Bobby Learns to Wrestle - Chapter 12

September 28, 1995

We were taking a break from our compare and contrast essays, and Eric (perhaps predictably) had me pinned on my bed, legs astride my waist, my wrists tightly in his grip. Since we were at my house, and my parents were home, the clothes were on, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t cum if we really wanted to. Still, sometimes we didn’t, and that was fine.

“So how was it with Cory?” Eric asked, smiling down at me.

I sighed. “It was … I don’t know. I felt bad. I tried to wake you up!” I whined.

“I remember waking up, but honestly it’s OK — just someday I want to see you and Cory cum together.” Eric waited a beat, and leaned into me for emphasis. I could feel his erection straining against the fabric of his khakis. “Honest. It’s fine. We’re fine. I still love you.”

There it was again, the bells ringing in my head. I couldn’t wait any longer. “I love you too,” I said, as breezily as I could, as if it was something both of us already knew deep down, as if we had professed it to each other a million times before. Maybe we had, in a way — every time we wrestled, I suppose, was a little I love you. “I just wish you could have watched.”

“What did he do?” Eric asked.

“He — all I remember was feeling his knuckles.” I shook my right hand out of Eric’s fist, and stuffed it between us. “He was on top of me, like you are now, but he grabbed both our dicks and started stroking,” I said.

“Wait, so,” Eric struggled to understand. He laid down on top of me. “Cory’s like this,” he said.

“Uh huh,” I replied.

Eric squeezed his hand between us, and I removed mine. Since we were both wearing pants, he didn’t exactly stroke us together, but at least he gained an understanding. I felt his fist in between us start to move up and down. “Like jacking you off?”

“All I could feel were his knuckles!” I repeated. “Like he was giving me a noogie, but, like, holding my cock,” I said, unable to keep my giggles in any longer.

“His cock was in there too? Like he grabbed both of you together?” Eric asked.

“Exactly, it was weird,” I said.

“Do you think that’s what Andy does?” Eric asked.

“So, like, Cory was fully on top of me — I bet Andy likes to stay straddling, chest up, and I bet Cory wishes Andy would come down to full-body,” I surmised.

“Ohh, OK,” Eric said. “OK. Do you want to try it?” he asked.

“What? Now? I mean, it’s risky, but —”

“Your parents haven’t come in while we’re studying in … months. Like your dad came in that first time, and after that, nothing,” Eric said, sotto voce. Eric’s eyes twinkled at me as he gave me a half smile. “I mean, we’re both hard, come on.”

“OK, let me be on top, I’ll show you what he did,” I said. Eric eagerly rolled onto his back, and unbuttoned his pants. We both just sort of pulled our pants and underwear down to our thighs, our cocks hard and touching already. “So it was like this at first,” I said, stretching out on top of Eric. “Fine so far, right? But then Cory does this —” my hand squeezes between us, and I found both of our cocks, and squeezed them together in my hand. “Oh, he had lube though,” I said.

“You don’t have to get lube,” Eric said. “I see what you mean though — I mean, I feel you squeezing, but it’s like you’re punching me in the stomach,” he said, giggling a little.

“So he starts doing this,” I said, holding my hand steady but thrusting with my hips. My cock slid against Eric’s inside my grip.

“Oh, OK, OK,” Eric said. “Are we, uh, are we gonna go the whole way here? Or is this just a demo?”

“Up to you,” I said. “Do you need the full Cory right now?” I joked.

“I’m, uh … I’m good,” Eric said. “Unless you want to cum, I mean, go for it,” he added.

I chuckled. “I’m not into Cory’s way of doing it,” I said, truthfully. Eric and I were touching each other, but it was less sexual and more of a curiosity more than anything. I knew the way it felt when Eric and I were together and wanted to cum, but this just wasn’t one of those times. This was … just experimenting, I guess.

I rolled off Eric and pulled my pants back up. I was actually a little proud that we didn’t just dive headfirst into doing it, just because we could. I felt, I don’t know, a little like an adult, in a way. “It wasn’t my proudest orgasm, I guess,” I said.

“I hear you,” Eric said. “We can try it sometime, but I think I like just going cock to cock, you know?” Eric pulled his pants back up over his boner, and we climbed off the bed, and went back to our English homework, letting our boners subside naturally.

The following Monday was the first meeting of the school newspaper, The Bobcat Beat, as our mascot was the bobcat, a denizen of the local hills. Mrs. Kane asked that I come by and meet the team, and she would show me her ideas for getting the newspaper printed and circulated around campus. When I arrived at her room, I opened the door and stopped dead in my tracks. At the head of an arrangement of desks, and already halfway through some kind of speech to her team was Amanda Cunningham. The same Amanda that created a furor on the bus on the morning of the last day of seventh grade.

“Oh good, Bobby, you’re here,” Mrs. Kane said, standing up from her desk in the corner of the room. “Do you know Amanda? She’s our editor-in-chief.”

“Amanda, yes, nice to see you again,” I lied, putting on the best kill them with kindness attitude I could muster.

“Please sit down,” Amanda said curtly, and I took a seat near the other end of the table, next to a boy I didn’t recognize. He had a short stack of drawings in front of him. Amanda had a big speech going that I had clearly interrupted — her vision for the paper, the importance of editorial independence, and making something useful for the average student. I could sense the discomfort of the five other students around the table — all of us were getting the sense that Mrs. Kane had really suckered us into something here: Amanda’s Vanity Newspaper.

“Jasmine, you can pitch first,” she said to the girl at her right.

“OK. Kissing on campus: I think it’s too much. There are couples just making out at break. There’s no shame,” she said.

“I love it. Front page,” Amanda said.

Mrs. Kane cleared her throat. “Amanda, uh, typically opinion goes inside the paper. News goes on the front page.”

“Fine,” Amanda said. “Brian?”

The boy next to me looked at his stack of drawings. “I have, uh, I have some cartoons that I’ve drawn.”

“Pass them down,” Amanda commanded. Commanda, I thought, and chuckled to myself. “Something funny Bobby?” she shot to me.

“Oh, the, uh — the one on top is good,” I said, covering for myself. Brian smiled.

Amanda handed out assignments, and I made mental notes — if they wanted to print this on 8½ × 11, this was going to wind up being four pages, which was going to be challenging to print on one sheet with Microsoft Publisher. During a break in the meeting, Mrs. Kane brought Amanda and I back into the teacher resource hallway bisecting the building, which connected all the classrooms. It was like a secret tunnel, and students typically weren’t allowed back there.

“I asked Bobby to bring some design samples,” Mrs. Kane started, and I handed her the three stapled layouts I had put together with example copy that Mrs. Kane had given me. I was particularly proud of the fact that Mrs. Kane had given me two Mac-formatted floppy disks, and my dad and I worked together to buy and install software that could read them on our Windows PC.

Amanda took the samples and flipped through them. “I like this one the best,” she said, choosing the option with The Bobcat Beat in a contemporary script font rather than a stodgy blackletter font (which I thought made it look like a real newspaper). “Any questions?” she asked me.

“How, uh, how are we printing this, Amanda?” I asked, knowing she wouldn’t know the answer.

Mrs. Kane immediately cut in. “Xeroxing it in the office is too expensive, so I dug out this monster,” she said, pointing to the table behind her. On it was something I only knew by the aroma. A Ditto machine.

Also known as a spirit duplicator, it was a crank-operated machine that used a ridiculously flammable liquid, somehow, to copy a master sheet onto paper. The printing was one color only — a sickly purple — and the copies smelled like gasoline. This was a Heyer, rather than a Ditto-brand machine.

“This takes extra large paper: 11-by-17-inch sheets. When you fold them in half, you get 8½ × 11. One sheet equals four pages, and there’s no stapling. I’ll show you how it works, Bobby. Amanda, could you hand me back Bobby’s example? You can go back in with your staff, and Bobby and I will make some masters” she said.

Mrs. Kane and I went to the office through the secret corridor with what she called “transfer paper.” She Xeroxed each page onto a kind of carbon-copy sheet that had a particular coating for the spirit duplicator. Back down the hall behind the classroom, she showed me how to carefully tape the inside sheets together — pages 2 and 3 — and clamp them to the master drum. I wasn’t allowed to fill the spirit fluid reservoir because it was extremely flammable, so she told me to call her whenever it needed more. I reset the counter to zero, and cranked out five copies, about one per second.

“That’s not too bad,” I said, proud of my work so far. Mrs. Kane agreed. She then showed me how to paste pages 1 and 4 together, flip over the sheets I just printed, remove the master and reclamp the new one, and crank out five more copies on the same sheets. She took the top one and folded it into a booklet.

“Great work, Bobby. This is what we’re making,” she said with a triumphant smile. “Do you see any design issues?”

I looked at the printing. “It’s a little blurry,” I said.

“It’s what we’ve got,” Mrs. Kane said, putting her hands on her hips. I nodded, finding it hard to think as I was inhaling the carcinogenic hydrocarbons off the paper.

Our deadline was October 20th, and the third Friday every month after that. At our last meeting that week, on the 16th, only Jasmine had handed in her opinion piece, Brian had his cartoon, and Amanda had written two fawning teacher interviews that passed for news. There was a sports roundup nowhere to be found, and one boy just never came back after the assignment meeting, so whatever feature he was working on was gone.

I looked at the computer screen in our living room after dinner, trying to lay out the paper with what I had. There was too much for two pages, but not nearly enough for four.

I had a lot of space to fill.

I briefly considered writing a story, but then I pictured Amanda seeing a story she didn’t approve suddenly appear without her consent, and I realized that was a bad idea. Then, an idea dawned on me. A word search!

I picked some easy words, subjects like math, science, and social studies, plus another word that I know only Eric might want to find. And in that moment I also knew how to tell Eric I loved him.

I stayed up late Wednesday, having to thicken the lines on Brian’s illustration with a marker so they would be visible, and finally printed out the four master pages I was going to copy onto the transfer paper. Thursday after school was printing day. I spent an hour cranking out 600 inside spreads, reloading the source tray, and 600 front-and-back covers. Amanda and Jasmine were all folding and bundling the issues for each classroom, and Brian was running them up to the office, stuffing them in teachers’ boxes. Mrs. Kane had to refill the spirit fluid twice, and each time, we could tell it was getting low because the printing would get increasingly light and blurry. I asked if we should reprint the worst copies, but Amanda shouted at me that there was no time. I shrugged. She was the boss.

Finally, the last issue came out of the duplicator with a clunk, and I felt high as a kite either from the fumes or from the cranking. “We should probably do this outside next time,” Mrs. Kane suggested helpfully as she fanned the room with one of the waste copies I printed upside-down.

On Friday, The Bobcat Beat was purple and white and read all over. It was particularly gratifying to see Eric run up to me at break with the copy that he had gotten in his second-period class. “It looks amazing, Bobby!” Eric said, grabbing my arm excitedly.

“I don’t know,” I whined. “I heard some kids call it The Bobcat Blur.”

“Don’t listen to them,” Eric said. “You did the best you could, especially with Amanda in charge. Plus — look, the only name that’s legible in the credits box is hers.”

“She did insist that her name was larger than everyone else’s,” I chuckled. I remembered suddenly. “Oh — Eric, I have something important to tell you,” I said, grabbing his arm and dropping back into an alcove just outside the boys’ bathroom, out of the rushing crowd of students.

“I know we said it, but I want to say it in a way that shows you I mean it. I love you, Eric, I really do. You said it at the sleepover and the other day, but it’s something I can’t get out of my mind. I can’t get you out of my mind. The two weeks you were on vacation were really hard, and, like, I felt like you could be just around every corner, but just out of reach.”

I continued. “Yeah, I love that we wrestle and we … are, like so free with making each other feel good and everything, but it’s more than that. It’s … everything about you, Eric. I love you. I love all of you,” I waited a beat. “I wanted to show you and everyone, so I put it in the word search.”

I pointed to the last four letters of the last row. “I-L-Y-E,” Eric read. “Aw, Bobby.” He paused, and smiled. “I-L-Y … uh … 2 … B,” he said with a grin. He dropped his voice, and touched his forehead to mine. “I guess we shouldn’t kiss on campus,” he said with a chuckle.

“Why not?” I asked, gaining the courage. We both looked out to see that the students passing by were thinning out, and nobody had come out of the bathroom. It was quick. Eric kissed me on the lips. The bell rang.

“I have to go to class,” he said. “I love you.” He turned and sprinted away, his arms open wide.

“I love you back,” I whispered to myself.