October 3, 1994
Eric, Cory and I were more-or-less back to normal after I got back from visiting my grandma, but Andy was still moody. He claimed it was because his soccer coach “is a complete asshole” but wouldn’t elaborate. Eric suspected privately that he was spending a lot of time on the bench, because he wasn’t particularly fast and, lately, not particularly agreeable. Eric and I hadn’t spent any time alone together since our last study session, but I couldn’t stop playing it over in my mind. I wondered if Eric was doing the same thing.
I was slightly frustrated that the universe couldn’t work in my favor just this once so Eric and I could have an opportunity to wrestle again, but I was also felt a little like we had hurt Andy’s feelings. I was thinking of ways to bring the group together again, and I thought a sleepover this weekend would do the trick.
When I asked my parents, my dad asked “didn’t you just have a sleepover?”
“That was last month,” I said. “Plus I want to show my friends the new computer,” I said.
It was true: We had finally upgraded the Tandy 286 that my dad bought for a song from his company, since it was otherwise destined for the garbage: It had an amber screen, and didn’t have any games. But this! This new computer was a top-of-the-line Gateway 2000 486 DX2: 66MHz, 8MB RAM, a 300MB hard disk, and Windows for Workgroups. Dad said I could have a directory on the C drive for my schoolwork, instead of saving it to a floppy disk. Best of all, this new computer had not just VGA, but Super VGA graphics: 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels tall, in 256 colors. When you won in Solitaire, the cards cascaded down the screen in an exciting waterfall animation. It came in a box printed with spots that made it look like a cow.
My favorite game was LHX Attack Chopper. It wasn’t a new game, but I’d never played anything like it before, certainly not on the Tandy. Every day after school since we got the computer I had spent maybe an hour playing it before dinner. It wasn’t a multi-player game, but it would still be fun to play with my friends. There were some other games that the computer came with, but I hadn’t looked much at them.
Now, my parents weren’t strict, per se, but they had their way of doing things, and didn’t like anything out of the ordinary. A sleepover was going to be out of the ordinary. They laid down the conditions:
- No “rambunctiousness” as my mom called it — Dad saw me and Eric, and with four boys, all he could foresee, he said, was a trip to Urgent Care.
- We could use the computer after dinner until 8:30, and then a movie on volume 5. The TV had an on-screen meter indicating how loud the volume was, and “5” was not loud.
- And finally, no noise at all after 10.
This was about what I expected, but when I explained the rules to my friends, Cory was the first one to say, “your parents are strict.”
“My dad would have said lights out at 8:30. Ten would be out of the question,” Eric said, shrugging.
“What’s the movie”? Andy asked.
“I taped MST3K. The movie is from the 50s and called Racket Girls. It’s about girls who wrestle, and I thought it might be … I don’t know, something we all might like?” I said, my voice raising to a question at the end. Eyebrows went up around the table, lips were pursed. It was a definite maybe.
“I’ll come,” Andy said. The frost was melting. “I mean, I’ll ask if I can come,” he corrected himself.
“Sure, me too,” Cory said.
“Count me in,” Eric agreed.
It was a date. Unfortunately, hosting a sleepover put me in cyclone of anxiety between now and Saturday. I had to promise my parents we were going to be good (and quiet, most importantly), while simultaneously promising my friends that we were going to have a good time. I spiraled into over-thinking. Dinner, snacks, soda: My mom wanted to know what we wanted to eat, and I had to have a plan. Never even mind the fact that if we make too much noise, and Mom comes downstairs to find four teenage boys dry-humping each other into orgasmic bliss, she’d blow a head gasket.
I worked out the details, answered every question, and finally on Saturday afternoon, Eric arrived first because he walked over early. He asked if there was anything he could do to help set up, which was nice. As soon as he walked into the kitchen, though, and saw everything staged, he knew that my mom and I spent all morning on getting things ready. She was upstairs reading in the master bedroom; Dad was in his office. They thought the best thing to do was leave us alone until dinner.
Andy and Cory arrived soon after, and we immersed ourselves in the DOS-based, 3D, ray-traced world of LHX. Everyone got a turn. I showed them my favorite mode, which is when you fired a missile, hit a function key, and could steer the missile as if you were on board. Then, in what was most certainly not a metaphor about how I self-sabotage, I would turn the missile around and hit my own chopper. Sometimes I could down the Apache, other times it would survive. Andy was the loudest, but when he saw me wincing as he cheered, he remembered, and tried to keep his voice down.
Mom and Dad appeared at dinnertime, gracious and in good humor. Dad grilled hot dogs. After dinner, they reminded us again to keep the noise down to a dull roar, and headed upstairs to watch TV themselves. They were good parents, if not terribly social.
We went back to LHX, and checked out some of the other games on the computer, including Battle Chess, which featured chess pieces fighting it out when a piece was taken. None of us knew really how to play chess, but we really enjoyed the knight animation that was an homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I was driving the computer, and we giggled incessantly but quietly. Andy went to the kitchen and came back with what was left of a bag of potato chips, snacking on them as we tried to match up the different pieces on the chessboard. We were definitely more entertained by the battle part than the chess part.
Andy’s hands got greasy and the bag went tumbling, and chip fragments littered the carpet. “Crap, sorry” Andy exclaimed, and I turned from the computer and gave him a wide-eyed look and made the shh! gesture. Andy backed away, grimacing. I went to the kitchen to find the broom and dustpan. The vaccuum was out of the question. Eric helped by holding the dustpan as I swept, trying and failing to get the pieces out of the berber.
Eric and I worked the chip problem, but Andy and Cory disappeared into the living room. When Eric and I finally made the last trip to the kitchen trash can to put away the broom, we heard Cory yelp in what we knew was a combination of joy and pain. We ran in the living room to find Andy on top of Cory, and it was clear what started out as wrestling was turning into something else.
“Guys! We can’t wrestle!” I hissed. They froze.
“Sorry,” they whispered simultaneously. Neither of them moved.
“Are you gonna cum, or do you want to start the movie?” I asked, saying the quiet part out loud. There was no sense in hiding it anymore. It was oddly freeing to acknowledge the elephant in the room: It’s OK to cum with each other.
“OK, OK,” Andy said, getting up off of Cory and adjusting his shorts. Cory looked somewhat disappointed, his own erection bulging from his pants.
We had a big, overstuffed sectional couch that we set up on in front of the TV. I loaded the tape and pressed play, making sure the volume of the TV was set to 5. I was all the way on the right, Andy was next to me. Cory was next to Andy, and Eric was on the other end, his legs up on the footrest that extended from that end of the sofa. I wanted to sit next to Eric, but Andy and Cory had planted themselves right in the center.
I didn’t realize it when I taped it, but there was a short before Racket Girls called Are You Ready for Marriage? It had barely started, when I flinched. There was a hand on my area, unexpectedly feeling me up. I practically whiplashed myself to look at Andy, and he was laser-focused on the TV. In the dim light of the tube, I could see he had one hand on my thigh, having instead answered the question is Bobby hard? and perhaps not the question of the short. His other hand was down Cory’s underwear.
My eyes went wide. Cory reached over, slid his fingers behind Andy’s waistband and down into his underwear. He found Andy’s cock, made a circle with his fingers and started stroking it. Cory’s other hand went in Eric’s direction, and explored his area. I couldn’t tell in the dim light if Eric was hard, but I could see that he looked at Cory, and then at me, and smiled. The tip of Cory’s cock was peeking out his waistband, shiny with precum.
The TV was very quiet, so we knew we had to be silent. We’re really doing it, I thought. Thinking about Eric liking being touched, and his own erection growing started to get me hard. Andy felt around my area again, and found that out for himself. He smiled, still focused on the television. “Hey, so,” Andy started, uncharacteristically gently, “does your mom keep, like, lotion nearby?” he asked.
I nodded, and I reached over to the side table and found a pump-top dispenser of lotion in the little cupboard underneath. Andy released me briefly so I could find it. I remember specifically being very quiet, because I knew the cupboard doors had magnetic closures that clicked very loudly if you let them. I left the door open instead. I returned to my seated position, and Andy accepted the lotion bottle, squeezed a little out for himself, and passed it to Cory.
Cory passed the lotion to Eric after he got some, and Eric set it on the table next to him. Andy was lubing up my cock, now thick and hard, and Cory’s cock, which he had been rubbing with his body earlier. Cory, reciprocally, had Andy in his right hand, and Eric in his left. Andy was the second boy now to touch me this way, and it still felt confusing. It felt good — really good — but both Eric and Andy seemed to have a way they touch themselves that maybe didn’t feel as good to me as it did to them. But everything lately seemed to be a new experience, and everyone was learning a little bit about themselves, and what they liked.
Andy’s eyes were still locked on the TV. Maybe he thought if he didn’t look, it wasn’t gay. His grip was strong and he went faster than Eric did. I think I liked Eric’s cadence better, but Andy was in more of a hurry. “Pull your shirt over it,” he urged, demonstrating by covering Cory’s hand around his shaft with the bottom of his t-shirt.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Eric twitch in the same way that he did when he jacked us off. His core seemed to spasm in a way that made his whole body tense up. After a moment, he enjoyed the blossom of pleasure coursing through his body and leaned back against the couch. Cory continued to stroke Andy, who came next with a soft grunt. Andy was squeezing the living daylights out of my cock. Cory shivered and pushed his hips up into Andy’s hand. I felt the rising sensation in my cock in that moment, and I erupted into Andy’s hand under my shirt.
Cumming with Eric felt so brief and anxious, Andy felt like … more. A bigger blossom of pleasure, a lot more cum, and less of a sensation that we were doing something wrong. It did feel good to do it as a group.
We all just sat there for a minute, watching the end of the short, and the commercials came on. Andy pulled back his hands. “Can you, uh, get us a towel?” Andy whispered to me. I had made a mess all over myself, so there was nothing to do except to make sure it didn’t drip on anything. I pushed it all back into my underwear, and hopped awkwardly to the kitchen to wet some paper towels with cold water. I brought them back, and the three boys cleaned up, and went to the bathroom or the kitchen sink to quietly wash their hands. Someone had paused the video. Eric gave me back the bottle of lotion, which got a swipe from a clean paper towel, and was silently replaced in the cupboard under the side table. Everything else went in the kitchen trash, under what we threw away from dinner.
That was it. It was done. “This is why we only do this together,” Andy whispered, as we sat back down on the couch and pressed play on the remote. “It takes a team to clean up.”
N — not really, I thought, but it did feel good, and the only thing I’d have to worry about is soaking my shirt. Andy suggested “I spilled my soda” was the go-to excuse there.
Racket Girls was definitely not the horny movie we thought it was going to be, but maybe that was because we weren’t as horny anymore as we could have been. All the “teenagers” looked like they were in their 40s, and the wrestling itself wasn’t sexy at all. B-plus riffs, though, from Mike and the bots. We giggled quietly. All of us fell asleep on the couch, and only woke up when the VCR clunked to a stop at the end of the tape. It was 10:32. Andy stretched out on the couch, head to head with Eric, who was curled up on the big attached footrest. Cory and I rolled out sleeping bags on the floor. We were all instantly asleep.
My mom was quiet in the kitchen, but unintentionally woke me up at 6 to start coffee. She always woke up early, and I was still in a slightly vigilant state about making too much noise.
“How was your movie?” she asked, whispering.
“Good. Did we make too much noise?” I asked.
“You were fine,” she said. “There were chips in the carpet near the computer though,” she said.
“I’ll vacuum it up, don’t worry. Sorry, Mom,” I whispered.
“You’re fine. It doesn’t look like there were any major injuries or furniture broken, so you’re fine.”
Cory must have heard us and woke up, gave us a quick “good morning” and went to the bathroom. He walked in an arc that didn’t show his front to my mom. By 7 everyone was awake, dressing in fresh clothes before it raised any questions. Dad came downstairs and greeted us all cheerfully, and made pancakes for breakfast. Cory’s dad picked him up for church at 8:30, and Andy’s mom came to collect him at 9, but not before another round of LHX on the computer. Eric was the last to leave.
“D’you wanna go up to my room?” I asked, eyebrows raised. It was a completely loaded question. There was no homework to do, and the computer was downstairs.
“I do, but,” he waited a beat. “I kind of want to take a shower,” Eric said with a half smile, and honestly I understood. “Next time?” he asked.
“Next time,” I replied with a grin.
Author’s note: I fudged the dates a little on the episode of MST3K: Racket Girls aired on November 24, 1994, almost two months later than the day this is set. I hope that didn’t distract from your enjoyment of this chapter. — PKS