Twenty-nine times I’ve gone under the knife. In a few minutes, it’ll be thirty. You’d think I’d be used to it, but I’m not. What they do to my willy gives me the willies. Every time. That’s not to say I don’t get a certain charge out of the surgeries. I do. Or that I haven’t become addicted to the pain and the fame as much as the sex. I have. It’s just that the whole thing is unnatural. Cutting a chunk out of your dick every few months so you don’t trip over it ... can’t get comfy with that idea. I don’t care if I ever appear on Letterman again.

And what if something goes wrong? What if, someday, the pieces don’t go back together? Shit happens, you know. Has happened. I’m writing all of this down, the story of Tommy Pennec from the beginning, from my POV, because shit happens. Because this is supposed to be the last time. They promised, my two little hotties did. Dash and Dr. Severance swear I can be normal after this.

Think, baby! Thirtieth birthday, thirtieth whacking of your penis, twenty-fifth pay-per-view broadcast, 25 million viewers! Then it’s over, honey. We promise.

Anyway, the Green Room. Misnomer. It’s not really green. It’s blue, mostly, with some Queer Eye for the Straight Guy decorating scheme that’s beyond my fathoming. This is where I chill before the ’tomy, before lights, camera and slicing action. Sometimes Dash is here with me, holding my hand, rubbing my shoulders, giving me the little pill that Doc says is parts hydrocodone and parts Ecstasy. Then Dash wraps my fingers around the sippy cup so I can wash it down.

I get a kid’s sippy cup because every so often my hand shakes. Yours would, too. They don’t put me completely under anymore. They haven’t since they started televising the “procedure.” People, guys and gals alike, pay plenty to see the pain on my face, to see my muscles slamming against the restraints. The hydrocodone helps me to not scream.

Maybe Dash hates the decor in the Green Room as much as I do. She hasn’t poked her head in for 45 minutes. I wish she would. She’s really good at the comforting thing.

She has the sweetest face — and the sweetest bod. She inherited the delicate feature set from her mother. She got only her name from her dad, an ugly mug who loves Dashiell Hammett novels. But my pretty bird hasn’t a single Maltese feather stuck to her sleek frame. Dash is All-American with California stylings. She’s 5-foot-5, blonde, blue and leggy. A teenage figure supports small-to-medium boobs that still defy gravity at 32. Yes, she’s older than I am. More on how we became high school sweethearts later.

For the producers, the directors, the horde of clipboard toting assistants and the medical staff, the mood is business as usual with a game-day edge. They don’t feel the Green Room the way I do. A few have been around since the beginning. The others come here thinking this is all routine.

I could tell them some stories.

I can tell you.

And I will, but there’s a few more things on the front end you should know before I go back to my roots, so to speak. See, that’s kind of the story of my life right there.

The front end is important. Sure, Doc could just discard the front end and keep chopping off a few inches of shaft every few months as the thing grows. It solves the recurring medical problem in the simplest fashion. If she did, however, neither she nor Dash would be very fucking happy. And I keep them fucking happy. Wink, wink.

And instead of being a famous freak, I’d be just a freak. A-list celebrities wouldn’t make clandestine appointments for the best cunt stretching of their fabulous lives. Rising starlets wouldn’t volunteer to be deepthroated and buttfucked on the pre-op shows. Letterman and Leno might make jokes about me, but they wouldn’t invite me to go clubbing with them. Without the front end, I’d have this huge, amputated thing hanging over my huge, hairless balls, but no wide, spongy glans or sensitive ganglia of nerves — nothing to complete the package, to make the cum shoot, to make the girls swoon.

The girls really do swoon. Faint dead away, some of them. When I enter the operating theater and expose the half-hard monster for the first time, the collective sound that rises from all those feminine throats would make a teenage boy cum in his pants. Not too many years ago, the sound would have carried more disbelief and maybe a little distaste, but I’m a pop icon now. Teeny boppers wear T-shirts saying, “Tommy Girl” and they don’t mean Hilfiger.

Funny how celebrity and fashion work their temporary magics. The Tommy phenomenon has parallels in the tattoo craze we all suffered through a few years back. Back in the day, way back, a girl with a tattoo couldn’t be introduced to your mother. Tattooed females were biker chicks, strippers and prostitutes, not the girl next door. Then, before you could blink, tats and tongue studs were as common as lipstick and lingerie. Time has marched, the ink has faded. The new fad — shocking and disgusting a decade ago — is the vicarious thrill of watching a beautiful woman butcher a bull-sized male member. Go figure.

In a way, I’m tired of it. Still addicted, yeah, but I think I’m hitting the cliched rock bottom. I’m rich now, so I can afford to be sick of the uncertainty. The teeny boppers and talk show hosts don’t know this, of course. Dash coaches me about what my fans want to hear. “Don’t whine” is one of her favorites. But Doc’s told me a thousand times how resectioning my penis over and over again could eventually end badly. I believe her. Thank God, the front end has to come off only one more time.

Like I said, the front end is important. My body won’t regenerate the silky, stimulus-hungry headgear, and I can’t have a whole organ without it. The secret to my success, on the other hand — or in both hands, as is usually the case with my dick — rises from the shaft. The thick hose that swells the slender throats of starlets at $29.95 per view has been growing unchecked from the root since puberty. Even now, after a decade of study, Doc can’t seem to regulate the generation of new male tissue. I’m the phallic equivalent of the Energizer fucking Bunny. I keep growing and growing...

(Without Doc’s invention and intervention, my penis would be 12 limp feet long by now if you make the unlikely assumption that my heart could have withstood the strain of maintaining blood flow to the thing. In the real world, Doc’s regular chopping keeps the erect length between 15 and 24 inches — long enough to be the unchallenged world champion but short enough for my heart to pump it into unwavering bone.)

Doc describes the non-stop growth as identical to the biological processes at work in hair follicles and the cuticles of fingernails. Why it’s happening in my penis Severance hasn’t quite pinned down, and she’s stuck a few pins in me — uh-huh, down there. The thing is, not much medical might has been deployed against hair and fingernail growth, so my sexy mad scientist is always breaking new ground — or so she tells me. I don’t comprehend much of her research. My major area of study is Doc’s g-spot.

She has some theories about my member mystery, genetic mutation chief among them, or that an accident in my early childhood created a healing response my body forgot to shut off. It even may be my continual growth spurt was triggered by a reaction to an unknown chemical compound. We’ve researched my childhood exhaustively for clues. Tore out the walls of the old homestead looking for the X factor in dryrotted boards. No luck.

Doc’s big breakthrough was the medical miracle that launched Tommy Pennec’s dingus on its repeatedly abbreviated journey. She solved the knotty problem of reattaching the front end to the growing cockroot — with glue. After a middle section is removed to keep the cock at a manageable length, a filmy coating of her miraculous Severance “stick” welds the two separated sausage lengths back together.

The protocol is simple. A thin, thin layer of the glue is cut, quite appropriately, from a semi-hard stick of the substance. It’s placed over the root end of my severed penis. The bright red blood pouring from my stump suffuses the glue wafer. It softens and activates, stirring up a complex recipe of bio-agents. Within seconds of glue activation, the detached front end is pressed precisely against the root end. Nerves, blood vessels and critical tissues penetrate the glue as flesh answers the biological imperative to become whole. Enough “irrelevant” tissue remains to assure the actual adhesive will hold everything in place until the healing process is complete, which by way of Doc’s genius usually lasts a mere 10 days.

Sound like Dash forced me to memorize that last part? You ain’t wrong.

“Do you want to be mistaken for Jessica Simpson?” she asks me. “If you don’t know this stuff forwards and backwards, you will be.”

My sweet, petite, girl Nazi.

She also has me assure interviewers that traditional stitching methods might have worked once, maybe twice, then hasta la vista, dickhead. “Hacks” Dash calls the prestigious surgeons who tried to sell us on the antiquated needle and thread solution. I sing Doc’s praises to the media almost daily. If surgery No. 30 works, I’ll cut a few tracks and buy air time for Tommy’s debut CD: The Gospel According to Severance.

All right, I hear you. Back to the stuff about cutting. Nobody loves Raymond anymore, everybody loves Tommy — getting cut.

OK. The bloody chunk of cock from the middle? Once it’s freed, Doc hands it ceremoniously to Dash, who places the gory souvenir inside a chilled glass container monitored by its own special camera, so the bloodlusting viewers can watch it ooze and steam. Shortly after the ‘tomy, the missing piece gets shaved into microfine cross-sections to be preserved in clear Lucite and sold on ebay with fancy certificates and unique serial numbers. There’s a folded pamphlet too, showing me and the big bone before and after. A colorful infographic indicates exactly where the slice was located in the resectioned area. For some reason, slices from the scar tissue at the front end always bring the highest prices.

Another problem. The front end is being whittled away. Tommy devotees know this. They watch it happen on every show. They review it over and over on every DVD. The reporters badger us about a solution at every opportunity. Again, Doc hasn’t found an answer she likes. Dash claims one of the most important aspects of my popular appeal is the big cloud of doom hanging over my male part. Love the doom.

My salvation is in the glue. My doom too. The irrelevant tissue initially held together by the glue heals right along with the more critical stuff, but at a much reduced rate because the special bioagents Doc developed are busy reconnecting nerves, matching uneven skin surfaces and what have you. The heavy hauling on the irrelevant tissue gets done by the body’s old Model T healing method rather than Doc’s Porsche 911 process. The result is a scar, very thin, barely noticeable, nothing like the typical surgical mark, but still a scar.

A few months down the road, when my cockhead is banging my knee and it’s time for another ’tomy, Doc chooses new places to cut and thereby shorten my guy gland once more. Let’s suppose she decides to make both new cuts on the root side of the old resectioning scar. I’m then left with two rings around my gorgeous engorging snake once the pieces heal. She could repeat the process when knee banging time rolls around again. Three resectioning scars. And so on. Keep up the scar wars and the like-magic reunion of root end and front end becomes a dead end. The segment with the irreplaceable cockhead is still as long as it ever was, but sensation starts to wane, healing begins to slow, necrosis starts to set in, you get the picture.

To avoid the build-up of scar tissue, Doc lovingly makes one cut on the root side and one cut on the cockhead side of the previous resectioning scar. The old scar gets carried away with the bloody chunk, most of which is rootside flesh. One and only one new scar replaces the former. Full sensation, quick healing, healthy as a stud horse.

But...

My single and world renown scar creeps closer to the hefty head of my organ with each operation. Doc slices whisker close to the old scar so that I’m bereft of as little header length as possible. (Header, if you’re unfamiliar with my story, is the informal term Doc and Dash use to describe the all-important front end. They don’t like my terminology. “Front end sounds like we’re talking about a car,” Doc complains.) The lost header tissue from each resectioning is about the thickness of a Ritz cracker, give or take a flake. Stack 29 crackers on top of each other and you’ll have an idea of how extensive the proud header was when we started.

In the early years, Tommy Pennec’s doom was a distant nightmare. It really didn’t have anything to do with me — Dash’s dear, shy Gus. The doomed guy with the silly name was the one on the magazine covers, not me. Then one romantic evening, Dash was going down on my newly jointed cock. She has mad deepthroating skills. She kept throating, gagging, backing off, throating deeper, gagging again, backing off, and then diving down once more.

“Dash, baby, what are you trying to do?”

She doesn’t release me to answer. She just traces the top edge of my scar with a manicured finger. The wet shine from her mouth stops a half-inch short of the line. Looking up at me all the while, she plunges down again. I focus on her eyes until I feel the tip of her clever tongue moisten the bottom half of the scar. I cum in her throat not comprehending until the final small spasms what the licking means.

The header had been shortened enough for my wife to swallow all of it. Tommy time was running out. I spent the next week terrified.

Two years later, Doc was able to repeat the scar licking trick. She has good throating technique but nothing like Dash’s mastery of the skill. Now, almost every woman who takes me in her mouth lavishes tongue action on my scar. Quite a few finger themselves to orgasm while gently testing their teeth on the mark. During the act itself, the implied threat is exciting, and when Doc is slicing me on the operating table in front of cameras and the studio audience, the real danger thrills me even more. It’s only after that I freak.

Well, I freak before, too. I’m freaking now, thank you.

Las Vegas oddsmakers are taking hundreds of bets each week on how many resectionings I’ve got left before Doc’s cutting equipment encroaches on tissue that can’t be replaced. Like so many other things, the exact point of no return remains on Severance’s list of unknowns. Not enough data, she claims. We have no examples to guide us. We’re prick probing pioneers.

My fans, bettors and non-bettors alike, want me to lose the head, of course. They dread it, just like I do, but I can tell by the glassy looks in their eyes at cutting time that they want me emasculated even if it means the end of their entertainment. They want the knife to cut one time too many. They want to see my famous, pussy-tearing glans turn black and wither at its magic joint the same way NASCAR fans rev up for a good crash-and-burn.

Shakespeare would tell you. The mob longs for tragedy — as long as it’s not their tragedy.

After today, with just a tiny amount of luck, my girls and I will tell them to go to Hell.

The first time Dr. Elena Severance cut off my manhood, I was 20. My knottable meat was 36 inches long — flaccid. I couldn’t attain what a normal man would consider an erection. Forcing enough blood into a yard-long hose to make it rigid would make any guy faint. I never did for the obvious reason. Get a little excited, get a little hard, get a little lightheaded. Lightheadedness leads to softcockedness.

And when the lightness fades and you can focus again, you’re staring at your baby who’s crying mad because she’s watched you get longer and limper month after month. Damn frustrating for a nymph like Dash. Oh, the Web site was doing well, and the tapes and DVDs. Rich, discreet socialites still called me for “book club” meetings and their daughters’ bachelorette parties. The cash was flowing. Dash knew how to pimp me, but she was having fits about the failing hydraulics of my then unjointed joint.

She never gave up on me, or my dick, or its moneymaking potential. The workarounds she developed to sidestep my impotence were amazing successes — until the laws of physics really grabbed hold of Tommy’s tube. Then, at long-dick last we found Elena.

The door to the Green Room opens and they’re both there. Blue-eyed Dash and green-eyed Elena. My saviors, my lovers, my managers, my captors — my punishers.

“It’s time, Tommy,” the Doc says sweetly. My girls are always sweet about cutting me up.

“Has the governor called?” I ask. This is a standard joke.

“Sorry, babe. No reprieve so far,” Dash replies on Doc’s behalf. “We’ll have the red phone by the operating table, just in case.”

“Can’t forget that,” I say. They both laugh a little. Not much. It’s an old joke.

I rise, emotions trying to flutter their way through the Ecstasy pill I took without Dash’s help. Both women take an arm. We enter the long hallway, fluorescents glaring off the lab coats peopling the narrow space.

“Dickman walking,” I say. Another old joke. The beautiful angel-demon duo escorting me smile a little.

“I’m not crazy about this, you know.” No reply. They’re used to my pre-op cowardice. Doc finally relents and attempts another tried-and-true bit of D-day humor.

“Let’s take one more whack at it, shall we?”

************

When I was just 13 and still counting every new pube that sprouted from my crotch, my famous fuckstick was a standard Johansen johnson, which means it was very big, bordering on huge for a middle school student. All of the guys my age were familiar with my size issues from gym class showers. Surprisingly, or maybe not since I’m from a rural Bible Belt community, none of my female contemporaries had picked up on all the locker room talk about Angus Johansen. (That’s my birth name. Dash dubbed me Tommy Pennec when we produced the first DVD of my first penectomy. Write it out last name first, first name last if you’re really slow. You’ll catch on.)

My dad was a long-haul trucker, and although I didn’t know it, a famous poonhound at truckstops up and down the interstate. My older brothers were less well known, but likewise poonhounds. They were athletic and not too ugly to get into a high school girl’s pants. The girls measured and found them not wanting.

I was disappointing as an athlete, awkward physically and socially. The big hands and big feet didn’t seem to belong at the ends of my skinny arms and legs. I was so shy around females I had to take my courage in both hands just to ask a question of a teacher. Mom was delighted with my self-effacing personality. One year, when I showed signs of growing bolder, she decided to homeschool me because she was afraid I might learn to emulate my father and brothers.

I guess I was a geek, so it makes sense that the girls at school expected so little from me despite my long family tradition. If there had been only a bit more communication between the guy and girl tribes in my grade, or between upperclassmen and my peer group, my first lay might have been some pock-faced size-fixated sophomore who still had baby fat around her navel ring. Instead, thank God, I lost my cherry inside the tight twat of the hottest, most popular — and respected — girl at Goforth High School.

Let me tell you how that all got started.

Angus rumors didn’t become widespread among the fairer sex until I joined a roguing crew the summer before I entered high school. Roguing crews are usually bunches of kids who “weed” fields by hand and thin out stands of crops that have been planted too thick. Often crews are hired by organic farmers, or agri-companies and university researchers that want to maintain the integrity of a particular hybrid variety. Don’t worry, it doesn’t violate any child labor laws, or at least none that really matter to the kids in the fields.

Roguing is strangely fulfilling if you enjoy long hours of backbreaking labor under the hot sun — or money. Most kids settle for part-time, minimum wage jobs. A rogue doesn’t earn much by the hour, but if you can handle the workload you can double what the burger flipping crowd brings home. I needed the money. I had aspirations of a ’67 Mustang painted so deeply blue it was almost black. I would have bent over for a lot worse things than roguing to have had that car. I would have sold my soul to have had junior class goddess Dashiele Graham.

The daughter of a banker father and a pediatrician mother, Dash never ventured anywhere near a roguing crew’s mix of white trash boys and “worse trash” Hispanics. She dazzled and short-skirted her way through stints as a teller at daddy’s bank and a records clerk at mom’s office. The town’s young fathers leaned through the receptionist’s window at the Health Plaza to glimpse her bending over for medical history folders. The old farmers stood back to make her stretch and reach over the counter at the bank when she handed them money. It brought the firm, young bosom into view, you see.

Dash often wore tops that gaped under the right circumstances. She had a preference for tight, short skirts too, but she was never reprimanded for her clothing choices. She had a Teflon fashion sense. No bad opinions would stick to it.

“She dresses young, you know, but very professional when she’s at work,” the matrons of the community would say. The old men of the community would say ... well, they all knew that trick of standing back a step at the bank counter.

One of those old farmers was Kirkwood Vickers. Mr. Vickers owned a minor interest in Empire Farms, a subsidiary of an agricultural conglomerate, Con-something, and the main employer for roguing crews. He worked as a general manager for Empire’s seed operation outside of Goforth. His cute daughter, Kylie, strained the buttons on her blouses and the zippers on guys’ jeans. Every once in a long damn while she was sweet, but “bad” was her favorite label, and for those who didn’t know Dash the way I’ve come to know her exalted Hotness, it was always a shock to learn the two juniors were best friends.

Kylie, even when she was bad to the bone, was a Daddy’s girl. She would raise the dust on field access roads — the kind with one rut for the right tires, one rut for the left tires and one vegetated hump in the middle — just before noon almost every day to deliver old Kirkwood his lunch. Kirk’s foreman, Joey Schulz, sometimes got lunch sacked right along with Kylie’s pop. She’d put it in his hands with a smile and a wink, a bump of her hip and a, “Hey, Joe. Here’s your Reuben.”

Joey was a pious German Baptist and universally adored for his kindness and good works in Goforth, so Kylie’s flirtations with him never worried Kirkwood. Plus, the lunches came straight from the kitchen of Mother Schulz, who didn’t drive as fast as Kylie, arriving about 10 minutes later with food for all of the rogues’ gallery. She was universally adored for never stinting on portions. The Empire fed us well.

Kylie’s flirtations among the more handsome of the often shirtless roguers caused more concern for Kirk. He tried to keep her close during lunchbreaks when everyone crowded around the pickups with their Coleman water coolers and sauerkraut-stained sacks. But a girl’s gotta pee. Boys too.

And so it was at high noon in a tree row of hedge apples and eastern red cedars that one of the in-crowd at Goforth High School discovered skinny Angus Johansen had far exceeded his breeding.

I had a favorite spot in the tree row alongside that field. The cedar smell was strong and countered the stink of urine. A strategic gap in the evergreen’s branches let me watch Kylie’s bare legs on the days she wore shorts to the field. That day I didn’t see her until I was shaking off the last couple of drops. The crunch of cedar needles and hedge twigs twisted my head around as Kylie came through the row to do her own business. Her head was down and her dark ponytail had fallen over her left breast as she worked on the second button of a pair of denim shorts.

I must have made a sound because her brown eyes came up and locked on mine. For a half-second she looked annoyed. A subhuman, not-even-a-freshman-yet, smelly, dirty roguer was in “her” spot, stinking up the place where she wanted to pee. Then the big browns slid down to my groin. My penis was 8 inches completely soft as I approached my 14th birthday. Normally, I could get rock hard and well over a foot long at a high 45-degree angle with small motivation. On this day, I was paralyzed by the princess of the Empire fields.

Kylie took one look at the elephant droop of the “giant Johansen” as it came to be called, and covered her mouth. When she started to laugh, I turned red and tried to stuff the ridiculed cock back into my pants.

“Oh, no, sweetie...” she said, still laughing. “Angus, oh, it’s OK, honey. No, no, don’t try to jam ... you’ll hurt yourself. Take it easy... Baby, it’s beautiful.” She continued in a quieter voice, no longer laughing but smiling wide with obvious amusement. “It’s just I’ve never seen anything that size. Your brothers I’ve heard about, but you ... oh my God. And STOP. Take it out again and put it back the right way or you’re going to be digging at your crotch all afternoon. No, don’t turn around. You wanted me to see, so let me see.”

“I didn’t, I swear. I just ... you were there, and I ...” I mumbled, obeying her and pulling the mashed up meat free from the folds of cloth where it had caught during the panic.

Kylie’s sparkling eyes flicked over my cock time and again as I rearranged my clothing and began to tuck the dick properly into my briefs. The heart-pounding shock of being caught naked by such a hottie was subsiding, and I was just now processing the words about my manhood being beautiful. Hot, teenage blood hastened to fill the flaccid penis. I attempted to escape before it reached full erection.

“Kylie, I’ve got to go,” I said when she didn’t move to let me pass.

“I thought you already went,” she said. Her smile and my growing hardon ruined any hope I had for rational thought.

“I mean, I need to ... um ... I, well I...”

“Yes?”

“Uh, I gotta work,” I blurted, hoping to edge past her. I noticed her shorts were still only half buttoned. The well-shaped legs below were brown and smooth. They almost shone in the way healthy girl skin will under a certain light. Testosterone flooded my brain.

“Not this way, silly,” she said when I approached. Kylie grabbed my unshirted shoulder with a slim hand and spun me towards a dense tangle in the tree row. “You can’t come out in the same place I went in. Daddy will be watching for me. Oh, and you can’t tell anyone about this, you know. This was your little show, and I don’t want to hear any rumors about me and you and your humungous dawg named Boo.”

She shoved me towards the snarled brush.

“But it is a gorgeous cock,” she called quietly after.

Hard. I was hard most of the afternoon, unnoticed, bent over in the corn rows. For most of the evening I was in my room, beating off, or out in the machine shed where my dad parked his rig, or in the bathroom. I must have sprayed cum half a dozen times that night. My cock was beautiful, a beautiful girl had said so. And, it was probably bigger than my brothers’ dicks, a fact I hadn’t imagined. (My brothers just didn’t show me their dicks all the time, all right? No sibling circle jerks, no family swing-alongs, not even skinny dipping at Miller’s Lake since it dried up when I was 9.) Besides, they were too cool to hang with little Angus now anyway.

Say hello to Big Angus.

I never spoke a word about the incident in the tree row. The Empire princess had dubbed my penis Sir Beautiful and that raised her above all other women, Dash included. The princess was to be worshipped and obeyed

*******

Despite my vow of silence, I somehow thought my naked dick encounter with Kylie Vickers would make a difference during freshman year at GHS. I’d be marginally cooler.

I wasn’t.

Kylie ignored me, especially when she was with Dash and her other, mostly cheerleader friends. The senior boys picked on me, and the juniors, and the sophomores, and even my own classmates, those who were popular enough to get away with it. Freshman PE was excruciating when the fun thing to do in the locker room became popping the head of my “Johansen” with a wet towel. I think my size provoked jealousy from the jocks, hence the extra shit that came my way.

Greg Pyle popped off at my penis the most. He would have had the biggest cock in the freshman class if not for me. He was the biggest dick hands down. I earned the grudging respect of the rest of the guys when I began calling Greg “Gomer” every time he wetted a towel. I got the crap beat out of me twice for it. Lots of in-your-face threats too, including the chopping up of the gigantic Johansen. But when I didn’t back off, he quit. My coolness factor went from 1 to about 3 on a scale of 10. Pyle’s total may have slipped half a point.

Really, the only salvageable moment of that entire school year was a few seconds in February when I was late for freshman Algebra and Kylie the Bad Girl was sent to the principal’s office for misbehaving in choir. A whole 20 yards of gleaming institutional hallway was ours alone. Kylie’s raven hair was loose and floating about her shoulders, the scooped neck of a body-hugging knit top showed the maximum amount of cleavage and midriff permitted by the administration, and the low riding jeans told epic stories about how bad girls always get what they want and want what they get. Her nipples were up. Kirkwood Vickers’ daughter was in a state of nubile grace.

She smiled from the instant of first eye contact. She walked, well, the way girls like that walk. At five paces, she said, “Hey Angus, how’s it hangin’?” A sweetly curved hip nudged me for emphasis as she passed.

I forgot to say anything, although I’m sure my mouth was open. She did the little bump thing only to people with whom she thought she shared something. I knew this from keen teen observation. I was too low a being to deserve such treatment, yet it had happened. At the time, I counted it as the second best day of my young life, proof that the beautiful girl hadn’t forgotten the incredible things she had said to me with her shorts half unbuttoned.

That was February. One day in May would eclipse all of the previous best days, and I would again have Kylie to thank for it.

School was ending when I approached the teller window at Farmers State Bank. I had my first roguing check of the year in hand. My new balance was going to put me over the top. I would pick up the blue-black Mustang that afternoon.

The teller window was unmanned by Dashiele Graham. So was I, figuratively speaking. The literal unmanning came later and continues to this day. But you already know that.

Men could file claims against our insurer for the neck trauma Dash causes now at 32. At almost 17, she lacked the fullness of form that womanhood bestows, but nobody in Goforth believed there was a more beautiful girl in the state. Yeah, of course, she was the most beautiful girl in the world to me, but that’s just spousal hyperbole. Goforthers never consider the whole world anyway since, to our way of thinking, the world pretty much ends at the state line. Doc Severance says we’re very provincial, us Goforthers.

Let me try again. Looking at Dash back then could make you go deaf — and dumb. Put yourself on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. You’re under attack. Picard calls out the orders, “Divert all power to the forward deflector shields.” That’s kind of your brain on Dash. It strips away all the power allotted to your other four senses to handle the visual impact of that face, those eyes, that hair, those boobs, etcetera, etcetera.

I put up an astronomical fight to regain my hearing — just in time for Dash to repeat her initial greeting.

“Mr. Johansen? Angus! Earth to Gus. How can I help you today?”

“Uhh-uh.” Language skills weren’t coming back online as quickly as the other systems aboard Starship Angus.

“Gus, hand me your check. No, wait. Endorse it first. There. Goody, you can follow simple instructions. Let me write your name down for Customer of the Year.”

My crestfallen look must have made her feel sorry for me.

“Oh, Gus. (Nobody had ever called me Gus.) I’m sorry. That was unprofessional. Will you forgive me?”

I nod like a bobblehead. Damn. That language center must have taken a pounding.

“And there’s your balance. $4,238.52. You’re really raking in the cash with that roguing. Saving up for some bling?”

“Harley Landers’ ’67 Mustang. I’m gonna go get it now.”

“The black one? Nice ride.”

“It’s actually a midnight blue with just a smidge of metal flake. Custom.” Language center online and humming. If a boy can’t talk cars, dump him in a hole and throw some lime over the body.

“Really? Well won’t you be the big man behind the wheel. And now you’ve got a way to the school’s-out party on Saturday.”

“Ohhhh, no. I don’t go to parties.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t. I guess ... my brothers say I drag them down. And I’ve just got a learner’s permit”

“Who cares? The cops never stop anybody for that. You should come. Kylie will be there. I know you like her, and she thinks you’re OK. I mean, she’d probably talk to you.”

“Uh, I dunno. She only talks to me when nobody else is around.”

“She will. You probably haven’t seen her in a party mood. And if she doesn’t, I will. OK?”

“Maybe. I may work on my car. Where’s the party gonna be?”

“The Spot. You know the place. That big clearing on Five Mile Creek, just below the trees where you and Kylie talked that time. You remember? You were — hanging out — by some cedars all casual like? She told me all about it.”

Captain, all of our systems are down except life support, and it’s redlining. Our face is on fire. Captain Picard, Captain! Are you listening?

“Gus, are you OK?” Dash has the prettiest smile on her face. “Oh, come on Johansen. Won’t you even let me tease you? It’s no biggy. Or maybe it is, from what Kylie says.”

We have to do something, Captain. The ship is dying of embarrassment.

“Just come to the party, big guy. OK? Door’s that way. Make it all right?”

“Um, yeah. Thanks. I’m fine. I’m just ... see Harley.”

“Bye now.” Little four-finger wave. Even her fingers are cute.

You’re thinking, all that chatter and innuendo in the middle of Daddy’s bank with all those customers around? Stop thinking. The bank was empty. The Farmers State Bank in Goforth on a Thursday morning is never a beehive of activity. Things pick up over the lunch hour and just before closing, but the drive-up takes a lot of the traffic and online banking reduces the walk-ins even more. I think half of the summer customers come in just to leer at Dash.

************

I switched from briefs to boxers the day after Kylie asked how it was hanging. Can a freshman boy be any more lame? Seriously folks, she made me think. Briefs were binding for Gus and the Giant Johansen. Try getting an 8-inch wicked weasel to bed down comfortably in your shorts without strangling a testicle or turtlenecking the head so badly you need a second circumcision. And that’s just when you get dressed in the morning. Think about snaking that thing through the flap door of a pair of white cotton briefs when you’ve got just 5 minutes between classes. It ain’t easy being big.

So when I stepped out of my kickin’ ride in my black tank top, khaki cargo shorts, sunglasses and sandals at the Spot, my discomfort was in no way connected to any imaginary constriction below the waistband. I had dropped the big boa down the left side of my boxers where it was swinging free and easy.

My discomfort was all about being 14 and friendless at a party of, by and for the beautiful people at Goforth High. I wasn’t the same kid Kylie had seen in the tree row by any stretch of the meat. The geek hadn’t disappeared, but my arms and legs had become a better match for my hands and feet. I didn’t fall flat on my face nearly as often, and my smile contained some confidence for at least 10 seconds of every school day.

Kylie must have sensed my maturity.

I stood rooted to the ground at the edge of the clearing, looking for anybody who would tolerate my presence when the Empire princess slid up beside me, holding a pair of Coronas. She hooked an arm behind my waist to push one of the beers into my right hand.

“Drink this, Mr. Dangle — after you take this,” she said, dropping something small and white into my left paw. Her Corona was secured by the three dexterous fingers not engaged in supplying me with party favors. “It’s X. You’ll like it. It’ll make you normal. Like me.”

I stared down at the half tablet of Ecstasy. Vick looked brightly up at me. I popped the tab into my mouth and chased it with the beer. The princess must be obeyed.

“Kylie,” I said, meeting her eyes, emboldened by her willingness to put her royal personage so close to me. “You could never be normal, you’re too extraordinary.”

I think it was the first time in my life I had said anything a girl would remember. I had said the right thing. Finally.

Maybe those eight little words were effective only because they took Kylie by surprise. They didn’t seem all that special to me. I wasn’t quoting anyone, neither poet nor the author of “1,000 Ways to Pick Up Girls.” But they got her attention.

Her teasing smile disappeared and gave birth to a smaller smile, less direct, that said she was looking inward, gauging how the words made her feel. The smile grew again without the teasing quality.

“Angus, if any other guy had said that to me, I’d know it was a line,” she said. “But I’m guessin’ you haven’t learned to lie to girls yet. Not just so you can get in their pants, anyway.”

For a second, I imagined she would kiss me — chastely, of course, on the cheek. But recognizing a geek as human doesn’t mean you’ll treat him like one in public. Bad girl or not.

“You and your swinging friend enjoy the party. Come find me or Dash when you start feeling the X.” She flashed the teasing smile again and walked a teasing walk away from me and back into the party crowd.

Night began to fall at the Spot a short time later. A scattering of bonfires lit the outlying party area while two banks of lights stolen 15 years ago from the Chishawaka River Park baseball diamonds illuminated the open air dance floor, which was all that was left of an old horse barn. The necessary electricity was diverted illegally from, but with the full knowledge of, the Chishawaka Rural Electric Cooperative.

Both the REC and local law enforcement allowed the Spot to operate on the theory it was better to know where the kids were drinking and raising hell than hunting every back road of the county for smaller gatherings. Sheriff’s deputies even performed walk-throughs on occassion and poured out a beer here and there just to make the partiers feel they had gotten away with something when the patrol cars drove away.

About the Ecstasy, which was not condoned by the Sheriff’s Department. I’ve more than a passing acquaintance with pharmaceuticals, from stimulants to depressants, from immuno-suppressors to diuretics, from painkillers to hallucinogens. Doc Severance has jacked me up and jerked me around with all of them for various, legitimate therapeutic and research reasons. For fun, nothing compares with X.

X is aptly nicknamed the “hug drug” for the sense of affection and friendship it fosters in the brain’s chemistry. It’s cheap and plentiful even in Goforth. For a misfit among the perfectly fitted, Ecstasy is a personal Savile Row tailor.

I didn’t realize when the X cut in because the Spot had become a funhouse. I was talking to people, people were talking to me. Everyone was funny. Everyone thought I was funny — in a nice way. Turns out, Kylie and company had been handing out the tabs like candy. The X hadn’t cut in just for me, it had excavated a big fucking ditch through the center of the party and swallowed everybody.

Chloe Mandretti, the eldest daughter of District Attorney Sonny Mandretti, was rolling on a full tab and at least three more beers than I had consumed. She was the freshman class version of Dashiele Graham — sweet, smart and cute as a button, a shoe-in for homecoming queen if any of us survived to our senior year. But not a world-by-the-tail kind of girl like Dash. Chloe was human.

She was dancing with me, dutifully being kind to high and low alike. She never turned a guy away if a dance was all he asked from her. Chloe liked everybody. On a tab of X and one side of an eight-pack of Little Kings Cream Ale, Chloe loved everybody.

“Liar,” she said to me, knowingly.

I had just explained to her — a slow dance had come along and she hadn’t resisted being pulled close — that what she was feeling against her body was a flashlight, a really big Mag-Lite® I had brought along in case I needed to work on my Mustang, not having owned it very long and tinkering as boys will.

“It’s not hard enough for a ‘Mag-Lite’ or whatever,” she said. “It’s solid, but...”

“Oh, it’ll get harder,” I answered back, letting the string of social successes I was accumulating stoke my confidence. “By the end of the song, you’ll think it’s a Mag-Lite for sure.”

The song, spun by a pimply DJ at the end of the Spot’s concrete dance surface, was interrupted before I could make good on my promise. May in Goforth country is famous for sudden thunderstorms accompanied by rain, hail and lightning. Nobody had noticed the stars disappearing from the southern sky. Our warning was 30 seconds of cool, gusting wind. Big, fat drops of rain two feet apart lasted another 15 seconds. Torrents followed.

My first impulse was to run to my car and spread-eagle all my lanky limbs and body over the top to save it from the inevitable hail. I was sure there would be hail. Murphy’s Law insists upon it in such situations. Chloe had other ideas. The future homecoming queen at Goforth had to help out, be a trooper, show she cared. She had to make others care, too, about the stuff that really mattered — party supplies. She held tight to me with her little hand and dragged me toward the food and refreshments table while less civic-minded partygoers fled to their vehicles.

We joined a group of upperclassmen including Dash and Kylie, boxing up all the food, knocking down the folding tables and loading the whole mess into the back of an Empire grain truck with its tailgate propped high. How the princess ever got away with using company vehicles...

The strange thing was we were still having fun while God pissed on us from the clouds. Dash smiled at me at least twice while we were loading things up. Kylie goosed me, and sweet Chloe let me cop a feel when we collided and fell down together in the mud. I was helping her up and cinched my arm around her torso just a little higher than was necessary. She was laughing.

Varsity linebacker Jared Torrance and I boosted the last half-filled keg into the truck before swinging up Chloe, Kylie and Dash by turns. We jumped in unassisted like the big, heroic, watching-over-the-females kind of guys we were, and I felt pretty studly, threats of hail and metal indentations notwithstanding. The truck groaned and gear-grinded off to a Butler building a quarter-mile away that was the homebase for a number of Empire farm implements.

*****

Pacing. The editor of the Tommy Times, my weekly newsletter, is always yammering at me about pacing. “You digress in your columns, Tommy — boss,” he says. “Then you digress about the digressions.” If he were looking over my shoulder now, he’d be telling me not to explain what a Butler building is. “Just call it a big shed and be done with it,” he would say.

About the last few pages of this short tome, he would say nobody wants to read a long build-up of detail about my first sexual experiences. But if you’re going to understand me, how I got to this point, you have to understand how I’ve been transformed by women, how much I love them, their kindness and their faith and their courage to do so much for someone who really does very little for them. I trust Dash and Doc with my life, but they won that trust with the help of girls like Kylie and Chloe. And... well, anyway, we played strip poker in the Butler building.

*****

You’ve probably seen Butler buildings in movies or television shows that have a rural backdrop. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but two things about their construction are consistent. A Butler building’s metal frame supports a metal skin, and no matter how packed they become with some farmer’s heavy metal crap, they feel like you could park the Louisiana Superdome inside. Big echoing spaces. Sharp metal smells.

“We should have had the party in here,” Chloe said, looking around from the bed of the grain truck. The rain beat on the cool tin roof, no cats allowed out in this weather. The noise wasn’t loud enough yet to be hail. I hopped to the concrete floor.

From the truck bed, the bobbed-hair freshman with the Pink-like body bent at the waist. Her hands went to my shoulders. My fingers circled her middle and I brought her down next to me. Chloe has a small waist. I have big hands. She noticed my thumbs almost meeting near her belly button and my eyes meeting at her wet cleavage. Her smile lit up the Mag-Lite® again.

“Thank you, kind sir,” she said, slapping me playfully above the elbow. “Oh, God. I’m filthy,” she added, looking down.

“Well, if you two hadn’t been mud wrestling while the rest of us were getting things done,” Kylie says.

“I think it was mud groping,” Jared chimes in.

“Heyyy!” Chloe pretends to be indignant.

“You know, the party doesn’t have to be over,” Dash notes. All eyes focus on Goforth’s favorite daughter. “We could do that thing, you know, that we were going to do later, just a few of us, after everybody left.”

“That’s a done deal?” asks Howie Jenkins, Jared’s buddy and one of two guys confirmed as having fucked Dash. A girl has to have sucked a couple of cocks by the time she’s a junior, or she’s considered a prude. I learned later that Dash had sucked a whole lot more. I guess guys took it to heart when Dash admonished them to keep quiet about their conquests of the most famous piece of ass in town. (Her talent for maintaining security is one of the reasons I’ve survived two assassination attempts.) “I thought maybe you two were kidding.”

“You two” means Dash and Kylie. Chloe’s still standing close, but she’s not meeting my eyes anymore. Something funny’s going on.

“Well, everybody’s here. I mean, almost everybody we were going to invite anyway,” Kylie speaks up, grinning. “And we’re all wet. We really should get out of these clothes. Plus, Angie’s not here, so it’s not going to get blabbed all over town.”

“I’m in. Let’s ante up,” Howie says. Chorus of nods and “me too’s.”

“Wait a sec,” I say. “I know I’m pretty clueless anyway ...”

“Got that right,” Eric Eisenhauer puts in. Not my best friend, ol’ Eric.

“But what are you talking about?”

“Strip poker, babe,” Dash says. “Didn’t Chloe tell you?”

“It started raining,” Chloe protests. “I didn’t have time.”

She turns to me and takes my hand, tugging me towards the small service door of the Butler building.

“Help me get clean, and I’ll explain ... the rules,” she says.

“You dirty girl.”

Catcalls and whistles follow us.

We disappear through the door, but Chloe doesn’t start in with the strip poker regulations right away. She tiptoes through puddles out into the midst of the rainstorm, brushing at her legs and succeeding in making more mud. She yelps when lightning explodes a tree back at the Spot. My turn to drag. I point to the eaves of the building where two 100-foot wide waterfalls are cascading off the tin and she lets me tuck her under my arm for the short trot over. Soon, we’re having fun again beneath the runoff, pawing at each other’s clothes and squeezing the flesh underneath in an effort to clear the mud away. We both know it’s a boy-girl game we’re playing.

“Hands! Hands!” Chloe warns a few times, making little attempt to enforce her protests.

“Mud! Mud!” I call back.

Chloe can’t complain. Her roving mitts have made a couple of glancing passes over the phallus major lodged in the left leg of my shorts. Gives me goose bumps.

“Thanks for being OK with this,” she says suddenly. “Everybody’s curious, you know? And your brothers, they get all pissy whenever anybody asks them. We think they’ve got penis envy — major penis envy.”

Angus is confused.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m doing this bad, aren’t I? I just couldn’t think of how to say it. But Dash and Kylie, they’re going to be seniors, you know? And they made it sound like so much fun. You’re a lot nicer than I thought. I mean, I like you. You’ve always been nice ... and now I think you’re pretty cool. So that’s what Kylie and Dash wanted me to find out before I was supposed to invite you to the poker thing, which I thought was going to be a skinny dipping deal, but I guess the plan got changed. Anyway, they kind of hinted it might be your way in — if you wanted.”

“Into what?”

“Oh, this is so hard. You know, I even hate the idea of cliques, but they kind of suggested we could hang with them this year if we all got along tonight. Wouldn’t you like that?”

I’m blunt sometimes. Not a virtue, Dash tells me.

“But you’re already popular, Chloe. Everybody loves you.”

“Thanks, but I don’t hang with seniors. Well, all right, maybe I do sometimes, but it’s not like I’m really tight with them, and I really want Dash to like me. She’s so great. C’mon, will you help me?”

“Yeah, OK. Well, what am I supposed to do? Does this have something to do with my ...” I look down to my left thigh. Chloe looks too, shyly, and shyly says...

“Well, yeah. I said that, sort of. Everybody just wants to know how huge... And you really don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Just roll with it, like you’ve been. It’s been fun, hasn’t it? You know, I never thought you would ask me to dance. I thought I was going to have to ask you, you slut.”

Having joined the conspiracy, I escort Chloe and her bubble butt to the door. Back inside, we discover that the eight soon-to-be seniors had been busy kicking their feet into the waterfall on the other side of the implement shed. They had gotten muddy too but not falling down muddy.

All clean, but wet and now cold, the girls are shaking, maybe more than necessary. The guys don’t mind trying to warm them up in their wet, clingy summer outfits. Kylie digs behind the seat of the grain truck and comes out with a dozen towels. (Like so many other things, I later learned skinny dipping had indeed been the discarded plan for after-party entertainment. Dash had nixed it because she thought the guys would shrink up too much in the cold, artesian pond water. I guess even perfect Dash didn’t realize how easily guys will unshrink.)

Soon, all 10 of us are gathered around a double stack of Bicycle playing cards and a pile of loose change. The game is simple penny ante poker, but everybody has to show their cards at the end of the hand. If you turn over eights or aces, an article of clothing has to be removed. The idea is that you have to choose between the money and your modesty. Odds are at least two people will be stripping off something every time the cards are dealt. Ironclad rule: No uninvited grabbing of flesh no matter what the state of undress.

Sixteen hands later, after much good-natured drama from the girls, a second round of X tabs and copious amounts of beer, the first bra comes off. Sascha German displays a healthy pair of C-cups that drop only a modest amount when they’re unholstered. Big, oval nipples stare pinkly back at us — the guys, I mean. The girls have seen it all before. Sascha didn’t fight the unveiling a bit, but she blushes now at five pairs of male eyes riveted to her chest.

It thunders, loud and nearby, a cracking, rolling sound that brings another little yelp from Chloe, who’s hip to hip with me. The staring spell is broken. Kylie laughs for all of us, and at us. She’s pressed against my other side. We’re all jammed flesh to flesh for warmth and so we can reach the jackpot on the gray concrete between us.

“Gawd, guys. It’s like you’ve never seen a pair of boobs before,” Kylie chides.

I raise my hand. Everybody laughs except Eric Eisenhauer, who sneers. Jackass.

“Sorry freshman,forgot about you,” the princess says. A white towel on Vick’s shoulders casts shadows over her lacy bra and its overflowing contents. “You stare all you like. Maybe it’ll help you lose a few hands.”

Sascha sniffs at Kylie’s advice to me. She tries to bring her knees up in front of her breasts covertly. The maneuver raises vocal protests from the men, most of whom are barechested by now. “Dutch” lowers her knees and flows back into that curiously feminine position that I’ve always thought of as “girl curl” resting on one hip with her feet tucked under her. It’s apparent that she only wanted to hide her rising nipples. For all her coyness, Sascha likes being viewed naked; she just didn’t want her excited nipples giving the fact away.

The males are concealing states of arousal too. On the next hand, Jake Arnaud drops trou. His full Monty is fully hard, an average six and a half inches but thick like the rest of Jake, who has a forest of back hair and five o’clock shadow at half past two. The girls cheer.

“One down,” Dash announces.

“Looks like two up to me, Dash,” I say.

Of all the girls, she’s been the luckiest so far, missing only her sandals, her towel and a pair of bracelets. The guys lobbied intensely to have the rules committee declare the bracelets one item instead of two. We won.

The primary objective of the guys in the circle is to strip Dash of everything. The rain has made it pretty obvious that the young goddess is braless and wearing only a thong under her shorts. Dash’s nipples project as dark, barely masked circles through her wet top.

Kylie comes to her friend’s defense, pushing at the big Angus knee that’s resting atop her creamy soft thigh. I’ve been liking that feeling a lot.

“Where’d you learn to count, redneck?” she says. “I see ‘11 up’ if we include Jake’s pointy thing. The rest of you must be thinking there’s a concealed carry law in this state.”

Kylie’s right. Blame it on the cold or the wanton nature of teen girls, but there’s no denying all the hotties are in touch with their sensuality. The nips are poppin’ on all five of them. Excepting Jake, the guys are hunched over their cards and crotches, making it unclear who’s hiding a boner. Eleven up it is.

“I can’t be sure what’s ‘up’ with that towel you’re wearing, Kylie,” Eric says. “Didn’t you lose that a couple of rounds back?”

“I got cold.” The towel flies off and hits Eric in the face. I’m not sure why anyone likes him. Oh yeah, he’s our all-state halfback.

We play cards again. Eric wins the pot of change. Chloe turns an ace of spades, I flip an eight of clubs. My tank top goes over my head in a flash so I don’t miss Chloe’s bra coming off.

“Ohhh, shoot.” She bites her lip and reaches for the clasp, then hesitates and brings her hands back in front of her. Tabs of X don’t turn every girl into an exhibitionist.

“Come on, freshman,” Howie says.

“Just give her a second, How,” Dash counters. Then, “You really don’t have to if you don’t want to, sweetie. It’s all good.”

“No, I’m all right, just ... nervous.” She reaches back again, and again stops short of unhooking the clasp. You can tell she’s worried about what people might think of her, or what might be said. Some reputations never recover from that freshman year.

I’ve been studying the clasp. I think I can do it one-handed. I reach and unsnap it with an audible click. Weird. I’ve never heard one make a sound since. It’s undone, but I don’t let go of the clasp.

Chloe’s brown eyes snap to my face furious, her knees and elbows bunched in front of her chest.

“No touching asshole,” Dash says from across the circle, her tone steely. “Remember the rules?”

I don’t bother to look back. I like Chloe a lot. I want to help her.

“Hush, Dash,” I say, meeting Chloe’s angry stare. “This way, if talk gets around, she can tell her parents, or anyone who asks, she never took her bra off, never stripped. She can say it was that nerdy Johansen kid. Blame’s all on me.”

Chloe’s eyes soften.

I ask her, “OK?”

She nods. I release the clasp. The knees come down, the elbows come apart, the bra falls and Chloe is small and stunning, nipples so tight that halos of flesh beyond the areolae have risen too. We’re all breathless for a moment, girls and guys. (One of my fetishes, nipples. Bet you didn’t guess.)

“Oh, baby,” Jared says.

“Sweetie, you’re the bomb.”

“What a pair.”

“I’d bet those against a straight flush.”

“Awww, honey, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Etcetera.

Chloe takes in the co-ed compliments with shy smiles and edges closer to me, if that’s possible.

“Kind sir,” she says to me very quietly under the sound of the rain. Every once in a while, I’m one gallant motherfucker.

Dash acknowledges the gesture with humor. “I think that’s the best line I’ve ever heard for getting a girl naked, Gus.”

Laughter all around. I think my coolness factor is way past 6, at least for the moment. Witness Angus basking in the approval.

My little lady fair has a possessive grip on my arm. A hot, rubbery nipple tickles the triceps. The mass of male meat that everyone has conspired to see becomes clearly outlined against the leg of my shorts.

“I think it’s 12-up now, Kylie,” Dash nods toward my bulge.

“You mean 12 inches?” Kylie asks. “I’m guessing it’s bigger.”

“Oh, God,” Sascha says, noticing what the other two are staring at.

“What’d you stick down your pants, Johansen?”

“He told me it was a Mag-Lite®,” Chloe says, chin on my shoulder.

“So you’re a flasher, freshman?” Kylie teases again.

“Wait and see,” I reply.

“Deal, Howie,” Dash says. “Let’s find out if Kylie’s got Johansen’s number ... of inches correct.”

The next round sees me strike 8s again. Kylie and Dash each finish with an ace.

The rules committee decides I should go first.

“Take if off, baby,” Kylie orders. “Or do you need help?”

“I can manage,” I tell her. “Or don’t you remember?”

The princess’ jaw drops. She slaps my knee, really slaps it.

“Big mouth,” she says.

If not for those two words, I doubt anyone would have taken my comment seriously. The flurry of questions Kylie must now answer are enough of a distraction for me to wrangle my erection safely around my hip. If I had dropped my cargo shorts without the relocation, a good six inches of the giant Johansen would have been exposed below the leg of my boxers. By the time Kylie finishes explaining about the incident in the tree row to everyone’s satisfaction, I am sitting down again, the bulge traced in clearer detail through the thinner cloth but decently covered.

“He really got so flustered, he couldn’t get it back in his jeans?” Chloe asks giggling. She reattaches to my arm as I sit down. “Hey, you didn’t ...” she looks. “Oh, you did. No fair! I wasn’t watching.”

Round of boos from the girls when they realize what they’ve missed. They stretch their necks for a better angle on the bulge. I think Dash kept her focus throughout. She’s grinning.

“Thanks for running interference for me, Kylie,” I say. I get slapped again, less painfully this time. “Oww, your turn, cutie.”

For such a big rack, Kylie’s set is incredibly firm. They make her narrow waist look even smaller. She shimmies briefly when Jake suggests they might not be real. He knows better, according to the rumor mill. Sparks — and sploogie — may be struck again by those two tonight.

Dash’s turn. Again, words fail me. Remember, all of the girls this night are hotties, Goforth’s elite pussy. Sascha was great, Chloe really had been breathtaking for all of her diminutive size, and Kylie came out to much deserved fanfare, but they were nothing beside Dash.

The Dash duo are small but not in a disappointing way. She’s a handful, if your hands aren’t too big. No creases mark the bottom edges where the curve of breast sweeps cleanly outward and upward. Her bosom is vulnerable and delicate without being meager or frail. So pink are the nipples, and they jut in two tiers of erectile tissue from the apex of her tits, even when she sleeps. When’s she needy, the points become warheads. (I’ve brought her to orgasm just by kissing them. Took me an hour, and I did need to touch her clit for about two seconds at the end, but she thrashed and moaned for a full 60 more.)

I kid you not. I have wondered more than once whether Dash is in reality some sort of divine being. She’s that beautiful. To this day, I don’t remember anything that was said from the time Dashiele took off her top until two whole hands of poker later when I turned over the ace of clubs.

Ace of Clubs.

We all stare at it. The moment has come.

I find out later — personally and separately from Dash, Kylie, Sascha and Chloe (I can’t remember who was the fifth girl at the poker party) — that all the hard nipples were mostly in anticipation of my rampant rod revelation. Dash and Kylie had hyped and schemed and planned and cajoled everyone into place that night just to put me through my paces.

If the dick showed itself to be irresistibly big, they wanted to fuck me just for that — not then and there, but in some more private setting. If I was cool enough, if their friends accepted me, it would mean they could fuck me, without losing social status. Tonight’s audition was supposed to answer both questions.

Without a word, everybody stands. The night has been a sardine can of firsts for Angus Johansen. Another gets crammed into this small space of my life as my hands go to my waistband. I feel female lust for the first time. It’s in their eyes, their taut nipples. It’s between their parted lips and the slick place held closed by their legs. I can feel it burning on my skin.

Or maybe I’m just overexcited.

Dash breaks the silence.

“Uhh,” This is another big first. Dash never stutters. “Gus, if you want, you know, just like Chloe, you don’t have to do this.”

“Jeez, Dash,” I’m surprised by how steady my voice is. “I’ve been Jones-ing for most of the girls here since sixth grade. How am I going to say no?”

No one asks which girls. Four of them smile. Chloe clamps down playfully on my left buttock.

The first line of thunderstorms has receded, and the party mix CD that Kylie has been playing for the last 45 minutes switches to the opening bars of Kid Rock’s “I Am the Bull God.”

I free the Bull God.

What Kylie saw in that tree row some 10 months ago was the 12-inch meat. I’m 14 inches now and too long to get completely hard without a little manipulation to fully flood the corpora cavernosa. The dick’s slight downward curve doesn’t fail to impress, however. Sascha actually retreats a step when the dragon springs up well past horizontal. Dash rocks back from the waist a half-inch before recovering her ever-present grace. Kylie puts one hand to my ribs in that touchy way some girls have and draws a deep breath. Chloe is pressed so hard against my left side I can feel her pulse thumping through an erect little nipple. (It wasn’t her heart thumping. That’s on the other side of her chest.)

The guys are trying to appear unfazed without success. They’re impressed, but at least two seem much less than happy.

Low whistles. Shallow breathing sounds. A tremulous “ohhh” noise so soft I’m not sure I’ve heard it.

“Angus?” Dash says when everyone’s had a moment to revise their concept of a big cock. “I’m not complaining, baby, but does your guy get harder? He doesn’t look quite proud enough.”

Her right hand is hovering near one of her own charged nipples. I think she wants to touch herself.

I nod in response to her question. “It just needs a little help.”

“Then help it,” Sascha says, plainly excited and blushing at her outburst.

I hesitate.

“Chloe, stroke him,” Kylie suggests.

“I’ve never...” Chloe begins.

Dash leaves her place between Howie and Jared, her eyes intent on the thick column of dick and pair of oversized balls. She moves in front of me.

“Hey, can’t see,” says the girl whose name I can’t remember. Karen? Kara? Kirsten?

The poker circle reshuffles to put Dash on my left side, displacing a chagrined Chloe. Dash reaches for me, then stops.

“You should earn this, freshman,” she says. “A girl’s never touched you there. Am I wrong?”

I think of Chloe’s glancing contact through two layers of fabric.

“No,” I answer.

“So show me something.”

Dash gives a little whistle and snaps her fingers an inch or two above the head of my swollen penis.

“Here, boy! Jump for it. Get your treat.”

I look at her blue eyes, angry that she would taunt after being so sweet earlier. But there’s no malice in Dash, and the others are grinning with the party’s untempered good humor. It becomes too absurd to try to stare her down. I flex the man muscle. The tip of my hugeness “jumps” remarkably high toward Dash’s snapping fingers, and she catches me neatly, softly, ever so carefully. Everyone laughs, Chloe claps, but my knees almost give way.

A girl never has touched me there.

Dash pulls the gliding skin up and down once, twice, her arm around my waist and a nipple digging into almost the same spot that Chloe’s little puffer occupied. The cavernosa are full. Hard isn’t the word for my post. I am rock. Dashiele Graham is touching me. That was all the help I needed.

“OK, baby. I’m going to let go. Don’t worry. It’s just for a second. I just want to let everybody see. Oh, look. It’s curving up now, oh, and twitching. Is that your pulse, Gus? God, that’s a beautiful hard, hard cock. I hope I don’t go to Hell for saying that.”

“Man, Angus, you need to call Guinness. That’s got to be some kind of record,” Jared says.

Next, Dash tries to encircle me with her fingers. She has long fingers for a girl, but they don’t meet around my meat. Her hand finds a rhythm without anyone noticing. The circle is silent, pupils dilated.

“Hah-uh-ha,” I say. I won’t last ten seconds with Dash doing this. Giggles from the girls.

“Dash, you better be careful,” Sascha warns from directly opposite me.

“Then you should step back, Dutch.” The goddess coos to me. “Are you close, sweetie? Don’t be shy about it. You’ve been stiff for a good two hours, I’d say. You need some relief.”

“Christ, Dash, you’re not going to jerk off this jerk off, are you?” Eric Eisenhauer snarls.

“Shut the fuck up, Ike,” Kylie answers. “If she doesn’t, I will. How would you like it if some girl left you this way?”

“What she said,” Chloe speaks up from behind me. My faithful little dance partner reaches between my legs and lifts both heavyweight testicles in a spread hand. She squeezes ever so tentatively. She’s never done this, but it feels wonderful to me. I can’t hold back.

The first spurt crosses over the pile of cards and money in the center of the circle. The big, pearl hued glob lands at Sascha’s feet. Busty Dutch makes a small happy noise, teats bouncing cutely as she retreats again. She’s decided to be delighted at the distance I can shoot, now that Dash and Kylie have judged it’s not totally gross for the geek to have a public orgasm.

Raven-haired Vick cups her hand in front of my spitting hose to keep the hot seed from splattering the money and cards. Thick, white jets leap into her palm one after the other. Dash assesses the sperm Kylie’s accumulating, white teeth flashing encouragement at her friend’s impulse to join in the fun, and whispers to Chloe to massage my manly vessels with a little more authority. At her urging, I keep blasting.

Stop a moment and imagine this scene: one off-the-social-radar, white trash, 14-year-old boy sexually ministered to by three of the Goforth girls everyone wants to know while two other giggling hotties watch. We know what the girls are about. We think we do. But what thoughts are going through the minds of the four alpha males who’ve tolerated this loser because seeing Dash and Kylie strip was just too good an opportunity to pass up?

Howie and Jared, truly likable guys who just happen to be great athletes, are letting the Ecstasy remove their reservations. They’re rolling with it, laughing right along with the girls, covering little twinges of jealousy and insecurity with the sure knowledge that they’ve done a lot nastier things to Dashiele Graham than she’s doing to the big dicked freshman. Jared, by the by, is one of those many guys who’s kept secret his cunt-slamming assignments with Dash. He’d like to hook up with her again, preferably tonight. Even now he’s concentrating on the fluid movement of Dash’s hard-tipped left breast as she jacks the juice out of the Johansen kid. Lucky fuck.

Jake is none too pleased about watching Kylie play catcher for the dumb roguer’s never-ending wad. He definitely plans on tapping that girl’s ass before morning comes, just as soon as she washes her hands. He feels like hurting her a little bit because he agreed to the strip poker game for the T&A factor, not for the chance to have his dick compared with freak boy. That the Johansen kid would actually live up to all the whispers about his organ had never entered Jake’s mind. Fucking Kylie so hard she gets tears in her eyes won’t erase his long-term inadequacies, but he’ll feel better about himself, enough that he’ll forget any real anger toward Angus. Jake’s a pretty simple dude.

Sick puppy that Eric, though. Loathes all of the Johansen brothers. Morgan, the oldest and now a junior at OSU, once put a spider on Ike’s ordinary dick to, “see if that’ll make it swell up to a decent size.” It was punishment for some mouthy thing Eric had said. Something about the Johansens thinking they were big men just because of the length of their dicks. Tonight, Ike stayed to help clean up because he hoped the poker game would still happen and he’d get his chance to humiliate the youngest Johansen in some similar fashion. Instead, everybody started treating the ugly fuck like an equal — better, actually. Nobody else has had Vickers, Graham and Mandretti tag teaming his package.

Kylie’s hand is brimming, literally, with the first ever girl-induced issue from my overjoyed joystick. A last dollop curls from my purple glans to hang for a long half-second. When it finally drops, Dash touches Chloe’s fingers to stop her from kneading my sperm makers any longer. Sweet, bright, barebreasted Chloe stretches her digits up briefly to leave a fingertip caress on the shaft before sliding away.

“Is that it, Gus?” Dash asks breathily, slowing her strokes on the bone.

“Damn, kid, wasn’t very much,” Howie says with sarcastic macho approval. “Girls don’t like just a dribble.”

“Just let me get my second wind, uh, boner,” I say, becoming aware at the same moment that I’ve unconsciously cupped Dash’s silky left breast in my hand and am even now gently pinching the distended nipple. I jerk my hand away quickly.

Whether it was the one-liner or my caught-redhanded embarrassment doesn’t really matter. The laughter, as it has all evening, breaks another round of unacknowledged tension. Everybody relaxes.

Except for Kylie, who can’t think what to do with a handful of cum, and Eisenhauer, who never has learned to shut up. Eric’s had too much beer, too much spider poison, and not enough Ecstasy.

“Why don’t you drink it, cunt,” he says to Kylie, directing everyone’s attention to her quandary. “You’re all fuckin’ ho’s, anyway. All of you. Playin’ slut to a goddam freak geek.”

It’s quite clear what has to happen. You’re with me on this, right? How else can Kylie answer such a disgusting verbal slap? It’s also quite clear that there will be consequences, cause piled upon cause, effect piled upon effect.

Dash helps. You would think they were a pair of spooky, X-Files episode twins the way they coordinate their actions. The blonde catches the brunette’s hand in her own, rotates it slightly, and then both slim arms hurl the full fucking wad smack at Ike’s face with perfect synchronicity.

Bukkake for loudmouths.

“Well, shit.”

I don’t say it out loud, things are happening too fast, but I’m thinking it. I also think I’m glad Chloe has let go of my balls. Good old, big old dangly balls, I’m so proud of them, loadin’ Kylie Vickers’ hand full to overflowing with Johansen semen. It’s good Chloe has released me because I have less than a microsecond to make a decision. And owing so much to the three amazing women around me, it’s really not a difficult decision to make.

Just as Eric’s insult had to be answered by the dynamic hottie duo, their unmeasured response must be avenged in turn by Eric. Human nature. Sure, he deserved it, he begged for it with that stupid comment, but there may be no greater affront to a straight male’s dignity than covering his face with an inferior male’s ejaculate. Ike’s gotta hurt someone.

The question of the microsecond is who will Ike choose to visit with physical violence? In the same circumstance, Howie, Jared or even Jake would all lash out at me, no doubt. Despite our reputation as ignorant, abusive louts, country boys are by far more chivalrous than your average urbanite. I know whereof I speak. We don’t hit girls. A male on male duel is a much more acceptable and even condoned way of settling scores — even if it’s a girl who started the whole thing. But Ike’s not average, and he’s already down as having called Dash and Kylie whores.

He could go either way. So could I.

I could lay back and let Howie or Jared leap to the rescue if Ike heads for the girls. Honestly, I should. No way am I a match for the All State halfback in speed or strength. The other guys at least have their genitals covered, though not much else. But I’m going to do what I shouldn’t do and put myself right in front of Eric, giving him no chance of harming my females. Primal instincts and chivalry ain’t too much different at times.

Damn, did I wish my dick wasn’t sticking 14 inches out of my groin. Given the naked and sex-saturated situation, it’s a target that won’t be ignored.

I try do it with style, shouldering the girls smoothly back as I block Ike’s path. With the microsecond finally elapsed, he’s signaled his intent by orienting his body towards goddess and princess. Jared and Howie register the threat too. They’re bent on protecting the girls just as I am. How could they let Dash (or Kylie, though she’s not their focus) be hurt?

But the stronger, older guys are a foot or two farther away. They’ll be a fraction too late. Eric’s going to have one free shot at me before they intercept, and I’m going to get hurt even if I land a blow first. The follow through and our momentum will drive us closer together than 14 inches. Like I said, it ain’t easy being big.

Eric has just enough time to wipe away two fingerfuls of jism before he swings low with a balled fist. Of course Spunkface is aiming low. That’s his style. I’m targeting Eric’s jaw with the heel of my hand on the advice of my trucker father who once told my brothers never to swing on anyone with their fists. Dad’s been in a few scrapes.

“You’ll break your hand if you hit anything hard,” he explained to them.

But it’s Dash who saves me from a broken dick.

Remember me flexing the bone? Popping my cockhead up a couple of inches to satisfy Dash’s teasing sense of humor? Her penis training flashes across the necessary neurons just in time. I flex again.

Ike’s fist slides and hooks beneath my jumping shaft instead of buckling it straight back. The still raging hardon is whipped upward by the imperfect blow. I don’t really feel the impact until the whole awesome length slaps flat against my torso. It’s right about here that my hand connects with Eric’s jaw while the middle of the trophy cock bends deep under his knuckles. I’m driving with all the strength of my legs to ram that jawbone through the skull behind it, forcing my groin even farther onto his fist. Crunch in two places. Fortunately, Eric is hitting with his cum-slicked hand. It slides off my delicate but enormous instrument at the last, spending its final energy in my stomach. I feel something bite.

Everyone told me later how lucky I was that Eric hadn’t hit me square. I didn’t feel lucky. I thought Ike had destroyed my manhood. I know I felt it explode. The head blew off and landed somewhere in the metal rafters of the Butler building. The shockwave ripped open my scrotum, knocking my testicles to the concrete where I’m sure somebody stepped all over them.

At least that’s what it felt like.

We both go down, Eric like a sack of potatoes, me screaming in agony. Dash will assure me a few hours hence that I screamed in a very manly way. The girly scream I heard was Chloe, she said.

Jared and Howie, still charging, end up on either side of Eric, ready to hold him down. Moot point. He’s out.

I may have lost a second or two of awareness myself, I’m not sure. The next thing I recall is Kylie and Dash propping me up and trying to pull my hands away from my wounded organ to see how badly I’m hurt. Sascha is alertly wiping at Kylie’s right hand with a towel so Vick can tend me without leaving shiny cum trails over everything. I can’t see Chloe.

A voice keeps asking, “Is he OK? Is he OK? What’s that cut on his tummy?” I’m assuming that’s her. Dash confirms it.

“Chloe, I don’t know. He’ll be better if you’ll kneel down here. Put your legs under him so I can use both hands. There, thank you.”

Two smooth-muscled thighs wedge beneath my shoulder blades. Little Chloe strokes the hair at my temples and pillows my head against a softness trying desperately to grow into a B-cup. The pain in my groin lessens by the slightest margin. The fairer sex, aren’t they amazing?

“This guy ain’t OK,” Jared tells Dash from the other side of the poker circle. Coins, cards and beer cans have been slung in every direction by 10 pairs of fast shuffling feet.

“Damn, Eric’s fucked up,” Howie agrees. “His jaw’s all outta place and smashed up lookin’.”

Dash raises her butt off her heels to peer over at the supine Spunkface, then sinks back, turning to me, determined.

“Gus,” she says, “that was a brave thing you did. Stupid. Really stupid. But very brave.” She blinks rapidly and her eyes are water bright. “So stop being a wuss and let me look at your dick, dammit.”

“What? Are you gonna kiss it and make it all better?” I ask, trying to grin and talk through clenched teeth at the same time. Movie actors do it. Why can’t I? They also — on celluloid — overcome vast amounts of pain. I force myself to relax the chokehold on my deflated masculinity.

“I don’t blow freshmen, you little snot.” Dash answers, wiping at her eyes. I wonder what that’s all about.

She pulls at my left hand. It comes away bloody.

Tonight’s my night for prompting collective reactions from people. Awe, laughter, lust, approval, horror.

The girls’ mouths are drawn in cartoon character O’s, even Karen-Krista-Kirsten. The blood gets my attention too. Chloe’s thighs shift and she increases the pace of her hair stroking. I can sense she’s upset. Oddly, it calms me somewhat. Can’t start screaming again. Have to be strong for Chloe.

“Great party, Dash. Thanks for inviting me. I’ll skip the limbo this go ’round, if you don’t mind. I’m thinkin’ ER instead. You?”

Jake snorts and haws at my joke, climbing back into his jeans. He’s the only one of us so far to correct his state of undress.

“Yes, Gus. Sure,” Dash says a little dazedly. The unexpected blood has put her off her normally confident game. “Oh shit, oh God. This is ...”

“Bad?” I ask. (Reassure me here, goddess Graham.)

“No, no sweetie, it’s not bad, exactly. It’s, it’s serious. OK? I’m so sorry I got you into this. Kylie, do you know, is there a first-aid kit around somewhere? Come on, jump girlfriend.”

Kylie runs barefoot and fetchingly topless across the building to a workbench. A blue box with a white cross hangs from a peg board.

Dash asks me, like I should know, “What the hell did this?”

A two-inch vertical cut parallels the ventral hump of my urethra before jaggedly angling right another inch. No longer compressed by my grip, the wound bleeds freely. I knew there was a reason I was holding on so tight.

The brain does funny things sometimes. It can handily accelerate your thinking and awareness in an emergency, or it can heighten your sense of touch so that a dozen strokes from the local hottie gets you off. Or it can do stupid stuff.

A second ago, I was just crushed, but now, with a real wound suddenly visible, the nauseating pain of hydraulic shock makes way for the sharper agony of ripped flesh. The cut gapes. Blood runs. It looks painful, therefore it must be painful. Brain, are you paying attention? Yowie. I was just adjusting to the idea that my genitals had not, in fact, exploded. Now this.

Jake unconcernedly nudges Eric’s limp right hand with the toe of his shoe. “Check Ike’s ring, dudes. Isn’t that like those fighting rings that prison gangbangers are s’pose to wear? With razors and shit on ‘em? Iz’got blood on it.”

“Yeah, I saw that on ‘American Justice,’ I think,” Jared agrees. “Fuckin’ scumbag,” he says to unconscious Ike. No one remembers Ike putting on the ring with its tiny but dangerous blade. Sneaky fuckin’ scumbag.

I feel the rapid patter of Chloe’s heart rev up another notch at the news. I reach back with my scarlet hand — leaving Dash in sole possession of the raw, red meat — to comfort my new friend. (Don’t forget how young we all are, Chloe especially. And it was a different time, before Tommy Pennec and crew made a spectator sport out of hacking cocks.) She seizes my fingers immediately, never minding the blood, and squeezes. I squeeze back and twist my head to give her a pained smile, though I’m far from certain everything’s going to turn out all right. How can it? Dicks aren’t supposed to bleed, ever. She caresses my cheek with her other hand. I wonder if I look as scared as she does.

Probably.

*********

We’re fishtailing up the muddy track from the Butler building toward the Spot’s packed dirt parking lot in Dash’s Land Rover. The shed had been the staging area for the evening’s party, so Kylie’s Dodge Ram had been parked there, too. Jared and Howie have loaded Ike into it and driven ahead to the Goforth Medical Center emergency room with instructions from our goddess to be as vague as possible about what has happened.

Jake left with them when he couldn’t peel Kylie away from the patch job she and Dash were performing on my badly cut and limply swollen penis.

Me, the stricken hero, and the girls are listening to a cell phone argument between Dash and her mother, the pediatrician, about whether I should go to the ER, too. Dash says no. Telephone company exec Pete Eisenhauer may communicate efficiently with the home office over a T1 line, but his interpersonal skills are no better than his son’s. If I’m at the ER behind the curtain next to Ike, and Pete finds out what the sticky glop on Ike’s face is, and who smashed his boy’s jaw, things could get interesting. The local authorities have hushed up a couple of violent episodes in Pete’s past. He’s the token hothead on the city council.

“Mom, Ike’s unconscious and probably can’t talk anyway if he wakes up. So, if Jared and Howie can fudge the facts, all of this may blow over tonight without any more confrontations. But if two busted up boys come in together, Daddy Eisenhauer’s going to put two and two together for sure. Angus would be in real danger, mom. You know that. It’d take a couple of deputies to hold Mr. Eisenhauer back, and who knows whether anyone could get the sheriff to take this seriously before Angus bleeds to death.”

Kylie pats my arm and whispers that Dash is just playing up the drama so her mom will unlock the Health Plaza and treat me there. I’m not really bleeding to death, the princess promises. Good to know.

“Oh, Mom, you’re the best, and bring Daddy too. You know, just in case Pistol Pete gets the truth out of the guys and figures out where we’re at.”

Sascha gets out of the Land Rover at her car, taking Karen-Kirsty-Katie with her. Kylie agrees to drive my Mustang to the Health Plaza when Chloe begs to stay with me. The freshman hottie doesn’t have a learner’s permit anyway, and my classic ride can’t be left behind. It would be too great a temptation for Eisenhauer clan vandalism, and I don’t want to send my just-graduated brother, Luke, after it. Who knows when I’d get the keys back.

Country roads are rough. Muddy country roads are worse, and when you’re in a hurry...

Chloe and I are in the middle seat of the Land Rover, bumping shoulders two or three times for every 30 yards of travel. She’s back in her clothes. I’m in a towel. Shoving myself back into my shorts was out of the question. I feel silly. Sillier still is the instinct to coddle my jostled prick. You would any other injured limb, but propriety demands you not play with your dick in mixed company. With the banging around, the impulse to grab the bruised and bleeding meat is almost irresistible. Thank God for the practical sweetness of Chloe Mandretti.

She really is a trooper, this great-great-granddaughter of Goforth’s pioneers. The pained expression on my face every time we hit a bump isn’t lost on her. Miss Five-feet Nuthin’ grips the back of the bench seat and hooks a heel under the bottom edge for leverage so she can scrunch me into the Rover’s side panel. Her softness and small strength absorbs the buffeting, and she asks me...

“Do you want me to hold it? You can still play the tough guy, and I’ll pretend to be the little slut so no one’s the wiser — you know, if talk gets around?”

We giggle at the clever way she’s found to repay my bra clasp gallantry, and I consent. Her free hand slips under the towel and controls me gently. I’m almost comfortable. If the blacktop hadn’t come along just a half-mile later, I might have responded to Chloe’s touch. (An erection would have been a bleeding disaster, of course.) But as soon as the ride smooths out with the pavement, she releases me with a smile.

She did leave her hand on my leg, however, and she kept leaning against me. Have you ever fallen in love with two girls who were too good for you, all in one night?

And Dash? Yeah, she was watching us through the rearview.

*********

A black BMW proclaims the superiority of German engineering from one stall of the empty parking lot at the Health Plaza. Not the best turnout for a National Socialist rally, it’s true. But all it really means is that Mr. and Dr. Graham have arrived ahead of the injured party. Lights go on in the Plaza’s lobby.

The Land Rover and the Mustang crowd around the BMW. Their cooling engines give ticking witness to the competence of British craftsmanship and American know-how as me and the three beautiful she’s pile out and head for the door, which is attended by the imposing silhouette of Elijah Graham. Actually, the females piled out. My exit and girl-assisted trip to the entrance resembled a sort of inmate shuffle.

“Daddy, if you tell him to stand up straight, I’ll start working for Ditech.com,” Dash warns her father when we start through the door. Apparently, bankers take that sort of threat seriously. We filed inside without a word from the ex-soldier turned money-man. He gets pecks of kissy greeting from both Dash and Kylie on the way. Chloe smiles nervously.

“Hi, Mr. Graham.”

“Hello, Chloe. Little late for you, isn’t it?”

“Hell-o-o, I’m going to be a sophomore, Mr. Graham. Besides, I think this qualifies as an emergency.”

“Still, you should call your...”

“Dad, leave her alone. She’s helping a friend. One of the big virtues you’re always talking about? Now, which exam room?”

“Your mom’s in 3. She said she’d have to do some stitching.”

The whole girl gang plus me and Mr. Graham troop to Exam Room 3. Dr. Graham, an older version of her daughter, checks her surprise at the crowd and lets Kylie and Dashiele help me onto the exam table, although I could have managed on my own. We’re all bedraggled and damp and obviously unsanitary. I wonder if Doc’s practiced eye can tell that we’re higher than kites. Do we smell of booze and teenage desires? Or is blood the overriding odor?

If Doc’s interested in any of that, she doesn’t show it.

“You must have been quite the hero tonight, Angus. Normally, the girlfriend stays outside in the waiting room, and here you have three following you into exam,” she says.

I have no idea what to say. Chloe blushes and even Dash colors a little. Kylie laughs.

“Yeah,” she says softly, sweetly. “The pretty towel boy really threw down for us.”

“I thought so,” the good doctor says. “All right, then. Thank you, girls. You can leave him with me. No buts, Dash. I know you’re concerned about your friend, and I know you’ve already seen everything — I remember our phone conversation — but this is still a doctor’s office, and my patients are afforded their privacy.”

The girls leave me with smiles and “don’t worries” and “we’re just outside” like I’m some kind of little kid who needs reassurance.

I miss them immediately.

Dr. Graham expects Mr. Graham to assist her. Summoning a nurse at this late hour would have meant more questions than Doc can answer just now. But she hasn’t told her stalwart hubby the nature of my injury. I’m sure he imagines it’s just the cut I sustained across the abdomen when Eisenhauer’s punch slipped off my boner. When Doc pulls the towel off, the banker considers my primary wound for a brief second and turns on his heel. The door latches firmly behind him.

Doc curses, obviously reacting to her husband’s departure and not my size. I’m disappointed.

“Blood bothers him?” I ask.

“No, he’s just homophobic like 90 percent of the male population.”

“But I’m not gay.”

“No, Angus, that’s not what I meant. The blood doesn’t make him squeamish, touching your penis does. He’s too manly.” Doc says this with the sort of derision women reserve exclusively for XY chromosone carriers.

“Oh, I kind of get that. When Alan Schmidtberger and I go to a movie, we always put a seat between us, so nobody can say we’re fag... uh, you know.”

“All too well.”

Dash re-enters the exam room and starts washing her hands in the sink.

“Dash.” Mom’s tone is full of warning.

“Mom, dad chickened out, so you need an extra hand. It’s not like I haven’t helped out in the office before. Have Angus sign a waiver or something, if you’re worried about whatever, malpractice or confidentiality.

“Do you mind, Angus?” the younger Graham asks.

“No, it’s cool. I was feeling ... abandoned, sort of, anyway. I got kind of anxious.” I hurry to add. “You don’t have to tell anyone I said that.”

“Angus doesn’t mind, mom.”

Dash stays. Dr. Graham peels off the bandage.

I’m swollen and red but decidedly not aroused. Dash lays the long, limp balloon over my belly so her mother can see the underside cut, which had almost clotted. With the removal of the bandage, fresh blood leaks from the gash. It’s about a quarter of an inch deep on average.

My imagination chooses this moment to take hold. If Ike had been wearing his “fighting” ring on his middle finger instead of his ring finger, my piss tube would be sliced open, maybe split in half. If I hadn’t flexed at that moment, the head would be mangled. I envision a gory section of the knob hanging to one side, secured by the barest strip of flesh. Still, I don’t feel lucky.

The mother-daughter pair begin cleaning the wound and sopping up blood. The two blonde women could be twins if not for the age difference.

“Ike did this to you?” Doc asks as she works.

“Yup.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No. I’m kind of embarrassed.”

“Don’t be. I can’t imagine Kylie bragging about you the way she did if you had done anything you shouldn’t have.”

“The way Dash put it, I was ‘stupid.’”

“Not fair, Gus,” Dash chides softly. “I said something else, too.”

“Oh, right, I forgot. There was a ‘really stupid’ after the first ‘stupid.’”

“And ‘brave’ followed by ‘very brave,’” my goddess says smiling. “I think you better check him for amnesia, mom. He’s not remembering things too well.”

Given the opening, Doc tries another line of parental questioning.

“How about it, Angus? Do you remember anything my daughter said — or did — tonight? What was her part in all of this?”

There’s a long pause because we all know what that question’s about. I’m supposed to rat out Dash. Maybe mom did notice the signs of substance abuse among the four of us. Doc picks up her funny looking needle and thread. She’s ready to stitch. I’m not sure if the action is a threat or just a professional getting on about her business, but I’m not going to betray Dash now.

A little speechifying seems in order.

“Dr. Graham, you know there’s a code, don’t you? Anybody who belongs to any group, they don’t talk about their business with outsiders. Convicts don’t trade secrets with prison guards, cops don’t cross the thin blue line. Presbyterians don’t invite Baptists to help them pick a new preacher. See where I’m going with this, ma’am? My group, well, they really took care of me tonight. So if you’re looking for me to give you chapter and verse about all the sins of Dash — real or imagined — I’ve got too much respect for her role within the group to help you any.”

Mother looks over at daughter.

“You said he was brave. Most boys would have just lied.”

“He’s not most boys, mom.”

“That’s becoming quite evident. As for the Graham group dynamic, your dad and I will test your honesty when we get you home.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now, hold his hand and pull just a little on the glans here to draw the edges of the cut together. Good. Ready, Angus?” She doesn’t wait for an answer.

Watching Doc sew my penis wasn’t easy, but it was more difficult to look into Dash’s face. Her hand on mine, the other hand on my manhood was quite enough to distract my thoughts from the pain. To see her eyes and the tender expression in them was too much. The things Dash can say with just a look... Better to focus on the rhythm of the needle making holes in my mauled organ.

Dr. Graham seems to sense this, or maybe she detects a lessening in the flaccidity of the penis. She starts talking.

“You might want to look here Angus,” she says. “Few people ever get to see this. Even fewer guys get to see their own. Deep down in the cut is a band of fibrous tissue. See that? I won’t bother you with the Latin name, but it’s a covering for the corpora cavernosa -- oops, I am spouting Latin now, aren’t I? Anyway, those two cavernosa fill with blood when the male is aroused. It’s how guys get hard.”

Dash interrupts.

“Fibrous. That means it’s tough, doesn’t it? So, a lot of blood can be pumped in there at really high pressure for a long time without the penis behaving like a big, squishy balloon. It becomes rigid instead of just fat, sort of a limited stretching?”

“There are other factors, Dash, but yes, that sheath is a key component in the mechanics of erection. Angus’ sheath has just the tiniest nick in it, which should heal without any trouble.

“You should recover pretty nicely, I think, Angus,” Doc says, turning her attention back to me as she ties off the last stitch. “You’ll have a scar, but it will probably be very faint unless I miss my guess.

“And unless I miss another guess, you were erect when this happened, weren’t you?”

“Uhhh,” I say.

“Dash mentioned some sort of ring Ike was wearing. If you had been flaccid, the cut would have been on the dorsal side of your penis, and probably much deeper. I suspect the ring didn’t rip through all that soft tissue because it wasn’t soft. His fist impacted the hard shaft before the ring could cut too deply, which would explain the extensive bruising, too. The hydraulic shock must have been tremendous.”

“It felt like the head popped off and the nuts went flying,” I confirm before I remember to be abashed.

Doc allows the tiniest smile to touch her lips.

“I see. Well, the glans appears to be attached still, and your Galahads ...” She touches my nuts lightly with a gloved hand. “...seem to be OK, too.”

“Galahads, is that Latin again?” I ask.

“No, it’s not, Gus,” Dash answers amused. “Mom, where did you come up with a name like that for balls?”

It’s the doctor’s turn to be reluctant. She doesn’t answer her daughter, but she apologizes to me.

“Just a little personal quirk, Angus. I’m sorry. I should be more professional.”

“Part of the Hippocratic oath, Doc?”

“Something like that.”

“Mom, you’ve got to tell.”

“Yeah. How do you expect us kids to be honest if...”

“All right, all right.”

Turns out, Doc had an uncle who visited her childhood home often and sometimes took his sister’s kids on afternoon outings. Doc was the youngest and the only girl, so Uncle Billy sometimes forgot the mite was around when he bragged to the boys.

“When a girl or woman would walk by, he almost always grabbed himself and said, ‘Gal I had,’” Doc explained. “My brothers would laugh hysterically. I didn’t understand for a lot of years. In the meantime, I just started thinking of a man’s testicles as Gal-I-hads, which turned into Galahads, which after I read about the Knights of the Round Table just seemed sort of fitting.”

Dash and I have a good chuckle at her mom’s expense. Dr. Graham became human at that moment, and I decided I liked her.

My prodigious penis is carefully wrapped again, and Dash finds a pair of surgical pants in the locker of a male doctor who also has his practice at the Health Plaza. The drawstring pants fit loosely and comfortably around the injured part.

Doc reminds me before I head into the lobby that she’ll need to take the stitches out in a few days. She will call my mother to arrange an appointment.

We all three realize at the same moment that neither of my parents are aware I’m here.

“You can’t tell her,” I beg Doc before she can speak. “My mom finds out, she’ll start homeschooling me again.”

“Angus, I ...”

“You can’t. She’d want to see it, too. You know how moms are. I gave birth to you, blah, blah, blah. Seen it all before, more blah, blah. Please Doc, that’s just too creepy.”

“Parents have to be informed, hon. It’s the law.”

A light bulb switches on in my dim brain.

“Call my dad. He always stays at the Pine Haven Motorlodge when he’s on the Little Rock run. He won’t care. He’ll probably laugh.”

Doc considers for a moment. I think she likes me. Half hero, half frightened juvenile. I guess it appeals to some women.

“All right, Angus. I’ll call information, and see if we can track down your father.”

**********

Jared and Howie have joined the girls in the lobby when I emerge with Dash. They couldn’t stand the heat in the ER. Pistol Pete had indeed grilled them, as had the medical staff.

Although the elder Eisenhauer had persuaded the physician’s assistant in charge to forget about notifying the authorities, it wasn’t because he was a forgiving man. Dash had been correct, Pete Eisenhauer wanted personal vengeance.

When Eric had begun to regain consciousness, Jared and Howie saw their opportunity and slipped away.

“Your dad’s away on a haul?” big Elijah Graham asks me.

“Yessir.”

“You see any of the Eisenhauers pull up at your place, you call the Sheriff first, and then you call me, understand?”

I nod.

“I don’t think Pete will do anything that open, but he doesn’t always demonstrate a lot of good sense. If Dash is correct about the other boy’s injuries, it may even be a few days before Pete knows what happened. And that’s assuming Ike tells his dad the whole truth. These girls here seem pretty sketchy on the details themselves.”

Elijah points a stubby finger in the general direction of Kylie and Chloe. Kylie gives him her best bad girl smile. Chloe looks at the carpet and then up at me. Her smile, and a slow, almost imperceptible wink, is not for anyone else.

***********

In a single night, Dashiele Graham had introduced me to all of the central themes of the next 16 years of my life: her own beauty and elegant charm, public sex with a neverending variety of women, the irrational hatred of a less endowed men, the regular attacks against my impressive genitalia, and the repairs made to them by beautiful female doctors.

**********

By design (the Eisenhauer propaganda network of busybodies and coffee shop gabbers) or by default (the Grahams, Mandrettis, Vickers, Germans, Torrances, Jenkins and Arnauds defending the reputations of their children against the rumors), word about the half-second battle and the incidents leading up to it spreads across the county. By Sunday evening services, the battle lines in Goforth are drawn. Only a handful of neutral or uninformed families still exist at midday Monday.

If you side with the Eisenhauers, you believe poor Ike was betrayed by his buddies and humiliated by those whore cheerleaders when he was only trying to stop a drug-fueled orgy initiated by Miss Perfect, my-shit-don’t-stink Dashiele Graham. Everybody shoulda knowed she was just like her mama, who only came back to Goforth from Harvard Med because she hadn’t found an East Coast dick bigger than ol’ Elijah’s local legend. Now Doc’s little precious has found a fuckstick a few sizes larger than dad’s, and it’s turned her into the worst slut the county’s seen in a decade. And isn’t it about time somebody put a stop to those Johansen boys deflowering every girl old enough to need tampons?

If you side with the Johansen-Graham alliance, Ike insulted the girls, then attacked them when they threw his insult back in his face. When Angus shot to their defense, Ike fought dirty and, again out of jealousy, cut open the other boy’s privates. He deserved the shattered jaw that knocked him into the Emergency Room. As far as the strip poker and innocent fooling around, who didn’t do a little of that at one time or another in their youth? Yes, there was booze, too. The kids admitted to that, but all this talk of drugs is just that — talk.

Of course, the Eisenhauers’ version was mostly distortions, while the Johansen-Graham line was mostly true — except for the teeny white lie about the drugs. The trouble with the truth was that it didn’t reinforce the stereotypes that so many redneck reactionaries cling to: anyone not living paycheck-to-paycheck is cheating at life somehow and deserves misfortune; cheerleaders are either stuck up or sluts; and all “rich” kids are druggies and sexual deviants. As a result, the Eisenhauers had far more allies than such a bullshit story would normally warrant. Local sentiment was almost evenly divided between the two clans.

Dash began campaigning immediately to rehabilitate her wholesome image — and mine by association. She’s sunshine in a bottle when she wants to be, and for the next two weeks she decided to light up Goforth by working every volunteer job and brightening every community gathering she could manage. The “undecideds” fell into our camp without much trouble, and Dash’s persistence converted a number of Eisenhauer supporters or diluted their emotional investment in the family feud.

Even Howie, Jared, Jake and the girls were called upon by the goddess to perform Herculean labors of community service. In large part, they also were successful in tipping the scales of local favor toward the Johansen-Graham organization.

But a hard core of the Eisenhauer gang were too easily fueled by hate to be swayed by Dash and Co.’s public relations work. They were the ones who really worried the parents of the kids who had been witness to Ike’s humiliation. Threatening phone calls, minor incidents of vandalism and hard stares exchanged across the streets of Goforth sustained their concern.

Dash knew the easiest way to end the feud would have been to distance herself from me. With her example to follow, the others would have done the same, with the possible exception of kindhearted Chloe. Without the allegiance of the Grahams, white-trash-nobody Angus Johansen would have been easy meat for the Eisenhauers and their ilk. Their need for revenge would have been satisfied the first time I left the company of adults (and thereby credible witnesses). Their relationship with the Grahams — and the remainder of the influential families in Goforth — would have repaired itself over time.

But Dash stuck by me — close by me.

She was the first person to call me Sunday afternoon after church was out. Chloe was the second, trailed quickly by Kylie and then Sascha. Jared gave me a “hey, buddy” ring that evening with Howie making wisecracks in the background. They all had a simple message: “We’re behind you. Don’t go out alone. Call one of us if you need to go anywhere, or just to hang. And don’t go out alone. Are you listening, freshman?”

Chloe, of course, took it a step further — at Dash’s nudging. I think she would have waited for me to call her if left alone. Instead, she practically demanded I take her out to see a movie Tuesday night and for ice cream at Dairy Queen afterward where we would meet up with the “gang.” Oh, and I had to meet her parents beforehand. That was one of their rules.

As I mentioned before, Mr. Mandretti was the district attorney. And Dash wanted me linked to Chloe in the public’s mind for that very reason. There could be no misinterpretation in Goforth’s collective perception about my status, if I met ma and pa Mandretti — who would talk about me to their friends — went on a date alone with Chloe — which would be remarked on by everyone at the theater — and then hobnobbed with my new circle of pals over a Peanut Buster Parfait®. The Eisenhauers, familial craziness notwithstanding, would think twice before attempting any vigilante action against the new beau of the top prosecutor’s daughter. And Chloe honestly liked me enough for it to ring true.

Things simmered that way for most of the summer, even after I got my stitches out, lost my virginity to beautiful Dash and became the son Elijah Graham had never had. The hardest part, before those stitches came out anyway, was staying soft.

See, just prior to leaving the Health Plaza, Doc Graham had pulled me aside, making me hobble out of earshot of everyone else. She spoke low in my ear, one hand on my shoulder. Her close proximity translated as a potent feminine presence. Like daughter, like mother.

“Angus you have a difficult few days ahead of you. Every young man your age would have the same problem if he had stitches where you do,” she said. “They put you in a vulnerable position. It’s very important for you to avoid erections until those stitches come out and for maybe four days after. You could do considerable damage to your penis if you don’t, especially if you find yourself in a situation that might bring on arousal suddenly and powerfully.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Angus? You need to be careful always but most of all when you’re with a girl. OK?”

“Umm, gotcha, Doc,” I answer. “Usually, that’s not a problem — being with girls, I mean.”

“I have a feeling it’s going to become a bit more of a challenge for you this summer. From what I’ve seen tonight, I’d say the girls are going to find reasons to be near you.”

Here’s Doc telling me to stay away from girls, and there’s Dash throwing me together with Chloe, Kylie and her own perfect ass. Both women had the best of intentions and good reasons for their orders, but they made my life tricky. When it was most critical for me to think of anything but girls, they were always in front of me. Adding to the pressure was the constantly intruding memory of Dash stroking me to heaven with Chloe’s help. Somehow, I kept those stitches from bursting.

Upon surviving those first two weeks intact, I was handed a clean bill of health from Doc Graham.

And a handjob.

The good doctor who eventually turned into my mother-in-law had indeed been affected by her first exposure to the mammoth trunk between my legs. To give her credit, she did her darnedest to remain the medical professional, but we both understood that science was less on her mind than the burning desire to make that boy’s dick hard and to feel it that way just once.

A week after my stitches were removed, I drove to the Health Plaza with bodyguard/girlfriend Chloe in the passenger seat for a last checkup before my “boner ban,” as Kylie put it, was lifted. The ban was public knowledge because Dash had guessed immediately why I became so uncomfortable when Chloe snuggled against me at the Dairy Queen that Tuesday night. Laughter and embarrassment are great anti-erection treatments.

Over the ensuing days, Chloe and I went out several times, often meeting up with the Strip Poker Gang. On Dash’s orders, I never went anywhere without the company of someone whose parents’ social and political status would protect me from the frightening level of revenge the Eisenhauers were said to be seeking. (No guessing necessary on what that level was, huh?) Only Chloe was considered politically strong enough to safeguard me by herself. If she wasn’t around, at least two and often three other kids arranged to hang with me. When I was at home, my brothers were usually there, and word quickly circulated that any attempt against the Johansen home would be met with armed and deadly violence.

At the Health Plaza, Chloe stayed in the waiting room, which was empty since I was the final appointment of the day. Doc’s last nurse ushered me back to Exam Room 3 with her purse on her shoulder as she left for the night. Dash’s mom came in a few seconds later in the shortest skirt I’d ever seen her wear. She smelled great, her makeup was perfect and she had missed a button on her blouse. She was wearing a white lace bra. I know black’s supposed to be more sexy, but I like white against tan skin.

“Let’s take a look, Angus,” she says.

Even the way she holds the tailless snake feels different today as she bends to look me over, blouse gaping. Then I realize she’s not wearing gloves. When I mention it, she shrugs, and her cleavage moves enticingly.

“You’re free of disease and open wounds. I made sure of that the last time you were here. We’re safe, don’t worry.

“You’ve healed beautifully,” she continues, making a close inspection of the soft penis. I can feel the breath from her words on my cockhead. “I don’t think the scar will even be noticeable in a year or two.”

She straightens, still holding my dick, caressing it, in fact. The giant hose begins to stir.

“Angus, we both understand you’ve an abnormal organ. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your penis, it’s just extraordinarily oversized. And science has an interest in the abnormal, the extraordinary. It even helps us define what normal means. Physicians all over the world keep statistics on the dimensions of almost every human organ they encounter. It’s important work, although one little piece of data may not seem that vital to the whole. But we know that humans are getting larger, smarter and longer lived, and the data we collect can help us explain why and how fast humanity is changing.

“That’s why I’d like to measure you, if you’ll let me.”

“Sure, OK. Do you have to...?”

“Make you hard? Yes, flaccidity varies on every male from hour to hour depending on a number of factors, but the fully erect state is fairly constant, and in young males fully erect is easy to achieve. I think we’re there, don’t you?”

She looks down. My 14-inch organ is pulsing in her hand. Its circumference is as impressive as its length. The swelling helmet of my warrior rises even with the bottom curve of her breasts. I’m stiff again for the first time in two weeks, and once more a female Graham has my bone-hard cock in her hand.

“My God! No wonder those girls wanted you in that strip poker game. I’m sorry. I mean to say, clinically speaking, you’re exceptionally large and very unusual in that you don’t seem to struggle for complete rigidity as is typical for most extremely long male organs. Studies have found that extended shaft type males usually exceed the capacity of the body to provide the extra blood pressure necessary to maintain a fully erect and upward inclined attitude.”

“Yeah?”

“Also, protracted length seems to hinder ejaculation. The extended shaft type can appear to be having a powerful climax but expel semen only in a dripping fashion. Again, their size seems to eclipse the ability of the supporting physique to provide normal function. How would you describe your own orgasms, Angus? From the clinical viewpoint, please. Remember, I’m just collecting data.”

“You’re going to be collecting more than that if you don’t take it easy, Doc. I’m hard now. You don’t have to keep working me. Are you gonna measure?”

“Oh, yes. Again, I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re quite bored with the size of your penis, but this is the first time I’ve seen any patient or even a photograph of a cock, uh, dick, I mean organ so fantastically proportioned and ... and ... you’re so fucking straight-up stiff. Forgive me not conducting myself with the detachment required by my profession. Let me get my tape...”

Doc measures me adoringly, sliding her fingers up and down and around the throbbing cock as she measures. The testicles are pulled down, squeezed together and circled by the tape too, causing me to grunt with discomfort, for which Doc does not apologize. Is that what she means by “detachment?” She makes several notes about the remarkable depth of the scrotum, which she tells me is unusual in the very young. Typically, the sack sags farther as you get older. Maybe the weight of the testes are too much for their pouch, she says, although she uses fancier words. She rolls the billiard ball-sized nuts around with her hands in a half-clinical, half-sexual examination. To me, it doesn’t feel much different from what Chloe was doing to me in the Butler building. Wonderful.

“So Angus, you never did tell me about the strength of your ejaculations... Why don’t you describe them while I power up my camera here. It only takes a second or two. Do you mind if I photograph your genitals? I’ll submit them with the data.”

“No, go right ahead, Doc. I guess, though, since I’m already at this point, and you know, talking scientifically and all, it doesn’t take much to excite the young male to shoot, I mean ejaculate, you could gather your data firsthand ... if you wanted.”

“Angus ... you little devil. But honestly, sweetie, I understand how guys are, and I was planning to help you climax anyway. I just wanted to know if I’ll have to clean anything off the walls.”

“Probably. I pump it out there quite a ways. And lots. It’s always a big mess when I ...”

“Masturbate? Turn this way, stud, and hold the balls out so the camera gets a good look at them in profile. So gorgeous! And this is atypical of the extended shaft type as well. The really, really big guys that you see in some porno flicks? Not your average porn stud, mind you, I’m talking the whopper willies. They come with somewhat larger than average testicles but not in proportion to their length. You probably have the largest human testes on record anywhere.”

Dash’s sexy mother, Elijah’s beautiful wife and my doctor stops shooting my cock and balls with the little digital camera. I can’t count the number of taboos she’s breaking as she runs her fingertips lightly up the underside of my massive prick — and all with my new girlfriend waiting a few doors down.

Weeks later, Chloe happily watched me having sex with Dash, Kylie and even Sascha. Sometimes, we all made love together. Once, the guys from the Poker Gang took turns with each of the girls orgy-style (except Chloe, who only did me). But I think if my little sweetheart had walked in on me and Doc Graham that afternoon, she would have been desperately hurt, and for that I’ve always been sorry.

As predicted, the young, growing cock reaches the happy moment in no time at all under the experienced touch of Dr. Angelique Graham, who doesn’t like her first name. She’s maneuvered giant dick boy, that’s me, against the wall of Exam Room 3. I fire sploogie three-quarters of the way across the space once, twice, thrice and four times before the intense spasms lose their initial vigor and begin to decorate the floor in a dying trail back to where we stand with her lab coat by her left ankle on the floor and my hand inside her lacy bra. How the pediatrician got to this state of near undress in those brief moments I’m not quite sure, but my heart is racing, and there’s not a twinge of pain in the recently ripped open rod.

I bend my head to kiss Doc reflexively. She turns away to accept it on her cheek.

“I’m a married woman, Angus,” she says. “I know this doesn’t seem very professional, and it wasn’t, I agree, but we’ve got to make the effort to keep our behavior within certain limits. Do you understand? You’ve got someone who’s quite fond of you waiting outside, don’t you?”

I mumble an affirmative, properly shamefaced now and not so confident that I understand what just happened. Women can make you crazy.

Doc rolls out her tape twice to record my spunky performance and cleans both me and the floor quickly and impersonally. She’s a little redfaced too.

When we’ve both recovered our equilibrium, she accompanies me out into the waiting room with one hand resting in the crook of my elbow and releases me in front of a smiling Chloe who likes Doc Graham just as she likes everyone but maybe a little more because Doc has been taking care of me for her, she thinks.

“He’s all yours, Chloe. You keep him close now,” Doc says.

“I will,” Chloe answers. Their smiles suggest some kind of girl code is being transmitted, but damn if I can figure out the message.

Back in my Mustang, Chloe asks me to head out to her grandfather’s farm about 10 miles south of Goforth. She has a picnic planned. The food she’s prepared herself, but the basket is waiting in grandma’s kitchen. Halfway to the farm, she rests a hand lightly on my thigh. She inquires shyly about my health.

“Doc says I’m good to go.”

“That’s great. Really. I’m glad you’re ... ready to ... umm, wow, isn’t it just a beautiful day?”

“To be with a beautiful girl? It surely is.”

Chloe smiles easily and honestly. She leans across the Mustang’s transmission hump and kisses the corner of my mouth. She tastes sweet. It’s natural with her, I think. Chloe exudes some honest-to-goodness delectable secretion that doesn’t have anything to do with the gum she chews, the soda she drinks or the lipstick she chooses.

“I’m going to get a cushion,” she says. “One that will fit right here across the tranny, so we can sit close when we go places.”

“Are we going places?” I ask.

She gets shy again.

“Maybe,” she says more serious than I expected. “Dash wants you.”

I snort. “Just for a toy.”

“More than that. She told me. She’s been watching you since you were in fifth grade and you went after that broken-winged hawk for the animal rescue outfit. Dash said you were smart and gutsy and gentle even after the bird got you with its claws.”

“Talons. I forgot about that.”

“Dash didn’t. Girls like smart, gutsy and gentle.”

The bird had been in a big cottonwood. Some tree hugger had called a metro animal rescue squad. They had roped the REC into helping them capture the hawk. But whenever the power company’s bucket truck had approached from below, the redtail had just hopped higher. On my own I had scrambled around, behind and above the bird. When the adults on the ground spotted me, they started yelling, which suited me just fine because it kept the hawk’s attention fixed on them. I swung down from a higher branch, hanging by my knees and scooped up the wounded creature. Swinging up to wait for the bucket truck while avoiding the sharp beak and talons proved a little more problematic, but I managed not to drop my feathered burden even when a powerful rear talon lodged in the fleshy part of my thumb.

Smart? I don’t know. Clever maybe.

Gutsy? Reckless, more like. All the adults said so.

Gentle? I was just trying to keep her from ripping off my thumb.

I show Chloe the tiny crooked scar the big female hawk left behind.

“Dash said she thought back then that you were special even though you were a ‘skinny runt.’ When you decked Eric the other night, she said she knew she wanted you for her guy.”

“Well, she got off to a good start at the Spot, I suppose, and then at the doctor’s office. But so did you, and she kind of got out of your way right after. I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about, baby.”

Calling her “baby” was a first in our new relationship, and I could tell she liked it. Her smile warmed me for a brief second, then she frowned again.

“Except, Dash asked me to look out for you — pretend we were going out so the Eisenhauers would be scared to go after you because of my dad. She asked me as a friend to keep her guy safe. She’ll want you back soon, I think. I don’t know how to tell her.”

We’re close to Grandpa Mandretti’s farm now. I use the turn-off as an excuse to think about what I should say and what I feel.

“You mean tell her you’re not just pretending?”

“No, she knows I like you. And I think she knows that the connection’s getting stronger. But I don’t think she understands it’s more than just liking now. I mean, I suppose I’m too young to be in love, but this feels like more than just dating stuff.” She pauses, then sets the hook. “How do you feel? Do you want her?”

At that moment, I wonder crazily if I should tell her that Dash’s mother, the upstanding pediatrician, has just jacked me off. My life is becoming far too strange. Kids are adaptable, but I was too out of my league to be the center of a bubbling county-wide feud that keeps threatening to boil over. Chloe is going to get more of an answer than she imagined.

“I don’t know! This isn’t how my life goes! You say, ‘more than just dating stuff.’ I don’t even know what dating stuff is! I never had a date before two weeks ago. I never kissed a girl before you. I never had a hand on me until Dash did what she did.

“I’m not even sure that any of this is really real. When I’m with you I believe what you tell me. Nobody could ever look at those eyes and not believe. But when I go home, and I’m back in my room all alone, I try to tell myself Chloe Mandretti is my girlfriend, and I can’t convince me!

“Now you tell me Dash isn’t fighting this cold war with the Eisenhauers because I protected her and Kylie, or because she feels guilty about me getting hurt, or because she wants to have a little fun with the big dick. The reason she really has you running interference against the Eisenhauers is because Dashiele Graham, the hottest hottie in Goforth, the girl the whole town bows down to, wants me to be her boyfriend when the feud is over.”

A cloud of dust hangs around the Mustang’s windows. I’ve pulled over a half-mile short of the Mandretti farm for this little tirade. Chloe’s big eyes are wider than I thought possible.

“How do I feel?” I continue in a quieter voice, recognizing that I’ve frightened the gentlest girl I’ve ever met. “I feel like a picnic with my baby is the only thing that can possibly save me from a straitjacket.”

“Oh,” she says. Half a heartbeat later Chloe’s laughing and hugging and kissing me.

(To be continued.)