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It starts out small.
It starts out as nothing, really.
John’s out showering before they head to the mess together for dinner, and Gale is picking up around their room while he waits.
Gale doesn’t mind much. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement: John picks up the slack for them in social situations, and Gale picks up the mess so their room is ready for evening dustdowns.
He walks over to their laundry hamper to toss in a towel and when something stops him dead in his tracks. Something in their room smells good.
It smells really good.
Gale pauses, does a slow turn while scanning the room, looking for the source. It’s a deep, earthy smell. Slightly cloying, but with a bite to it.
Gale breathes in again, testing the air. It’s strong. It’s close, and it smells so fucking good. Heady and rich and masculine, like something he could live in forever.
His gaze drops down to the laundry hamper.
John’s crumpled shirt, used during afternoon PT, is lying on top.
Gale shakes his head and turns away. Pauses.
He glances at the door. John left for his shower two minutes ago. He’s usually pretty quick, give or take a few minutes lost to socializing with whatever guys are also there. That means Gale is guaranteed to have the room to himself for at least ten more minutes, maybe even closer to twelve.
Feeling like he’s doing something he shouldn’t, Gale quickly pulls John’s shirt out of the hamper and straightens it out. It’s still damp with John’s sweat: darkened under the armpits, in the lower back, and along the front where John’s chest had been pressed to the ground.
Experimentally, Gale presses the shirt to his nose.
His entire world fractures in one nanosecond.
The delicious smell is John’s shirt, John’s sweat.
Gale inhales, and is instantly jealous of all the Wisconsin summers that got to have John before Gale met him. That oppressive, oven-hot air that must have kissed sweat onto every inch of John’s sun-freckled skin. The Midwestern humidity that must have clung to the nape of his neck, must have gathered in the dark of his crotch.
Gale’s life is ruined. He’ll never again smell anything as good as this.
Gale groans a little, broken.
The noise of it startles him. He realizes that he’s hard.
Embarrassing, really. Although from what he’s heard around base, all of the guys tend to be on a hair trigger, with no girls around, and barely any time for privacy.
He should put the shirt away. He should forget this ever happened.
Gale glances at his watch. He’s got eight more minutes to himself, a few more after that if he’s lucky.
“No,” says Gale out loud, to himself.
Gale looks at the shirt again. The back is dotted with a little ladder of sweat stains, where the cotton fabric had pressed against the knobs of John’s spine. In a flash, Gale envisions John’s broad back, wet and slippery beneath the shirt, pressing its moisture to the cotton with every movement. He thinks about the crooks of John’s elbows, the backs of his knees, warm and damp and releasing its heat to the world.
Gale’s hips stutter forward into the open air. He’s just frustrated, like everyone else. And this shirt just happens to smell unusually good. He’ll rub one out quickly, return the shirt to the hamper, and no one will be any the wiser.
Gale lifts the shirt to his face with his left hand, and reaches down with his right hand to unzip.
With the fabric pressed to his nose, the warm musky smell is overwhelming. Gale closes his eyes and tugs harshly at his cock, thinking about John’s body always running hot, John dripping in the Texas heat, John soaking through his shirts with sweat.
Gale’s mouth opens, chapped lips dragging across the front collar of the shirt, where John’s perspiration had turned the entire hem dark and wet. Gale sticks out his tongue and laps at it. It’s delicious. He suckles, and the salty taste of it floods into his mouth.
He’s drinking John’s sweat.
The orgasm rips out of Gale at a hundred miles an hour.
He shouts, curling into himself, fingers and toes clenching all at once. His vision goes white.
When his cock finally stops spurting the last drops of come onto the floor, Gale’s legs are shaking. It was the best orgasm he’s had in months, maybe years. And all because of – because of –
Hurriedly, Gale reaches down and wipes up the mess he’s made on the floor with the shirt, then stashes it deep down in the hamper, beneath a mountain of other clothes.
Four minutes later, Gale has cracked open the window and spritzed the air with his aftershave to cover up the smell of sex.
Two minutes after that, John returns to the room. He smiles at Gale, eyes crinkling. “Sorry, Buck!” he says. “Saw some of the guys on my way back, got a little caught up.” He pauses, sniffs the air. “Did you put on aftershave?”
Gale shoves at him lightly as they head out to the mess hall. “At least I won’t stink like you,” says Gale.
The timing of Gale’s newfound discovery – namely, middle of summer in fucking Texas – is rather inconvenient.
The next day, they start their morning PT session with the rest of their company at 0700, all freshly dressed in their plain grey army-issue PT shirts and athletic shorts. The drill sergeant starts them off with alternating pushups and situps on the field, 50 reps at a time, punctuated by running laps around the entire perimeter of the airfield.
By 0725, John’s whole forehead is dotted with perspiration, little beads of it gathered on his temple and above his eyebrows. Dark patches have started to form on his formerly-dry shirt, the fabric growing wet under his arms and around the collar. It’s all new, fresh sweat. A light breeze drifts downwind towards Gale, and he catches the slightest whiff of it, sweet and warm.
He tries his best to ignore it.
On their third lap around the airfield, John slaps the back of Gale’s neck in encouragement as he passes by. His palm is wet with perspiration. Gale fights the urge to shiver, then digs his heels into the dirt and runs even faster. He laps John once, then again for good measure.
By 0755, the sun has fully risen, and it brings the Texas heat of day with it. Gale is sweating too, his skin prickly-hot and irritating, but he doesn’t really take note of it. There’s something much louder, much more distracting, and it’s currently on his 3 o’clock and saying his name.
“Hey, Buck,” pants John, next to him, as they’re dropping back to the grass for another round of pushups.
Warily, Gale glances over. John’s whole face is flushed, his cheeks healthy and pink. There’s a big wet spot on the back of his shirt, a smaller wet spot on his front, and two matching patches of dampness beneath both of his armpits. He grins at Gale, lopsided. A droplet of sweat rolls off his nose.
“Betcha,” John grunts, lowering himself in time with Gale and the rest of their company, “I can beat you on the next lap around, huh?”
Gale swallows, thickly. Presses into the ground through his wrists and comes back up. “I ain’t a betting man, John. Remember?”
John huffs, half-laughter and half-grunt. “Geez, you’re no fun,” he says, lowering again. He sighs, dramatically. “What’s a man gotta do to place a bet around here?”
Gale beats him on the next lap, and the next one after that, just for good measure.
As soon as they return to their room, Gale tells John to go on ahead to the showers without waiting for him. John doesn’t seem to notice, just nods and shucks off his wet shirt, tossing it into the hamper. He grabs a towel and heads out.
Gale closes the door.
The aroma of John’s used shirt drifts towards Gale from across the room. He sighs, open-mouthed, and steps forward to close the distance. He’s been waiting all morning for this.
With a shaking hand, Gale lifts the shirt out of the hamper and up to his nose, and inhales. It smells like –
A sunlit forest in the summer. Wet, rich soil beneath the trees. Dew-damp leaves on the dirt. And underneath it all, the warm and salted punch of John’s body heat, John’s exertion, John’s chest and back and armpits.
Gale moans.
He wants to inhale these fumes for the rest of his life: sharp and tangy, wild, natural. The patches of darkened grey on the shirt, where John’s sweat had soaked through, excite Gale in a way he’s never before experienced.
It’s thrilling. It feels like he’s seeing a side of John that no one else gets to see: the tired, dirty side. The side that works harder than everyone else and then pretends like it was no effort at all.
And John had looked so good today, working his little heart out on the PT field. The tops of his big ears were always the first to turn pink whenever he got flushed, then the rest of him. Gale imagines wrapping his teeth around that delicate cartilage. If John would shiver and moan beneath him, if John would beg Gale to bite down. Gale would, of course.
Afterwards, Gale would gently lick into the shell of John’s ear, tongue exploring all those exquisite curves and turns, to soothe the pain of the bite. Gale would nibble his way down John’s flushed neck, wet and salty and slippery with sweat. He would kiss the top of John’s meaty shoulder, then the broad side of it, then maybe – if John let him under –
Gale reaches into his shorts and tugs sharply – once, twice –
Gale manages to mostly keep the two parts of his life separate: on one hand, he’s still John’s friend, his classmate, his fellow flying cadet.
And then – when he’s all alone, when no one is watching, he can’t help but keep returning to this new, electrifying masturbatory diet of jerking off to John’s sweaty shirts. It’s both terrifying and invigorating, gratifying and unquenchable. He’s having the best orgasms of his life, and no one even knows.
Gale can’t pinpoint the exact moment when it all starts to fall apart on him, but it possibly starts the night when he and John are ironing their uniforms in preparation for the following day’s drill practice.
“You ready for tomorrow, Buck?” asks John, squinting at his dress shirt and then plucking off a stray piece of lint. “I heard the sergeant we’re getting is a real tough bastard.”
Gale snips a loose thread from the hem of his trousers and hums. “That so?”
“Yeah, Tommy said he made a guy drop and give him 100, right in the middle of a Sunday Parade,” continues John. “In front of all his family and friends, no less.”
Frankly, Gale thinks that sounds pretty miserable. The Texas heat is nearly unbearable on the flat stretch of tarmac where they do drill. In the full trousers and long-sleeve jackets of their dress greens, just standing in formation is enough to get a man sweating, let alone extra PT as punishment.
Gale’s brain stutters on the thought.
Let alone –
Gale swallows and turns back to his ironing board.
He tosses and turns all night long, his worst desires grappling with his better judgment.
The next morning, John leaves to take a quick shower and Gale shoves the door closed as soon as he’s gone. He pulls out the same sewing kit that he and John had used to sharpen up their uniforms the night before, but this time, he takes out the seam ripper instead. He stares at it, takes a deep breath.
John’s uniform is hanging on his locker, neatly cleaned and pressed.
Carefully, Gale undoes the stitching on the lower hem of John’s left pant leg, and then refolds the fabric. He inspects his work. It’s virtually unnoticeable, and will stay that way, until it’s too late.
It’s a fine summer day, August in full force, not a cloud in the sky.
It’s a miserable day to be outside for drill.
Gale marches with his feet straight, his arms swinging precisely three and half inches forward and three and a half inches backwards to create a symmetrical, seven-inch arc. He cuts neat, ninety-degree turns.
Although he can’t outright look at him, Gale knows that John is just as neat and precise in his movements, his big body smartly tamed and controlled, whenever it matters.
Their drill sergeant, as it turns out, is indeed one picky bastard. As he inspects the men, moving through their formation from back to front, he nitpicks everything from the smallest fleck of dirt on their rifles to the wrong distance between their thumb and the side seam of their trousers. Watkins gets called out of formation for 50 pushups, then Stokes for 50. Perkins goes next. Miller. Hurst. They knock out their reps, wipe their brows, and get back into formation.
When the sergeant reaches the front row, Gale holds his breath. There’s a long pause.
“Egan,” says the sergeant, eerily calm.
There’s movement to Gale’s right – John saluting in acknowledgement, as the rules dictate.
Another long pause. Then the sergeant asks, “Did you dress in the dark this morning, soldier?”
“No, sir,” says John, truthfully. Gale and John had gotten dressed together this morning, ensuring every seam and every fold was precisely in place. What John didn’t know – what Gale had done – was that the hem of his pant leg was only held in place by a few threads. Enough to stay together while getting dressed. Certainly not enough to withstand the motion of all the stomping, marching, and turning they’ve been doing since then.
The sergeant squints. “So you’re a liar, then. Is that what you’re saying to me, soldier?”
“No, sir,” replies John.
Gale keeps his eyes trained forward, but there’s a shift in the air next to him. It crackles, raises the hairs on Gale’s hands.
“Is this a joke to you, Egan?” asks the sergeant, leaning closer. “Did you wake up and decide that you would show up to my drill, and treat it like one big fucking joke?”
“No, sir,” says John.
“Then how the hell,” the sergeant shouts into his face, “did you think those pants are in an acceptable state to represent the UNITED STATES FUCKING ARMY?”
Without moving, Gale carefully darts his gaze down to take a peek. It does look pretty bad – worse than he’d estimated. With the bottom hem let out, the excess length had caught under John’s heel with every step, and the fabric hanging off was now filthy and threadbare. It looks sloppy. It’s certainly out of regulation.
“Down the runway and back,” barks the sergeant. “We’ll wait.”
John salutes sharply and takes off running. Gale does the calculation in his head. The runways at Randolph are just over 2500 meters long. Down and back is a three mile run.
They wait.
The sun beats down on them, high in the cloudless sky. Gale’s skin prickles, uncomfortably.
Seventeen minutes later, John returns, panting harshly. His face is blotchy and red, the collar of his uniform shirt starting to turn dark. He comes to a halt in front of the sergeant and salutes. “Sir.”
The breeze moves, and Gale can smell his fresh sweat, strong and sharp. Something stirs deep within Gale, waking up with interest.
The sergeant takes his time looking at John, sizing him up. “Again.”
John salutes and heads out again.
They wait. The sun burns in the sky, bright and hot and unrelenting. Gale can feel his heart pounding in his chest.
When John returns twenty minutes later, he’s a fucking mess.
His hair is dripping wet, the whole front of his uniform soaked through. Beads of sweat roll down his face and off his chin, droplets losing their fight to gravity. Even his pants are wet. His face is pinched, strained. Six miles in the August heat, and he’s worse for wear.
“Fall in,” barks the sergeant, and John dutifully takes his place back at Gale’s 3 o’clock. He quietly heaves while the sergeant finishes the rest of inspection, struggling to catch his breath.
Anticipation bubbles under Gale’s skin, eager for the moment when he can bury his face into John’s soiled clothing. Soon, soon, soon.
Gale inhales, and nearly keels over. The stink rolls off John, thick and ripe. It clings to the air, wraps itself around Gale and makes him want to scream and then come and then maybe cry, just a little.
Drill can’t be over fast enough for Gale.
When they return to their room, John brusquely peels off his soaked uniform, tosses it into the hamper, and heads out to the showers.
Gale shoves the door closed and practically runs to the laundry. The air over the hamper is pungent and sour. Heart racing, Gale reaches in and lifts out John’s soaked undershirt.
It’s skin-hot in his hands, heavy with John’s sweat.
Gale groans, helpless to his own reaction. It’s completely drenched, wet and foamy. He can’t even pick out the sweat stains: the whole thing is soaked.
He lifts it to his face, and the smell of it hits him like a suckerpunch. It smells like an animal, it smells like all-out effort, it smells so much like John.
And the feeling of it, in his trembling hands: hot and heavy and wet. Gale gently squeezes the fabric and it squelches with a soft, sucking noise. Hot, clear liquid oozes over Gale’s fingers.
Gale moans. All of this, all of this came out of John today. It’s natural, it’s John’s: slick and hot and pure.
Gale unzips, and frees his hard cock from the confines of his pants. He wrings out some of John’s sweat, and the fabric gives easily, droplet after droplet streaming down onto his shaft. There’s so much. There’s so much.
Gale pumps his fist up and down the length of his cock, squeezing firmly. It’s amazing. It feels like a woman’s pussy, hot and tight and wet, yet it’s also unmistakably masculine, unmistakably John’s.
Gale pumps harder, thrusting into his fist a little. He closes his eyes and replays the images from the afternoon in his head. John, running up and down the runway, miserable and alone. His uniform growing damper with every stride, how his pace faltered the second time around.
The sergeant had given John hell. He’d really punished him, made John run and run and run –
until there was sweat dripping from his hair –
dripping from his face –
dripping from the sleeves of his uniform –
Flying high, Gale sails all the way to orgasm.
The following week, John meticulously checks every single stitch on his uniform the night before drill.
“They ain’t getting me again, Buck,” he mutters to Gale.
Gale hums, nods in acknowledgement, and then slides a clod of dirt down the barrel of John’s clean rifle right before they head out.
As the drill sergeant inspects each cadet from the back of their formation to front, Gale practically whistles. It’s another fine August day, blazing hot and unrelenting.
Smith gets called on for some bullshit with his uniform and does 50 pushups in front of the group, looking sorry for himself.
Same goes for Osborne, who didn’t tuck in his shirt correctly (rookie mistake, in Gale’s opinion, but Osborne was always kind of an idiot like that; Gale suspects he’ll wash out to navigator or bombardier training soon).
Hewick for holding his rifle incorrectly.
When the sergeant gets to John, there’s a flash of recognition in his eyes. He remembers John’s infraction from last week’s drill.
He takes his time scrutinizing John from head to toe, but John is in perfect regulation. When he takes John’s rifle to inspect it, there’s finally a pause.
John is standing quietly at attention, but Gale can feel the tension radiating from him. Last week’s drill had been a miserable experience for John. He’s clearly not eager for a repeat.
“Well, Egan,” announces the sergeant, loud enough for the whole group to hear. “Thought you could cut some corners, did you? Save a little time?”
A little zing goes down Gale’s spine. He’d found the dirt Gale had put down the rifle. John is about to get punished.
Like he’d done to the others, the sergeant sends John out in front to do 50 pushups. John knocks out the reps with good form, stands up, and patiently awaits the order to fall back into formation.
Instead, the sergeant sends him back down for another 50 pushups. This time, Gale can see frustration in the line of John’s jaw, in the hard set of his shoulders. He’s broken out into a sweat, fine dots of perspiration lining his forehead, his cheekbones. His uniform, which has always fit him so handsomely, clings to him uncomfortably.
By the third set, Gale thinks he may have made a mistake.
By the fourth set, the other cadets are getting antsy. It’s uncomfortable to watch.
By the fifth set, Gale knows he’s made a mistake. He’s made a giant miscalculation.
John is high up in the unofficial social hierarchy of their cohort. He's a natural leader, tall and loud and handsome, and the second-best flier to boot. Everyone looks up to him, and the commanding officers and drill instructors know it.
If John is sloppy, all the other cadets will think they can be sloppy, too.
The sergeant is going to make an example out of John. And everyone is going to watch.
Gale cringes inside.
After a while, John’s arms start shaking. His legs are shaking. Every time he pushes back up, he grunts with effort. From his vantage point in the front row, Gale can see how John’s uniform clings to his body, the whole topline of his back and thighs growing damp. It’s embarrassing, humiliating.
Everyone is still standing in formation, forced to watch it unfold.
Maybe half an hour in, John’s arms finally give out, collapsing under the weight of his own body. His whole face is red and slick with sweat. His uniform is starting to seep, the fabric going dark and wet under his pits, below his neck, around his crotch.
The sergeant makes him roll over to his back.
“If you can’t push yourself up,” he barks, “then it’s situps instead.”
John hauls himself up into a sitting position, and the noise that escapes from his mouth has Gale nearly gasping. The heat, the overexertion, and the motion of crunching his abdominals has John dry retching with every single rep.
It’s like nothing Gale has ever heard before – the desperate, animal sound of it. He wonders if John is even aware. John comes up again, and then gags so hard, he can’t even breathe.
Gale waits. The drill sergeant waits.
Everyone waits.
“Are you stopping, soldier?” asks the sergeant.
“No, sir,” pants John.
John resumes. When the sergeant is finally satisfied with the countless situps that John has struggled through, there’s a wide puddle on the concrete where John’s back had touched the ground.
Despite the near 100 F heat, Gale shivers at the sight.
John is drenched and miserable. Sweat is dripping from his hair, the bottom of his chin, off his elbows. His clothes are plastered to his skin, parts of the olive green fabric so thoroughly saturated that it looks nearly black.
It’s the hottest part of the day, the sun having had enough time to heat up the surface of the earth, and yet still remaining high in the sky.
The sergeant sends him on a lap around the adjoining field. At the far end of it, John doubles over, vomits, and then keeps running.
It’s painful to watch.
As John stumbles back to the starting point, he’s gasping raggedly for air, struggling to catch his breath. Underneath the flush of exertion, his face is ashen, sick with nausea. Gale wonders when their drill sergeant will finally let up.
“Again,” says the sergeant.
Overhead, the sun cuts an arc through the sky, then starts dipping.
John runs the perimeter of the field again, and again. He’s so soaked and humiliated it feels like they’re not even watching a human being. He throws up so many times that eventually the retching stops bringing up anything, and he’s just violently dry heaving every few hundred meters.
Then the cramps start.
At first, they’re small enough that John just grits his teeth and rocks through the pain, doubling over until it passes, sweat dripping from his forehead onto the ground. He makes it a few more laps like this, painstakingly slow. Then his entire body jerks into itself, muscles locking. He crumples to the ground, overcome with pain.
Even the sergeant knows when it’s over.
“Dismissed!” he barks to the whole group, clearly tired of the whole affair.
The order can’t come fast enough. The other cadets break formation and tear off for the barracks, scared that the sergeant might change his mind and call them all back.
John’s still on the ground.
Gale hesitates. He doesn’t want to embarrass John any further, but if John can’t even get up…
He walks closer, and nearly moans out loud.
John stinks. The smell is sour and bitter, stench rolling off him like waves. Everything is totally saturated: his uniform shirt, his pants, his face and hair. He’s shaking. Gale has never seen John brought to a heel like this. It’s shocking.
Gale hauls him up, and John trembles against him, shaking like a leaf and letting Gale take most of his weight. Slowly, painfully, Gale gets them back to the barracks.
In their room, Gale helps John take off his wet jacket, helps him unbutton his collared shirt.
He unbuckles John’s belt.
John peels off his pants and skivvies in one go, and even his pubic hair is drenched, beads of sweat dripping freely from the dark, coarse hairs to the floor.
Gale has never been more ready to masturbate in his life. Quickly, he helps John with undressing the rest of the way, eager for John to finally leave so he can jerk off in peace.
He hands John a towel.
John wraps it loosely around himself, turns around, and then crawls right into his bed. He turns to the wall, curling into himself.
Gale stares at his back, stunned.
This wasn’t the plan.
“Aren’t you going to shower?” Gale asks, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
“Oh, fuck off,” John mutters, exhausted. When it’s clear that he’s not going to leave, Gale stiffly changes into his own sleep clothes and then lies in his bed, wide awake. He stares at the ceiling.
John sniffs, settling in deeper. It’s a familiar sound to Gale – all those soft, sleepy noises that always come from across the room as John gets comfortable in bed.
Then he sniffles again.
John is crying, as quietly as possible.
At first, it’s alarming, to hear John being vulnerable in a way he’s never heard before. But soon it mixes with Gale’s lingering arousal, swirling into a confusing tapestry of frustration and want.
By the time John goes quiet and his breathing evens out, Gale is rock hard.
“Bucky?” whispers Gale across the dark. There’s no response. John seems to have finished crying himself softly to sleep.
Carefully, Gale sits up and slides his legs up and over the side of his bed. He plants his feet on the floor, a little louder than normal, and waits again.
“John,” he whispers again. No response.
Heart racing, Gale tiptoes over to the laundry hamper and pulls out John’s used shirt. It’s still sopping wet, and hot to the touch. As he scrambles back to his bunk, it drips onto his feet.
By the time Gale has settled back into bed, lying on his back, his hands are slick and covered with John’s sweat. He places the shirt over his own face, smothering his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Arranged like this, he can barely breathe. All he can do is suck in the fumes, practically choking on them. Sweat drips down and stings Gale’s eyes.
It’s all-encompassing. Pungent, sour, heavy. Gale gasps against the wet fabric, the weight of it pressing down into his open mouth.
He reaches down with his wet hands and tugs at himself. As he fucks his fist, he imagines that it’s John using his skilled hands on Gale in the darkness instead, it’s John pressing his sweaty pecs into Gale’s face and practically suffocating Gale with the sheer broadness of him.
With one hand working his cock over, Gale reaches lower with the other hand. His hands are so wet, he thinks he might be able to – he could –
the first finger penetrates the ring of muscle. It practically slips right in, everything is so sloppy and slippery and hot and wet. Gale’s mind blanks out. It’s a sensory overload: his finger rubs against the tight clench of his own body, registering every ridge, all the spongy tissue. At the same time, he can feel the fullness inside of himself, a deep pressure that sets every nerve alight.
As he adds a second finger to the mix, he gasps in a breath, creating suction on the wet shirt over his face. The fabric gives easily, spilling hot sweat straight into Gale’s mouth. He gulps down a mouthful of it, then another. The taste is insane. He feels like a man parched in a desert, drinking the first fresh water for miles.
Three fingers is a perfect stretch. As he slams himself down onto his own fingers, Gale imagines that it’s John’s thick cock fucking him, that it’s John dripping his sweat down into Gale’s mouth, that it’s John’s hot mouth and wet neck and broad chest over his face, that it’s John grunting and gasping with every thrust – until Gale – until –
Gale manages to walk the razor-thin line for a while.
While he’s with John, Gale is a supportive friend, classmate, fellow cadet.
When John is gone, Gale finds himself frantically cramming his face into anything of John’s that he can find: John’s dirty socks, his worn skivvies, his used sweat rags. If Gale isn’t actively getting himself off, then he’s using the time to quietly sabotage John’s belongings, messing with his uniform, his boots, his gear.
John has just left for the showers, so Gale helps himself to the laundry hamper and pulls out the shirt he wore during afternoon PT. It’s warm and perfect in his hands, soft and dampened with John’s perspiration.
Gale lifts it to his nose, and inhales that sweet, musky warmth. He sighs happily, closes his eyes, and unzips his pants. He gives his cock a few lazy tugs.
The door opens.
“Oh shit, sorry!” says John. “I just forgot – is that my shirt?”
Gale’s eyes fly open. He freezes. John is frozen too, standing in the doorway. A towel is wrapped around his shirtless waist, but he hasn’t showered yet. Gale’s still holding his cock. Gale’s still holding John’s shirt.
Cold fear washes over him.
“It’s not – it’s not what it looks like,” Gale stammers.
John’s eyes narrow. He steps closer, and kicks the door closed behind him. “I dunno, Buck,” he says, a dangerous edge to his voice. “Kinda looks like something to me.”
Gale’s heart is racing.
John steps closer again, crowding into Gale’s space, and Gale instinctively takes a step back, then another and another, until he’s trapped against the wall.
“John,” Gale pleads. “Please. You can’t…you can’t tell anyone.”
John sucks in a breath through his teeth, and peers down at Gale. His gaze is hard. His bare chest is right in Gale’s face, sparsely dotted with dark hairs, still flushed and sweaty from PT.
They stare at each other.
“That’s pretty fucked up,” John muses, “don’t you think?”
"Please,” begs Gale, close to tears.
John carefully studies Gale’s face, and Gale knows, he knows that John must be connecting the dots. All the mysterious uniform infractions. All the equipment failures. All those grueling workouts, the humiliation, just so Gale could – so he could –
“Seems to me,” says John, slowly, like he’s still turning it over in his head, “it would be better from the source.”
He lifts his arm and slams his hand on the wall above Gale’s head, and his sweaty armpit is right there – right there in Gale’s face –
“Go on, then,” says John, tensely. “I know you want it.”
Gale doesn’t need to be told twice. He falls face-forward into that wild and hairy bed of turf, and sobs into it. It’s perfect: sopping wet, bitter and nutty, impossibly moist and warm and dark. Gale sinks into it, lets the scratchy wet hairs massage his cheeks, his lips.
He can’t stop sniffing it, licking it. He sticks his nose in and rubs the scent of John’s natural stench all over his face, until it feels like he doesn’t even exist anymore.
“Drink it,” hisses John.
Gale shivers, then wraps his lips and teeth around a clump of sweat-beaded hairs and suckles. The moisture drains into his mouth. He’s nursing from John’s armpit – he’s drinking John –
hot and wet and salty –
Gale crashes through his orgasm, shaking uncontrollably as he releases rope after rope of come. He thinks maybe he screams. He thinks maybe he bites down.
When his vision returns, he weakly reaches down towards John’s crotch, wanting to return the favor.
He pats around, seeking John’s erection, but there is none. He’s entirely soft.
John’s not hard. He’s just pissed.
Gale’s emotions stutter to a halt.
“Great!” says John, fake-cheery as he shoves Gale back into the wall. He walks over to Gale’s locker, and starts rummaging around. When he finds the sewing kit, he pulls out Gale’s scissors triumphantly.
Gale watches him helplessly, weak, dizzy.
John takes the scissors, and without fanfare, cuts two large, ugly slashes right across the front of Gale’s dress uniform. Drill is tomorrow. Even if Gale spends all night stitching it carefully back together, it will still clearly look damaged.
He’s fucked.
He's so fucked.
“Now let’s see,” John hisses, “how you like it, Buck.”
Gale moans, sweet and loud.