Today's lecture was about a group of texts in which a protagonist's fantasies took on a life of their own, seeping into the real world and inexplicably changing the expected course of events. Our professor had just said something really interesting - about the dialectic between showing and concealing which, according to him, was not only a prerequisite for building up suspense, but also lay at the basis of true eroticism - when I noticed a strange, tingling sensation in my legs.

I shifted in my seat, feeling uncomfortable all of a sudden, but trying hard to stay focused on what Professor Smith was saying. I absent-mindedly tugged at my shirt, wondering why it was so hot inside the lecture hall when it had been so chilly outside. Scanning my notes, I tried to pick up the thread of Professor Smith's argument, which I had lost not only due to the distraction caused by the feeling in my legs, but also because of an increasingly painful hard-on in my pants.

"To say that something is erotic means that we are not dealing with physical excitement alone - indeed, erotic pleasure involves patience as well as creativity. It is, to put it differently, a feat of the imagination." Professor Smith was going at full throttle now, working himself up into an intellectual state of excitement. I had found my way back just in time to hear him deliver one of his notoriously quotable and often quite thought-provoking one-liners. "Eroticism, ladies and gentlemen," he declared, looking up and smiling at the class which seemed transfixed by his argument, "is sex with brains."

I was just about to write this down when I saw that Jaleb Kasheen was leaning over towards Sandra Kassowitz and giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. In itself, this might not seem particularly unusual, but Sandra Kassowitz was the hottest girl on campus (a fact which even I was aware of - I am gay, after all, not blind), and Jaleb was... well, actually I thought he was very cute, and I loved the soft, black tone of his skin, but he was known to be extremely shy, and I could not figure out for the world how he had managed to win over our undisputed beauty queen.

I watched Sandra respond eagerly to Jaleb's kiss, and wondered why no one else seemed interested in what was going on between the two. I looked up at Professor Smith, somewhat bewildered by the fact that he simply went on with his lecture, saying something about the blurring of social divides in erotic literature and how it sometimes served as a subversive device, but apparently oblivious to the unlikely couple secretly making out in the front row.

I admit that I was glad for Jaleb, who was a nice guy and had once rather despondently told me how much he was in love with Sandra. To be honest, I never thought he would stand a chance, but obviously he had found a way to Sandra's heart. Watching two people in love never failed to make me feel good, and I silently wished Jaleb and Sandra all the best. It was a pleasant surprise that nobody was cracking silly jokes about them, or found fault with their beautiful show of mutual affection just because it was, somewhat unconventionally, taking place in a classroom during an ongoing lecture.

At this point, I realized that I had once again lost track of what Professor Smith was saying, and while a tried to retrace his discursive steps, I adjusted my hard-on, which was becoming more and more uncomfortable as the lecture proceded. I was still feeling hot, and wondered whether I should open the top bottom of my shirt, or perhaps even roll back the sleeves. I decided that the latter would probably be more effective in cooling me off, and quickly went to work while trying not to disrupt the class.

It was very refreshing to feel the air against my skin, but I noticed that the veins on my forearm were much more visible than I remembered them to be, giving the impression that the blood was running faster through my body than it usually did. Judging from my throbbing dick, my circulation must indeed have been a little out of and above the ordinary, and I began to worry whether I might be getting ill.

Somewhere in the background, I heard Professor Smith elaborate on the reaction of panic most protagonists displayed when they realized that their deepest and most secret fantasies were suddenly becoming true, but I was too distracted by what was going on with my body to pay any further attention. I examined my right forearm with my left hand, tracing the outline of my pulsing veins.

Suddenly, I became aware of a strange noise, the source of which I could not immediately detect. I listended more intently to the the little cracking sounds, which were accompanied by a noise vaguely reminiscent of two balloons gently rubbed against each other. For a moment, it seemed to me that the sounds were coming from inside my body, a thought which I tried to dismiss as too weird to be true. I realized that some of the others were hearing the noise as well, turning their heads in order to find out its cause.

I looked back down at my forearms and could have sworn that they were somehow thicker than before, as if they had swollen in the few seconds during which I had turned away my eyes. In the meantime, the noise continued, and I gasped as I saw that the muscles between my wrist and my elbow were slowly increasing in size. At first, I could not move and watched them continue to inflate, but then I recovered and put my arms under the table, afraid that somebody might see what was happening to me. I realized with a mounting sense of despair that not only my forearms were growing, but that my whole body had begun to change.

I understood now why I had felt more and more constricted in the course of the lecture, seeing how tightly my shirt was stretched across my ballooning chest. I closed my eyes, still hearing those cracking, crunching sounds, unwilling to accept that I was apparently growing more muscular by the minute, threatening to eventually burst right out of my clothes in front of the entire class.

I wished for my growth to stop, but I knew that I was still gaining more muscle even before I opened my eyes because I could feel a powerful pressure inside of me, blowing me up and inflating every muscle on my body with size. My eyes open once again, I gazed in amazement at my broadening shoulders, when suddenly a button popped off the front of my overstrained shirt. I knew now that I needed to get out of the classroom as soon as possible, before my muscles would become too big.

Utterly confused by the fact that I was turning from an average guy into a muscular hunk, I got up too fast and hit my desk with my swelling quads, crashing through the wood as if it was a piece of crumbly cardboard instead of solid beech. There might have been, in the back of my mind, the faintest flicker of excitement at this amazing display of strength, but above all I felt embarrassed by what was, after all, a complete loss of control over the workings of my body.

All the other students turned around and watched me struggle out of my seat in the back row, my clothes looking several sizes too small on my ballooning body, my shirt wrapped tightly around my blown-up torso, and my jeans indecently stuffed with way too much muscle. I stormed out of the room, stumbling because of the unfamiliar amount of muscles on my thighs, which kept getting in each others way, hurrying towards the bathroom while another button popped off my shirt.

Two more buttons lost their fight against my growing pecs, leaving my shirt open and hanging losely on my increasingly muscular frame. I entered one of the stalls and shut the door behind me, trying to calm down, but the sound of my pumped up biceps tearing through the sleeves of my shirt did not help me to regain my composure. Leaning against the locked door, I felt my pants being filled up with more muscle with each passing second, and was reminded of my raging hard-on by the astonishing size of the bulge on my crotch. More and more muscles were being packed into my back, pushing against the door behind me. I crouched down in a fetal position, which turned out to be a bad idea because it made my calves and quads flare up, which was the last straw for my sadly overextended jeans. With one ripping sound, my legs burst through the seams of my pants, leaving me with the torn fabric hanging from my hips, and the cracking, crunching noises of my continuing growth. •