Page 8 of Choke Up

My heart beats overtime as I contemplate my next message.

ELLISH: You could, too.

ELLISH: If you wanted. No pressure.

JOHNNY: It's not that I don't want to.

ELLISH: It's okay. Like I said, no pressure.

JOHNNY: I'm not ready. But to pay you back for your efforts…

Oh, Holy Night.

I have to cover the surprised choking sound I make with a coughing fit, which, of course, makes Brad grumble. I can see the light from his phone, so I know he's not sleeping, and he has earbuds in, but I'm still quick to scramble off my bunk. I leave the room and run down the hall, barefoot, and slip into the restrooms. There's no one at the urinals and several stalls are open, so I hurry into one and shut the door. I lean against the door and take a breath before looking at my phone again.

If I thought my photo was a step up from the little patches of skin we'd been teasing each other with, his is on an entirely different level. There's no face, of course. It's all skin. Specifically, abs. Glorious, extremely cut abs. At least eight of them at this angle, leading down to one of those muscly V’s that I wouldn't think existed in real life if I hadn't seen one in person once or twice. On a man that I'm definitely not thinking about right now, because whatever that guy was packing never came close to this kind of definition. Or at least, I never had the chance to stare at him this closely.

I'm definitely not zooming in on the light brown happy trail, or the veins that ripple over the bottom of his abs, dipping into unknown territory before the picture cuts off.

JOHNNY: You okay?

I didn't realize that, in my hustle to get out of my room and find a fleeting moment of privacy, I'd accidentally sent a string of unintelligible gibberish. Which, to be fair, is a pretty honest representation of what my brain did when I saw the picture. I only wonder how much of that was accidentally typed by my boner when I was holding my phone down over it to hide it.

ELLISH: Just trying to figure out if that's a real picture or not.

JOHNNY: I'm wounded!

ELLISH: No one real has that many abs.

He sends another picture. And then another. Each picture is taken from a different angle, which I assume is meant to verify legitimacy. But what I'm more concerned with is the lack of cropping on these two photos, and how the angle of the second one shows the path of his happy trail quite a bit further down into the top edge of his pubic hair. The rest is covered by a sheet, but I can still see enough to see that he's sporting a very large erection. Jesus. What does he feed that thing?

My cock is so hard that I'm afraid to touch it.

JOHNNY: ?

His message gets me to blink enough to refocus my thoughts.

ELLISH: Sorry. I died a little.

JOHNNY: Like what you see?

ELLISH: Uh, yeah.

ELLISH: I mean, I like what I don't see. This is just a bonus.

ELLISH: A very big bonus.

Shit. No. Fuck. I didn't mean to say that. Not in that way, anyway. I meant that getting to see a picture was a big bonus, not that what was in the picture was a big bonus. Goddamn it. He probably thinks I'm a complete weirdo now!

JOHNNY: Oh, that.

JOHNNY: That's your fault.

JOHNNY: Been that way since you sent that picture.

My cock twitches, and the friction of my tight briefs hurts a little. I stare down at the bulge pressing against my pajama pants. I’m not going to be able to walk back to my room if I don’t do something about this. I’m pushing my pajama pants and briefs down around my knees when my phone pings again.

JOHNNY: Tell me if this is too much.

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