September 14, 1994
After the sleepover, there was something odd hanging over our table in Room 308. We did our schoolwork, we talked about the TV we were watching. But conspicuously absent from our discussions was what happened last Saturday. Andy, and therefore the rest of us, behaved as if it was just a normal part of life, even though Cory, Eric and I weren’t a hundred percent convinced. Even Andy, I think, thought in retrospect he may have gone too far, because it isn’t as if he brought it up in the middle of lunch where every other seventh-grader could hear him crow about pinning me and jizzing in his shorts.
Indeed, Andy was making a point of being preoccupied elsewhere. Soccer was starting, and his first practice was this afternoon. Cory had a church thing on Wednesdays, so I figured this was my golden opportunity to finally ask Eric what was going on. I felt like I needed someone to have the same questions I did.
“Do you want to come over and do homework?” I asked Eric as we walked home from the school bus stop. “You can stay for dinner.”
“Sure, I guess, we don’t have much homework though,” he said. He was right: one problem set for math and a current event summary for English would take us about a half hour.
We stopped by Eric’s house first, and he poked his head in the front door and yelled to his mom that he was going over to Bobby’s house and staying for dinner. His mom shouted back be home by eight, to which Eric cheerfully replied “OK!” and shut the door quietly.
Two doors down, we arrived at my house, and I yelled a “hi, I’m home, can Eric stay for dinner?”
My mom poked her head around the corner from the kitchen. “Hi guys, sure, Eric can stay.”
“What are we having?” I asked.
“Spaghetti with garlic bread,” my mom said. “Eric, there’s a folding chair in the hall closet. Take it upstairs with you.”
We both made mmm sounds, grabbed the chair, and hurried upstairs to my room. Eric set up next to me at my desk (which was really just a folding table). We started with the math, and worked out some fraction multiplication: He did the odd numbers and I did the even ones.
I ran downstairs to get that morning’s newspaper, and we found some articles to summarize for our current events. We both giggled at the headline Another thrust follows withdrawl, which was actually a pretty serious story about violence in a place called the Gaza Strip, which neither of us knew about. I clipped a science story about a living pine tree that researchers found in Australia that had only been found in fossils before. Eric picked a story about the upcoming midterm elections and something called the Contract with America. We wrote in near-silence for a little while, the only sound being pencils on paper.
Eric sighed, finishing before I did. He was a faster writer, but my handwriting was tidier. “What was Andy thinking on Saturday?” he asked.
I dropped my pencil and looked at Eric. “I know! I was thinking it was me the entire time. That was weird, right?”
“It wasn’t just you, that was definitely weird. You were in the bathroom, but he, like, aggressively pinned me. He started rubbing his boner into me,” Eric said.
“Wait, he already had a boner?” I asked.
“Yeah, I mean, kind of. It felt like it. He, like, seemed to find exactly where my … area … was, and rubbed on it. He’s definitely done it before,” Eric said.
“He said he and his brother did it all the time,” I said.
“He did?” Eric asked.
“You might have been asleep. Cody got on top of Andy and came on Sunday morning.”
“What?!” Eric’s eyebrows shot through the ceiling.
“You must be a deep sleeper,” I said. “They were, like, right next to you.”
“I guess I heard something and woke up.” A beat. “Did you see the whole thing?” Eric asked.
“I couldn’t see much with you in the way, but I saw, like, enough to know what was going on,” I said. “Cory said it felt really good,” I said, more softly than I had intended.
“I mean, it kind of does,” Eric admitted. “When Andy was pinning me, I could see, like, how it could feel good. Andy’s too big, though,” he added. Eric looked me up and down once, seemed to have a quick realization and went back to looking at his paper.
“What … what does it feel like?” I asked.
“Well, I mean, you’ve masturbated before, right?” Eric asked, making the jerk-off motion. He truly had no filter.
“Um … no? Actually. All I’ve had are wet dreams,” I said. It was true. I started getting wet dreams maybe a month before we moved away from San Diego. My room was in boxes, and I figured it was because of stress — my body just needed to let some stress out, and I came in my sleep. The dream was weird: I fell from the sky and landed gently on top of Christina Ricci, except she wasn’t a person but a thick piece of styrofoam. It happened again after the sleepover, except I dreamt about Eric. Maybe I was stressed about that, too.
“Well, OK, it feels better than a wet dream, and a little like jacking off, but different. I guess it feels closer to what, like, actual sex would feel like, because you’ve got someone on top of you, or you’re on top of someone. It’s not just your hand.”
I looked at Eric. It was just a split second, but I felt the first … I don’t know … twitch? It felt more like a glow, or a blossom in a way, this idea that I could be attracted to Eric. I would look for him when we were out at P.E., and try and see if I could pick him out of a crowd. I was oddly excited to see his legs — his calves, with his white P.E. socks and sneakers. His legs were smooth and shapely. They weren’t, like, muscular, but they looked strong, and occasionally I wondered what they would feel like wrapped around me. His mom was white and his dad was Japanese, and Eric his dad’s jet-black hair. His smile was so unique — when he smiled, the corners of his lips kind of turned down instead of up, and —
I snapped out of my thought. Eric was looking at me with that intoxicating smile, as if to say what?
“Nah,” I said, my cheeks reddening.
“What?” Eric asked, out loud this time.
“Do you want to see what it feels like?” I asked. “Do you want to wrestle? Like that, I mean.” The pregnant silence got to me fast. “We don’t have to, I mean, I just thought if you were curious,” I started, the words falling out of my mouth faster than I could catch them.
“Um,” Eric started, and I worried about his answer. “I do, but, like, I don’t have a change of clothes if I cum.”
“The bathroom’s right there,” I said, indicating the door attached to my bedroom. “We can clean up. Your mom won’t notice, or she’ll think you had a wet dream.” I realized I was repeating Andy’s talking points to try and convince Eric to do it. “Let’s just … maybe let’s just start out wrestling and see how far we want to go,” I suggested.
Eric took a deep breath, nodded, and smiled. If I didn’t know any better, he seemed excited. My heart was pounding out of my chest. Eric took off his shoes, and I took mine off. I climbed up onto the bed gingerly, and Eric followed me.
“Should we just sort of pick a position?” I asked. I had a twin-sized bed, so it’s not as if we had a whole wrestling ring to ourselves.
“Um, I guess. Maybe pin me down like Andy did, like a schoolgirl pin,” he said.
“Schoolboy pin,” I quipped.
“You know what I mean,” Eric said, giving me a little swipe with his hand as I climbed over him, straddling his hips. My legs weren’t long enough to put my knees on his shoulders, but I also kind of didn’t want to scoot up, keeping our areas close. Our fingers interlaced, and I pressed his hands down into the bedspread. My heart raced, feeling his palms in mine. The bulge in my pants had to be unmistakable by now.
Two fast raps on the door, and it swung open. I was facing away from the door, but I heard my dad’s voice. “Ope, you’re wrestling. You better have your homework done,” he said.
“All done,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “We’ll be quiet,” I said, trying to sound natural and normal.
Dad nodded, quickly surveying the situation and realizing he was interrupting. “Dinner’s in thirty minutes, at five. No permanent marks,” he joked, turned and left, closing the door behind him.
I looked down at Eric, the panic in my eyes. I exhaled, and Eric did too. “That was close,” I whispered. I was lucky that dad couldn’t see the tent in either of our pants from where he was standing.
“We should probably stop,” Eric said. “But.”
“But what?” I asked.
“I kind of don’t want to.” Eric pressed his hips up into me, and I could feel a bulge in his pants against my butt cheek. He grunted. “Do you want to try it?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. It would have been easy if we had a bed big enough that we could just roll over, but we didn’t, so I got up off Eric, and he got to his knees as I laid on my back, and he straddled my tummy. “Um, lower,” I said softly, and Eric scooted down. I didn’t reach for his hands, but Eric reached for mine. My heart fluttered as he re-interlaced our fingers. “There,” I said, feeling his hard shaft against mine, through the fabric of our pants. “Ow,” I exclaimed softly, feeling the metal zipper of his fly.
“I don’t know,” Eric said. “It’s hard to get the right angle.” He sat up and put his hands on his hips, still straddling me.
“The zipper hurt,” I admitted. “We should stop,” I added, awkwardly. “Let’s try and get these boners down for dinner, and we can try again after.”
“No, let’s keep going. I’m … I don’t know if I could really stop right now if I wanted to.” Eric waited a beat. “Can we pull our pants down? Our underwear can stay on.”
“Well, I mean, what if we took our underwear off? That way you wouldn’t have to worry about, you know, the laundry or whatever.” I said. I felt weird, like I was pressuring Eric, or crossing a line, but Eric seemed as into it as I was. Or at least that’s what I wanted to believe. I was ridiculously horny, and now that I thought about it, I wasn’t going to be able to last through dinner either.
Eric nodded and laughed a little. “This is so stupid,” he said. “I’m so horny I just don’t care.” Eric climbed off me, and dropped his trousers, and then his briefs. His cock sprang free with a jet black bush just like his hair. I stood next to him and took off my pants, then my boxer briefs. We stood there for a second, just looking at each other, hard as a rock. Neither of us had seen another penis before — well, I mean, I had seen my dad’s, but I mean another penis my age.
“Let me be on top,” Eric said.
“I think I like it better that way,” I admitted. We took up the same schoolboy pin position, and were able to see better and aligned our cocks. Without the restriction of our shorts, they kind of jutted out between us at a 45-degree angle. Eric rolled his hips in an effort to generate some friction on our shafts, but it was a very light touch, and wasn’t really having the desired effect. Eric sighed.
“I mean,” Eric said, laughing slightly. “Are we even trying?”
“We’re not doing a great job if we are,” I admitted, chuckling nervously.
“Do you have lotion or something?” Eric asked.
“Um, maybe — can you look under the bathroom sink?” I asked. Eric climbed off me once again, and opened the door to the bathroom. He found an old pump-top bottle of Lubriderm and brought it out, along with a hand towel.
“You don’t masturbate, do you, it’s all gummed up,” Eric said, referring to the spout that had possibly been used last winter, when it was excessively cold and dry. He climbed back on top of me, straddling my waist, our cocks almost touching. He got the pump top started, and wiped the dried plug of lotion on the hand towel. He squirted some lotion out on his hand, and he stroked his cock first, and then tentatively touched mine. It was the first dick besides his own that Eric had ever touched.
Eric briefly alternated between our little erections, but then, curious, grabbed them in one hand and stroked them together. This felt very different, and very good. I looked at Eric and our eyes met briefly, and Eric smiled his intoxicating smile. It wasn’t wrestling, that’s for sure, but it was the beginning of something very new and very intense that I had never experienced before.
Eric kept going. I kind of wanted him to lay down on me, so I could feel more of his body, but he seemed fascinated just jacking us off. He went slow at first, but sped up a little as we both started to get close. I had never touched myself this way, and Eric doing it for the first time felt like learning from a wise master.
My heart was pounding. “I — I’m gonna cum,” I whispered. “It’s — unh,” I stammered, my cock throbbing as I felt a pinch of an orgasm, the wave of pleasure tamped way down by excitement or anxiety — probably both.
“Me too,” Eric said as sped up, and he came just a few seconds later, with three quick ropes of cum followed by a molten river that followed. His core twitched and he leaned forward, planting his free hand into the mattress. Our eyes locked, and for a split-second —
“DINNER,” we heard Mom shout from downstairs. Our eyes locked and we realized we needed to get cleaned up fast. Eric grabbed the hand towel and wiped his hands, and wiped his cock, which was still hard and twitching from his orgasm. My own erection was rapidly shrinking, and he gave me the towel. I wiped my hands and chest and tummy as Eric climbed off me quickly and went to the bathroom. He found a washcloth, wetted it, and cleaned himself up.
“Use cold water,” he counseled. “Hot water makes it stick to your hair.” I couldn’t stop looking at his cock. “Come on, focus!”
We washed our hands, pulled on our clothes from the floor, and put our shoes back on. We walked casually downstairs, hearts still pounding, but trying to project calm and normalcy. Mom had us fill our plates in the kitchen, and we made polite conversation as we ate. “So, Eric, do you like wrestling?” Dad asked. Eric choked on his food.
“Sorry, swallowed wrong,” Eric said. “Yeah, a little. I like Bret Hart and Shane Douglas. I got the pay-per-view Wrestlemania last year for my birthday.” Eric was trying desperately to avoid follow-up questions by providing more detail than what Dad really understood.
“I’m not sure who those guys are, but that’s good.” I didn’t know who those guys were either, and I doubt Eric really did. But it was enough to change the subject. Mom remembered that Eric’s birthday was exactly a week before mine, and it went from there, away from wrestling.
We helped wash up after dinner, and Eric came back upstairs to collect his backpack before he went home. “Are, uh, are you OK?” I asked tentatively.
“Yeah, I’m great,” Eric said nonchalantly, as though he didn’t cum on my chest an hour ago. He saw my eyebrows knitting. “It was just for fun. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine, I just … I … can we do it again someday?” I asked, anxious. “I kinda feel like there’s more stuff we can try.”
Eric smiled. “You got it. It’ll be an experiment!” I liked that idea — it was for science!
I was relieved that Eric was into it, and I slept like a rock that night. The next day at school, I got to class and Andy was in a real mood. Mean Andy was sarcastic, critical and biting. We saw a shade of Mean Andy at the sleepover when he accused Cory of wetting the bed. I finally confronted Andy at break. “Who peed in your Cheerios, dude?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s because of what you did with Eric yesterday.” Andy lowered his voice, even though nobody could hear us anyway over the din of conversations around us. “Wrestling is something we do together, the four of us, or not at all. You’re gonna get caught, and I’m gonna be the one who gets in trouble for it.”
“OK, OK, I get it,” I said. But I didn’t get it at all. Why would Andy care? He wasn’t even there. “I’ll talk to Eric.”
“See that you do,” Andy said, in a way that he probably meant to sound threatening, but came out goofy, like he was a super-villain with an underground lair.
Sitting next to Eric on the bus home, I decided to start with “Andy’s pretty upset.”
“Yeah, I know. He punched me in the stomach before school.”
“What?!” I exclaimed.
Eric shrugged. “I don’t understand why though. All I can think is that he’s jealous,” he said.
“Maybe,” I replied. Maybe Andy thought the idea of wrestling as an exercise in creative onanism was his invention, and we didn’t have the rights to it. “I think maybe we just need to be more careful about what we share with Andy,” I said, giving Eric a pointed look.
“Yeah yeah,” Eric said, unconcerned. “Can you come over this weekend?”
My heart raced, but then sank. “We’re going up to my grandma’s this weekend,” I said. She lived up in Los Angeles, and it was going to be the first time we’d seen her since we moved to Rancho. “Sorry.” I truly was. “Next time?” I asked.
“Yeah, next time,” Eric said, smiling.