I turned to the mirror in my mind, its edges hazy and indistinct. That wasn't so important; the gym in my mind was never finished, because I always needed new equipment to excercise with there. The mirror reflected back the perfect V-shape of my body. I filled its surface as I brought my biceps up into a slow, controlled flex. The biceps bulged, bulged, and leapt to attention as I completed the maneuver. Then, I brougth my arms down into a most-muscular. My pectorals leapt from my chest, threatening to snap the strings of the black tank top.

Six feet tall and two-hundred twenty pounds of solid, ripped muscle. I was the center of attention, and those who did not want me wanted to be me. Radiant, glowing--

"I think the little freak's starting to get a chubby," someone exploded nearby. I wouldn't have heard the whisper had I not been spacing out, but my ears honed in on the words, filtering them out of the music of the gym and the pounding of weights being lifted.

My eyes snapped open. Brent Thomas and Reagan Fitzgerald were at their usual places by the bench press closest to the mirrored wall of the San Cristobal State gym. They were a customary decoration at the bench station, typical former high school jocks who had come into college without a workout plan or a brain in their heads. They put their time in at the gym, and genes and hormones had done the rest. They were three years my junior and I had been a senior at El Paseo high school when they were just sophomores.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was only a shadowy wisp of the me in my mind, pale where he was golden bronzed and short where he was tall. I had some sparse muscle on my frame, enough to fill out the real black tanktop decently, but no one would call my build muscular. You could call it a swimmer's build. I was handsome enough, not gorgeous, but the goatee I wore lent my face a rakish cast that some guys found attractive. Yes, I'm gay, but not a flamer, even though some guys seem to think I'm a twink. Gosh, I hate that.

Even though I'd been working out for almost six months now, I was nothing compared to the painful hotness of Brent Thomas and Reagan Fitzgerald. Their faces had been seared into my fantasies for months now, even as their names sparked panic in my heart.

Brent and Reagan had barely registered as bleeps on my radar until senior year, when I had begun tutoring both in Organic Chemistry. Both had proved to be indifferent students, but their ire at their failing grades had been of little concern to me: I was on the cross country team, not precisely a jock but of average strength for an 17-year-old. At 5'7 and 125 pounds, I wasn't big in any vagary of the imagination. I hardly felt threatened by two 5'2 14-year-olds. I told them that I couldn't tutor them any more, they had demonstrated a surprising foreign vocabulary of curse words, and that had been that. After all, they had no big brothers to threaten me, no friends my age. I suppose it had been the wrong way to deal with them.

The next time I saw Brent and Reagan--after graduation, of course, where I was salutatorian because Marcos Gallego finagled an 'A' in a class he should have failed--was at orientation at San Cristobal State. I had been on the O-Team for two years and was standing out by the libary. I was still 5'7, and a little less svelte at 140, but I had been keeping in shape. So, apparently, had Brent and Reagan.

"Holy shit, it's Johnny Ford," boomed a baritone voice from nearby.

I looked up. And up. Brent Thomas had somehow metamorphosized. He was no longer 5'2, nor could he be called a boy. Muscle strained every fabric of his polo shirt, its pale turquoise length several sizes too small for the 6-foot frame it showcased. His pectorals were slightly out of proportion to his body, as were the baseball biceps that exploded from his folded arms. Worst of all, he was clearly half a foot taller than I was, and gorgeous. I barely recognized his face from the boyish features that had raged at me a few years ago. I should admit now that the time in the gym was hardly the first boner I'd gotten around Brent or Reagan.

Brent turned to the guy next to him, taller by a good two inches and far more muscular. Reagan looked like he had been playing football, and not on some high school team, either. He was Brent built on a larger scale, massive hands clenched powerfully at his sides, his polo shirt--this one was the same salmon pink that thousands of fraternity jocks worldwide, from the Sig Alphs to the Sig Nus to whatever other combinations of Greek letters you could think off, used to proclaim their originality. Reagan made the ordinary shirt extraordinary. It would have been the right size for most guys his height, but he was forced to wear it unbuttoned due to the breadth and depth of his chest. His body entered into an astonishing taper from shoulder to abdominal, causing the fit of the shirt to hint at muscle beneath. And Reagan had something Brent didn't. A massive bulge was encased in those khaki shorts, begging to be let out and manhandled.

I shuddered. Sure, both of the guys were legal, but I had a feeling that sex with me was the last thing either had in mind. No, I was certain of it.

"He looks scared," Brent continued, loudly enough that some people were turning to look.

"Guess he didn't think we'd get out of high school," Reagan quipped.

Brent smirked. "Guess we did, no thanks to him."

They started to step toward me.

So I did what any brave, upstanding man would do to confront two superior specimens of manliness. I walked away and pretended I didn't hear them. My ears flushed at the sounds of them laughing, and that was an admission of weakness enough for the two of them.

They acted like they were still in high school. So far, there had been only a few problems with the boys. Brent acted alone; Reagan, never. I passed them in the halls, and they pretended not to notice where they were going, bumping into me. I cannot say how many times my face came into contact with Brent's taut biceps or Reagan's pectorals. Always, they pretended not to notice I was there, and made it difficult for me to escape. They occasionally wrote messages on the white board on my room door inviting me to gay sex parties or advertising sexual favors I would provide. Those stung, even though neither of them had an inkling as to my true sexuality. I had thought the most humiliating thing they could do was when one of them wired the communal showers' door shut, and I had finally come crashing out into a gaggle of jocks fresh from the baseball field.

One of them, Ryan Tanner, had hooked up with me in the past, and he had joked the loudest about how I was desperate for some action.

Yet now they had pointed out the inexcuseable; an unconcealable erection in the weight room when only guys were around. Brent was sniggering at this point, Reagan looked slightly uncomfortable and embarassed at seeing my face turn the color of a burn victim, but he joined Brent in laughing.

I reached down and gathered up both 20 pounders, turned away, and began trying to curl them while sitting on a nearby bench. I couldn't quite make it to 10 with my left arm, but my embarassment was at least killing my erection. Adjusting it, I figured, would be admitting it existed. I could still hear Brent snickering even though he had long since stopped.

"Eight, Nine..." I was trying hard, but the ninth just wouldn't go.

Something yanked the weight out of my left hand. I stumbled.

"Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen," Brent's voice chanted out the numbers as he pumped them. His left biceps was right near my face, and I watched it swell and explode innumerable times before he finally stopped. His skin was glistening with sweat, and I could smell the unimistakable scent of jock: that faint odor that rises from clean sweat mixed with deodorant.

"Dude, Reagan, can you believe this guy? I was curling these when we were sixteen."

Reagan grunted. "Eloquent," I muttered under my breath.

"What's that?" Brent stared down at me. He edged his crotch closer to my face. "You can't suck it now. I'm trying to lift weights." With that, he twisted to show me the weight he carried in his other arm. Seventy pounds. For one-armed curls.

He brought his right biceps up into an incredible flex for an 18-year-old. The weight seemed not to faze him whatsoever. Sweat gleamed on his skin, turning it into a bronze effigy of masculinity that I could never possess, damned by genetics.

I couldn't stop my boner from rising, thrusting up out of my shorts. It was not a huge piece of meat, maybe five and a half inches, but it was visible in my basketball shorts. I should've worn briefs.

Brent started to say something else, but I was already on the move. I dashed for the door of the gym so fast that it took him by surprise. Clumsy with humiliation, I tripped once over a mat someone had left lying out, and burst back out into the main hall of the gym. Neither Brent nor Reagan followed, but I heard several guys laughing at my back.

My eyes stung, and suddenly I was crying.

The harassment had gone too far, I knew. I should have gone to the Dean's office or the Campus Police. Instead, I rushed back toward the dorms. When I made it back to my dorm room, I locked the door--I was one of a few fortunates in my area to have my own individual room--and proceeded to jerk every last milliliter of cum out of my balls. The swelling mass of Brent's biceps leapt in my mind, along with the massive package that Reagan could not hide. I fell into fitful sleep fraught with dreams of massive men laughing at me. I awakened from my misery once as someone knocked on my neighbor's door fiercely.

Try as I might to filter out the sounds of struggle next door, I failed miserably. The Jason kid who lived in that apartment--he was another of the campus jocks, it seemed, although I'd never taken the time to get to know him and hadn't really noticed how big he was until recently--was always boxing around with someone. Finally, the sound stopped, and I resumed my wretched rest. Tomorrow, I thought, I would skip class and go out into town. Maybe I could buy some protection. Or maybe I'd get hit by a bus. •