[matt1995]

It had been such a long time. Charlie was speechless just to see him. He felt, for a moment, as if the last five years had not happened. Although they both looked different, had both aged and developed, it was for a moment like Charlie was sixteen.

Zak had been the coolest guy in school, at least when Charlie had first met him. Charlie: shy, unassuming, a virgin, a wallflower. Zak, then: a captain of the football team, widely renowned (wrongly, as it transpired) for his sexual credentials, allegedly having slept with all the prettiest girls around. People by-and-large however had not asked enough questions. Zak's performance had been realistic. He had seemed like the sort of person who slept around. He had seemed like a typical jock, maybe even a little more refined than some of his occasionally-concussed peers. However, when Charlie had incited the wrath of the older, stronger, cooler boy, he had ended up learning the truth.

Zak was not who he appeared; simply an excellent actor, a young gay man who'd grown so good at pretending to be a straight devil-may-care jock that he had learnt to live deceptively. Charlie, it transpired, not canny enough then to navigate safely the world of high school, was the sort of boy who he could use. That wasn't how Charlie had thought of it at the time. When Zak had invited Charlie to his one evening, it seemed what Zak wanted to do, what Zak had perhaps become used to doing, was to use Charlie. They had played truth or dare, a game that had escalated and escalated, the older boy challenging Charlie to take off his clothes, to measure his cock, eventually to wrestle Zak naked on the ground, a tussle that had ended in the unveiling: Zak kissing Charlie.

For a few weeks afterwards, their lives had been very intimately tied together. On that first night, the final forfeit brought on by the great lie had induced Zak to give Charlie a blowjob, his first. At a party, only a week later, not only had Charlie engaged in a much more explicit game of truth or dare with Zak and his entire football team, but Charlie lost his virginity to, of all people when considering his former social standing, a cheerleader called Marie. Unfortunately, that same night, as truth or dare continued on a more intimate basis after the party had died down between Zak, Charlie and a third boy, a moment of unshielded lust - Charlie consenting to permit Zak to fuck him - had been caught on tape by a classmate, Lisa.

Thereafter, they had been blackmailed for what had been some highly fearful, highly arousing sessions of dares. It culminated in an elaborately orchestrated set-up where Zak had fucked Charlie through a curtain as the rest of the football team, thinking it was a woman on the other side, looked on. Lisa then, in an act of spiteful homophobia, had dropped the curtain, revealing to the top of the school hierarchy what had gone on. It had been a whirlwind. It had been a lot.

Charlie had weathered it. He didn't have so much status to lose. If anything, the rumours that swirled around him afterwards, many of them untrue, only suggested to him a more raucous lifestyle than he would ever achieve. He'd been avoided by some, mocked by others but embraced by a few, who felt sorry for his exposure, who had no problems whatsoever with gay people. Not that that was what Charlie was. Other than Zak, Charlie had never had sex with a man, and that had only been one surreal, traumatic occasion. He had endured the rest of high school and then gone to college, where he had met Rosaline. Not having many friends at his short-lived high school anyway, he let the whole episode sink into the past, even if he thought about it often, sometimes in moments of arousal, sometimes in moments of deep melancholy.

And Zak, Zak had disappeared straight away. He was gone off social media. Charlie had tried to get in contact with him, but there'd been nothing. This was literally the first time he was seeing him in five years, the first time since, in front of a group of elitist teenagers, Charlie had been photographed and filmed with Zak's cock inside him. And here he was now.

'Fucking hell,' Charlie said. 'How... how did you know I was here?'
'It's a bit of a story,' Zak said. His voice was deeper still than Charlie would've remembered. Where he had once had short conventional hair, spiked up, if Charlie was remembering it right (with the social media blackout, there'd been no way to find images of Zak, except for those posted by those awful jocks), he now had long hair, a fringe that came over his eyes, that fell to his shoulders at the back. He had been very muscular, and whilst he still appeared athletic, he did not look like any sort of weightlifter. His shorts gave way to strangely muscular legs, legs that looked like they'd carried him a long way. His arms were tanned and covered in scratches and they crossed his chest, holding a heavy rucksack on his back. It looked like he'd come a long way.

'Do you wanna come in?' Rosaline said. Her voice suggested that she still had no idea what to think of the newcomer, he who'd arrived out of nowhere to their apparently isolated cabin in the middle of her romantic weekend away with her boyfriend of two years.

'If it's okay,' Zak said. 'Charlie?'

'Yeah,' Charlie said. 'Come in.'