential endlessly vibrating from somewhere deep inside. This power-knot he’d acquired had to be the key to figuring out his brother.

He needed to know more. What could he do? He knew that there was a capacity there to change things—to change people—with words and intent. A cosmic nudge. What amounted to the casting of a spell… But he also was acutely aware, following its first application, that when it came to his cocky brother he was as on the back foot as ever. He couldn’t help harboring a perverse, only-half-joking notion that he might secretly have received this gift from one of those fabled, slightly sadistic genies you always heard about, the ones who made sure all the wishes they granted were ironically undermined in some significant and amusing fashion.

Outside, the buzz of the lawn mowing continued, filtering through the walls and windows like the rasp of distant yet enormous bees.

He couldn’t lay there a second longer. Barry jumped up, suddenly resolved. He had to—something.

Feeling jittery, he stomped to his dresser, pulling on clothes and shoes almost at random, ignoring the dose of precum goo he’d smeared between his hip and cockhead. He had to get out of there and be somewhere Vince wasn’t. Before he saw his brother again, he needed to have a much better handle on what, exactly, he had done to himself.

Barry drove blindly for a while, until he realized he was downtown and only two blocks from work. Must have headed this way on autopilot, he thought. With a mental shrug he flicked on his signal and made the left onto Union, pulling into the lot a minute later and settling into a space with a quick jerk of the hand brake. Killing the engine, he got out of the familiar gray Hyundai and headed inside, appreciating the warmish spring breeze as it ruffled his hair and the thin, yellow tee he’d pulled on sat the house. The breeze played with the rest of him, too, brushing with casual intimacy along his forearms and the sockless skin of his ankles, which were slightly exposed by the frayed hems of his oldest jeans.

Fuck, he was so touch-hungry today he was horny for the fucking wind.

Shaking his head, he entered the restaurant, noticing right away the five-degree shift in clime from pleasantly mild outside to its irksomely warm interior. Glancing around, he saw the dining area was mostly deserted, a contrast to the steady drive-through traffic he’d noticed pulling in; though between the piped-in white noise and the hum and clatter of the food-prep ironmongery it was as noisy within as always. He made his way to the completely customer-bereft counter, glad to see his extra-tall ginger buddy Joey manning the till. Rocking up in front of the register, he first threw a quick chin-tip to Morose Miguel busily stacking burgers in back, getting a scowlier one in return, and another to Iryna on drive-thru. She nodded back efficiently, then went back to handing out a shitload of extra-large soda through the window to a middle-aged lady piloting an SUV the size of a tank. Barry then turned his attention to his friend.

Joey smiled in greeting. Barry liked Joey a lot, though he didn’t know too much about him apart from his age (19), his lack of interest in ever going to college or having any kind of career, and the list of yummy male celebrities he was dead set on sleeping with, in reverse order of hotness (so you got the best for last, he said). Timothée Chalamet was in there somewhere, and given that someone had told Barry once that he looked like Timothée Chalamet’s blond twink younger brother, he nursed a sliver of hope Joey might be willing to be asked out someday, as soon as Barry found the nerve. “Still no A/C, huh?” Barry asked over the low but persistent ambient noise of the restaurant.

“Not ‘til May,” Joey answered ruefully, grabbing the fully unbuttoned V of his orange-striped uniform polo and fanning his chest to cool it. Grahamburgers corporate was pretty employee-positive; the downtown branch’s general manager, not so much. Any penny that could be pinched went into the pincer, and the workers be damned. “What brings you in on your day off, anyway? You here to spell me?”

Barry blinked at him, alarmed. How could he—? “W-what?”

“Spell me,” the redhead repeated a little louder, giving up using his shirt to gently waft tiny gusts of extra air over his long, extra-lanky torso and leaning his big hands on the Formica-patterned counter. “I could use a break.” Casting a smirking glance up and down Barry’s form he added, “Looks like you’re… up for it?”

Barry glanced down at himself and the visible 7-inch ridge along his hip his battered, light-blue jeans weren’t doing much to hide, then back up at Joey, equal parts embarrassed and exasperated. He just was not getting away from this today. You know what? he thought. You asked for it. He knew Joey had meant “spell” as in swap places on shift, but he was going to pretend it was the other one.

“Okay, Joey,” he said, brushing his thoughts along the little knot of power in his chest as he held his buddy’s gaze, almost daring him to look away. Lacing his words with intent he continued in a slow and deliberate tone, “I want you to listen to me.”

It was subtle, but as soon as he’d said the words Joey’s hazel eyes seemed to glaze over and his expression went comparatively blank. An electric thrill coursed through Barry, mixed with a kind of reckless anxiety. Instantly, he had mic fright. What was he going to say?

His brain was stuck on the way Joey had flickered his gaze over Barry’s unslakable cock, and he blurted, “You like staring at dick, Joey,” he said. “Especially my dick. You want it in your mouth so bad.”

“In my mouth,” Joey mumbled, zombielike.

The easy success goaded Barry on. “You love sucking cock so much, and you’re so good at it,” he pressed, holding Joey’s empty gaze. “Just seeing my stiff dick makes us both extra big and hard.”

“Extra big and hard,” Joey parroted. Was that a moan Joey had not quite suppressed?

Arousal and something darker surged through his hard-on as he stared at Joey, letting his eyes drop momentarily to Joey’s full lips (was that why he had gone there? those lips?) before jumping back up to his eyes. Fuck, now he was wondering what Joey’s tool was like. Long and lean, like him? Thick and stubby? A surprise whopper? Anything could be hidden under that apron.

“And of course, you like getting sucked, too,” he babbled, his eyes again fixed on his coworker’s. “You’re probably limber enough to suck it yourself.”

“Suck it myself,” Joey repeated, a little louder than before. Why had he said that? Hypnotism couldn’t make you autofellatio-capable, or else half the male population would be slobbering their own knobs every day of the week.

Belatedly, Barry remembered they weren’t alone. Terrified, he glanced over at Iryna, then Miguel, but neither gave any sign that they had heard or cared. Fuck, this is like public sex, he thought. All right, wrap it up, Elton John. “Now, Joey,” he said urgently, staring even harder into the other man’s eyes, “when I… uh… touch your hand, you’re going to, um—” He couldn’t think of the right word for offboarding a hypnotism reverie. Was it like exiting a train or a jet? “—you’re going to detrance—” (He shook his head mentally. He needed a better outro script.) “—and not remember anything since I said ‘Okay, Joey.’ Got it?”

“Yes,” Joey said, his tone eerily flat and affectless.

“Okay, one… two…” (Why am I counting?) “…three.” He laid his hand over Joey’s where it was splayed on the counter, taking some of the taller man’s weight.

Joey blinked rapidly a few times, focusing on Barry as though he were just noticing him. He looked down at their hands, but before Barry could pull his away—he was enjoying the contact a little too much—Joey’s gaze zeroed in on Barry’s crotch and the very obvious erection to be found there.

“Uh, Barry,” Joey said, not taking his eyes off the long, hard bulge pushing out the thin denim, “you want to maybe pop into the walk-in with me for a couple minutes?”

Barry felt a full-body surge of all-new, furnace-hot arousal at the words. His cock flexed and swelled, somehow feeling bigger and harder than it had any right to being. Confused and intensely horny at the same time, Barry made to pull back, intending to regroup and consider his options, but as soon as he lifted his hand a half-inch off of Joey’s the taller man quickly grabbed his wrist, holding him in place.

When Joey looked up, his eyes were dark with a kind of pure, weirdly gratifying lust. “Iryna,” Joey said loudly without looking away from Barry, “watch the front for a minute, okay? I gotta show Bar here a… new procedure.”

Iryna glanced their way with a frown, then shrugged when she saw there were no inside customers to deal with. She muted her headset long enough to toss them a curt “Whatever,” then reactivated her mic and growled, “Welcome to Grahamburger’s, home of the Double-Stacked Double-Jacked Extra Grahamburger. May I take your order?”

Without another word, Joey dragged Barry along the counter the two feet needed to get to the swinging door at the end, then pulled him back through the kitchen to the walk-in, closing them in behind him. As soon as they were alone Joey was on his knees and unbuttoning Barry’s fly, the heat they were both feeling completely offsetting the chill of the walk-in—enough Barry instantly forgot where they were, Brad, his brother, and everything but how intent Joey was on wringing his raging cock dry.

Disoriented by how fast this was going, Barry said, “Uh, Joey—?”

Joey didn’t stop his nimble ministrations, just throwing an adorable half-smile and a chiding look up at Barry. “C’mooon,” he cajoled.

Barry sputtered. “Okay, just… go.”

As he said this, the red underwear was pulled down and Barry’s veiny beast sprang free, looking unnaturally big and formidable in the muted light of the walk-in. Joey looked it over hungrily, and Barry couldn’t blame him. Geez, I want a lick, too, he thought, slightly stunned by how magnetically hot his dick looked.

“Nice,” Joey said approvingly, before immediately spearing himself on its thick, rigid length.

Barry barely trapped his scream of instant pleasure before it made it out of his mouth. The joy of being sucked felt twice as intense as jerking himself off, maybe more, and as Joey moved his lips, mouth, and tongue it became extremely clear that the man was a fucking artist. “Oh god,” he whined quietly, the words sounding in his own ears almost like a real and genuine prayer for divine assistance. He slid his fingers through Joey’s thick reddish-brown hair, coaching himself not to pull on it when Joey did something—oh!—like that!

Joey hummed happily around Barry’s mouthful of a cock. Barry stared down, taking in the sight in exhilarated wonder. Curiously, he noticed Joey wasn’t jerking himself off, the way guys normally did in porn when they were sucking someone off. Joey, it seemed, loved fellatio so much he wanted to devote all of his attention to it.

Or he’s waiting for the reciprocation, Barry thought feverishly. This got him imagining Joey’s hitherto-unseen cock again. It had to be big—tall, lanky guys were always super-hung. He could see it, long and red-tinged and uncut and demanding to be swallowed by an appreciative mouth like Barry’s.

Suddenly his massive orgasm was barreling toward him like an angry jaguar. No longer capable of speech, he whined in the back of his throat, fisting Joey’s hair as gently as he could in warning. Joey got the message and intensified his suckmastery, showing no sign of pulling off. Barely five seconds elapsed before Barry lost all ability to hold back any part of this orgasm, and suddenly he was cumming hard in Joey’s throat, shooting blasts of cum that Joey eagerly swallowed, his adam’s apple bobbing to keep up.

Eventually Barry subsided, and Joey gave his full, slightly softened cock a last, thorough, tonguey suck before rising to his feet and, to Barry’s surprise, engulfing Barry in a hard, full-body hug. The embrace was warm, affectionate, and tight enough that Barry could easily feel the truly enormous iron pipe—it had to be a good ten or eleven inches—Joey had going on under his apron. Barry shivered, the ebbing of his arousal instantly curtailed and, if anything, powerfully reversed.

“Even better than doing myself,” Joey murmured happily in Barry’s ear.

Barry, tucked into the taller man’s neck, was too focused on the press of Joey’s monster erection against his hip to take in the words fully. His mouth was watering, and his dick was already swelling back to full interest. Before he could offer to return the favor, however, they were interrupted by a sharp banging on the door to the walk-in. “Boys! Customers!” Iryna barked.

Joey pulled back to look at him, grinning wide, then bent and dove in for a messy, cum-flavored kiss. “See you tomorrow, Li’l Beast,” Joey said when he was done, before releasing him and pulling open the door to the walk-in.

Barry, dazed, found himself back in his car a few moments later, shaking with a mix of afterglow and, at the same time, arousal that felt almost as desperate and in need of release as what he’d had going on when he’d arrived. His brain was broken, too, enough so that for the moment all it could retain was one circling, impossible-to-answer question: Do I dare try something like that with Vince?

The longer Barry sat in the car, engine off and windows up, the more antsy and uneasy he felt. The stale, slowly warming air trapped with him there in the enclosed space seemed to be playing him, stoking his mood beat by beat as he sat in the diver’s seat, clenching the gray, sun-warmed vinyl of the steering wheel as though he might suddenly yank back and rip it violently from its column if he got riled up enough.

It was a bright blue day, the spring Saturday heat now beating down on his knuckles through the windshield as he sat there, stewing and uncertain. The warming sensation itself gave him no joy, because thinking about the sun only reminded him of the morning’s torturous vision of Vince mowing the back lawn stripped to the damn waist, the jerk smugly reveling in the wash of those hot, golden rays over his gleaming, rippling muscles. Barry had never been jealous of the sun before, not that he knew of, but the fact that an uncaring, inanimate fusion engine eight light-seconds away got to lovingly caress and pleasure those thick, shifting delts and firm, overlarge pecs while he—who did care, whose soul yearned to worship every striation and curve of his delicious torso—was deprived seemed almost to rank as an abject cruelty to be begrudged against the universe itself.

His erection had somehow bent itself at an uncomfortable angle, prodding him for succor through his internal sensory apparatus. Testily, he shoved it into a less awkward position in the crotch of his battered old jeans. It still tingled from Joey’s stellar ministrations, and he was low-key marveling that his lanky, unambitious, everydude coworker could be such a natural at sweet backroom fellatio. It was like a gift. Barry’d never thought about sex work as anything other than something some desperate people were driven to, but honestly—Joey was so good, he should be paid. There should be celebrity cocksuckers. Cocksucker Olympics. Scholarships and training programs, like the culinary arts school his cousin went to but for sucking the cum out of people so skillfully and with such expert pleasure-stimulation that Barry was still feeling it. Not just in his heavy, throbbing cock and still-taut balls but all through him, from the back of his neck to the hot, tiny-pulsing muscle-ring of his super-tight, cock-curious anus.

He glanced at the restaurant from the corner of his eye. Joey was still in there. Would he be up for it a second time? He owed him reciprocation, after all. That tool he’d felt pressed against him as they’d hugged had been the stuff of dreams, even apart from Joey’s remarkable skills with oral. Barry swallowed, his throat almost feeling the ghostly brush of Joey’s glans in lusty anticipation, the long, warm shaft of that hefty prick sliding stiff and naked past his attentive lips and over his long, eager tongue—

Barry gripped his skull with both hands, squeezing hard, ignoring the sturdy cock semaphoring its approval against the snug denim of his jeans. He knew what was eating at him. The real problem with these supremely erotic incidents, these encounters that kept happening to him in succession like some kind of French sex farce, was that he couldn’t meaningfully assess his own role in making them happen. He knew that he was at the center of these events, but whether as target or instigator, he couldn’t tell.

The fact that he was certain that something had been unlocked in him only made it worse. Events seemed to be telling him that he had induced alterations in these men around him—men he lusted after, at one level or another. But the changes were so ambiguous, he could just as easily believe the universe was out-and-out gaslighting him. Sure, he might think he’d used this metaphysical thing he felt in his chest to force Vince to get off on his boner (and his hair—the hell?) and Joey to want to blow him (and himself?)—when maybe the reality was they were like that anyway, and all Barry had done was… what? Acted on his fantasies? Ogled his hot brother more blatantly than usual, feeding the asshole’s already ogre-sized ego and potentially shifting their dynamic exactly the wrong way? Scored a stray blowjob off someone with whom he had to go in and stand next to at the tills for a full six-hour shift tomorrow?

“Ugggh,” Barry moaned aloud, mashing his hands harder against his head. Maybe if he kept going and squeezed hard enough to smoosh his life-fucking skullmeat to harmless paste, like those videos of hydraulic presses relentlessly crushing cameras and bath bombs to bits, all these issues would be resolved.

He was agitated. He needed a plan—something that would give him clear and tangible evidence of what had happened to him, if anything; but his thoughts were too discombobulated. He needed to calm himself and cleanse his inner grid.

Letting out a breath, he twisted the ignition key and tapped the accelerator, starting up the Hyundai. A moment later, he was pulling out of the Grahamburger parking lot and into the busy Saturday traffic, heading for the one place Barry found steadying in this otherwise turbulent existence: the hermetic, multilevel domain of randomly teeming NPCs known as the Paradise Towne Centre Mall.

Barry found malls calming. He knew he was an anomaly in this, but being odd was, one might say, hardly unusual for him. Malls were large and open, yet systematic and self-contained: a semiartificial environment in which random people milled randomly to produce a kind of patternless pattern of complexly simple motion, like a hive of ants climbing over each other, or snowfall caught in a twisting wind. Each mote had a path, and the paths made a shifting weave. When he was stressed, Barry sometimes went to the brightly designed, slightly retro urban mall that somehow still thrived long past its due and parked himself on one of the wrought-iron benches in the center of the three-story atrium, letting the countless wisps of gabbling, anonymous humanity out for a shop that day sift and teem around him at a safe orbital distance like living manifestations of white noise design to soothe fractured neurons.

It worked as an escape, too. The tripled-up sets of glass doors he was passing through now were like a kind of portal out of his various personal tumults. It was a palpable change, too, not just a notional one. Sound, temperature, and smell all changed as soon as you got through the inner doors and into the shiny, classically designed ground-floor promenade. Not that it was completely sealed off from reality, metaphorically or otherwise. It wasn’t Narnia back here, or Fillory, or the hidden vales of Rivendell. Sometimes he did see people he knew—classmates, neighbors, coworkers—but (he thought wryly to himself, as he made for the central escalators) Barry wasn’t exactly the sort of man people rushed to greet and embrace in public spaces. A brief smile and a jerky wave generally did the trick, and everyone proceeded about their business.

Vince did not come to the mall.

Ascending the long escalator, Barry was already feeling more focused. This was not a time to loaf in the atrium seating and let the world churn, not that he would likely be able to idly repose anywhere with a hardon as hot, heavy, and insistent as the one currently sliming up his left crease and desperately trying to nose past his waistband. He realized that in here, away from his life, he could properly pursue the mission he’d had half-formed in his head from the moment he’d felt that unlocking in his chest and his brother had started acting strangely: to test that strange node inside him, and do it blatantly enough that there could be no doubt what he could and could not do.

Exiting the escalator onto the second floor, Barry strode resolutely toward his first target, T Street Tops.

Despite the cheesy 90s-sounding name, this particular shop and its inexpensive yet stylish graphic and solid tees were reasonably popular with the local population of late-teen and college-aged guys, having been sort of claimed as a straight-guy testosterone space (despite the very homoerotic advertising and in-store imagery) in an effort to counteract the umpteen girly clothes and accessories shops seeded in every other corner of the mall. They sold other athletic wear, too. The franchise-owner’s steady policy of hiring very fit specimens from the various college sports teams to pour into the tight black uniform tees and suitable black trousers added a patina of “cool” to the place as well.

Sure enough, as he passed the ten-foot-tall sepia image of two well-muscled young men grabbing each other’s bare shoulders by a lake, not bothering to hide his smirk, he found the shop occupied by a half-dozen customers, all looking like they did a little high-end adult video on the side, and a couple of black-shirted staff as buff and handsome as their clientele. The taller of the two employees was in a tight knot with three other, similarly proportioned guys over by the tank tops, all of them gossipping and laughing like they knew each other; Barry thought he recognized the tallest and prettiest of them from the on-campus coverage of the school’s Division I basketball team.

Barry steered clear of them and the compactly-muscled staffer behind the register doomscrolling on his phone and headed for the two customers he’d spotted chatting by the banded pocket tees in the back of the shop. He felt like he was being drawn to them by the aching rigidity of his heavy, hard cock, but he definitely wasn’t thinking with his dick—despite him being very aware that these two were almost as built as Brad and nearly as hot as Vince when it came to overall sex aura. He hadn’t forgotten his mission, and he realized there was one thing he hadn’t tried yet that he suddenly felt an urgent need to attempt. Barry thought they seemed slightly familiar, like he’d seen them in passing on campus, but he hadn’t been very attentive to his fellow students of late and couldn’t place them.

As he approached he noted the wavy, dark-gold hair, classically handsome features, and lean physique under a loose white tee and jeans on the one closer to him. The other was darker and cuter, though he had a couple of inches and maybe ten pounds of muscle on his buddy. He exuded a kind of low-level charm that Barry identified with his brother when he wanted something, though with this guy it didn’t seem malicious; just his natural aura. What did you call the combination of good-looking and enchanting? Was that what ‘winsome’ was? Barry couldn’t remember.

Goldie was looking over the countless huge stacks of tees in different colors and styles with an easy smile. “I should get a few of the green,” he was saying in a low, pleasant tenor. “Sarah likes me in green.”

Barry, hanging back a foot or so away, thought Sarah might be right, given Goldie’s autumn coloring; but Winsome Guy—who was more of winter, Barry thought—frowned. “C’mon, Cass, when are you going to wise up and dump her?” he complained, resting his hand companionably on his buddy’s firm shoulder. “You don’t even like her.”

Cass shrugged lightly, and Barry enjoyed watching the hand lift and lower with the small shrug. Was it gripping a little tighter? “And you know she’s only dating you for status,” Winsome added.

“Eh,” Cass said, unperturbed. His smile hadn’t dimmed in the slightest as he listened to his friend and perused the offerings before him.

Barry grinned. This was like a gift. They’re a total double act, he thought. Mister Chill and Crush.

Emboldened, he moved into their space before he could stop himself. “Hey guys,” he said cheerfully. Instantly he was pierced by stares of warm amber and cool ice, respectively. He pushed on, ignoring the feeling of blond-twink inadequacy meeting jocks always stabbed his gut with. He put as much resolution and urgency into his voice as he could muster. “I want you,” he said, flicking his gaze steadily between both of them, “to listen to me.”

That new unlocked part of him, the notional power-knot he located in the center of his chest, warmed like an ancient talisman invoked by a selfless mage who knew of nothing but this ritual to create erotic change in this world. As he felt the invisible eldritch glow he saw both of their expressions had gone instantly blank—the sight of this was such a rush Barry almost came right there and then.

He had to take a second as they stared placidly at him and refocus himself. There was a purpose here, and he was on track. This was confirmation, he told himself. He’d already precipitated a trace-like state of readiness twice now, and this was the third (third and fourth?) time. Triggering a trance was officially a thing he could do. And—that wasn’t all: he could trigger two people at once. Maybe more.

He swallowed, suddenly needing a drink. Was there a Jamba Juice on this floor? Hell, if one of these guys had had a water bottle or a frappuccino in his hand he could have just asked for it, and they would obediently hand it over.

For that matter, he could—he could order Winsome here to go and buy him a peach smoothie, and Winsome would do it. And not remember doing it. He was… he could…

Barry’s heart was pounding. One thing at a time, asshole, he told himself. You can build a harem of sex slaves later.

The two handsome hunks hadn’t moved a muscle, their pretty eyes fixed passively on him. Fuck, he was close, and not just from how hot these two were. His dick was so big and so hard, and his crease was so messy with warm, slick goo. Focus!

Noises a good ways behind him toward the front of the shop suggested the knot of tall guys had finally migrated to the register with their wares, and were now engaging with Fireplug Guy, who’d presumably set down his phone for a minute. Resisting an urge to glance furtively over his shoulder (which might only draw attention to himself), Barry kept his attention on Mister Chill and Crush.

“You guys are so into each other,” he said, getting straight to the point. “You get so much pleasure from touching and kissing and fucking each other. You’re addicted to each other’s touch. And cum. You don’t need anyone else. Right?”

“Don’t need anyone else,” they murmured. Somehow, the way they stood with each other shifted almost imperceptibly. Nothing had really changed, but suddenly they looked like a unit, complementary and inseparable. Barry shivered, his cock squeezing and flexing against his waistband.

“You don’t need shirts, either,” he added, eyeing them both. He could almost sense his words drifting between them, at some faint and subliminal level. It was on the edge of perception, like a room where a vase of roses had been an hour or two before, but it was there, feeling and intent and meaning taken into the minds of these two unwitting marks. He doubled down. “Especially you, Cass. You love working out and you like the way Winsome here looks at you when you’re all shirtless and rippling with muscle.”

“Shirtless and rippling,” they said dumbly, their eyes staring docilely into his.

A beat. Barry’s brows drew together—had something shifted under Cass’s white tee shirt?

Had Barry just—?

An edge of uncertainty crept into his voice as he probed further. “After all,” he said slowly, watching Cass’s athletic but less-than-swole physique closely as best he could through the thick cotton of his top, “you’ve always loved doing pull-ups. You’ve done then every chance you get since… puberty…” He trailed off, watching with a kind of alarmed euphoria as Cass’s muscles visibly moved under the shirt. His deltoids and traps seemed to thicken, subtly but noticeably, especially toward the back. Barry’s eyes lowered, his mouth dry. Cass’s biceps had swelled a bit, too, enough that the sleeves of the tee were now looking more filled out than before, and his sleek, elegantly curved lats were now visible against the sides of the shirt where they had not been before.

Barry’s masculinity-appreciating id was enthralled. Lats, it murmurmed. Fuck, I love lats. Vince has lats, but they’re a part of how big he is. Lats on a lean torso, though, flaring out like that…

Barry’s stomach fluttered nervously, even as his cock somehow managed to get even harder. Keen awareness of what had just happened sharpened in his excitable mind, clamoring for attention. His ‘suggestion’ had… had somehow pushed backward along Cass’s lifestream. A few simple words and his instruction had become fucking retroactive.

This is not hypnosis, he told himself hectically. Whatever I’m doing, whatever that thing did to me, it’s not mere fucking hypnosis.

Just then Barry heard a voice behind him—the tall staffer, he realized with alarm, wandering their way from the register now that the other group of customers was gone. “Hey guys! Anything you need help with?”

Barry spoke quickly. “Okay,” Barry hissed to the two hunks, “listen. When I say ‘now,’ you’re going to exit your trance and forget this conversation and ignore the fact that I’m standing here. Okay? Now!”

Instantly, Cass and Winsome—Barry had never even learned the brunet’s name, which suddenly felt like a stupid oversight for a hypno-change-o practitioner—broke free of their stupor and turned to each other with a grin. Instantly, they got caught in each other’s stares, their smiles turning fond and decidedly carnal at the same time. Winsome’s hand on Cass’s shoulder moved, the fingers lightly brushing along Cass’s subtly improved traps and delts.

“You know,” Cass said distractedly, staring into Winsome’s cool blue eyes, “I probably don’t need any more tee shirts.”

“I don’t know why you’re wearing one now,” Winsome said, an edge of smarm in his voice.

Cass looked down at the white tee, now just that much snugger than before, then grinned up at Winsome. “You’re going to pull it off me, aren’t you?”

“Don’t I always?”

“Go on then,” Cass said blandly, as though in mock resignation.

In a swift, practiced move, like he did it all the time, Winsome grabbed his friend’s shirt from just below the nape, whipped it off in a single, fluid motion, and shoved it behind him under his waistband in the small of his back, giving the golden, chiseled physique he’d just exposed an appreciative leer. The shop, Barry noticed, was just cool enough that Cass’s nips were visibly perking up almost instantly.

Cass was staring just as hungrily at his friend. “Dude, I gotta taste you,” he moaned softly.

Tall employee guy moved into view, clearing his throat. “So, no shirts then,” he said. He stroked his dark stubble, sounding amused. “Anything else I can help you guys find?”

Cass and Winsome exchanged a look. “Uh, jock straps?” Winsome asked.

The staffer gave them a crooked half-smile. “We got a nice little selection, actually,” he said. “Let’s go find ‘em, shall we?”

The three slipped off together to another part of the store in search of athletic supporters. Barry, who’d been ignored the whole time as instructed as though he were a horny twink ghost haunting the homoerotic-themed tee shirt store, was left feeling flushed and hot and generally as close to release while being terrified as he imagined any boy could possibly be.

Barry sat on a long bright red bench in the third-floor food court, loudly slurping the dregs of the medium Diet Pepsi he’d bought from the off-brand Johnny Rockets across the way. He’d bought a larger order of fries, too, but they sat on the little table in front of him untouched. He was too queasy and chaotic to eat, despite the achingly needy hardon that was still jerking along his crease demanding up at him that he was perfectly fucking fine and that he needed to find a bathroom and jerk off already as soon as humanly possible.

Before he could descend further into his state of confused, morose arousal, a slim young guy in a jeans jacket and messy sandy hair flopped down on the bench next to him, between Barry and the next table. Barry glanced over at him, still slurping the last of his all-but-dead soda. The guy was skinny to the point of slight, maybe 20 or 21 from the looks of him. Probably not any taller than Barry and definitely a notch or two less in heft and body weight. His hands were jammed in his jacket pockets and his head had fallen dejectedly forward, tossing his considerable bangs in his face; even so he could tell the guy was very pretty in a way that came off as genuinely pure and sweet. He was slightly darker than Barry, with light-honey skin and, guessing by his smooth chin and exposed wrists, not much body hair.

He was sitting close, but not that close. At least an inch of cushion remained between their knees and elbows. He seemed to want company without actively engaging, and Barry was surprised to find himself willing to provide it. Anyone else dropping down next to him like that, with the whole rest of the bench for three tables in either direction unoccupied, and Barry would have been peeved, but somehow his heart went out to the guy instinctively. He couldn’t help it.

Wordlessly, Barry slid his plate of fries over toward the congenitally adorable interloper.

The guy glanced up inquisitively at him from under his bangs, revealing expressive chocolate-brown eyes. Barry tipped his chin toward the fries and was rewarded with a wide, shy smile that tickled him someplace deep and vulnerable. His cock responded, too—he was aroused as fuck already, and the guy was ridiculously cute.

The guy scooted closer, pulling three fries from the pile and scarfing them down, and suddenly Barry was dealing with there being no space between them whatsoever. It might be perfectly innocent, but that didn’t undo the fact that their thighs, hips, and flanks—even their calves—were now pressed tightly together. Barry pulled his trapped arm free and laid it on the back of the bench behind his new friend as he reached for more fries, an act that seemed to bring the newcomer officially within his personal bubble.

Barry smiled, forgetting his own inner turmoil for the moment. “Bad day?” he asked. Unable to help himself, he rubbed the guy’s shoulder through his jacket, and he glanced up with that shy smile again and nodded.

Before he could look down again, Barry used his free hand to put a finger under his chin and lift it up. “Hey, listen,” he said, and the guy was staring at him, eyes round as if ready to drink in anything Barry said. It seemed like one of the guy’s natural expressions, and Barry’s heart twisted a little. Fuck, he just wanted to see this kid smile. He spoke as firmly and reassuringly as he could. “It’s going to be okay,” he told him.

The guy beamed at him, and Barry found himself slammed with that same mix of adoration and lust, stronger than before. He chuckled, grinning, and messed his hand through the guy’s hair. “You are such a puppy!” he said. “You are just one big, happy, friendly puppy dog man!”

The guy grinned even wider at him and said, “Erf!”

He also wasn’t looking away.

Oh shit, oh shit. “Nonono, snap out of it,” he said, leaping to his feet. “Snap out of it!”

His new friend was now looking up at him with concern and apprehension. Fuck, how can eyes be that expressive? “You’re not actually a dog, it was just an expression,” he babbled insistently. “It was just a joke, it’s not real—”

The guy was now looking increasingly upset and closed in, like Barry had just told him they couldn’t ever be friends. He started flicking his gaze away to the left and then back up at Barry, like he might bolt. That would be even worse. “Nono, c’mere,” Barry said, unable to bear the thought of him being lost and alone in this state. He was invested in this guy even before he’d fucked with him, and now—! He opened his arms. “C’mere, c’mere,” he said, and the guy jumped into his arms and plastered himself to Barry, wrapping his arms tightly around him and squeezing him with an unexpected strength. Barry followed suit, holding him close and whispering in his ear. “It’s okay,” he cooed. “I’m sorry.” Fuck, ‘sorry’ didn’t even begin to cover it.

The guy nuzzled close into Barry’s neck, every inch of his pressed against him, and Barry loved it. It felt amazing in every way, and his dick felt like it was going to stab one or the other of them through the waist at any moment. Fuck, what kind of a pervert am I? Barry thought, wondering what the other man was thinking,

Just then a phone buzzed between them. His canine-esque friend startled, and (pulling away the absolute minimum from Barry to do so) proceeded to slowly retrieve an iPhone out of his inner jacket pocket and glower suspiciously at the screen. Barry wasn’t sure if he was upset by who was calling, or if he was now so doggified he was confused by the concept of a phone. Given that the caller name was set to “Fuckwad,” Barry hoped it was mostly the former.

The phone kept buzzing, and his friend’s expression darkened. Barry was amused and alarmed to hear a light growl from the back of the guy’s throat.

The call ended, then immediately the screen lit up again with the same caller ID. The guy was still just glaring at it, softly growling, so Barry pressed the accept button and put it on speaker.

“Kevin?” a man’s voice shouted. “Where the fuck are you?”

The guy, Kevin, rested his head firmly against Barry’s shoulder, glaring hatefully at the phone and saying nothing.

“Hey, buddy, calm down,” Barry interceded. “There’s no need to be a dick. You’re just upsetting him.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Fuckwad exploded. “Kevin, what is this? One fight and you’re already in the arms of some other guy? Jesus, you are the worst fucking boyfriend ever.”

Barry looked down guiltily at Kevin, who was indeed wrapped tightly in Barry’s embrace. His guilt evaporated, though as soon as he remembered who was on the phone and how Kevin clearly felt about him. He very much doubted that there had been only ‘one’ fight, or that it had been anything but one-sided.

“Dude, calm your gonads,” Barry said, stroking the back of Kevin’s head reassuringly as he did so. He was trying to sound assertive, though he was sure his chances of hypno-changing someone like Fuckwad over the phone were measurable in atomic units. Still, he could at least keep a straight spine and stand up to the bully as best he could. “Try talking instead of shouting, and you might get somewhere in life.”

“Who the ever-living fuck do you think you are? I’ll shout if I—!” Fuckwad broke off and let out an enraged scream over the phone, cutting through the noise of the food court so effectively Barry noticed one of the cashiers at the Panda Wok look up in surprise. “Okay, fuck this. I am done. I want you out. Kevin, get your shit and be out of the townhouse by five or I am burning every goddamn beach thong and ABBA CD you own!”

Barry realized that Kevin was looking up at him with pleading eyes. They were still holding each other very close, but even without their intense physical connection Barry knew he had only one path in front of him now.

He gave Kevin a smile that communicated everything the other man needed to know. When Kevin smiled back, Barry felt like his heart had been skewered with pure cute-adoration. Without thinking he bent and pressed his lips to Kevin’s, and they kissed for a few seconds. It was not quite as chaste a kiss as Barry had intended.

Barry then addressed himself to the phone. “Done,” he agreed, disconnecting the call. He took the phone from Kevin’s hand and dropped it in his own back pocket, freeing Kevin to hold him close again with both of those strong, wiry arms.

Okay. So. Get Kevin’s stuff, and then… well, he wasn’t going to abandon the guy in a box in the side of the road. They would sort out his situation later, but first things first. A thought struck him. “You, uh, remember the address?” Barry asked uncertainly. This earned him an eye roll and a goofy grin, and Barry grinned back. Okay, not completely a dog, he told himself, relieved. Just a little… well, just a happy, friendly puppy dog man.

Kevin was looking at him a little more heatedly, he realized. His hands were moving on Barry’s back, and Kevin’s groin was writhing gently against his. Abruptly he realized that his was not the only long, rigid tool grinding away down there.

Barry felt his skin heat, his thoughts drowning in lust. Kevin was smiling at him, his natural empathy leaving him under no doubts what Barry was feeling. Clearly, he was on exactly the same page.

Fuck, this couldn’t wait until they got home. Barry had been needing to nut for a good hour now, maybe more. “Kevin, babe,” he said, “I gotta go find a bathroom and take care of this.” Kevin watched him, expectant and alert, waiting to see what he’d say next. Barry felt his lips quirk. “Do you… wanna come?”

Kevin grinned, nodding enthusiastically, and Barry chuckled.

The public bathrooms on the fourth floor were probably the safest, Barry told himself as he guided his new friend toward the narrow up escalator they had on this level: the fourth floor was mostly admin and offices, and the one public area, the skylight terrace, was little used unless they were having an event. Sure enough, the spacious fourth-floor men’s room was completely bereft of patrons or workers, and he and Kevin had the gleaming expanse to themselves.

He pulled Kevin into the last stall and hurriedly dropped his pants, Kevin doing the same, then dropped to sit on the commode with Kevin straddling him, a moment of clarity (he was the one to do laundry after all) prompting him to quickly pull off his faded yellow tee as well. Once this was cast aside he went to reach for their cocks, but Kevin had beat him to it and was using both hands and all the goo Barry had been generating to slowly stroke them in the direction of what was clearly going to be ecstatic oblivion.

Barry knew it wouldn’t be long, but he took a moment to admire their tools and Kevin worked them with expert efficiency. Kevin’s was maybe two fingers wide, long, and very straight—maybe 10 inches of sweet, throat-nudging meat that Barry wanted to get to know as intimately as possible. He hoped Kevin was generally as horny as he was these days—he needed the distraction. Given their present circumstances he reckoned the odds were pretty good.

He wasn’t sure about the length, though. Kevin had a couple of inches on him, it looked like, but Barry’s own cock looked fucking magnificent, bigger and thicker than he’d even seen it. He knew this had to be on account of him having kicked himself up into an all-new level of horny, so that when he saw any cock it was like a desert island guy seeing not just a roast turkey but the biggest, most mouth-watering roast turkey any guy had ever seen. He remembered wanting a taste when Joey was sucking it—fuck, had then been just earlier that morning—and now, watching and feeling Kevin stroke both their slick, hard pricks together, he wasn’t sure which he wanted to suck more.

Not that there would be any sucking this time. He was already beyond close, his orgasm boiling up and ready to erupt. He grinned at Kevin, and knew that he was ready too. “Come for me,” he ordered them both, and almost instantly jets of hot spend were spurting out of both cocks and onto Barry’s abs, his defined pecs, and even his cheek and jawline. They dove into a breathy kiss, still cumming, and then Kevin started licking the cum off Barry’s face while they both laughed.

It was midafternoon by the time Barry and Kevin pulled into Barry’s street, Kevin’s meager belongings stuffed in a suitcase and a handful of boxes stowed in the hatchback of his trusty Hyundai. Fuckwad—a lawyer, it seemed, and not a great one, or so Barry chose to believe judging by the cheapness of the shit in his outwardly nice red-brick townhouse—had blessedly made himself scarce for the removal by ultimatum, so they made quick work of collecting the few belongings Kevin had brought with him when he’d moved in only three months previously and shifting them into Barry’s trunk. They closed the door behind them, Kevin tossed the key into the juniper bushes, and they were off.

There wasn’t a space directly in front of Barry’s little white house with the red door, and they had to park a couple of cars down and lug the stuff back. Barry was feeling a little chagrined, looking around the neighborhood and thinking where Kevin had been was at least two tiers nicer—he could only see Barry’s house, Barry’s neighborhood, and Barry himself as a come-down after what he’d had. Kevin, however, was cheerful and beaming as he toted his box of select physical media (a small, curated selection of books, CDs, and DVDs) up the sidewalk to Barry’s house.

Barry couldn’t help smiling. He was telling himself this was only temporary. Tomorrow they’d tackle getting Kevin better situated, maybe with family somewhere or something—after fixing the dog thing, of course. But his heart was firmly repelling the idea that Kevin might end up anywhere but next to Barry.

If Vince didn’t fuck it all up, of course. That was always the random element in every plan Barry had ever made, and his newfound abilities gave him absolutely zero confidence in any agency he might have to alter Vince’s knack for randomly bending Barry’s fate to suit his own.

After a little awkwardness opening the door with their hands full, they got into the house. The door opening onto the front room, which was always relatively dark despite the big windows, meant that it was a second before he noticed Vince sprawled across the big sofa, reading a motorcycle magazine by the light from the front window.

Barry stilled, the heavy suitcase gripped in one hand. Kevin, just behind him, bumped the corner of his box into the middle of Barry’s back.

Vince looked up and gave Barry a flat look. He was still shirtless—and unwashed, if the strong redolence of grass clippings was anything to go by. Barry hoped that he was unwashed, at least. Otherwise, his imagination was adding olfactory tortures to his fantasies, reminding him of the erotic lawnmowing he now had to dread/look forward to on summer Saturdays. That, or his ability to smell had been boosted along with his libido and (it seemed) his capacity to attract trouble. Barry really hoped Vince just hadn’t bothered to shower after the long hour or two of yard work, and that was why he smelled like he’d dumped the bag of grass clippings over his head, not for any other reason.

Holding Vince’s gaze, in his peripheral vision he sensed Kevin peering cautiously around him at Vince—perhaps with a friendly puppy-man smile. Vince flicked his gaze to Kevin, then back at Barry. “Who’s this?” he said. His tone was exasperated, like Barry should have explained already and not forced him to ask.

Barry deeply, desperately wanted to make the joke. He truly wanted to say, “He followed me home, can I keep him?” with every fiber of his being. It was actually kind of funny how much he wanted to say it, and while holding it back he cracked a slight smile, which his brother visibly noticed.

“Vince,” he said instead, pushing down the smile, “this is my friend, Kevin. He needs a place to stay for a while.” He held himself back from asking if Vince thought this was okay—this was his house too!—and turned deliberately to Kevin. “My bedroom is down there, on the right,” he said. “Wait for me? We’ll go get the rest of your stuff from the car a little later.”

Kevin beamed uncomplicatedly at Barry, gave Vince an uncertain smile, and trotted off, giving Barry his first really good look at the extremely nice, perfectly rounded ass packed into Kevin’s tight jeans. Barry kind of wanted to see it wiggle in happiness. He watched as the door shut, leaving the two brothers to each other.

“He seems like a cuddler,” Vince mused.

Barry turned to glare at Vince. It seemed almost offensive for this dark godling to even talk about someone so innocent. But Vince’s gaze was already reverting to Barry. Setting the magazine aside, he swiveled to an upright seated position on the couch. “Have a seat,” he said, patting the coffee table in front of him.

Setting down the valise, Barry reluctantly came around and sat in front of Vince on the coffee table. Just being close to him was lighting fires of arousal in him, despite the series of very thorough orgasms he’d already had that day, and his cock was already half-chibbed as he sat and stared back at Vince.

Vince reached forward, cupping his hands around both of Barry’s upper arms in a way that sent a mirrored thrill through him, then set his hands moving, slowly gliding up and around the shoulders, then back down the arms, his warm, sexy eyes locked on Barry’s the whole time. The feeling was electric, every part of Barry reacting with raw gratification.

“So, how does that feel?” Vince asked, his tone gentle. “Does that feel good?”

Barry swallowed and nodded mutely.

Vince took one of Barry’s hands and placed it deliberately onto Vince’s proudly protruding left pec. Barry’s breath caught—he could almost feel Vince’s strength and beauty through his hand. “What about this?” Vince asked softly, smiling slightly in encouragement. The pectoral flexed minutely—not a full flex, but enough he felt the muscle physically expand, pushing against his hand. His breathing seemed to stop. “Yeah? Feel nice?”

He should pull his hand away, he should get away from Vince, but there was no way he was moving. “Vince—”

Vince shifted closer, and one of Vince’s hands slid into Barry’s thick, blond hair—the hair Barry had stupidly instructed Vince to get off on. “I find myself,” Vince said, “really, really wanting to make you feel good. For you to experience—” He’d been following the motions of his hand, but now his eyes flicked back to Barry’s as he finished, “—strong physical pleasure.” He cocked his head. “Why is that, Barry?” he asked. “Because I think you’d agree that doesn’t sound like me.”

Vince was so close. Barry’s stomach was twisting, and his rationality and his fight or flight response were both banging urgently on the closed, bolted, and probably welded-shut fire door of his rampaging id. All Barry could feel right then, however, was that it did feel good. Vince was touching him, and it was amazing. He was as hard as if it’d been days since he’d cum, not the near side of two hours. He even thought he might be able to smell heat and arousal coming from Vince, like his asshole hunk brother genuinely was deeply enjoying giving Barry physical pleasure.

His face was unbearably attractive to him, and—he couldn’t help it. He let his gaze drop to those sweet, dangerous lips, then back up again.

“So I treated it like an engine problem,” Vince said conversationally. “I looked for evidence. Causes. History. Contributing factors.”

Vince’s hand was massaging the back of Barry’s neck, making it very difficult to concentrate. Pull me in, he thought. Our lips are inches away. Pull me in, pull me in, for fuck’s sake pull me in.

“The timing seemed to be around yesterday, right? So I went through every word of what we said to each other. Everything I could, you know, remember. What you said, what you told me…”

Barry was crazy hard along his crease (which was still a little slippery from earlier). He glanced at Vince’s lips again. Maybe I should take the initiative. If he thinks it’ll make me feel good, and fuck, will it—

“And I had a look around the place. The kitchen, the food, the pantry. The bathroom. My room. Your room,” Vince went on, still kneading Barry’s neck and his shoulder on the other side. “I checked through your drawers, your notes, your books… your laptop…”

All at once, Barry’s blood went cold. He was still hard, still incredibly aroused, but the glint in Vince’s eye suddenly looked like the wrong kind of dangerous.

“You know that I know your laptop password, right?” Vince said. He was smiling now, playing with his prey. “I mean, I probably would have guessed ‘V1ncedick’ even if I hadn’t seen you typing it in a year or so ago.”

Barry was staring hard into Vince’s eyes. His stomach had fallen through the floor. “Don’t worry, I’m not mad,” he said reassuringly. “I’m, like, the opposite of mad. I just have one little thing to say to you.” His tone was almost cheerful, though he was returning Barry’s stare with equal intensity.

The hand on Barry’s neck stilled and became a grip, like the other on Barry’s shoulder. “I think you know what it is, Barry.”

No, no, please—

“Barry,” Vince said patiently, “I want you, with your whole mind and all your heart, to listen… to … me.”

Barry awoke on Sunday morning to the sound of his brother moving around the house and—whistling?

Barry frowned without opening his eyes. Something was off kilter about this morning, starting with his inexplicably un-glowery hunktastic brother. A lot of descriptive phrases could be thrown at Vince, and “cheerful as a tree of sparrows first thing in the morning” wasn’t normally one of them.

Maybe it was the night of strange dreams he’d had. Vince was in them, his crystal-blue eyes alight as they only were when he had the winning hand in whatever game he was playing. The dreams were disjointed and uncertain, falling apart and drifting away on the currents of his mind like cinders as he tried to grab for them. Snatches of bizarre imagery. Vince pulling him into a demanding kiss. Vince and him… getting drunk at the kitchen table on a bottle of Maker’s Mark? Vince retrieving a felt-tip marker from the kitchen junk drawer and writing something in small block letters on his naked back, all slow and careful, while they both giggled uncontrollably?

Vince… buying him a motorcycle? Taking him off on a four-day junket to Hershey Park where they rode the Comet together, twice?

Ridiculous, he told himself. Dreams were crazy. He’d never even been to Hershey Park. More than that, Vince would never get Barry, of all people, a motorcycle. Why would his sleep-brain even go there? It would be like getting Vince’s meathead friend Brad a library card and a subscription to The Atlantic.

Though it had been a pretty sweet ride, the one in his dream. A shiny blue Yamaha. Second-hand, sure, and needing a little work, but all that power under his ass—

Fuck where did that come from? He hated motors… gears, belts… engine lubricant… all of that shit.

And yet—he kind of wanted to go find the bike and maybe… start working on fixing it up?

He shook his head slightly, still with his eyes closed despite the Sunday mid-morning sun streaming through the open curtains directly onto his face, making his eyelids all red and translucent. It was all weird dreams. All of it. Vince wouldn’t get him plastered on fucking Maker’s Mark or anything else, and if he did he’d have a huge splitting headache, because alcohol was all about busting his skull open the next day if he had so much as a shot. A clear head meant it was a dream for sure, obviously. An unnaturally lucid and realistic dream. Or, at least, it had been. Already, the fine details were fragmenting and vanishing like motes into the ether.

Well, good. He didn’t need to remember that shit anyway.

And yet… he thought he could kind of still feel the kiss. That kiss. Right? His lips definitely seemed to remember the lingering press of Vince’s against his. His tongue, too, longed to brush against Vince’s the way it had last night. It lolled disconsolately against his palate, lonely for its aggressive, domineering playmate.

Not “the way it did last night,” dummy, he told himself sternly, chasing the memory. The way it did in the dream.

His bare shoulders told him it was a little cooler today, and he was glad to be under the covers, cozy and warm and… aroused. Fuck, he was hard. Hard and ridiculously horny, like “cumming once won’t be enough” horny. Horny the way only Vince-fantasies could make him. Or Vince himself.

There had been words, too. Last night. In the dream. An image formed in his mind: Vince, close, tanned and crazy handsome, his smirk dimpling his right cheek. Barry had been saying something… telling Vince about… he didn’t know. Or… no, Vince was speaking. His mouth was moving, forming sounds; but the words were lost, or scattered, or something. There were words, though. The words were—

The words were—

A warm, lightly-muscled body snuggled closer against him under the sheets and comforter, a long, narrow erection rutting lazily against the side of his thigh. Barry woke up a little more, noticing for the first time the arm thrown over his chest and the leg draped over his own. His own arm was wrapped around a lanky frame, a head resting lightly on his shoulder.

Oh, right. I brought home a puppy.

A mix of guilt and amusement flickered through him as he opened his eyes and looked down at the young man nuzzling up against him from head to toe. What Barry knew to be an adorably cute honey-hued face was mostly hidden by his bedmate’s trademark mass of sandy bangs. Kevin stirred contently and wriggled his head against Barry’s shoulder and chest, like he was still half asleep, smiling to himself without looking up at Barry and writhing gently against him. Barry’s arousal edged up another notch, his quickening pulse audible in his ears.

Kevin’s hand started sliding southward over Barry’s naturally twunky bod, and Barry, always the touch-glutton, found himself suppressing a moan as ripples of happy pleasure danced up his spine. The hand left his firm chest and had barely discovered the flat, subtly segmented abs he’d had more or less since birth before it discovered its quarry.

This time Barry did moan a little, closed-mouthed and with his blood heating up dramatically, as Kevin wrapped his long, delicate fingers around Barry’s iron-hard footlong shaft. Oh, yes, take care of that for me, he thought muzzily. How surprised Kevin must’ve been to see a genuine 12-incher when they’d both fallen into that episode of sudden mutual sex-frenzy in the mall bathroom. Not everyone reacted the same way. Coworker Joey had stared at it hungrily for a solid minute during their little hypno-induced encounter before the redhead had gotten down to business; but Kevin here had just dived onto it like he saw cocks that big every day.

Maybe he did. Could be his new pup was a size queen, and had latched onto Barry up there in the little third-floor food court because he’d sensed Barry was as prodigiously hung as his uptown asshole ex.

Unnhhh. The kid certainly knew what to do with a big cock. Vividly, Barry remembered always having been a little chagrined about the size of his dick, an unease cemented by his first and only attempt at a high-school hookup backing away and fleeing the eraser room in a sudden unreasoning panic, like he’d assumed the only possible outcome of their little third-period tryst would be him getting brutally impaled on Barry’s towering dick. Nor had Jessie been at all discreet about what he’d seen, leading to Barry being pelted with snickering epithets like “Ruler Boy” and periodic demands to see the goods the whole rest of his sojourn at Eastview High.

Kevin caressed his cock with long, firm strokes, and Barry ran his hand along Kevin’s long, narrow back in encouragement. Further down he was enjoying the feel of Kevin’s splendid eight-incher rutting messily against his firm, hairless thigh. Fuck, Kevin was smearing enough precum onto him he could be reasonably confident the pup would cream spectacularly all over him the instant Barry blew his load. Convenient, he thought wryly. Gay erotic romances always had that awkward sex-haze “I guess I should reciprocate” moment in the early encounters, but Kev’s libido was pitched almost as high as Barry’s—enough so he was literally getting off on driving Barry over the edge with a simple, snuggly morning handjob.

That big eruption was coming on fast. The force of it was building up in his larger-than-average balls like a dam burst held back by a layer of Saran wrap and a couple lengths of Gorilla tape. Kevin was deftly stroking his self-slicking uncut monster toward a full and irresistible climax. In seconds he would be gushing of crazy amounts of cum that… would be a bitch to get out in the wash. With his last brain cell he threw back the covers with his free hand, wafting cool, invigorating air over him and exposing his nice body, his big cock, and the tall, slinky, honey-dark sex-imp wrapped around him, giving him all the pleasure he could manage.

The convergence of sensory input hurled him over the ragged edge and he started cumming violently, spraying his seed all over his chest and abs, a few spatters even hitting his face. Kevin convulsed with his own orgasm, shooting a more normal amount of hot, gooey cum over the surface of Barry’s upper thigh. Panting, Barry held him close as they both came, and when it was over he kissed the top of Kevin’s head, full of affection and oceans of unabated lust.

Kevin finally looked up, his smile heartbreakingly adorable as those chocolate-brown eyes found his through the bangs, and Barry’s afterglow got even happier.

They were in the shower, playfully washing each other, when Barry suddenly asked, “Is there anything written on my back?”

Kevin’s sandy brows lifted into his wet bangs. Then his expression shifted into one of amused consternation, as if to say that Barry was being very silly for posing such a question with his back not presently in evidence.

“Right,” Barry said with a crooked grin, turning around in the narrow stall. They were the same height, and though Kevin was substantially less… well, substantial… than Barry, his form was still mostly in the way of the shower spray. Barry thought that being in a shower stall with the mist and steam billowing around you but not being actually pelted with water felt oddly isolating, like wandering naked down Main Street when everyone else was wearing pajamas.

He twisted to look over his shoulder at Kevin. “Anything?”

Kevin shook his head happily and started soaping up his pale, gently tapered back. Barry’s cock, only half hard, twitched, ready for more. Barry smiled. This was nice, though the annoyingly practical part of his brain reminded him it was only temporary. He’d taken in this stray for just the one night. After that—well, Kevin had places to go, surely?

He cleared his throat, eyeing the shower tiles on the back of the stall. They needed a good scrub, he thought. “What’s your plan, Kevin?” he made himself ask. “Where do you want go after this?”

By way of answer, Kevin took a soapy index finger and slid it boldly along the inner recesses of Barry’s butt crack, the pad of his finger brushing his hole.

Barry shivered and twisted to look back at him. “I’m serious, though,” he said. “Where do you need to be?”

Kevin looked hurt that Barry was even asking about other places to be. His sweet chocolate eyes looked huge. “Here,” Kevin said, moving in to embrace Barry from behind. “I want to be here.”

Kevin’s eight-inch tool rubbed along Barry’s crack, close to where his finger had just been. Barry couldn’t help smiling. Turning in Kevin’s embrace, he drew him in close and began kissing him under the spray, slowly and sensually, his own cock tall and rigid between them.

Barry sat shirtless at the kitchen table, clad as usual in nothing but sneakers and loose old-fashioned ketchup-red cotton gym shorts with no underwear, and poured himself and Kevin each a bowl of apple and cinnamon Cheerios from the big plastic keep-fresh cereal container. Vince was still moving about the house and whistling tunelessly, out of sight and unsettlingly out of character. Kevin, sitting close by on his left in a loose tie-dyed tee and jeans from his luggage, shot him a doubtful glance before splashing some two-percent on his cereal and sliding the half-full gallon jug over to him. Even the pup was picking up on Vince’s atypical behavior, and he hadn’t even been here a day yet.

Barry reached for the handle of the milk jug and then stilled as he caught sight of a distinctive long-necked glass whiskey bottle sitting pertly on the counter above the dishwasher. A distinctive, empty glass bottle.

Barry narrowed his eyes at the bottle, his pulse picking up. His hand squeezed the jug handle, crumpling it slightly, but Barry didn’t notice. He’d have had a hangover. It had to have been a dream. It had to.

Vince burst into the room, looking every inch the tanned, wavy-haired muscle Adonis in his envy-making ensemble of ripped jeans and nothing else. Barry held back a shuddering exhale, his freeballing buts tightening lustfully at the sight of his glorious, perfectly sculpted hunk-bro. He hated and loved that body for all the complex feelings it have him—not least because it made him feel impossibly inferior, like he could never be that hot. Sure, Barry had always been a ripped, bantamweight natural twunk with a 12-inch dick, but he felt like a pipsqueak in front of Vince’s 220 pounds of carefully hewn, 7-percent bodyfat spunk-churning perfection.

Barry’d even tried working out for a solid month back in his senior year to see if he could build up his natural muscle to something approaching the exalted tier Vince and some of his fellow gym-obsessives occupied. All he’d gotten for his effort was sore biceps, even more sweaty clothes in his weekly laundry pile, and extra taunts about the mouse with the monster cock from the football jocks he’d had to share the school gym and showers with. What a bust.

For his part, the object of his infatuation was outright beaming down at them, his teeth bared and his hands on his hips in pure Jolly Green Giant mode. It was like all of a sudden he’d woken up with the revelation he’d wasted the last decade being a verbally abusive grouch and from now on he’d be the human embodiment of sunshine and rainbows. It was weird but flattering on him, and an extra layer of turbulent feelings fluttered in Barry’s gut as he stared up at his barely resistible brother.

Next to him Kevin scooched his kitchen chair an inch closer to Barry’s. Barry glanced at him. He was giving Vince a wary look. Barry looked back up at Vince, and Barry caught it then—a faint glimpse of low-key Vince-malice in those bright, beautiful baby blues.

Barry’s shoulders relaxed a fraction. Vince was still Vince. Reality remained intact, and the usual content prevailed. Like, comment, and subscribe. Belatedly noticing his tight grip on the milk jug, Barry finally poured the moo juice over his cereal and set it back on the table, capping it so he didn’t forget.

Vince had come around the table and was now sliding an affectionate hand over Barry’s sinewy shoulders. “Hey bro,” he cooed. “Interesting night last night, huh?”

Barry swallowed, his face heating from the proximity and the attention. “I, uh, don’t remember.”

“I’ll bet.” Vince bent down, close enough now Barry could feel his body heat in the cool spring morning air. “Now, Barry, you know I love to see your beautiful dick. Go ahead, get it hard for me.”

Instantly, Barry’s cock shifted in his lap to a full and aching erection. The movement around to its usual sitting position above the crease of his hip brought it along a twitching, flexing counterclockwise arc as it grew and hardened, until it pushed itself free of the tired elastic waistband of his gym shorts and pressed against the left side of his lower abs, half its ruddy uncut length exposed for Vince’s delectation.

“Nice,” Vince said, his voice low and rough with genuine appreciation. His thumb stroked back and forth along the striations of Barry’s delt, making him want to shiver with conflicted pleasure. “So nice. Now make it messy for me, bro.”

On command, pleasure surged through Barry’s balls and up his long shaft. They both watched as precum pearled on his slit and started oozing over his wide, flat head and all over his cock and along his belly where it touched.

Barry looked up at Vince. His face was close. What his bro was doing to him would almost be embarrassing were it not for the real and avid attention Vince was giving his long, hard, beautiful dick. This was why he wore the shorts, of course, and no shirt when he was around the house. It wasn’t a “rule”—he could wear what he wanted. He was a grown man with his own life. But seeing as how Vince could make him hard and slimy at any time, it was just… easier this way. A lot easier.

Vince let out an audible breath, gazing raptly at Barry’s rigid, pre-smeared footlong dick. “You ready to blow for me, little brother?”

Barry tried to make his stare defiant. Vince looked at him finally, and Barry could tell he was definitely amused as well as turned on. “You ready to kiss me?” Barry challenged.

Vince’s grin went crooked. “Them’s the rules,” he said cheekily. He moved in. Barry met him halfway, and they kissed hard, their mouths open and tongues wrestling for dominance.

As soon as their lips met, Barry started blasting spunk all over himself, the chair, the kitchen floor. Without realizing it he doused Kevin, too, the poor kid not having known not to sit on Barry’s immediate left when Vince was around. He’d figure it out soon enough. As he came Barry reached up and gleefully felt up Vince’s dense, godlike pecs, and the pleasure of this made the intensity of his orgasm seem to spike two or threefold. He was allowed to touch Vince, but normally Barry held back out of natural reticence except while he was blasting cum from Vince kissing him.

Vince, for his part, had a hand pushing through Barry’s thick, silky blond hair. Barry’s touchable hair was definitely Vince’s second-favorite thing about his twunky, extra-hung younger brother.

Finally the kiss broke and Barry fell back heavily in the kitchen chair, awash with pleasure, a dopey grin on his face as the orgasm subsided in slow stages. His eyes tracked Vince upward with a kind of stupid afterglow happiness as the muscle Adonis straightened behind him, looking extremely pleased with himself. “You better get all that cleaned up before you go to work,” Vince teased, nodding toward the pools of spunk behind him on the hexagonal linoleum flooring.

“Yeah, yeah.” Barry was still basking in the pleasure, idly waiting to see if and when his hardon would go down. It was usually… reluctant, especially after one of these high-intensity kiss-induced insta-climaxes. Of course, Vince could make him soft with a command—or, at least, as soft as Barry ever got, which was a bulky not-quite-flaccid that still give him a considerable bulge. Unsurprisingly, Vince never made Barry soft. He should be flattered at how much Vince loved his thick, hard cock, but he did sometimes feel like a toy Vince liked playing with but never bothered to put away.

Vince shifted his incandescent grin to Kevin, reaching out to ruffle the younger man’s hair. “What about you, Dug?” he said cheerfully. “You want to have some fun?”

Kevin eyed him fixedly through his bangs. Though his mouth remained a thin line, Barry swore he heard a soft, barely audible growl emanating from the back of the skinny man’s throat.

Barry couldn’t hold back a smile. Guess that thing about dogs being good judges of character is true, he thought. Did I do that to him, or was he like that before?

He glanced up at Vince, who was also smiling—for once he and Barry seemed to be thinking the same thing. “All right, I won’t mess with you,” he said. “For now,” he added with a wink. He turned and started walking away. “Mop’s in the mudroom, Bar,” he said over his shoulder.

“Fuck off.”

Vince chuckled and turned at the doorway. “Oh, don’t take the Yamaha to work yet,” he said, eyes bright with mischief. “We still need to work on the throttle and the clutch lever at least before it’s roadworthy, okay?” Tossing Barry a blazing grin he turned and left, whistling as he vanished into the rest of the house.

Barry stared after him, frozen in place. The motorcycle… the motorcycle was real? Even weirder, Barry could feel the genuine desire to work on the thing with him that had kindled when he’d mentioned the needed repairs. The impulse felt foreign in him, like a barium injection to give false coloring to a CT scan.

“Was all that… normal?” he heard Kevin ask uncertainly.

Barry was still staring at the empty doorway. “The bike thing,” he said resolutely. “That was not normal.” He paused. “Engines and motors suck.” He heard himself say the words, but suddenly, inexplicably, for the first time in his life they felt like a lie. What the hell, he thought.

“Just the bike thing?” Kevin asked. He sounded slightly incredulous.

Barry turned to him with a small smile, noting the line between Kevin’s brows (barely visible under the hair). Well, probably Kevin wasn’t used to the kind of cock appreciation he and his brother practiced around here, but knowing Kevin and his finely tuned sex drive Barry thought he’d get with the routine quick enough.

“I really do have to work today,” he told him. “I work at the Grahamburgers on Union. You know it?”

Kevin nodded.

“Do you want to stay here, or come with?”

Kevin didn’t have to think about it. “Come with,” he said immediately.

Barry smiled. “Cool.” He glanced at the obvious bulge in Kevin’s jeans, remembering the change he’d induced in his redheaded workmate. “I’ll introduce you to my buddy Joey. He’ll like you.”

Kevin grinned, catching Barry’s drift. Barry leaned in for a kiss, and Kevin responded eagerly. It wasn’t like the kisses with Vince, but then nothing could be. It was very nice though, and his still-hard cock jerked against the smeared mess of his cum-slicked skin.

The kiss ended naturally, and Barry turned to his soggy cereal with a sigh. Getting up, he went to the sink (taking care to avoid the puddles of cum) and tossed the glop of sodden Cheerios and sugary milk down the dispose-all, then dropped back down in his seat to pour himself a new bowl and start over. Vince really was a colossal pain.

The restaurant looked pretty much dead as they headed up the concrete walk to the main entrance doors. That would be, in Barry’s experience, pretty much normal around one on a Sunday. Their regulars tended to work in the nearby business district, which around here was shut up like a tomb on Sundays. They did get a bit of a shopping rush most midafternoons from the department stores and strip malls up Union—these tended to be either impatient to-go orders or folks with bags and smartphones parking at the big tables for hours gassing on about their booty and each other’s wayward besties—but the upscale Paradise Towne Centre where Barry had met Kevin, got the bulk of the weekend crowd. There weren’t any big churches nearby, either, so they didn’t get the cheapskate after-services multitudes that apparently plagued the luncheonette diner where his chatty classmate Wendy worked. Daytrippers headed to the beach a half-hour east tended to patronize the Grahamburger’s on the state highway leading out of town, not this one. Nobody doing anything fun went to this place, Barry thought wryly.

Sure enough, on entering the place he saw the registers were completely bare of customers. Workers, too, as it happened, though there was movement in the back, so the place wasn’t completely postapocalyptic and abandoned. The large public area, divided in twain on either side of the main doors, together sported exactly one occupant: a quiet, skinny stubble-chinned thirtysomething all in black was tucked behind a laptop in one of the corner booths in the west side seating area, a large coffee and a half-eaten breakfast burger steaming away next to him as he typed.

Barry recognized him. The guy came in a lot to use the wi-fi, clatter away on his keyboard, and generally bask in the ambiance. He always ordered food, too, which was nice (not always the case with the laptop crowd), and made sure to thank the counter help, Barry, Joey, or whoever, with a smile and a soft word. Barry thought his name was Noel. He looked up as Barry passed and gave him a friendly head tilt, his gaze sliding down the well-filled-out uniform to the wad of mostly-soft equipment subtly pushing out the fly of his work trousers before guiltily jumping back up, his expression sheepish and apologetic. Par for the course with Noel, and Barry was happy to get all the fuckability affirmation he could when he was out of his hunkier, hotter brother’s considerable shadow.

Barry rewarded him with a rakish smile and a quick wave as they moved past him, making for the tills. His confidence in his physical appearance felt slightly out of character, oddly. Barry wasn’t quite sure why that would be. He was decently built, he had nice hair, a great butt, and a package that was deserving of the attention it got. The latent impulse to be awkward and reticent was out of kilter, more in keeping with someone skinnier and more nondescript. He wasn’t some diffident, 7-inch-dicked twink—was he?

Fucking Vince. Even when he wasn’t around he was bad for Barry’s sangfroid.

He glanced over at Kevin, who’d taken out the AirPods he’d been wearing in the car and was looking around at everything with a big grin as they covered the distance to the counter. Barry was immediately cheered just by the sight of him and his comforting proximity. “You like?”

Kevin turned his grin on Barry, making him instinctively reach out and stroke his back through the tie-dyed tee. He nodded happily. “It’s nice!”

“Uh huh. And is this your first ever fast food restaurant?”

Kevin rolled his eyes, still grinning. Barry laughed, ruffling his sandy-blond hair a little. The place was nice, actually, as sit-down restaurants went. The tiled floors, tables, and other fixtures were spotlessly clean to the point of gleaming, which went a long way toward making people comfortable and relaxed as they settled in to eat. Barry was one of the people who did the sweeping and scrubbing, and the fact that everyone seemed committed to a sparkling-clean dining experience made it as much about pride as about drudgery. Being the only one who cared would have been a real drag, but Miguel, Joey, and Iryna wielded the mops and spray bottles as diligently as he did.

It wasn’t just the cleaning regime. Nothing was especially worn out, outmoded, or scarred from years of use. Battered or damaged tables were replaced, and the generic artwork was rotated out and new equally bland but colorful pieces were put up instead more or less yearly. The tendency to keep things up to date thankfully extended to the kitchen as well; everything was in good order and properly repaired—even the ice cream machines. The pay was decent, too, if not ludicrously generous—enough that he could feel like he was contributing his full share to the household expenses. And then there were his fellow employees. Things had taken a turn there recently—probably for the good, though they say there are always ramifications to evolving a coworker relationship that tend to show up when you least expect it.

It wasn’t a bad place to work. Apart from having to deal with certain customers, he amended mentally with a grimace. Retail food service didn’t always expose you to the best sides of people.

There was still no one at the registers when they arrived. Barry slapped his hand a few times on the counter like some of the more obnoxious patrons did. “Hello! Anybody home?” he called cheerily into the back. “I require service here!”

Morose Miguel looked up from cleaning the cook surface and gave him a beady look. “Fuck off,” he shot back. He got back to cleaning, clearly hiding a barely-there smile. Kevin snickered behind his hand.

Barry gasped theatrically. “I demand to speak to the manager!”

“I am the manager,” Miguel shouted back, not turning around this time.

Barry winked at Kevin and said, “Wait here.” Keying in the passcode to the side door leading into the kitchen he headed back to slap Miguel on the shoulder. “How’s it going, bro?”

“Dead,” Miguel answered shortly. “Even the drive-through. One car in the last hour.”

“At least you’ve got Noel,” Barry said playfully.

“Pfft. Pretty boy poser,” Miguel pretend-scoffed, resuming his scrubbing. His shoulder felt powerful under Barry’s hand. The lanky 24-year-old shift supervisor wasn’t especially good-looking, but he seemed strong in a lean, bare-knuckles sort of way.

“Look who’s talking,” Barry teased.

“Suuure,” Miguel huffed good-naturedly.

Barry felt a sudden, overpowering impulse and immediately wanted to act on it. He needed to check his app-given mojo. He hadn’t done anything since he’d turned Kevin. It felt like a lot had happened since then, though he knew it had only been yesterday afternoon.

Or… had he done something else since? He didn’t remember much from the night before, and most of it was Vince speaking, Vince’s lips, not his own. That whisky, though. He could have—

No. He’d remember. He had a vague feel for all the things he’d done so far, stored away somewhere in his head. Still… the urge to make sure he could still work this ability was close to irresistible.

He shifted his grip on Miguel’s shoulder, using it to gently turn the man toward him. “Hey, Miguel? I want you to listen to me for a second. Okay?”

Miguel’s brown eyes lifted to Barry’s and seemed to stick there. Everything seemed to slowly still around them.

Barry felt a small shiver slide up his spine. Was he really going to do this? He’d started the whole thing with the sockboner app became he’d wanted to force Vince to smooth the edges of his behavior toward him, but the way he’d actually shifted that guy Cass’s appearance—not only altering his attitude toward working out but retroactively redirecting his physical progress so he’d become swole in seconds—that had been such a rush.

Could he do more?

How far did that kind of physical retcon go? Maybe he only retroactively strengthened Cass’s predisposition to work out. That’s what he’d thought at first, but now he wasn’t so sure. Had his sockboner ability actually amended Cass’s physical form? He swallowed, the bulge of his thick cock plumping in his shorts.

He tried to remember the exact wording from the sockboner ini file, but the text was oddly blurred as if he wasn’t meant to remember them exactly. Something about making people do things? What if one of the things he could make them do was physically change?

After all, he reasoned, brains were just chemicals and cells. Changing people’s mental states was a physical change. If that was true, hadn’t he already proven he was making physical changes?

The distracting sensations from his straining, balled-up cock inevitably got him thinking along phallic lines. If a person with this power could nudge physical states as well as mental ones, they could give someone, say, a fat twelve-inch just like Barry’s… Even nudge it to grow under certain circumstances…

There was something about that idea—giving someone a Barry-like cock. Something lurking, pressing and ominously close to the surface in the morass of his confused mind. The raw eroticism of a reality-shifted cock, though, distracted every part of his equally worked-up body and mind.

He pressed his lips between his teeth, wavering. He was scared and feverishly aroused, all at once. Before he knew it he had started speaking again, entirely on impulse.

“You know… you know that you’re really good-looking, right, Miguel?” he said, holding his gaze as he lightly squeezed the man’s shoulder. His heart was pounding in his chest. “Like, incredibly handsome. Your genetics—”

He hesitated. Convincing Miguel he was good-looking was easy. He knew he could do that. He could feel the energy between them: it was like a strand of low-key warmth connecting them, making the words true behind Miguel’s dark brown eyes. Could he really reach in further to Miguel’s being, to his very DNA or whatever?

“—your genetics fell out in such a way to produce, well, an ideally attractive man. You know this, you feel this. You embody this truth.”

Barry felt a twinge of frustration listening to his random spellwork. He was doing it wrong. The strand was thickening, intensifying—something was happening, but… this was all too abstract. Maybe if he grounded it more in examples and raw everyday experience, it would feel more concrete, or something.

“I mean, people are turned on merely from seeing your face, dude,” he continued, holding Miguel’s unwavering stare. “We got people coming here just to look at you and swoon if you toss ’em a smile. Folks want to stare at you, make out with you. You’re—”

Barry’s mouth went dry as he realized Miguel’s previously mundane face was subtly shifting as he watched, as though he were gradually being blended with an alternate-universe version of himself. His skin smoothed, the pores tightening and a pair of light pock-marks melting away into nothing. His forehead lengthened, though barely perceptibly, a few microns at most. His eyebrows became cleaner but were still dark and dramatic, emphasizing the intensity of his gaze.

The changes were immensely subtle and seemed to be part of the most gossamer-delicate symphony. Miguel’s facial structure was moving toward greater symmetry and classical ideals at microscopic levels as though navigating across the osmotic boundaries between infinitesimally near-identical Miguels. Solid reality was finding a subjective alignment with abstract aesthetics. The details were fascinating to track and catalog. Miguel’s dark, nearly black hair filled out, thickening and lengthening slightly, with muted highlights appearing that ranged into a deep, dark mahogany. The line of his jaw firmed ever so slightly as he watched. His faint cheekbones rose subtly as well; this, like the sleekening of the eyebrows, also highlighted the eyes, which seemed to brighten somehow with latent intelligence and expressiveness despite their temporarily unfocused state. His nose was now ever so slightly less pronounced, the nostrils more even and uniform. His lips became more alluring in a way Barry couldn’t quite put a finger on, manly and slightly redder, like they were stained with dark wine. They were parted slightly, showing perfect teeth. The barest ghost of waiting stubble shaded his caramel skin along his jaw, chin, and upper lip. A dusting of silky hair curled in the open vee of his uniform shirt.

Barry realized he’d stalled in his hypno-change-o spiel, momentarily entranced. He had to keep going. Remembering his brother’s attitude, in no small part the result of his exceptional appearance, he stammered to add, “Y-you’re not going to be a dick about it, of course. Right? Right.” He cleared his throat, feeling self-conscious in his unskilled control of the change. Good thing they were alone back here. He hoped they were alone! He couldn’t look around now—that would break the spell, or, at least, he was pretty sure it would.

“Um, yeah. You’re a good guy, people love you, uh, yadda yadda.” Dumbass! he chastised himself. How the fuck could the sockboner power make sense of “yadda yadda”? “O-okay, I’m—I’m done.” He flushed, embarrassed and edgy.

The newly handsome (and possibly still morose) Miguel blinked, once, then twice. His tongue slid out unconsciously as he seemed to mentally come into focus, licking along the upper lip, and Barry’s coiled-up cock tried painfully to get instantly all the way hard in his underwear. Bending to necessity, he gave it a hasty adjustment with the heel of his free hand so it was vertical and free to go about its business.

Miguel was now staring right back into Barry’s eyes, his gaze acute and knowing as his too-enticing lips twisted in a friendly smirk. He probably did not need to look down to know what was going on in Barry’s lower regions. “Getting a good look?” he asked.

Barry was genuinely having trouble looking away. That glint in those vivid-brown eyes was almost luminous. “How can I not?” he breathed distractedly.

Miguel’s stunning handsomeness was not just in the face. “Really good looking” was apparently a full-body command. This upgraded version of Miguel was a sex bomb—the whole package, head to toe, even in the stupid uniform of a Grahamburgers peon. He wasn’t any more built than before, really—Barry probably had more actual muscle than Miguel even now, let alone Brad or Vince—but he was so toned and tightened and exquisitely well-proportioned, Barry wanted to draw him. Or sculpt him. Or maybe just lick him in various strategically chosen places.

Wait—could I make someone a brilliant artist or something? Barry thought abruptly, his brain finding another mental tangent to follow as he dove deeper into those compelling eyes. Artistic talent seemed like a combination of physical and mental, so maybe that would be a good test to try out…

“Dude, don’t waste your assets on the straight boys,” he heard Joey snark from behind him.

Belatedly realizing he still had a hand on Miguel’s shoulder, he quickly disengaged and finally took a step back.

“Fuck you, I’m bi,” Miguel told the tall redhead with a casual smile. Barry started—this was news to him. Had he known Miguel was bi before? He’d been pretty sure he’d been straight, with a wife and everything. Hadn’t he?

Miguel, meanwhile, remained oblivious to Barry’s latest bout of reality-shifting existential worry. “Anyway, I know all about dick-boy here and his ‘assets,’” the hot supervisor went on, nodding his chin toward the obvious erection pushing steadily up Barry’s torso under his uniform shirt with another relaxed smirk. “I just don’t think my husband would appreciate me doing anything about it. Or my wife,” he added with a wink.

“Yeah, yeah,” Joey said, as if he heard this all the time. “Hot guys get all the polyamory, what else is new.”

Miguel’s expression sharpened as if he’d been reminded of something on his list of supervisory headaches. He aimed a remonstrative finger at both of them. “Speaking of assets,” he said, “you two need to be more considerate in the fucking walk-in.”

The change in topic caught Barry off-guard. He and Joey exchanged a delighted look. “The… fucking walk-in?” Barry repeated, grinning.

“Is that what we’re calling it now?” Joey chimed in.

Miguel’s sexy eyes danced under his dark brows, but he doggedly continued his scolding. “I’m serious,” he said. “The cum gets gooey in there and it’s gross. If I have to clean up any more damn puddles—”

Joey grinned wide, his eyes drifting automatically to Barry’s tall, erect cock. It had reached the full extent of its thick, rigid footlong hardness, and the results were creating quite a bulge under Barry’s orange pinstripe uniform shirt. “Don’t worry,” he promised, leering lovingly at Barry’s major-league twunk tool. “There won’t be any excess next time.” Barry blushed again.

Miguel grunted. “See that there isn’t,” he said, the edges of his lips quirking as he tossed the cleaning cloth into the sink. “Now go watch the front.”

Barry huffed and slid an arm around his extra-tall, cock-hungry ginger suckbuddy coworker. “C’mon, meet my friend,” he said, guiding him to the counter. Kevin had his back to them, humming to himself as he looked around. Barry noticed Noel sneaking a glance at his boyish new housemate and smiled.

Hearing them approach, Kevin turned and beamed at them, avidly taking in Joey’s fit, lanky frame and the barely hidden pillar erupting from Barry’s work pants. “Another appreciator of the finer things,” Joey remarked approvingly. “You seem surrounded by guys who know a hot dick when they see one. Must be your magic touch!”

Barry’s breath caught at the random remark. Coming on the heels of Miguel (possibly?) suddenly turning bi, the idea that there might be truth to what Joey had said made his stomach twist a little. Consciously using his ability was something he was trying to be careful about, even if not all his words were exactly planned. But if he was doing things to guys without even knowing it—! Once again he was conscious of his hand and the way it was resting firmly on his friend’s long, sexy back.

He shook his head, not dropping his hand. “Uh, yeah, well, it’s hard to ignore quality,” he said lamely. “Joey, this is Kevin.”

“Dude,” Joey said in greeting. Kevin just smiled happily at them.

“You want anything, Kev?” Barry said, using ordinary banalities to work through his intense arousal, at least a little. “It’s on me.”

“It will be on you,” Joey muttered salaciously under his breath. Barry tried to ignore him.

Kevin hesitated, then shook his head. Barry was not buying it. “C’mon, what?” he pressed.

“A shake?” Kevin said tentatively, as if this might be asking too much.

“Of course,” Barry said. He logged into the register in front of him and found the shake button. He looked up. “Chocolate?”

Kevin shook his head vigorously, looking alarmed. “No chocolate.”

Barry nodded. “Right, of course. Chocolate is… bad for you…” he said, trailing off as he remembered that he’d accidentally all but made Kevin into a human puppy. Could that possibly have extended to physical canine characteristics like intolerance to chocolate? Really? No. That was ridiculous. Kevin just… didn’t like chocolate. That had to be all it was. “Uh, yeah, okay. Strawberry good?”

Kevin grinned. “Strawberry good,” he repeated.

Barry finished keying it in, hitting the employee comp button. Two down, he thought. He got five full comps a month, and he’d already used one for the meal he’d ended up handing over to his brother, a couple of nights before. Dickhead, he thought reflexively. Even so his hard cock squeezed at the uninvited memory of the hot kiss they’d shared that morning, Vince making his cock instahard and messy out of those ketchup-red, just-for-hanging-out-at-home gym shorts.

Joey, his mind on a similar track, had reverted to staring fixedly down at Barry’s poorly-hidden footlong wonder-cock. “You know, Bar,” he said, “I just realized that the chocolate mix actually needs to be swapped out on the milkshake machine. I’m just going to go in back and get that, okay?”

Barry felt his skin heating up as his need to cum intensified yet another notch. “Uh, sure,” he said shakily. “Gimme a sec to make Kev’s shake and I’ll, uh, help you out with that.”

Kevin’s grin was getting even wider. “I can wait,” he said, oh-so-innocently.

Joey let out a breath. “Good man!” he said briskly, a hint of genuine gratitude in his crooked smile. Grabbing Barry by the arm, Joey guided his equally horny coworker firmly toward the back and into the newly-christened “fucking walk-in,” while a resigned-looking Miguel went up front to make Kevin his non-chocolate milkshake.

A couple of hours later, Barry was ringing up a nice lesbian couple passing through town looking for a nice urban house to move to when their jobs transferred here. He turned away to get their drinks, pausing to check on Kevin. He still seemed happy to hang out here while Barry worked, which baffled him a little. He wished he were that easily contented. Earlier he’d been playing some game on his phone, but now Barry found him in the far corner chatting up Laptop Boy, aka Noel. The black-clad regular was notoriously bashful and closed-mouthed, but Kevin was so easy to talk to he seemed to be drawing him out. Barry thought he should feel jealous, but he didn’t.

He grinned as he realized what he was feeling. It was like when your dog was all friendly and went up to other people when they were all scowly and made a smile come out from behind the clouds, and you felt nothing but pride and the fortune of getting to know this creature and gain its love and simple, unbreakable loyalty. Kevin had to have been like that before, at least some, because him being like that was so Kevin.

The main doors opened, and a new customer walked in. Barry frowned. What was he doing here? He never came here, not while Barry was working. Turning his back on the man approaching the counter, he focused on making a large lemon soda and a medium cherry cola. He set them in front of the lesbian couple as they waited by the pickup area, comparing notes on the houses they’d seen so far, and reluctantly turned back to the register.

“What can I get you?” he asked his brother’s obnoxious best friend, Brad.

Brad rolled his shoulders, looking uncomfortable. As always, he was wearing a thin white tank top that seemed meant to show off his thickly rounded delts and bulging traps, not to mention his bulky arms, inhuman intercostals, and boldly flared lats. His obsession with minimizing body fat showed in the sharpness of every cut and the extreme striation of his delts. Veins snaked along his biceps and forearms. Rippling abs showed through the snug cotton fabric, too.

Oddly the overall effect was to reduce attention to his firm, thumb-thick, completely hairless pecs. These were duly impressive, of course, certainly bigger than Barry’s thick but twunky chest, but because of everything else they came across as almost small in proportion to his shoulders and arms. They were certainly not as mouthwateringly thick and rounded as Vince’s, that was for sure.

His curly brown hair had been trimmed, and the goatee was new as of a week or so ago. It suited him, Barry admitted reluctantly to himself. The guy might have been good-looking, even remarkably so, for an ape anyway, if it weren’t for the fallback expression of disdain and the easy tendency to sneer at anyone who wasn’t a meathead like him.

Right now, Brad wasn’t sneering. Instead, he was staring daggers at Barry, like Barry had stolen his prized set of Tonka trucks as a kid and Brad had sworn eternal vengeance.

They glared at each other for a full minute before Barry gritted his teeth and repeated, “What can I get you?” He emphasized each word, staring Brad down and letting him know he wasn’t about to be pushed around.

“Burger,” Brad said tersely.

Barry’s lip curled. That really narrowed it down. “What kind?” he spat, his low simmer starting to heat up to a slow boil.

“Cheese. Burger.”

Barry gritted his teeth. It had been a good day. The sun was shining, he had good friends, he’d made a guy a really hot, and he was still feeling the lingering afterglow of his second mutual round of blowjobs with Joey in the walk-in. His dick was still happy and 90 percent hard against his abs, wanting a third go. He didn’t need this.

Off to his left, he heard Joey tell the couple he’d been serving to have a good day, and he sensed them moving off, heading for the east dining area. He and Brad were soon alone at the counter.

He leaned forward aggressively. “What are you really doing here, Brad?” he hissed. He pronounced “Brad” as if he were really saying “shithead.”

Brad’s gaze was locked with his. He looked angry and confused. “I don’t know,” he ground out. Then his voice became stilted and monotone, almost robotic. “I’m supposed to go to the Grahamburgers downtown and find you and make you steal my dick.”

Shocked, Barry started to say something, but Brad kept going, still in that scary toneless voice. “I’m supposed to say, ‘Vince says do it’.”

Something shifted in Barry, and he knew there was no getting out of this. It was a command. The truth of it was in his bones. Under these circumstances, with the trigger tripped, he had no choice but to do what he was told.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t be fucking furious about it. He leaned forward even closer, neither of them able to look away. “You listen to me, dickwad,” he said, his voice low and vicious.

Instantly, Brad’s muddy hazel eyes went glassy, his receptiveness total and complete.

Barry took a shaking breath, his rage riding him like a jockey. He wanted to vomit words of acid back at Brad—that he had never had a dick, that everyone had laughed at him, that he’d lived through high school in misery and the solace of working out was his only refuge. As adrenaline surged through him, though, he knew that course of action was wrong—not because he didn’t hate Brad but because the real target of his fury had to be Vince. After deluding himself into thinking Vince was capable to treating him nicely just because he liked Barry’s cock, the veil was ripped aside and the ugly truth revealed. Vince was doing this, jerking them both around on his strings like a fucking puppeteer.

But Barry wasn’t the same sad sack push-over he’d been a mere week earlier. Whatever else had happened, Barry was now confident enough in himself that tolerating Vince playing him like this was beyond his capabilities.

Steal his dick, huh? he thought viciously. Watch this. There was more than one way to fuck an asshole.

“Your dick isn’t yours to control,” he said, enunciating clearly so that neither Brad’s soul nor Barry’s ability would have any excuse to misunderstand. “Anyone gets hard around you, it gets hard. You’re near an erection, it erects. It’s always been that way. You have no control. Got it?”

“No control,” Brad barely rasped, almost mouthing the words. He was panting lightly, as though this were causing him some kind of exertion. It was Barry whose temples were damp with sweat, however. He ignored it.

“Also,” he pressed, digging in, “you started noticing around puberty that every time it gets hard from being around another boner it gets a tiny, tiny bit bigger. You can’t control that, either. It—it—”

As Brad stared into Barry’s eyes, nervous somehow despite his zombielike blankness, Barry became aware of something moving in his peripheral vision. It became clear a moment later when Brad’s cock grew into view, gradually catching up with Barry’s retroactive transformation in the same way Miguel had become gradually more handsome. It pushed between Brad’s pecs, riding his cleavage almost up to the notch in his collarbone. Barry got a chance to glimpse the uncut, arrowhead-shaped glans before the cockhead and upper shaft were suddenly hidden by a damp, new-looking athletic sock.

A sockboner, Barry thought, wanting to laugh. The implications of the word hadn’t quite hit him before. A genuine, honest-to-goodness sockboner. Not that the sock really hides—

A split second later Brad acquired a thin brick-red zip-up jacket, as if the practical, socially enforced need to hide his cock had finally overpowered his deep craving for eyeball muscle worship. It was zipped halfway up, Brad’s pecs and towering tool still showing in the open upper half.

The appearance of the jacket was intriguing. Barry wanted to look at Vince’s camera roll, just to see all the tank-top shots of Brad replaced with Brad wearing a zip-up jacket and an unwanted rosy tint to his cheeks.

The cock was all Barry could see. “It’s—it’s irresistible,” he stammered, unable to look away from it. An instinct for self-protection finally reared itself in his consciousness and he amended, “—to everyone but me. You’ll know they know. You’ll know I know.” He drew in a breath. “Everyone senses it when it’s hard and no matter how much you hide it people want to touch it and lick it and suck it—me excluded.”

“Lick it and suck it,” Brad echoed in a whisper. He licked his lips unconsciously—Brad was “people” too, Barry realized. Suddenly Barry was all the way hard under his shirt. Brad’s cock responded, flexing and stiffening to full erection in turn. Fuck, even without the compulsion Barry wanted that delicious giant cock in his mouth.

He grinned. Vince was going to see that cock very soon, and he would not walk away so easily. Fucker.

“Also,” he hissed impulsively, “you’re a really good artist and can draw anything as well as you want.”

“Really good artist,” Brad repeated, blinking owlishly. Yeah, suck on that, sketch boy.

“Brad, you will forget everything Vince told you about why you were coming here and what I would do. You’ll forget why you are here and everything that just happened. You came here because you were hungry and you wanted a Bacon Grahamburger Deluxe. Understand?”

“Bacon Grahamburger Deluxe,” Brad repeated mechanically.

Angrily, Barry punched in the order. He wanted to adjust his now-raging hardon, maybe jerk it a few times until he came all over Brad’s face. He sighed. He’d just have to find Joey as soon as he had another break.

He looked up again into Brad’s trance-dulled eyes. “Okay,” he said firmly. “I’m done.”

Brad blinked. He looked around, then down at himself. Grimacing, he pulled up the zip on his light jacket to hide his pec-fucking boner. Pressing his lips together, he looked up and seemed to notice Barry for the first time. “Oh,” he said. “Uh, hey.”

Barry let out a breath. His anger was now all fully compartmentalized against Vince, leaving him free to be human, at least, to Brad. “Hey.”

“Uh, what did I—?”

“Bacon Grahamburger Deluxe,” Barry said calmly, nodding at the customer-side display screen.

“Oh yeah,” Brad said, as if dimly remembering the reason he had come here, despite how uncomfortable he tended to be around Barry. Especially when he was hard.

“You want the combo?”

“Uh, yeah. To go,” he added hurriedly, heading off the possibility of his fleeing being delayed any longer than necessary. He pulled out his wallet. Barry finished the order and gave him his total. Brad tapped his card, and Barry went to get his food, unavoidably aware of the chest-high uncontrollable cock he had just induced in this man who was the least favorite non-sibling person in his life.

A few moments later and Brad was gone, food in hand and jacket tightly zipped. Barry leaned on the counter, staring after him. The implications of what had just happened were stacking up.

Vince knew about the sockboner powers. But it was more than that. Somehow, inside Barry there was a switch Vince could flip with a single verbal command—a verbal command that, terrifyingly, could be spoken by anyone, at any time. The indirect control seemed to be weak enough it left Barry some leeway for subjective interpretation, but that the switch was there was incontrovertible.

That means one of two things, he told himself. Either Vince got me drunk and made me give him the sockboner powers somehow, or…

He shuddered. Or… Vince found the app on my computer and fucking used it on himself.

Barry remembered the strange dreams that had seemed almost real. The inexplicable desire to work on the blue Yamaha Vince had brought home for him from the shop, despite him still hating engines and shit—either a sloppy oversight on Vince’s part or a deliberate, taunting clue.

He remembered the shape of Vince’s sexy, kissable mouth as he spoke, face close, the night before. The sound was blurred out in his memories, but the shape of the words was clear.

Listen… to … me…

Barry’s stomach twisted sharply, though his cock was still thrilling with arousal, as if this whole situation was hot as fuck. Maybe it was.

He stared hard into the middle distance as he pressed his hands on the counter, eyes narrowing at nothing. I need to get him back for this, he thought grimly.

He would have to be careful. He and Vince both had hypno-change-o powers now, and Vince’s cocky, deeply ingrained self-assurance might give him an edge. A frontal attack would probably be disastrous. He’d have to plan this out exactly right.

A wicked grin spread across his face. Planning he could do. Maybe he hadn’t shown it so far—his dealings with the sockboner app had been reckless from start to finish. That was all in the past. He was an honors-level comp-sci major. Setting up a series of commands and conditions to produce the desired outcome was in his blood.

Joey’s hand slid up Barry’s back, and Barry resurfaced a little, enough to see that the little rush was over. “That is the angriest ‘asset’ I’ve ever seen,” Joey purred. “You want me to help you with that again, dick boy?”

Barry turned to look at Joey, consigning the gears of revenge turn on their own in the back of his head as he leered up at his well-hung, cock-fixated friend. “Fuck yeah,” he said.

Barry stood tensely at the register, eyes on the big analog clock over the fryer. The last minutes of his shift were ticking down, vanishing into the eternal nothing.

Barry’s shifts were shorter on Sundays, owing to the restaurant closing earlier than it did other nights (ten instead of two). They got a decent after-midnight drive-through crowd on weeknights and Saturdays, but Sundays overnights had been a wasteland and management had moved the close up to cut costs. Generally he found this shortened shift slightly awkward and irksome, if only because it meant either going early home to Vince or killing time not going home to Vince.

Killing time was a drag. With everything closed, the campus library included, not going home meant driving around aimlessly, trying not to think about gas prices and the transmission issues that had been playing up lately, until he finally went home anyway. Going home to Vince meant having the two of them there in the house and aware of each other, even if Barry managed to lock himself in his room coding or surfing (or jerking off). Of course, he corrected himself, his door had no lock (Had it always been like that? It had, right?) and by “locked in his room” he really meant sequestering himself in his room, or intending to be sequestered. If Vince was bored some nights he might seek Barry out and make him cum over and over again, repaying him with long, deep kisses that thrilled Barry on a level he didn’t understand, before loping off to his own room with a self-satisfied smirk.

Most of his life, Vince had been annoying; then, annoying and distracting; then, once he was past 18, it progressed to annoying, distracting, and smugly cock-attentive. The house they shared should have smelled like sweat and engine grease, but instead the air was filled with arousal and the lingering scent of manly spunk no amount of cross-ventilation could entirely remove. Most of it was Barry’s. It couldn’t be all his—Vince had to get off sometimes, right?

And yet, whenever they were sitting on the couch watching action movies, or eating in the kitchen, or nestled placidly in Barry’s bedroom doomscrolling and cumming after a Vince-invasion, it was always Barry spurting those bucketloads of spunk—either onto his chest, or (like this morning) making a mess on the floor, or into Barry’s own mouth. Vince enjoyed seeing Barry self-pleasure his long 12-inch tool, the upper third of which he could get into his mouth rather easily these days. Meanwehile, though obviously hard himself Vince never exposed his dick, or came, or even partook of the bitter sprays of Barry-semen he seemed to find so endlessly entertaining to witness being produced. The closest he came was occasionally deep-kissing Barry after Barry had gulped down some of his own load for this audience of one, and those rare occasions of Vince tasting cum on Barry’s tongue had been the fodder for many solitary fantasies.

Barry’s hands clenched into fists as he leaned on the counter, a tickle of resolve forming in him. Maybe there was something he could do about the inequity of their spurting. He could, totally could, use his sockboner power to make it so Barry wasn’t the only one in the house cumming his brains out all the time. Sure, it felt amazing—cumming on command felt twice as good as bringing himself off, for some reason. It was even a few notches better than getting diligently sucked by an expert fellator like Joey or Kevin. But the bottom line was this: everything to do with their physical relations was about Vince, as though Vince had engineered it all just to fuck with Barry.

Well, screw that. It was high time to turn the tables on his smug, casual-cockhound brother.

As though feeling the attention of his brooding, Barry’s long tool throbbed under his shirt, straining against his loose waistband. It was achingly hard, again, which struck him as ridiculous if not perverse. Joey had sucked him off three times already since he’d got here. The last time, Barry had been so in need of release Joey’d roped Kevin in and brought him back to the walk-in (past an eye-rolling Hot Miguel) for maximum surface-area coverage on Barry’s mighty, indomitable shlong. He was still feeling the tingling from that round. It had barely been half an hour ago, for fuck’s sake—and yet his balls and cock wanted more.

An unwelcome thought came to him. Maybe his junk didn’t just want to cum—maybe it wanted to cum for Vince. Screw that, too. He shoved the idea away angrily just as his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, glad for the distraction himself.

Paul: Dude we gotta finish that project for data comm

Paul: Can we meet tonight at yours after you’re off work

Paul: { ? yes : no }

Paul: A little ternary humor for you

Barry made a grumbly noise in the back of his throat, cursing the wiles of fate for listening to his mental kvetching. A new option had appeared, but Barry didn’t feel like it was much of an improvement. He liked Paul well enough. He was tall and skinny and stood close to you when he talked and smelled like coconuts, which was the main fact he retained about Paul (since most of the guys in his program he knew that weren’t great with personal space smelled like old sweat socks). But the Data Communications course they had together was kicking Barry’s ass, and Paul, while more adept with information connectivity, wasn’t self-confident enough to carry the two-person group project they’d been assigned for the both of them.

Fuck data comm, anyway. Give him web dev or interface design and he’d ace every assignment before you could say “upload,” but anything involving networks and protocols and physical connections between actual machines left him cold. Thus the group project and Barry’s procrastination, and now the thing was due this week and Paul was fretting.

He couldn’t leave Paul out in the cold any longer, anyway. Making another little noise in his throat he responded to the text with a suitably passive-aggressive “Fine” and shoved his phone back in his pocket. A calming distraction was what he needed.

Instinctively he looked around for Kevin. He scanned the empty restaurant, his gaze landing on the far corner table. As before, it was the only one occupied. Noel still being there this late was something of an anomaly, but he seemed unwilling to leave Kevin’s company. He’d even had another writer friend drop in. Amusingly, the newcomer was almost a clone of Noel down to his dark clothes and sexily unshaven chin; though his hair was shorter and more tamed than Noel’s curly shock, and his expression was a shade more sardonic than their normally shy regular’s tended to be. Maybe Noel was part of a whole coven of interchangeable internet novelists whose adepts never actually produced any text—just more members.

Unsurprisingly, the two of them were clustered around Kevin in the booth, all attention on the messy-haired goof in the loose tie-dyed tee as he told a story with his hands. (About what? Barry wondered. Bathroom sex at the mall? Breakfast bro-kisses?) His vivid attire was a comical contrast to the more dour clothing and mien of the other two. Equally as expected, the boy was beaming under the attention as the two fawned over him, ignoring their laptops and the half-eaten round of cheesy crinkle-fries Barry had brought them half an hour before.

Barry smiled despite himself. Had Noel contacted his friend with the human-Kevin equivalent of “Come look at the puppy”? That would be hilarious. At this point Barry wasn’t sure how much of this canine stuff was real and how much he was projecting onto Kevin out of his own sense of guilt from nonconsensually changing him, but he was enjoying it, and he knew his brain would probably keep doing it. He was responsible for Kevin now, and honestly he wasn’t sure he would roll that back if he could. Not completely, anyway.

He’d been standing there for a while watching the trio in a sort of unfocused, nonspecific way when his phone buzzed again. This time, he felt a twinge of foreboding. He pulled it out. Sure enough, it was Vince.

Vince: Want to work on the Yamaha tonight? ;)

Barry stared at the screen, new embers of irritation kindling in him. His own reactions bugged him, because… fuck it, he did want to work on the secondhand blue beauty Vince had brought home for him. (According to the fragments he remembered, Vince had recently assumed ownership of the bike after the shop had grudgingly taken it in payment for extensive repairs to some suddenly insolvent cokehead’s tricked-out BMW. Then the cokehead had been shipped off the pen, probably never to be seen or financially viable again.)

In his head, Barry could see the insides of that engine—both the real working and the schematics he’d apparently worked out in some unconscious part of his brain that now thought about engines even when he didn’t want it to. He yearned to get his hands in there and feel how it worked and it irked him how wrong that craving was. It was so obviously a planted thought, it might have well have had a sign and an arrow pointing to it like “look here” directives from an old Chuck Jones cartoon.

Under any other circumstances, his unwonted yen for gears and grease under his nails would have been stark evidence in support of whatever conspiracy theory Barry found most believable—aliens, CIA, hyperintelligent geckos, whatever. As it was, Barry could only suspect Vince. The afternoon’s reveal of the trigger words “Vince says,” which had to have been previously embedded in him long before Brad had been sent in on his little mission, was the clincher. This had been done to him.

Okay, yeah, from a certain perspective he knew wanting to muck about with a motorcycle was a silly thing to feel rage over. Not only that, Barry wasn’t so lacking in self-awareness as to be unaware of how vastly hypocritical it was for him to cultivate umbrage over someone using their secret, illicit sockboner powers to alter him without his knowledge. That dissonance he ruthlessly compartmentalized to deal with later, because ultimately this was about Vince. His smug, bullying, super-sexy and distracting older brother Vince had done this. And because it was Vince, it was not to be tolerated.

“Fuck you,” he typed. He knew he was showing his hand, letting Vince know he knew the engine thing was alt-Barry, but he was pretty much done.

Vince: LOL

Barry seethed, staring at his phone, his boner and his friends and the rest of the world all but forgotten. Vince probably was laughing out loud, which—given the progressive erosion of the idiomatic term—was probably pretty unusual in this day and age.

The dots danced, just for a second. Then came another text.

Vince: Are you hard? You are, aren’t you?

Barry’s footlong tool squeezed, striving to obey the instruction despite being already as hard as a steel bollard. Cold alarm filtered through Barry’s anger. He wasn’t going to—was he—?

More dots danced as dread curdled in his gut, then:

Vince: Make it cum for me, bro

“Shit!” Barry said aloud, tossing his phone on the counter with a clatter. He looked around frantically. The orgasm was already welling up in him—there was no time to get to the walk-in or anywhere safe. Desperately he dropped down behind the counter and ripped open his uniform shirt, hearing the ping of small plastic buttons as he exposed his twunky abs and pecs and his rosy, ragingly close cock. He thought about putting it in his mouth, but he couldn’t be sure he could swallow it all down with the amount he came. The main napkin trove was too far away, out of reach at the other end of the tills.

With no other recourse, he strained his hand toward the drink cups and managed to snag a large one off the end of the dispenser stack just as his need to climax plowed into him like a semi truck hydroplaning on an interstate at 90 miles an hour.

Sitting up a bit more behind the counter, he shoved his cock into a low enough angle that all of the spunk was spraying into the soda cup he had facing it, like he was trying to fill a water glass sideways from a garden hose fitted with a high-pressure sprayer attachment. Unable to hold back another second he released at last, the intense sprays of cum loudly hitting the paperboard interior of the cup in long, intermittent blasts.

Heat flooded through him and grudgingly let the double-strength pleasure of the commanded climax overtake him like always, the ecstasy sinking lava-deep into his muscles and bones like a birthright.

The pleasure ordeal ended, finally, and he slumped, closing his eyes and letting the base of the soda cup thunk on the tiled linoleum next to him. The substantial accumulation of semen within the cup warmed his hand through the wax-coated material, as his sated cock rested hot and turgid against his naturally chiseled lower abdomen, spitting out the desultory dregs of his protracted release.

It was a moment or two later before he was able to focus again. He looked up, only to find Joey and Miguel standing directly over him. Their arms were crossed over their chests, Miguel’s in genuine remonstration, Joey’s in a mocking parody of same.

“Seriously, Bar?” Miguel’s expression seemed to be saying. He was looking at him the way a teacher might after the third time you’d claimed the dog ate your homework.

Barry stared muzzily up at him, his euphoria-burred brain snagging on the full-body package of his now unnaturally attractive supervisor. Man, he’d really gone whole hog on that guy. Barry’s barely-softened prick actually twitched a little at the sight of him. His spouses were two lucky people. Next to him, the carrot-headed beanpole Joey looked like he could keep his eyes off the twelve-inch boner he loved fellating so much. That was a bit of post-nut turn-on, too.

He sensed other eyes on him and glanced the other way to see Noel, Kevin, and Noel’s unknown friend peering over the counter at him with various expressions ranging through surprise, relish, and admiration. Kevin was grinning, like he wanted a go at blasting his load in public behind the counter of a Grahamburger’s, too. After the food court bathroom and the walk-in it probably seemed like the next step.

“So,” Noel’s friend quipped, breaking the silence, “is that what you guys use for mayo around here?” Kevin giggled, and Noel’s eyes danced, as though intrigued by the idea. Barry gave them a narrow look.

Joey turned to Miguel. “Hey, boss where’s the monitor for the CCTV again?” he asked, trying to sound innocent and failing completely.

“None of that,” Miguel ground out. He reached a hand down and Barry took it, letting Miguel help him to his feet.

He still gripped the cum-filled soda cup in his other fist, he realized, and the rank smell of his spunk rising from it was like a visitation. Calmly, aware all eyes were on him, he grabbed a large-size drink lid from under the counter and fit it silently on the cup. The others watched with such obvious silent amusement, they might have been posing for a new range of sexy-boy emojis.

Barry closed his eyes for a second, stilling himself and trying to deal with the pounding demands of his emotions and impositions. The spectacle he’d made of himself felt larger than its seed, like a voracious chronobeast that had burst out of a heartbeat’s worth of frozen time. He still felt the double afterglow seeping through him and resented it, hating the pleasure of it and how much he wanted more. The stupid cup he was gripping in his hand felt like an avatar of his tribulation—a cum-filled fast food academy award honoring and commemorating everything that was fucked up in his life.

He could turn this around, right now. He could dispose of the reeking evidence and hypno all five of them into forgetting what they’d just seen with just a few sputtered words, the same way he’d recklessly edited Brad’s day a mere hours before.

He could do it. He could look them each in the eye and say, “Listen to me,” and all five of them would be totally under Barry’s control. The whole thing would go away. It was just that… between the extra-strength afterglow of his command-cum and the simmering rage/arousal he was feeling toward Vince for pulling this sexy stunt, he couldn’t handle deliberately creating another thing. Anything else would be too much.

Anyway, his ire felt justified, so removing the source and justification for it felt like he would be working against himself. Like he’d be undermining his internal fortitude.

Not yet, then. He’d wear this, for now. Other concerns had priority.

Opening his eyes, he straightened his shoulders and, ignoring the disarray of his clothes and his still-exposed half-erection, turned to his fellow Grahamhands (as the company newsletter liked to call them, bafflingly) with as much dignity as a man who’d just publicly orgasmed into a cup wearing a polyester orange-pinstriped fast food uniform could reasonably muster. “Can you guys do me a favor and close without me tonight?” he asked them, with what he considered an admirable level of composure and steadiness.

Joey, ever the easygoing workbuddy, looked about to answer in the affirmative, but Miguel was staring Barry down and spoke over him. “Why?” he asked flatly.

“No biggie,” Barry said, a cold calm setting into his belly. “I just have a brother who seriously needs to be fucked with.”

Barry left not long after that, Kevin at his side.

Weirdly, Noel and his friend packed up and followed them out, trailing after Barry like paparazzi, or infatuated fanboys. He found himself cornered next to his car, the two dark-haired writers alight with curiosity, their earlier fascination with Kevin seemingly forgotten. Great, turns out I’m even more interesting than the puppy, he thought grumpily.

A cool night breeze played with his hair and the tails of his uniform shirt. It was still hanging open, exposing his chest and abs, the white threads from the popped-off buttons starkly obvious against the saturated orange. He envied the black, heavy overshirt Noel was wearing, likewise hanging open over a heavy snug tee; though the midnight hoodie his friend had on looked even more comfortable.

At least he’d managed to get his dick shoved into his pants. The soda cup half full of cooling cum had gone into the kitchen food waste bin, and Barry hoped it stayed trashed and unfound. The way his night was going he half expected to find out in a few weeks it had wound up on eBay or been used to impregnate a manatee or something.

Noel was gushing about how hot it was Barry had given them a show right there in the restaurant. Normally he wasn’t this vocal, Barry thought. It was as though the incident had stripped away all of his reticence. “I mean, I know you’ve noticed I was into you,” he said, his olive-toned cheeks coloring slightly as his dark-blue eyes stayed riveted on Barry.

“It’s true, he’s sent me all the pictures he’s snuck of you,” the friend confirmed cheekily. His attention on Barry was just as avid. Though his hair was shorter and his lips were a little thinner, the synergy of similar height, appearance, coloring, tight-bodiedness, clothing, and overall disposition made them seem in the moment like they belonged to the same Greek chorus, with more attributes in common than not. Even the dark forest green of the friend’s eyes seemed more like a complement to Noel’s almost navy-blue peepers than a divergence.

Barry had seen this before with shy guys where a shared moment of ruptured social convention breaks them open like a dam bursting. He’d never borne the full brunt of it before, though, and it was slightly disorienting. Especially twice over.

He blinked at them in turn, unable to quite process all of what he was hearing. “You’re… taking pics of me?” he asked, a little dazed. Instictively he shifted back slightly on his heels, his shoulders coming into contact with Kevin behind him. He let them press more firmly against his warm torso. Kevin responded, slipping an affectionate arm around his waist and turning Barry’s press into a kind of hug. Barry was too focused on his dark-haired fans, though, to fully register the comfort of Kevin’s embrace at anything more than a subconscious level.

The friend gave him a knowing smile. “Come on, you’re a cute grumpy blond with a hot body and a big dick,” he said. Surprisingly, he kept his eyes on Barry’s face as he said this. If Vince had told him something like that, he’d have expected an up-and-down leer, even standing this close.

“And really nice hair,” Noel added, giving Barry’s lush, silky locks a wistful glance, like he very much wanted to run his hand through them.

“And really nice hair,” the friend agreed, the smile growing a little crooked. “It’s like you radiate beauty and sex. Like a muse.”

Barry was flustered, trying to focus on the two men. “Guys,” looking hard at both of them. “I’m glad I’ve inspired you or whatever, but—”

“You have,” Noel said, his tone more confessional than before, like he was being drawn into Barry’s web. “I’ve actually written stories with characters I modeled on you.”

“Me too,” the friend admitted, very calmly. His fixation on Barry, like Noel’s, had gone up a notch. “Though mine are kind of dirty.”

“Mine are sexy, too,” Noel said, just as eerily calm. In that moment, the two of them felt somehow more lined up with Barry than the rest of reality. “They’re not as sexy as Neil’s, though.”

“You guys—” Barry said, flustered. “Listen,” he said, “I’m sure you two are really nice and I’m flattered by the attention of two such sexy—”

They blinked at him, and Barry’s brain caught up to what Noel had just said. He smiled crookedly. “Wait, Noel and Neil?” he said, swallowing a chuckle. The strained situation and the closeness of three hot guys had him on autopilot. “You guys really are the same person. No wonder you’re so drawn to… each other…”

He trailed off, sensing something odd about the two men.

“Aw, they can’t be the same person,” Kevin put in from behind him, though he sounded more speculative than doubtful. “Can they? You mean, like, what, alternate universe doppelgangers?”

“Sure, yeah,” Barry said distractedly as he looked between the two, his brows drawing together. “Like you said… You know, alternate universes… portals… and…”

As he stared at the two men, not really paying attention to what he was saying, he realized with a quickening of his pulse that they hadn’t actually been alike before—not truly, not to the extent that they were now. The two men he was staring at now were exactly identical, even down to the dark blue-green of their eyes and the medium fullness of their pinkish-red lips. Neil’s shorter hair and slightly thicker stubble now stood out as self-evidently deliberate efforts to introduce deviations that otherwise would not exist, like the choice of an overshirt instead of a hoodie.

Shit, he’d done it again. Criminy. It was bonehead stupid that he was this careless about something that can go so wrong so easily.

I’m this slipshod when I’m just tired and cum-woozy at the end of a shift? God help us if I’m drunk. Even as he thought this, the image of the empty whisky bottle on the kitchen counter came to him, and he shivered in agitation.

“Uh—end trance,” he muttered. When nothing seemed to happen he tried again. “Come on,” he murmured under his breath. “End, stop, finish—”

The two identical men blinked at Barry, confused. “Sorry, what were we…?” they said in unison. They exchanged a glance and stopped, then looked back at Barry and Kevin in confusion.

“We were talking about how alike you guys are,” Kevin said from behind him, breezy as ever. He was still gently embracing Barry, which Barry tried very hard to find steadying as his mind roiled. “You know, like Neil is really you from a parallel universe,” he added, smiling at Noel as if they were sharing a joke.

Noel and Neil exchanged another wary glance, then gave Barry and Kevin the same studiously blank look. “That’s not a thing,” they said in unison.

“There’s no such thing as interdimensional wizardry,” Noel said earnestly.

“Or portals,” Neil added. “There’s definitely no such thing as portals.”

“And they’re really hard to make, so don’t try it,” Noel said.

“Or you might get stuck in the wrong universe. If they existed,” Neil hurriedly went on, “which they don’t.”

“No, that would be silly.”

Barry looked between them, flummoxed and unhappy. “Uh… huh,” he said sagely. He had no idea how to fix this, or what to make of the whole parallel dimensions thing. Though… if him stumbling across the sockboner app was thanks to some kind of multiverse shenanigans, that would at least explain some of the weirdness, given how the app, uh, shouldn’t exist, and all the things it shouldn’t have been able to make happen.

“They’re so cute,” Kevin said happily, his mouth close to Barry’s ear—completely unaware, of course, of Barry’s inner turmoil. “Hey,” he asked them, “if you two get together, is that, like, selfcest?”

Noel and Neil’s cheeks colored in a pretty display of synchronicity, like dye dropped into matching water glasses. They turned to look at each other. “We should go,” they said, each hoisting the strap of their laptop bags into a higher position on their shoulders. Barry realized they were momentarily stuck eyeing each other’s lips, and his never-dormant, always-chubbed trouser snake flexed mightily in approval. Fuck, I should get Brad to sketch them making out with each other, he thought. Kevin snuggled closer behind him, no doubt imagining the same snog session they all were.

“Okay, well,” Barry said loudly, and the two men turned to him, eyes dark with the lust Barry had kindled in them. “It was, uh, nice seeing you guys—”

They were already standing so close, and then in the next moment they were kissing, the three of them falling into a deep make-out session with Kevin making a fourth, pressing hard against him from behind and smooching warm kisses along the sensitive side of Barry’s neck. Barry’s arm slid around the two men, Noel and Neil doing the same, and by the time the kiss broke he had had to adjust his cock to allow for the fact that he was fully, one-hundred-percent rock-hard all over again and ready to cum like he hadn’t been doing so over and over all fucking day.

The flush of need made him reluctant to let go of the two identical men, and he almost considered using his ability to command them to suck him, right then and there in the parking lot in the middle of town, the overnight traffic on Union Avenue whizzing by as they blew their loads all over each other under the looming, impassive glare of the city’s high-pressure sodium street lights.

Noel’s eyes lingered over each part of Barry’s face, clearly experiencing temptations of his own, as Neil snuck in a bit of nuzzling along Barry’s cheek and lower jaw. Kevin was still holding him tight, his long, hard cock pressed against Barry’s ass as he continued kissing the other side of his neck.

“When’s your next shift, Barry?” Noel asked softly, lifting his eyes to meet his gaze, his frank intent impossible to ignore.

Barry gulped, overwhelmed and conflicted. “T-Tuesday,” he whispered.

Neil looked up and they both smiled at him, their obvious appreciation making his hard-on buck impatiently. “See you then,” they said, for once ignoring their unison speech.

“Right,” Barry said, finally disengaging from the embrace. “We’ll let you guys get home and—you know—and we’ll head off and—”

“‘You know,’” Kevin finished, adorably delighted at his own joke.

Barry and Kevin piled into the Hyundai, Barry having to shove his dick aside to avoid impaling himself. As he started the car he watched Noel and Neil head down the sidewalk and toward the nearby residential neighborhoods. Apparently, they lived close by. Barry couldn’t help thinking that such proximity was inconveniently dangerous. Hooking up with his new adoring doppelganger fanboys on work days, whether before or after his shift, or during for that matter, would be a little too convenient.

“What the fuck just happened,” he muttered, staring after them.

Finally he put the car in gear and pointed it toward home, his fingers laced with Kevin’s as their cocks throbbed with a need they couldn’t put off for long.

It wasn’t until he pulled up in front of the house and saw him sitting patiently on his porch steps, idly scrolling on his phone, that Barry remembered inviting Paul over to work on their data communications project. He glared through the passenger window at the unwelcome visitor, yanking up the parking brake so violently he’d have pulled it straight out of the housing if he’d been any stronger.

“Shit,” he said. Beyond Paul, he could see that the lights were on in the house. Vince was definitely home, waiting for him, just like the texts had promised.

“Who’s that?” Kevin asked curiously.

Barry grumbled but didn’t answer. He’d been all hot under the collar earlier, ready to storm home and put his brother in his place, but the incident with Noel-and-Neil in the parking lot had thrown him off his game. Now he felt unsettled and uncertain, the confidence he needed for a showdown with Vince badly dented. Dealing with Paul with Vince around would only further mix up his focus.

Barry hated being at sixes and sevens like this. He was half-tempted to just drive off in a cloud of exhaust, but Paul sitting there meant he couldn’t do that, either. And his extra-friendly, extra-adorable housemate next to him would make fobbing Paul off with excises and sending him back home difficult, too, at least with any kind of expedition. Strangers loved being around Kevin almost as much as he did.

Barry eyed his classmate broodingly, rubbing his chin and feeling the fine sandpaper of his day-end bristle as he tried to plan his next move. It didn’t help that Paul was kind of a distraction anyway, especially given how Barry was currently still hard after the foursome makeout. Medium height, brown-skinned, and lightly muscled, at first sight Paul came across more as an ex-Love Island contestant than the nerdy programmer he was—not that Paul himself was anything but comically clueless about his own appeal and the undertow of gentle magnetism he radiated. Even the glasses he wore all the time, a stylish affair with thin black frames, came across as allure-enhancing rather than the dweebifying accouterments they would have been on someone more ordinary.

Yeah, Paul was looking like all that, despite his complete unselfconsciousness. The front porch light, normally so brutal it made everything look terrible, was casting his cheekbones and the little patch of beard he had just around his chin to favorable effect. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, open down the front, because of course he was. Paul hated fastenings and confining clothes almost to the point of a compulsion, which meant that in lieu of tight tee shirts or sweaters he favored loose tops that he tended to leave completely unbuttoned, inadvertently and unself-awarely showing off what objective observers might have been tempted to characterize as “the goods.”

If anything, the open shirts, loose jeans, and unlaced, sockless tennies were a compromise. If he were less devotedly introverted and more instinctively exhibitionist, Barry suspected Paul wouldn’t wear more than the minimum amount of clothing necessary to meet social convention.

Then again… Barry himself was currently sporting an open-shirted look that was not too different from Paul’s, though his flapping shirt top wasn’t a matter of sartorial choices so much as the product of having elected to rip his shirt open to deal with a maliciously commanded orgasm.

Paul looked up just then, perhaps sensing Barry’s attention. Spotting his friend parked at the curb he lifted his hand in a cautious greeting, then dutifully stood stuffed his phone away in advance of imminent human interaction. Kevin, for his part, had already undone his seatbelt and was looking at Barry uncertainly, one hand on the door handle. “Are we… going in?” he asked.

“Yeah, of course,” Barry muttered. He unbuckled, retrieving the ignition key, and they both got out of the car, the doors klacking shut behind them.

On the way up the sidewalk Barry spotted Brad’s motorcycle, which the no-good lout had a bad habit of parking in the side yard instead of on the street where it belonged. Great, he thought as he approached his waiting classmate. This is going to be a clusterfuck, and probably not the good kind.

He tried adjusting his cock so that it was at least kind of hiding behind his hanging shirt-tail as he arrived at the bottom of the porch steps. “Hey,” they said. Paul wasn’t the sort for hugs or arm-slaps, so the two just lifted their chins to each other in greeting, both with their hands in their pockets like that was where your mitts belonged around other guys. Barry tried not to count the soft undershadows of Paul’s exposed abs.

Paul’s brows lifted as he took in Barry’s damaged uniform, the orange looking more virulent than ever in the harsh glow of the porch light. “What happened?” Paul asked, nodding a bewhiskered chin toward Barry’s shirt.

Barry cringed, though his cock flexed at the memory. “Work incident,” he said tersely. “You know how it goes.” Paul didn’t (he had money and so no need for a part-time job) and seemed to require more information. “Uh, a container broke open,” he ad-libbed. “Sauce everywhere.”

Kevin barked out a laugh, making Paul’s kissable lips twitch automatically as he turned to the sandy-haired goof. “This is Kevin,” Barry said belatedly. “Kev, this is Paul. We have a couple classes together.”

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Paul turned to Barry. His expressive brows were now drawn together, as if he were sensing something extra going on with his moody classmate. “So,” he said slowly, “are we still good to work on the project tonight, or...?” He left the last bit dangling.

“Actually,” Barry said apologetically, lifting his shoulders up toward his ears as he kept his hands buried in his work trousers. “My brother’s home,” he temporized, “and I really need to figure something out with him, so…” He let his sentence hang, too.

Unexpectedly, Paul brightened. “Oh, I ran into your brother when I got here,” he said.

“Did you,” Barry said after a beat, trying not to show his alarm.

“Yeah. I was waiting out here because I knew you weren’t home yet, but he came out and we talked for a minute. He told me that you should definitely invite me in, no worries.”

“Oh yeah?” Barry wasn’t liking where this was going.

“Yeah. If you weren’t sure, he said to say, ‘Vince says invite him in.’”

All at once, the resolution and ire that had flagged after the doppelganger incident flares back to life, full and strong. “Did he,” Barry gritted out.

He felt the trigger. He knew he had no choice. But he wasn’t going to take Vince fucking with him, however playfully, lying down.

Startled at Barry’s change in expression, Paul answered, “Y-yeah?”

Barry fixed his gaze on the front door. “Come on,” he said, the command taking in both his companions.

He started for the steps, then stopped and turned suddenly on Paul. As the two boys were close behind him they almost bumped into him, their faces inches away. Kevin was about his height, maybe a sliver taller, but Paul’s face was just under his—perfect for what Barry had in mind.

Ignoring Kevin, he stared straight down into Paul’s wide, surprised eyes, his heart pounding in his chest. “Listen to me,” he said, with all the intensity he had ever put into those words. “When we go in there, you’re going to do whatever I say. Got it? Not Vince, not anyone else, just me. Understand?”

“Just you,” Paul repeated robotically. Hyperfocused on Paul, Barry didn’t notice Kevin murmuring “Just you” at the same time.

“That includes commands, or changes, or anything physical or sexual,” he emphasized. Weirdly, he was heating up, his cock flexing at this display of dominance. “Especially,” he went on, his locked-in gaze unwavering, “anything having to do with your—”

Barry couldn’t help it. “—your big, fat, superhard monstercock.”

“Big, fat, superhard monstercock,” the two young men mumbled, transfixed by Barry’s words and his power over them.

Finally noticing that Kevin had been inadvertently pulled into his hypno-change, he gritted his teen and spat out, “Fuck!”

Kevin and Paul turned to each other with glazed eyes. Kevin drew a tongue across his lips. “No, that wasn’t a command!” he said hurriedly. “Look at me, just me.”

He pushed the thought aside as the two thralls turned obediently back to him. Barry took a breath to steady himself. “You both will forget everything about this conversation, okay?” he instructed. They nodded. “Okay. Uh, end trace!”

Kevin and Paul blinked, then, at the same time, they both reached down to awkwardly adjust their suddenly very large and very insistent hardons, forcing them into a more-or-less up-and-down position. Barry turned quickly around, trying to ignore the fact that they had both looked for a second like they were now sporting erections considerably larger and wider than his own stupidly big tool. Said tool also seemed to be feeling the love and was perversely trying to get even harder than it already was.

They couldn’t have been that big, he told himself firmly. It was that darn porch light. Everything looked weird under that thing.

Straightening his own dick ruthlessly to a perfect vertical line, he pushed all other thoughts aside and started resolutely up the porch stairs, eyes on the front door as if he might bore holes in it. The other two followed close behind.

Barry wanted this little brush war with Vince to be over. He was going to end this thing, tonight… one way or another.

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