Everyone is 18+ and fully consenting.
I noticed Caden before he ever noticed me.
That was just how it was with me in general. I always felt a little bit invisible. I was always on the small side, and bigger guys would be loud in the hall, chest bumping and hitting each other in the arm and talking loudly. I sort of just slid by unnoticed.
Caden was one of those guys, but I remember the first time I laid eyes on him, freshman year. I couldn’t look away. I didn’t even know why I couldn’t look away. My eyes literally just wouldn’t move away from him. He had sort of spiky hair that day. He had gotten sweaty while playing football or something at lunch, and he had pushed his short hair upwards with his hands, something I saw him do many times later. He was leaning against his locker and eating a lollipop, sort of just doing nothing, waiting for someone maybe. I was far enough away that no one noticed me looking. I just saw him and suddenly wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to be close to him.
When I went home that day, I thought more about it. Why couldn’t I stop looking at that guy? It took me hours of ruminating and self doubt until it hit me that I had a “crush” on him. Like a real crush.
“Ahh,” I said out loud to myself in my room. “Well, shit.”
Over the years, I don’t think we ever shared a single word. He always had more people around him, and a physical confidence that made him hard to look away from and also made looking feel like a guilty pleasure. He was tall, but not oversized, with a meaty body, but a narrow waist. He filled out his t-shirts and looked like a man. He had dark hair always looked perfectly “messy” but in a good way, and he never seemed to think about how he looked. He didn’t fix his hair or adjust his clothes. Everything just fit him naturally.
And his jawline caught light in a way that made me realize why people talk about male jawlines. It was just the right shape. I learned what the term “aesthetic” meant from observing him. He was especially handsome when he laughed at something one of his friends said.
I don’t think I was ever a creep, after that first time where I just openly stared at him freshman year. I sort of just learned to adjust. I developed other minor crushes over the years, but in my head I always compared them to him, to Caden.
I had friends, and they seemed to self-congregate. There was a group of guys who loved video games and D&D, and I hung out with them sometimes, but I wasn't really into their scene. There was the group of water polo guys I got to know when I played freshman year, but I wasn't that into the sport and moved on to just playing tennis and volleyball by the next year. There were people I ate lunch with, and texted, and did stuff with sometimes, but I moved through the day mostly on my own axis. My one constant was Patrick, my neighbor.
Patrick was in Caden's grade but went to a different school, so our friendship existed completely outside of all of that. We had done the string-and-cup telephone thing between our bedroom windows when we were kids, since our houses sat close enough that it actually worked. We had accidentally seen each other naked plenty of times over the years, since our windows faced each other, and neither of us really thought about it. It was never a thing. It was just Patrick. He was a decent guy I could talk to anytime, but for some reason, we were never that close either. He had his own friends, his own life on the other side of that window.
The first time Caden spoke to me directly, I was in the parking lot after school, waiting for a ride from a guy who had parked far away, and was going to drive back for me. I was crouched next to a shiny new Tesla, because I had dropped the keys to my house, and they had skidded underneath it. I was trying to fish them out with two fingers and not quite reaching. I heard footsteps slow behind me and then stop, followed by a very light chortle.
"Hey, man. You alright?"
I looked up. He was standing pretty close to me, basically standing over me. I saw him from a brand new angle, from the ground, the curves of his muscles making his shirt flow perfectly over his beautiful body. He was casual, one eyebrow raised as he looked down at me, with his bag over one shoulder, not in a hurry. His expression was neutral and open. No one else was around.
"Dropped my keys," I said.
He set his bag down, crouched next to me without being asked, reached his whole arm under the car, and pulled them out easily. He handed them to me and stood back up.
“This your car?” he said, pointing at the Tesla.
“No,” I said with a dry mouth.
“Just kidding, it’s mine.”
“Nice. Is it new?” I heard myself say, while my mind went blank. I couldn’t believe I was talking to him.
"Yeah," he said. “First time my mom let me drive it to school.”
He opened the door and threw his bag into the back seat.
“You need a ride?” he asked.
“Someone’s supposed to grab me,” I said, hearing the sheepishness enter my voice.
He looked around. “They seem late.”
“Yeah, but I guess they might’ve forgotten me.”
“So hop in. I think you live by me right? Mariposa?”
I fought away a smile as my stomach filled with butterflies. “Yeah.”
—[]—
He drove the way he did everything else, casual and confident. He had one hand on the wheel, not in a hurry. The Tesla was quiet inside, almost no engine sound, just the low hum of the road under us and the air conditioning. He had some music playing but I was too tense inside to even register what it was. His thick thighs shifted as he adjusted himself slightly.
The interior was clean and smelled faintly like him, a hint of cologne. I sat with my bag on my lap and looked at the neighborhood sliding past the window and tried to act like I was somewhere I belonged.
He didn't really fill the silence at first. He just drove. His right hand rested on the wheel and his left arm was along the door, and I watched his hands from the corner of my eye, then looked at his legs again, and then looked away.
"Which house is yours again?" he said.
"Three-twenty-two."
"I'm four-fifteen," he said. "We've probably walked past each other a hundred times."
"Probably," I said.
“Do you know Patrick? I think he lives right there.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling that we had someone in common. “That’s my neighbor.”
“Hate that guy,” he said dismissively, but with a little smile toward me.
I chuckled, and didn’t ask why.
“Doesn’t this thing have auto-pilot?” I said.
“Hell yeah,” he said as he engaged it quickly. “Check it out.”
I started to smile as I watched the wheel turn on its own.
“Nice.”
“It even makes turns,” he said, just as the car turned onto our street and slowed. He disengaged the autopilot to make it stop at my house.
I reached for the door handle and he said, "Hey," and I stopped.
"What’re you doing after school tomorrow?"
“Tennis.”
“And then?”
“Nothing.”
“Come over. We’ll watch the game.”
“Sure,” I said, probably failing to make my excitement.
He nodded. "Cool.”
I got out and he pulled away and I stood on the sidewalk and watched the Tesla's taillights until the road curved and they were gone.
—[]—
The next day he found me on instagram, and I got a message from him.
Caden: Hey. Sorry can’t hang today. School shit.
I was disappointed, but not fully. I could tell there was something there. Maybe we would be friends, in some way. He followed me, and I followed him back. I tried to stay cool about it, even internally, but I was honestly just kind of happy.
After that he started acknowledging me in the hallway. A nod, sometimes. Occasionally a hey. Always when the crowd had thinned and we were close enough, we would even say a few complete sentences to each other. I was in his orbit. I started adjusting my routes between classes to pass him on purpose, not dramatically, just enough that I would see him a little, but also not feel like a freak for doing it.
The hanging out started because of an elective we ended up in together, during the Spring semester. It was sort of like a “yearbook” committee, but it was basically a free period class that met every day. On the second day he came in and looked around. He saw me and sat across from me with a simple nod. He spread his stuff out, and that was that.
We would talk in low voices while the teacher went through logistics of stuff we were supposed to be planning, even though she did all the work herself and never actually gave us anything to help with.
Caden was easy to talk to. He was never nervous. He asked questions and listened to the answers and made the occasional dry observation that was strangely funny. I’m not sure if it all would’ve been funny had i not been crushing hard on him for years at this point, but still. I laughed at things he said, and he noticed that, and he liked it. He liked having a little audience for his humor.
We started walking out together after class. Then to the parking lot. Then we started sitting on the hood of his car before either of us left. The conversations were ordinary for a long time and I didn't mind that. I was learning how he talked, the way he paused before he said something sometimes, like he was looking for the right words, and how it was inevitably followed up with a very simple word for what he was trying to say. I liked the way he stretched his arms over his head when he was thinking, and the way his shirt lifted a few inches and I could look at the strip of his stomach with a tiny bit of hair heading South. I think he knew I watched. Sometimes I think he did it just so I would look.
One afternoon he asked me, without preamble, if I had ever dated anyone before.
“Not really,” I said, feeling nervous for some reason, “You?”
I already knew that he had dated a few girls. Even without ever talking to him, I knew he had dated Geena W., and then Kim S., and then I think he juggled two girls who ended up fighting each other in the hall one day, but I never got clarity on that. But I felt it was best not to reveal how much I knew. He seemed to very genuinely like me, and want me around, and I still didn’t want to fuck anything up.
“A couple girls, nothing serious,” he said. He looked at me when he said it.
"You're kind of hard to read," he said.
I didn't know what to say to that so I said, "Yeah."
He nodded.
“Yeah,” he echoed, and then changed the subject.
—[]—
I told him in his car. We had been sitting in his driveway for an hour after he drove us back from getting food one day, not going inside, not going home, just sitting with the windows down and the engine off, on a day where the weather was “perfect”, and the neighborhood was quiet around us, just a few rustling trees.
The conversation had slowed to nothing and the silence was comfortable, and I felt the thing I had been carrying for years press against the inside of my chest until I couldn't keep it there anymore.
"I like you," I said. "Like. Not as a friend."
He was quiet for a second. He was looking at the steering wheel.
Then he turned and looked at me, and the look on his face was, surprisingly, not surprise. He reached across the center console and put his hand on the side of my face, his palm warm against my jaw, his thumb below my cheekbone, and he held it there for a moment before he leaned across and kissed me.
My mind went blank, and I felt tingles rush to my stomach, and my crotch suddenly woke up. My body was nervous and horny even if my mind hadn’t caught up yet. The kiss was slow, and gentle, even as I felt the strength of his body through his hand holding the side of my face. He was assertive, and his mouth was warm. His hand stayed on my face the whole time. I sat very still because I was afraid that if I moved, something about the moment would change or stop being real.
When he pulled back he was still close. He was looking at me with that same considered expression.
"No shit," he said quietly.
—[]—
His bedroom was at the end of the upstairs hall. He closed the door behind us and turned on the lamp on the nightstand instead of the overhead light, and the room went amber and warm. It was my first time in his room, and I stood near the door for a moment as he crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at me and waited.
I walked to him.
He reached up and took the hem of my shirt in both hands, slowly, and I lifted my arms and let him pull it over my head. He set it aside without looking at it and looked at me instead, at my chest and my stomach, and his hands came to rest on my sides, thumbs at my ribs, and he just held me there for a moment. His hands were warm. The air in the room was warm. I was aware of every place his skin touched mine as a distinct and separate sensation.
He stood and I stepped back to give him room, and he pulled his own shirt off in one motion. He was broader without it, his chest and shoulders built from years of using the force in his body to its maximum, a light trail of dark hair from his sternum down. I looked at him and didn't pretend I wasn't looking. He reached out and ran his hand down the center of my chest, slowly, palm flat, and the touch was so calming that for a moment I stopped wondering what was happening. I felt my breath catch before his hand had even reached my stomach.
He sat back down on the edge of the bed and pulled me closer by my hips, and I stood between his knees while he worked the button of my jeans, then the zipper, pushing the denim down my thighs. He looked up at me when he did it. I looked back at him. He hooked his fingers into my underwear and brought that down too and I stepped out of both as my male firmness sprang up and he looked at me standing there without moving, taking his time, and the warmth in my face spread down my throat and into my chest.
He stood and undressed himself the rest of the way, while I reached out and tried to help. When his dick appeared, I stopped and stared. It was getting hard, and it was about twice the size of mine. He stood in front of me, and for the first time I was aware of another guy’s naked body, of all of him at once, and I wasn’t scared.
He leaned down to kiss me again, and walked me backward until the back of my knees found the bed and we both went down onto it.
He held me like he had been waiting for this. His hands moved across my back slowly, thumbs pressing into the muscle on either side of my spine, working downward. It felt better than anything I had experienced from another person's hands. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding and my whole body went loose under him as my naked body lay bare for him to see. He kept going to my ass, his palms spreading my ass open, and I felt him look at my most vulnerable spot.
He worked his hands across my ass with unhurried attention, squeezing slowly, spreading, and I pressed my face into the pillow. I felt him spit onto my hole, a warm wetness foreshadowing what was going to happen.
His hands moved and his mouth replaced them, and I suddenly felt a tongue pressing inside me. I made a sound into the pillow that I immediately felt embarrassed about. I had heard guys say they ate ass, referring to girls. I always assumed it was a joke, or an exaggeration, or something guys just said to each other to sound adventurous. But Caden had definitely done this before. He was very good at it and very committed to it, and I stopped thinking about anything for a while, except part of me imagined being Geena W., or Kim S.
When he finally pulled back I was breathing hard and gripping the sheets. He reached over to the nightstand and picked up a small bottle and I knew from the internet what it was. He was about to lube up his big dick and put it into me.
I turned over and sat up a little.
"Wait," I said. "Can I suck it first?"
He looked at me. Something in his expression shifted, pleased and a little surprised. He set the bottle back down.
He sat up on the bed and I repositioned myself on all fours. I took him in my hand first, just holding him while my ass stuck our in the air.
I got used to the weight of him in my hand. He was thick and fully hard and warm and I wrapped my fingers around the base and lowered my mouth onto him.
I was terrible at it.
I knew it almost immediately. My jaw was open as wide as it would go and it already ached and I was barely past the head, and the thing only got thicker in the middle. I tried to compensate with my hand and tongue and I think that part was working because his breathing changed and his hand came to rest loosely in my hair.
I kept going. I found a rhythm that worked for me even if it wasn't much and I stayed with it and I genuinely loved it, trying to look for signs of his pleasure, the weight of him on my tongue. I listened to the sounds he made, the way his stomach tightened occasionally, but I learned nothing
Then he flinched. A small sharp movement, involuntary.
I pulled back. "Sorry."
"It's fine," he said. His voice was strained, but maybe in a good way.
I went back. A minute later he flinched again. I pulled back again and looked up at him.
"You can keep going," he said.
I did. The third time he flinched he made a low sound with it, something tight and controlled, and I stopped.
"What’s wrong," I said.
He looked at the ceiling for a second. He was clearly trying to decide whether to say it.
"It's the teeth," he said.
I sighed. My jaw already felt like it was coming unhinged. I was already opening as wide as I physically could. "I can't go wider," I said.
He looked down at me with a patient expression. "It's okay."
I felt my head get heavy. I felt a weird sense of shame, the first sexual embarrassment of my life, unless you count my neighbor Patrick occasionally seeing me beat off.
He almost smiled. "You want to do… the other thing?" he said.
I looked at him. My stomach dropped in a good way.
"Yeah," I said.
He reached for the bottle on the nightstand, again. And I turned around on all fours, arching my back to give him access to everything he needed.
He was careful about it opening me up. He used his fingers first, slowly and patiently pressing into me and gently widening my hole, little by little. It felt like an hour passed while he just played with my ass, occasionally returning with his tongue.
The stretch of it made me grip the sheets and breathe through my mouth and push back against him without meaning to. But inside, I felt steady the whole time, implicitly trusting him. When my breathing evened out, he added more pressure and waited again. I was aware of every millimeter of what was happening and I wanted more of it.
He finally stood, positioning himself at my ass, and I felt the pressure build as I turned my face to the side, eyes closing, one hand reaching back, finding his forearm and gripping it.
He pushed forward slowly and stopped when I went rigid and waited and pushed again when I exhaled. The fullness of it was a mix of stinging and direct mechanical pressure, and it spread outward from the center of me, and I made sounds I did not plan to make. He stayed steady, his forehead dropping to rest against the middle of my back, his breath warm on the back of my neck.
“I wanna see you,” I said as I leaned forward, letting him fall out of me. I felt the relief of my ass not being stretched anymore, but I also missed the sensation immediately. Maybe it hadn’t been so bad.
I turned over and lifted my legs. He re-positioned and started pressing immediately.
From this position, it was different. Maybe it was easier, or maybe the second entrance is the easier part. I brought both hands up to his back and felt the muscles moving under my palms as he leaned into me. I held on.
We found a rhythm as he pressed just a few inches into me. The girth was the real pressure point. Every movement went through my whole body.
I arched up into him when it randomly got “good” in a way, and he pressed down into me and my hands tightened on his back and his breathing got heavier and he said my name once in a low voice that made my chest ache. Soon he was all the way into me, making short, quick thrusts as he stared into my eyes, his forehead producing small beads of sweat, my legs flailing in the air as be bounced on me. I held him as tightly as I could, even scratching his back a bit.
When he got close I could feel it in the change of his rhythm, the way his hips pushed harder and his breath went ragged. I held on tighter and tilted my face up toward him. He pressed his forehead against mine and his eyes were closed and he was breathing through his mouth and then he groaned, low and broken, and went still, buried deep, and said it.
"I love you."
Three words, quiet, wrecked.
I lay under him and felt the warmth spreading inside me, and felt his heartbeat against my chest and felt those three words repeat in my chest with my heart beat.
I. Love. You.
It settled into the center of me, a part of me now.
I believed him completely.
—[]—
When I didn’t hear from him that night. I barely noticed. We didn’t talk much via texting or anything. Even if my life had changed completely, I had a boyfriend now, I thought.
When I didn’t hear from him the next day, I tried not to freak out. It was Saturday. People don’t talk every day. Even people who love each other.
On Monday, he walked past me in the hallway with two of his friends and did not look at me, and I felt my stomach turn over. But I tried to rationalize. I thought I had mistimed it, caught him when he was mid-conversation, not a real snub. I let it go. After school, his car was gone before I got to the parking lot.
Tuesday, he looked at me once across the cafeteria and looked away fast, and I felt the first cold edge of it but told myself I was reading into nothing. He said he loved me. Maybe that didn’t mean what I thought it meant. But we were still going to be together… right?
Wednesday, in the hallway near the gym, I was walking toward him and he was with a group of four guys and one of them said something I didn't catch, and Caden looked at me, and laughed. A short, dismissive laugh, and turned back to his group. That was it. That was the whole interaction.
I kept walking, and I felt my face turn red. I turned the corner and stood at my locker and put my hand on the combination and did not open it. I felt my body get weak, as the tension rose in my throat. Don’t do it, I told myself, not here. I stood there for a moment, trying to gather myself. The bell rang and the hallway emptied and I was still standing there with my hand on the lock.
—[]—
I didn't tell anyone. I went home and sat in my room and stared at my phone for a long time and did not text him. My eyes watered every five minutes before I stopped myself. But after the tenth time it happened I layed down on my bed and let it flow. I cried, I wept, and my body tensed.
He didn't text me. I checked again and again. I put the phone face down and left it there.
An hour later, or maybe it was two minutes, I don’t even know, my phone buzzed on the bed next to my face. I felt my stomach twist, in anger and shame and an unhealthy level of hope that it was Caden.
It was Patrick.
Damn. Who broke your heart dude
I stared at it. I looked up at my window. His light was on across the gap between our houses, and I could see his silhouette moving away from his window like he had just walked back from it.
I typed back: nobody
Three dots. Then: k
Then: you ok?
I looked at his empty window. Then back at my phone.
No, I typed.
There was a pause. Three dots appeared. He was responding, but I sent another message first.
Me: when a guy says he loves you does he mean it
I sent it before I could think about it too hard. I watched the dots.
Patrick: I mean. no. guys suck
I felt the pain move through my chest in one clean, dense wave.
fuck, I typed.
yeah, he sent back.
A pause. Then:
Do you want me to come over
I looked at the time.
it's late, I typed.
I'll sneak over. like we used to do when we were kids.
I stared at that for a moment. Despite everything I felt the corner of my mouth move. I didn’t even remember we used to do that until just now.
Me: Do it.