A Few Small Repairs

Read Part 1 HERE.

Read Part 2 HERE.

Read Part 3 HERE.

 

by Cris Kane

Shiloh and I stood in the dimly lit street, our astounding bodies each seven feet tall and bursting with more muscle than I'd ever seen on a human being -- if that's even what we were any more. Our shoulders and biceps were bigger than beach balls and solid as steel. Our lats flared out so dramatically that neither of us could lower our arms fully to our sides. A street light behind us showed off our musculature in sharp relief and cast long brutish shadows along the pavement. I was glad I'd had the presence of mind to switch us into stretch pants when our bodies became so gargantuan, so at least we weren't naked.

Guys had run outside the Manhole and the other gay establishments of 69 Street once people heard the sounds of our frenetic battle with the guy who had taken Cole away with him. Everyone was keeping their distance from the two silhouetted giants in the middle of the road, but every-goddamn-body had a camera on their cell phone and was taking pictures and videos of us like two sasquatches who had just landed in the gay-borhood.

Ironically, Shiloh and I were the only ones who didn't have a camera, and we were the ones who really could have used one, since it was my magical camera that had gotten us into this mess. Too bad Shiloh had accidentally stepped on it, his enormous weight grinding it into irreparable bits.

I was surprised that I had maintained my composure and most of my wits. Shiloh was more riled up, having been in the heat of the battle with Cole's abductor, smashing the guy's shotgun and tearing the driver's side door off his pick-up truck. Shiloh was still wired with adrenaline and ran angrily toward the crowd with a menacing roar that echoed off the buildings. Everyone scurried back in fear, and I clamped one of my meaty paws on Shiloh's traps, dragging him back toward me. I spoke as softly as I could, even though it felt like everything I said in this new body was being bellowed through a megaphone. "Chill, Hulk. You don't have to 'smash'."

Shiloh, still glaring furiously at the mob armed with their smartphones, asked, "Well, what do you suggest we do?"

"We maybe got a minute before the cops show. I say we run as fast as these big-ass legs will carry us."

"Where to?"

"Someplace we won't be noticed."

"Oh, that oughta be easy to find", Shiloh snorted sarcastically and it came out like a lion's roar. That gave me an idea.

"Follow me." I spun on my heel and began to run away from the crowd.

I could hear from the pounding at my heels that Shiloh was right behind me and that some of the crowd were attempting to keep up. Fat chance of that. Despite my bulk, I felt just as agile as I had earlier in the day when I weighed half as much. I'd never felt so exhilarated as I bounded at ten feet per stride, my muscles like coiled springs.

I tried to keep us in dimly lit areas, under railroad bridges, in industrial areas where no one was working at this time of night, but I'm sure that the pounding of our feet alone made our presence obvious to anyone within several blocks. Maybe one sprinting muscle beast could slip by unnoticed, but two would definitely catch your attention. One unlucky driver must have gotten the scare of his life as he turned down the street toward us. He slammed on his brakes as fast as he could, and I miraculously hurdled his car. Shiloh leapt over the car too, but his heel clipped the rear bumper, knocking it clean off. Shiloh paused to look back, but I yelled for him to keep going. The sooner we vanished, the less likely the driver was to know what hit him. I did take one short cut over a parked car where I left a giant foot-shaped dent in the hood of the trunk. If you parked anywhere in the neighborhood of Sixteenth Street that night, I sincerely apologize.

When we finally reached our destination, we had to scale a fifteen-foot concrete wall with barbed wire at the top. Leaping to the top was simple with our new muscles, and the barbed wire left little more than surface scratches on our thick hides. After being such a little dweeb all my life, it was extraordinary to experience life as an almost purely physical being. I felt practically indestructible. We slid down the other side of the wall and landed in a scummy, stagnant water pool. We had become so animalistic in our behavior by that point that we felt refreshed, splashing ourselves and each other playfully, joyfully. We even cupped water in our hands to slurp it up and rehydrate after our marathon run. At that point, we both came to our senses and spat out the putrid stuff.

Shiloh looked around. "What is this, a zoo?" I grunted affirmatively. "So we're in a cage with wild animals?" He scanned his surroundings with fear, moonlight catching in his eyeballs.

"There are no animals. It closed down a couple years ago. My folks used to bring me here when I was little. Never thought I'd be on this side of the cage." I lay down on the cement where apes used to prowl, feeling my gigantic ribcage expanding and contracting as I caught my breath. Shiloh prowled our new habitat, on alert for anyone or anything approaching. He began to swing swiftly on a rusted old set of bars that had been installed for the apes to play on.

Part of me was already making plans for what Shiloh and I could do with bodies like these. Obviously, we would be the center of attention wherever we went. We could probably go into football, pro wrestling, acting, modeling. I didn't think they'd let us into bodybuilding with the head start Dad's camera had provided. Then again, once Dad's camera went on the market, body building the old way would probably become obsolete. As would dieting. And plastic surgery. And shopping for clothes. And visiting the barber. This one little gadget might drive half the companies in America out of business. Dad and his colleagues were in line to become the richest people on earth, or the most hated, or most likely both.

As I rested a hand on my thigh, I noticed something tiny and hard caught in my skintight pants. My cell phone! Even when I transformed our pants into running shorts, eliminating pockets, the phone in my front pocket had survived the change and was pressed firmly against my flesh. I gently pulled down the shorts and carefully extracted the phone, which now felt so tiny in my oversized palm that I was afraid I would crush it. If I'd had to dial individual digits with the bratwursts my fingers had become, I'd have been shit out of luck, but fortunately the person I needed was on speed dial. As the phone began to ring, I raised it to my ear.

"Hey, big guy, what's shaking?" came the comforting voice of my dad on the other end of the line.

"Why, what have you heard?" was my response, coming out in my laughably low new voice.

"Holy cow, Ryan, is that you?"

"Yeah, Dad. I need your help."

Sternly, Dad asked, "Have you been using the camera some more?"

"A little." I could probably lift a semi with my bare hands right then, but Dad's disappointed tone instantly transformed me mentally into an eight-year-old afraid to admit that he had knocked a baseball through the neighbor's window.

"I warned you to take it easy with that thing. But don't worry, if you've pushed yourself too far, there's a quick fix that'll reset you right back to normal. You got the camera with you?"

"Ummm...that's part of the problem. The camera got kinda...crushed."

A long pause from Dad's end. "How 'kinda' crushed?"

"Like oblivion crushed."

Dad let out a world-record sigh. I waited for him to say something, anything.

"You still there, Dad?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just trying to get a fix on your coordinates. Looks like you're at the old zoo, right?"

"Right. How'd you know that?"

"When the camera transformed you, it put radioactive tracers in your body. I'm seeing another big blip. Is someone else with you?"

"Yeah, my friend, Shiloh." My delight at being able to tell my dad that I had made a friend at college was tempered by the knowledge of what I had turned that friend into. He was currently atop the monkey bars, pounding his chest like Tarzan and yowling at the moon. I shushed him, not wanting to draw any attention to our hideout.

"Okay, hang on, buddy. I'll be right there," Dad said.

"Thanks, Dad. Hurry." I could hear distant sirens and couldn't imagine that Dad could drive here before we'd be discovered by the cops.

I was walking toward Shiloh to give him the good news that Dad was on his way when I saw a weird glow over the water pool. The air above the ground seemed to be thickening and pulsating, reminding me of my initial transformation when the camera sucked me through space to another location via some gelatinous portal. Sure enough, I saw the outlines of Dad's shape emerging inside the glow. As he stepped his way through the ethereal goo, he became aware that he had beamed in at ground level, while the ground beneath him was actually several feet lower. He plunged into the stagnant water of the apes' drinking hole.

I rushed over to grab him as he scrambled out of the water, carefully holding his camera aloft so it would not get wet. I reached out and wrapped my fingers completely around his forearm. He seemed unprepared for just how monumental I had become.

"Oh my, Ryan. What have you done to yourself?"

"I just wanted to put on some muscle. Things got out of hand."

"Nice understatement, son. I know how sensitive you are about your size. I thought you'd use the camera to give yourself a few minor adjustments so you'd fit in better with the other college kids. But this, son, this is not fitting in."

"I know I screwed up, Dad, jeez. Why do you think I called you?" I must have been the whiniest gigantic muscleman in the history of gigantic musclemen.

Dad dropped the lecturing tone. "I'm sorry, kiddo. I'm glad you called me." He noticed Shiloh, who was hanging on the monkey bars. "And you must be Shiloh. I'm Ryan's dad. Nice to meet you." Shiloh dropped down and ran toward us, slumping forward and practically running on all fours.

Dad looked around the spooky old zoo. "Well, one thing in our favor. At least you came to a nice isolated place to experiment where no one could see you." The silence from Shiloh and me must have been pretty obvious, as were the sirens in the distance which were growing louder. Dad looked up at me wearily. "People saw you, didn't they?"

Shiloh and I nodded like bad little boys. I had to tell Dad, "We're probably on YouTube by now."

"Fuck!", Dad yelled. I think I'd only heard him drop the F-bomb twice before in my life and never with such well-deserved ferocity. "If my company learns that I gave my son an untested prototype and that he turned himself and his buddy into monsters..."

"We are not monsters!", Shiloh shouted, his words bouncing off the concrete walls as he shook a cinder-block-sized fist at Dad. I ran behind Shiloh and grabbed his arms to keep him from attacking Dad.

"Well, you won't be in a minute," Dad said, raising his camera. It looked slightly different from the one I'd been given, bulkier with extra modifications, like a newer model that had been jerry-rigged in the lab. Dad quickly took a flash photo of Shiloh and me and started to manipulate the menus. I hovered over his shoulder -- high above his shoulder -- and watched how masterfully he worked the controls. I thought I had been getting the hang of it, but Dad had clearly been fiddling with this device for months or maybe even years.

"If you have a picture of two people, the command affects both of them," I told Dad, offering one of my hard-learned lessons as if he might not already been aware of it, even though he was probably the person who had designed it to work that way.

"That's right, son, but there's an easy override for that. What I'm trying to do is trickier. I want to set you both back to the way you started, which would be MUCH easier if I was working from the camera that made the changes in the first place." Nice way to rub it in, Dad. I already apologized for that.

"Do you have to change us back?", Shiloh asked. "I feel kinda awesome like this." He flexed an arm and admired his massive biceps pump.

"You're caught up in the endorphin rush, but it'll fade soon. You've expanded your body parts to inhuman proportions, way beyond the size at which they were designed to function. Your heart, your lungs, your brain, they're all straining to support what you've become. If you stay like this, you'll be dead in two days."

"Okay, you can change us back," Shiloh said, all menace and bravado immediately gone from his voice.

"Ah, there it is!", Dad screamed. "I connected back to the lab. All your settings were stored back there every time you used the camera, so I can revert you to your original states. You better brace yourselves. It's going to be quite a shock to be yourselves again."

Shiloh and I walked over to the monkey bars and gripped them tightly. Dad gave us no warning that the process was already in motion. It felt like I was being crushed by a black hole, becoming smaller and denser at such a speed that I worried it might keep going until I was reduced to nothingness. The metal bar in my hand seemed to be getting bigger when it was really my hands growing smaller around it. It was a relief when my extreme hyper-inflated muscles were gone, but I genuinely felt comfortable when I had reached the size of the miniature weightlifter of my initial transformation. I felt like yelling to Dad to stop the shrinkage right there, but I was going all the way back to my frail "baby" weight. I felt so distanced from that version of me after all that had occurred, it was hard to believe that I had only been Big Ry for the past twenty-four hours.

When I could feel the process coming to an end, my hands slipped from the metal bars, my knees buckled and I fell to the concrete, whacking my head and discovering that pain was once again a factor in my life. I looked blearily across the way and saw Shiloh coming to grips with being ordinary again too. All the "improvements" which I had made to him were gone. Shiloh was no longer the blond sex god of my dreams. He was just a regular guy trying to look tougher than he was. We were each wearing the jeans that had worn before our first transformations, but the rest of our clothes were missing, since whatever they had been changed into by the camera was shredded when we grew to behemoths. Interestingly, Shiloh's backwards baseball cap had returned from the oblivion where I sent it, having been stored in memory back at the lab.

My ears had been ringing throughout the shrinking process, but I could now distinctly hear the sirens closing in. In another minute, we would be discovered trespassing at the zoo and we'd have a lot of fast talking to do. Dad hustled over and gathered Shiloh and me close together, holding out his arm to snap a selfie of the three of us. As soon as the flash went off, we could hear voices outside the wall as cops noticed the burst of light.

"I've never transported three people at once, but it SHOULD work," Dad informed us. "We would have overwhelmed the system's capacity if you were still the size of human tanks, but we shouldn't have much trouble with you kids." Shit, I was back to being a kid.

I can't speak for Shiloh, but my heart was racing with fear that we were going to get caught. Dad seemed unworried and unhurried. He pulled up the "BACKGROUND" menu -- something I'd forgotten about since last night -- and input very specific latitude, longitude and elevation coordinates, an option that hadn't been included on the model Dad had given me. The screen previewed the three of us against a plain white wall instead of the murky background of the zoo. Dad pressed "ACCEPT" and wrapped his arms around Shiloh and me. I realized too late that I'd better warn Shiloh what he was in for.

"Shiloh, it's gonna feel like..."

By the time I could say, "...squeezing through Jell-O," we had already made the freaky transit through space and were standing in an all-white room that I recognized as one of the labs at Dad's company.

Shiloh was reeling. He braced himself against a counter top to keep from falling and turned to Dad, wide-eyed. Of all the shit he had seen and experienced today, this teleportation had blown his mind the most. "How did you do that?"

"Simple. The hydrogen componolizer interacted with the dichlorium atoms in your duodenum, generating a paradoxical flux which reverberated against the polonium-synchronized geographical wave spectro-analyzer and creating a temporal parahelion dispersion of point-two-seven."

Shiloh stared at Dad, in awe. I laughed and said, "That was just a bunch of nonsense, Dad."

Dad smiled. "Yeah, but if I'd said, 'It's magic,' you wouldn't have believed me."

And with that, he walked purposefully toward a computer work station, where several other working models of the camera were charging.

Shiloh and I stared at each other. In the course of one day, we had been hunks together and hulks together, but now we were face to face as our real selves. Two skinny guys, same height, same weight, with more in common than we would have assumed that morning.

"Almost forgot what you looked like," Shiloh said. "I dunno why Cole made so much fun of you. You're a cute guy."

Even in the dim light of the lab, I'm sure it was obvious that I was blushing. The way Shiloh was examining my emaciated frame, I got goosebumps. "I thought you liked your guys big."

"I do." Shiloh's slim lips curled up. "But size isn't everything."

Across the room, Dad cleared his throat loudly and started humming some unrecognizable tune, which is what he always did when he heard something he felt uncomfortable hearing. Shiloh and I walked over behind him to see what he was checking on his computer. He was cycling through all of our vital statistics which the camera had recorded. "Looks like you two guys are safely back to normal, so that's a relief. I can survive any shit I'm going to get from the company, but if I had done anything to harm you..."

"I know, Dad," I said, wrapping my skinny arm around his shoulders. I could feel his body tense up, and he leaned forward to look at something on his computer. "What is it?"

"I'm seeing two more blips," pointing to two bright spots on a map of the city, not far from Sixteenth Street. Dad turned to me, looking like he might be willing to harm me after all. "Care to enlighten me?"

Shiloh scooted his body between Dad's and mine, trying to explain. "I did them!"

Dad glanced at Shiloh, then angrily back at me. "You let someone else use the camera?"

I was in the middle of shaking my head when Shiloh blurted out, "Ry didn't know. I snuck it away from him and did it totally on my own. Please, it's not his fault."

Dad glared at Shiloh. "So are you telling me there are two more monsters on the loose out there?"

"No! I made them both skinny! Skinnier than we are now! That shouldn't be dangerous, right? I mean, not as dangerous as super-sizing at least."

Dad thought it over, still unhappy. "Well, no, in our tests, we've found that making the body smaller and leaner is actually healthier, within reason." Dad sat down, his temper cooling. His eyes darted between Shiloh and me as he decided whether or not to believe Shiloh's story. "Can you keep tabs on these other two? And if you notice ANY adverse changes in them, you'll bring them to me immediately for testing?"

Shiloh and I said, "Yes" at the same time. I added "Dad". Shiloh added "Sir".

Dad took blood samples from both of us and ran tests on them. While we waited for results, I checked YouTube on Dad's computer. Sure enough, a dozen or more grainy videos had already been posted of two mysterious figures prowling the streets of the city. Fortunately, nobody got a good shot of our faces -- not that either of us resembled those two gorillas any more. The company had a TV in the break room and we watched the late news with Dad. The monster rampage was naturally the lead story on all the channels, but the police seemed baffled. They thought they had the beasts cornered at the old zoo, but a thorough search turned up nothing.

They did say that police were seeking a man who drove off in a pickup truck at a high rate of speed and they showed his mug shot from a previous arrest. Shiloh and I immediately recognized him as the big hairy guy who had taken off with Cole. He looked even scarier in the mug shot than he had in real life, with scowling features and steroidal muscles. "That's one of the guys, sir," Shiloh told Dad.

Dad studied the screen. "And you say he's smaller than you boys now? I think you did the world a favor." Dad smiled and went to check on the blood tests.

Left alone together in the lab, Shiloh and I stared at each other nervously. "So, what are we gonna do now?"

"Life will go back to normal, I guess. I'll be my old wimpy self and you'll hang out with the rest of Cole's posse of douchebags."

"I don't think I can, after this."

"I know what you mean."

"And what about...us?", Shiloh asked warily.

"I dunno. I mean, I really loved what we did together, but I still like girls too." I looked down at my once-again anemic body. "But they probably won't like me. Story of my life."

"Any girl, or guy, would be lucky to have you," Shiloh said, walking over and kissing me on the mouth. His lips weren't as luscious as the ones I'd specifically chosen for him, but they had the benefit of authenticity. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sensation. Anyone would be lucky to be kissed by Shiloh.

I heard Dad clear his throat and begin to hum again in the hallway. Shiloh and I parted quickly as Dad reentered the room, pointedly looking down at a computer printout. "Good news, guys. I'm not seeing anything scary in the blood tests. You probably weren't at enormous size long enough to cause any permanent damage to your organs, but you let me know if you notice anything unusual in the next few days. Fatigue, migraines, shortness of breath, pain in your joints, pain in your...loins."

Shiloh and I nodded. Dad got out his cell phone and called two cabs to pick us up. "I assume you two don't mind going back to campus the old fashioned way?"

"Fine, Dad," I said. "I think I've been sucked through Jell-O enough for one lifetime."

"Absolutely," said Shiloh. "You positive we didn't screw up anything for you?"

"I'm sure I'll be asked a few stern questions in the morning," Dad said. "But your little unauthorized field test gave us tons of data to study. And quite a few more ethical questions to debate."

When the cabs arrived, Dad shook Shiloh's hand, then gave me a warm hug. I heard him whisper in my ear, "Have fun at college, son. Make me proud."

I was happy that, after all of this, it was obvious that he still loved me. I got in the cab and, as we drove away, I felt something hard in the back pocket of my skinny jeans. I wriggled in my seat and extracted it. Shiloh and I were amazed to discover that Dad had slipped another camera in my pocket, with a Post-It attached. In the passing street lights, I was able to read the note:

"Ryan,
This camera's options are limited. Yours are not.
Love, Dad"

"What do you think that means?", Shiloh asked.

"I dunno."

When we reached my dorm, I invited Shiloh to come up so we could check out the camera. Dad had deactivated most of the menus, but I discovered two presets, one with my name and one with Shiloh's. I snapped my picture in the full-length mirror, then applied my preset. My image on the screen now looked exactly like the musclebound stud I had first changed myself into the previous night. I clicked "ACCEPT" and braced for the standard painful contortions, although they felt like nothing compared to being enlarged to "BEHEMOTH" size. As the metamorphosis occurred, I realized that my mind hadn't dulled. Dad must not have lowered my IQ the way I had during my original transformation. I couldn't blame him. He wasn't spending good money to send a dope to college.

Shiloh watched enviously as I evolved back into Ry before his eyes. As I grinned down at him, I could have predicted his next words.

"Do me."

He stood against the wall, still in his dumbass baseball cap. I eagerly applied the preset "SHILOH" modifications and pressed "ACCEPT".

Shiloh was wracked with pain as his slim body was once again wrapped in lean muscle and sun-kissed skin, and his face regained the features I had given him, the sleek nose, the powerful cleft chin, the ultra-kissable lips. His purple hat evaporated and his hair turned from brown to gold.

I reached both hands toward him and lifted him to his feet. We stood in the middle of my room, thick arms wrapped around each other's torsos, studying each other closely. If he had any imperfections, I couldn't see them, but I hoped to inspect him very, very closely, very, very frequently.

We stripped off our clothes and tumbled onto my bed, our combined weight testing the limits of the springs. Since I had taken the lead back at the Manhole, I let Shiloh assume control now. Our powerful bodies slid across each other, working up a quick sweat. Long strands of Shiloh's blond hair dangled into my eyes as he explored my mouth with his tongue. My hands slid down along his ribs until I reached up and squeezed his ass cheeks. I felt his cock pressing against my abs and starting to ooze precum, so I wriggled underneath him until I was face down. He slid his erection gently but firmly inside of me and I yowled with a mix of pleasure and pain, clawing at my pillow and tensing my legs. Shiloh's strong hands were pressed against my back for support as the pace of his humping accelerated.

When Shiloh came inside me, it may have been the best feeling I'd had all day, and after a day like this, that was saying something. But my cock was still rigid, so I flipped over and wrapped my hands around Shiloh's neck, pulling him down toward my erection. As he lovingly applied his tongue and lips to my shaft, slowly and lovingly bringing me to orgasm, the "best feeling of the day" competition had a new winner.

Shiloh lay beside me, brushing his bristly chin against my cheek and rubbing his hand up and down my chest. He whispered in my ear, "Thank your dad for me."

I laughed. I probably wouldn't mention this specifically to Dad, but I was glad he had been so cool about everything. I'm sure I had changed many of his perceptions of me that day.

Shiloh slept over with me. Cole never did come back to the room that night, and in the morning we decided it was more important to track him down than to go to our classes. We knew basically where the blips had shown up on Dad's computer screen and hoped that Cole might still be near there.

Sixty-Nine Street wasn't as active in the daytime, and city crews were still busy cleaning up the damage from last night's fracas. Shiloh and I attracted our share of attention as we walked down the sidewalk, but we had no fear that anyone would imagine that two studly gentlemen like ourselves were in any way connected with the massive creatures who had terrorized the town the night before.

As we walked further down the street, I noticed something and grabbed Shiloh by the elbow, pulling him backwards. We had just walked past a pickup truck. One that was missing its driver's side door. Jackpot! Now all we had to do was figure out where...

"Hey, boys!"

We turned and were amazed to see Cole -- at least the slender twinky version of Cole I had created -- leaning against a wall.

 

"Cole!", Shiloh shouted, looking relieved that his former crush was still alive and seemingly unharmed.

Cole was wearing a black fishnet tank and a black Speedo. He still had on my purple sneakers. Even in this part of town, it was an unconventional look for street clothes in broad daylight, but he was pulling it off. It was a bit annoying that I had made my tormentor look so fucking cute.

"Thank god, you escaped from that lunatic!", Shiloh said.

"What lunatic? You mean Jerry? Oh, he's such a sweetheart. I'm waiting for him so we can go get matching tats."

Shiloh and I couldn't believe what we were hearing. "You're still hanging out with the guy?", I asked.

"Uh-huh. He's inside buying some new clothes right now. He woke up this morning and couldn't find a thing that fit. Fortunately his ex had left behind some clothes that were just right for me. You like?"

"It's definitely a different look for you" was as much as Shiloh would commit.

"So when you coming back to school?", I asked.

Cole shrugged his shoulders. "Dunno if I will. Jerry wants me to go to a motorcycle rally in Reno with him. He's got a Harley and I can ride on the seat behind him!" The prospect seemed to excite him, if you could judge by his Speedo.

Not that I really wanted old Cole back in the world, but my conscience was killing me. "Are you sure about this? I found out there's a way to cure what you've got so you'll like chicks again." I had checked overnight, and the camera still would allow me to alter a person's sexual orientation.

"Chicks? No thank you!" He flapped his hands dismissively. "No chick ever appreciated me the way Jerry does. Oh, and here comes my baby now."

Even though I knew I had reduced him to an ectomorph in the middle of last night's craziness, Shiloh and I were unprepared for the shock of seeing the new Jerry. He was walking down the sidewalk toward us, zipping up his new leather jacket, his skinny legs encased in tight leather pants. Unlike the thuggish lout who had nearly run over Shiloh with his truck last night, he now looked like a boy-band dreamboat trying to play the tough-guy act, with a slightly shaggy pile of light brown hair over a baby face that had never felt the touch of a razor.

"Mmm, check out my sexy little boy-toy," Cole said. "Doesn't he look fantastic? Jerry, these are my dear friends Shiloh and Ryan."

"Uh, yeah, we met last night," I said cautiously. I had been worried about running into last night's hothead again, but I felt pretty sure Shiloh and I could handle Jerry now.

Jerry peered his bright blue eyes through the fringe of his bangs. "Oh, hey, how you guys doing today?"

If he was still mad at us, it sure didn't show. He was positively meek as he wrapped a leather-clad arm around Cole's body, palming an ass cheek. Cole kissed Jerry on the forehead. Cole may be a shadow of his former self, but the camera had made Jerry even tinier, several inches shorter than Cole.

"Awesome outfit, Jerry," Shiloh said. "Cole says you guys might be going to Reno?"

"Yeah, if he'll let me buy his sweet ass some leathers. Somewhere around the Continental Divide, he'll realize he needs more than a tank top and Speedos."

"We got time, baby. Lots and lots of time." Cole gave Jerry a long French kiss, then smiled back at us. "So good to see you boys again." He blew us kisses, then they got into Jerry's truck and drove off.

Shiloh and I watched the truck disappear around the corner. We were shell-shocked.

"Holy shit," I said. "I guess your posse really is breaking up."

"And good riddance to it. So...does that mean you have an opening for a new roommate, Ry?", Shiloh asked with a sly grin.

I smiled back and teased, "Only if he looks as good in leather as Jerry."

Shiloh's eyebrows leapt at the idea. He practically raced into the leather shop.

As Shiloh began trying stuff on, I pulled out my camera and reopened my photo from last night. I hadn't pressed "SAVE", so it was still editable. I pulled up the "ORIENTATION" menu. My finger hovered over the screen as I thought about Kay from the pier and all of the girls in high school who had been content to be my friend but nothing more. And I thought about what Cole had said about Jerry. No "chick" had ever appreciated me the way Shiloh did.

I slid the dial from "BISEXUAL" to "HOMOSEXUAL".

I clicked "ACCEPT". I didn't feel much change, actually. Maybe relief, followed by a sense of calm and clarity as I watched Shiloh sliding his bare brawny arms through the holes of a leather vest. Goddamn, he looked hot. I might need to buy one of those too.

Buy? What was I thinking? I pulled up the clothing menu on my camera, found an awesome studded leather vest and clicked to make it appear on my body.

Satisfied, I clicked "SAVE".