Tales From the Gym

by Roland Graeme

  His genitals were in proportion to the rest of him. Guy realized that he was being awfully blatant in his checking out of the other man. He tried not to stare, because he knew it’d be considered rude in some quarters. But he couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from Avery’s package. After all, it was the only part of him that hadn’t been photographed regularly for the physique magazines! His balls dangled low in their black-furred pouch. The long thick hose of his uncircumcised cock stood out at half-mast from his groin. As though aware it was being scrutinized, and proud of the fact, the penis seemed to stiffen perceptibly under Guy’s intent gaze. It had to be a good nine or ten inches long, and it looked even larger, as any man’s dick did when it was attached to a shaved torso and a pair of hairless thighs. The lack of body hair gave the genitalia greater visual prominence.

  If Avery noticed Guy’s blatant interest in his dick—and it would’ve been hard for him to miss—he didn’t appear to be offended by it. He was probably used to having other guys check him out. Maybe he even enjoyed it. He only smiled as he lathered soap all over himself and stepped under the shower head beside Guy’s. He towered over Guy, making him feel like David confronting Goliath.

  “How’re you doing?” he asked Guy.

  “Fine.”

  “You were sure pounding away at the iron out there.”

  “Yeah, this is one of my heavy days. It’s a pain in the ass while you’re doing it, but it always feels good when you’re done.”

  “Yeah, doesn’t it? Christ, this hot water feels good! It’s very relaxing. You know something? Being out there on the floor and tossing all that weight around—it always gets me kind of excited. Revved up, if you know what I mean. It must have something to do with the adrenalin rush. It always takes me a while to wind down. How about you?”

  “I get wound up the same way,” Guy admitted. “Even now, standing here thinking thank God I’m done, I can feel my pulse pounding. It must have something to do with the adrenaline, like you said, pumping through our veins.”

  “And a really good workout always gives me a fucking hard-on,” Avery confided. “You, too?”

  “Sometimes.” Guy was both embarrassed and excited by the turn their conversation had taken.

  “Isn’t that a bitch? I mean, isn’t it ironic? You get all worked up, until you’re just about ready to grab the first guy you see in the locker room, throw him down, and fuck the shit out of him. Only you’re probably too tired to go through with it.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Guy said, boldly. “I have a pretty fast recuperation time.”

  Avery laughed. “Do you? Good for you. Speaking of hard-ons…I’ve been known to spring a boner onstage, too.”

  “Me, too. It must be the same thing. A combination of nervousness and excitement. It’s so embarrassing.”

  “Yeah. Of course, some of the judges like to see that,” Avery said, slyly. “It turns them on. They start fantasizing about what it might be like to have sex with you. Hey, has any of them ever come on to you?”

  “No.”

  “I find that kind of hard to believe. A good-looking guy like you? Well, just you wait. It’ll happen.” Something about the way Avery said it implied that he didn’t think being hit on by a judge was necessarily a bad thing. “You looked especially good out there on the weight floor just now,” he added. “If I were a judge, I’d sure as hell hit on you—and professional ethics be damned.”

  Guy blushed—all over—at this unexpected compliment. “Thanks, Avery,” he said.

  “By the way, have you eaten yet tonight?” the other man asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  “No.”

  “Me, either,” Avery said, with a laugh. “And now I am absolutely fucking starved. But this one of those nights when I don’t feel like going home and cooking for myself. You want to go someplace and strap on the feed bag?”

  Guy jumped at the chance. “Sure.”

  “Have you ever been to Romanello’s?”

  “No. I’ve never even heard of it.”

  “Really? You don’t know what you’re missing. It’s a little Italian place I go to sometimes. If you like Italian, you’ll love it.”

  “You’ve talked me into it. Let’s go.”

  They dried themselves off and got dressed. Guy followed Avery’s car to the restaurant. It wasn’t far away, and it turned out to be the kind of unpretentious mom-and-pop establishment that served good food at a reasonable price. The place lived up to Avery’s recommendation. Confronted with a menu listing one tempting dish after another, the two men abandoned their stringent diets for the time being and pigged out shamelessly. Between mouthfuls, they talked.

  “It’s funny,” Avery said, at one point. “You and I have known each other for quite some time, now. And yet we don’t really know each other, if you understand what I mean.”

  “I think I do. We seem to just sort of pass each other, coming and going.”

  “Maybe we ought to do something about that.”

  “I thought we were doing something about it,” Guy pointed out. “We’re having dinner together.”

  “Yes, we are. And this is nice, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  Underneath the surface of their casual conversation, Guy could sense an increasingly suggestive subtext simmering away. He was indeed beginning to wind down. He could feel his post-workout tension giving way to a sense of pleasant relaxation, almost approaching lethargy. He suspected that Avery, seated opposite him at the small table, was feeling much the same way. Back at the gym, when he was on the job, Avery always seemed to have an alert, businesslike look about. Now, his guard was down a bit. Guy liked the way the other man was looking at him and smiling at him.

  “It was strange to see you working out alone tonight,” Avery remarked. “Lately, you and Petr have been practically joined at the hip.”

  “He’s a good workout partner.”

  “Is that all he is to you?”

  “Well, we’re friends.”

  “Just friends? Not lovers?”

  “Me and Petr? Don’t be ridiculous, Avery.”

  “I don’t see what’s so ridiculous about it. You and him look good together. I would think it’d be a perfect arrangement. What’s holding you back?”

  “Well, for one thing, Petr’s not an American citizen. Eventually, he’s going to want to go back home, and then I’d be left high and dry.”

  “I wasn’t an American citizen either, when I first came here,” Avery reminded Guy. “But I decided to stick around.”

  “That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Maybe Petr will decide to do the same. But if he doesn’t…are you saying you don’t want to get into a serious relationship, with no guarantee that it’ll be more than temporary?”

  “Maybe,” Guy admitted. “Maybe I’m about ready to stop all this whoring around and settle down a little.”

  “But only a little,” Avery teased him. “Not too much.”

  “Too much of anything can be bad for you,” Guy retorted.

  “So what you’re saying is, if I were able to talk Petr into performing in the shows, I wouldn’t be horning in on your territory. You wouldn’t be jealous.”

  “Not in the least.” But even as he said it, Guy wondered whether it was the whole truth.

  Over Guy’s objections, Avery insisted on picking up the check.

  “Are you in a big hurry to get home?” Avery asked, casually, after he’d paid at the cash register and he and Guy were getting ready to leave the restaurant.

  “No, not particularly.”

  “Why don’t you come to my place and hang out for a while? I’ve got something to show you.”

  I bet you have, Guy couldn’t help thinking. He could feel a stirring in his loins. Was Avery propositioning him? Was that why he’d asked about Guy’s relationship with Petr—because he wanted to trick with Guy, but didn’t want to interfere with anything Gu
y might have going with Petr?

  “Show me what?” Guy asked.

  “Come and find out.” Avery’s tone of voice was light, not particularly seductive, and Guy now wondered if he was reading too much into the invitation.

  He agreed to follow Avery to his place.

  Aside from anything else, Guy was curious to see where and how Avery lived. It was a nice apartment building, a cut above the rather run-down building in which Guy lived.

  Avery’s living room wasn’t decorated, although the furniture, with leather, chrome, dark wood, and glass predominating, had a certain elegance. Guy was intrigued by a Modernist lamp set on a side table. It was an oversized clear glass cylinder, two feet tall, resembling a test tube, open at the top. Two-thirds of the way up the interior of the cylinder, the actual light socket was inserted, with the power cord threaded through an opening in the glass. A big opaque white bulb was screwed into the socket. This lamp was lit, and it threw a pool of warm light across the living room floor.

  One wall of the room was devoted to a photo gallery. There was one large, spectacular photo of a young and chiseled Avery, nude except for a pair of posing trunks, and caught in an especially dynamic pose, with an intense look of concentration on his face. The other photos were smaller. They were all of other bodybuilders, and all of them were autographed.

  “Want a drink?” Avery asked.

  “Sure.” Because they were driving, they’d limited themselves to one glass of red wine each, back at Romanello’s.

  “I’ve got a couple of bottles of red that’re at least as good as what we had with dinner. Why don’t I open one of them, unless you’d prefer something else?”

  “No, the wine sounds great.”

  While Avery busied himself in the kitchen, Guy took a closer look at the photo gallery. Avery returned, carrying an open bottle and two glasses. He set them down on the coffee table, filled both glasses, and handed Guy one.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  “Cheers,” Guy responded, as they touched glasses. He took a sip of the wine. “Oh, this is good. I’ve been admiring your photo collection. But where are the rest of the other pictures of you?” Guy asked.

  “Oh, stashed away. In scrapbooks, or packed away in boxes in the closet, or just shoved randomly in drawers. I think it’s kind of vulgar to have all that kind of stuff on display.”

  “Then I’m afraid I’m extremely vulgar,” Guy admitted, with a rueful little laugh. “You see, I have every really good photo of me ever taken either framed and hung on the wall, or at least readily accessible. And every magazine I’ve ever been in is stacked right there on my coffee table, ready to impress visitors. You must think that’s terrible.”

  “No, you’re entitled. You’re young and just starting out. You deserve to enjoy it.”

  “While it lasts?”

  “Well, that’s a consideration. Let’s face it, that’s one of the realities of our racket. There’s always somebody younger than you, bigger than you, more ambitious than you, who’s out there just waiting for you to start slipping, so he can take your place. The trick is not to let yourself start slipping too soon…but when it is time for you to step down, do so gracefully, and for God’s sake make sure you have something else to do for a living and to keep yourself occupied, something you can care about just as much as you did about bodybuilding.”

  “Like running the gym?”

  “I enjoy that.”

  “And the porn?”

  Avery laughed. “I admit it—I enjoy that, too. Maybe even more. And since I’m behind the camera, I don’t have to worry about how I look.”

  “But you still look damn good.”

  “Thanks. I hadn’t thought you’d noticed,” Avery said. “After all, work isn’t everything in life. There has to be room for recreation, too.”

  Now there was a definite seductiveness in Avery’s facial expression and tone of voice.

  Guy liked the direction the evening seemed to be taking. “You said you had something to show me.”

  “And so I have. Grab a seat.”

  Guy sat down on the couch and drank his wine while he watched Avery turn on his TV, then search through an extensive array of DVDs on a nearby bookshelf. Avery chose one and loaded the disc into the DVD player.

  “What’s this?” Guy asked. “Another Big Boyz live show?”

  “No, although I can put one on later, if you’re interested. This is just a pump room and contest video. But I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  “Are you in it?”

  “No. What kind of a narcissist do you think I am, anyway?” Avery protested, as he sat down beside Guy, with the remote control in his hand.

  “So you’re telling me you don’t own any videos of yourself?” Guy asked.

  Avery grinned. “Oh, shut up. I do, but I don’t sit here watching them, obsessively, for hours on end. And I’m not about to inflict them on anybody else.” As he spoke, Avery thumbed a button on the remote, and the TV screen flickered, then jumped to the start of a scene. Curious, Guy settled back to watch.

  The pump room segments of the video showed a group of young bodybuilders milling about backstage, pumping up, oiling themselves, getting ready to go onstage. This was followed by highlights of the actual competition. This sort of video appealed to two different groups of viewers—bodybuilding enthusiasts, and the kind of gay men who liked their j/o material to be very soft-core. Sometimes, of course, these two groups overlapped.

  Guy enjoyed seeing nearly naked, muscular bodies as much as the next red-blooded gay man, but he didn’t see what was so special about this particular DVD.

  “What exactly are we looking at?” he asked, after a minute or two of the pumping and oiling action. “I mean, when and where was this taken?”

  “It’s an amateur contest, in Hamburg, Germany, a few years ago. Wait…coming up now is what I wanted you to see. There.”

  The camera was now focusing on a blond bodybuilder who was pumping up with a pair of heavy dumbbells.

  “Hey, that’s Petr!” Guy exclaimed. He leaned forward in his seat, fixing his attention on the image on the screen.

  “I thought you’d be interested,” Avery said, smugly.

  “God, doesn’t he look young?”

  “Yeah, he was just a kid. But he looks good, doesn’t he?”

  “He sure does.”

  “Even back then, he was hot.”

  “You think so? So was I,” Guy boasted. But then honesty got the better of him, and he added, by way of qualification, “In an immature sort of way.”

  “Are you telling me you didn’t have guys hitting on you, back then?”

  “Of course I did. The problem was, I didn’t always know how to handle it. That was where the immature part came in.”

  They watched the rest of the video, making comments on the various competitors. Petr won not only his class, but the overall title. He was beaming, and all but bouncing down with boyish glee, as he hugged the men who’d won second and third place. Then Petr brandished his trophy over his head for the photographers.

  “Isn’t that cute?” Avery asked. “I think that was his first major title.”

  “I wonder if he had a boyfriend back then,” Guy speculated, salaciously. “Or if he and one of the other competitors went back to his hotel room to fuck.”

  “Is that the sort of thing you do after a contest?”

  “Well, I go and eat first. Then I start thinking about getting laid.” Not unlike the sequence of events this evening, Guy thought.

  “Admit it,” Avery said drily. “You got off on seeing your boyfriend up there—flaunting that hot little stud body of his, beating the competition, and collecting his trophy with that starry-eyed look on his face.”

  “Petr is not my boyfriend,” Guy reminded him. “And look who’s talking! You’re the one who has the DVD in his collection.”

  “You can borrow it, any time you need something to watc
h and fantasize about, while you beat off.”

  “Fuck you! For your information, I’m a big boy now, and when I beat off, I prefer to do it over real porn. The kind of thing you put out. I like to watch grown men—not a bunch of kids.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Avery picked up his glass and drank from it. “Tell me something.”

  “As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, I’m not shy. Ask me anything.”

  “Are you into body worship at all?”

  “A little,” Guy said, cautiously. He thought about Jeremy. The conversation was taking a potentially interesting turn. “Provided it leads to other things. I don’t want to just stand there and look and touch, and talk. I want to get off, too. Why do you ask? Are you into that?”

  “I’m into all sorts of things. More wine?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  Avery refilled both their glasses. “I’m into all sorts of things,” he repeated. “And I was thinking, if I can just get you drunk enough, I might be able to talk you into some of them.”

  Guy snickered. “You wouldn’t need much wine, and you wouldn’t have to do much talking, to do that. I’m easy.”

  “Are you? I like that in a man. How’d you like it if we did some posing for each other?”

  “I’d like it just fine…but like I said, provided it leads to other things.”

  “Oh, I think I can accommodate you. Why don’t you drink up—and then we can take this into the bedroom.”

  Guy drank up. He wasn’t exactly drunk, but he’d consumed enough of the wine to start feeling a distinct, pleasurable buzz.

  He followed Avery down a hallway and into his bedroom. There were two nightstands, each with a small table lamp set on it, flanking the queen size bed, which was unmade. But Avery switched on a ceiling light fixture, which lit up the entire room.

  It seemed perfectly logical to Guy when Avery suggested that they both strip down naked so that they could compare their muscles and work on some poses together. Provided, of course, it didn’t end there, but led to other things!