Chapter 5: Beer-Fueled Confessions
The balcony was narrow, a concrete shelf clinging to the side of the building. Two plastic chairs and a small, wobbly table sat between pots of dead herbs I’d promised to water. The city exhaled below us, a warm, diesel-scented breath that mingled with the chill of coming night. Stu had bought the beers—some fancy craft IPA that tasted like pine needles and disappointment. He’d insisted we drink them out here. “Air’s better,” he’d said, not meeting my eye.
We were on our third. The empty bottles glinted in the fading light like green glass sentinels. For Stu, three beers was a monumental deviation. I could see the looseness in him, a slight slump in his usually ramrod posture, a slower blink. His fingers tapped a restless, silent rhythm against his bottle.
“So,” he said. The word was too loud in the quiet.
“So,” I echoed, leaning back. The plastic chair creaked in protest.
He took a long swig, his throat working. He stared at the skyline, painted in streaks of orange and bruised purple. “The sample. Consistency varies.”
“Okay,” I said, drawing the word out. “You running a quality control audit? Gonna give me a grade?”
“It’s not a joke.” His voice was low, gravelly from the hops and something else. “Volume and viscosity correlate directly to dietary intake, hydration, and… arousal level.”
I snorted. “Yeah, no shit. You figuring this out just now?”
He ignored me. His focus was unnerving. “The best results—the clearest lifts, the most significant endurance markers—came from the samples with the highest concentration. Thicker. More… potent.”
A slow smile spread across my face. “You’re saying my better loads make you bench more.”
He finally looked at me. His eyes were dark pools in the twilight. “Empirically, yes.”
“Good to know my spunk’s got range. Some days a game-changer, some days just a participation trophy.”
He didn’t smile. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the bottle dangling from his fingertips. The space between us shrank. “What causes the high-concentration days?” he asked, his voice dropping. “Specifically.”
The air felt suddenly still. The city noise faded to a hum. “What do you think causes it, Stu? I’m hornier. It’s not rocket science.”
“Define ‘hornier.’” The question was clinical, blunt. “Is it visual stimulation? Psychological fantasy? Physical touch?”
I laughed, a short, sharp burst. “Christ. All of the above. Sometimes it’s just a Tuesday.”
“But the peak.” He was unrelenting. “The absolute peak output you’ve ever produced. What generated that?”
I took a swig of my beer, buying a second. His intensity was a physical pressure. This wasn’t about data anymore. This was a hunting expedition. “Why?”
“I need to understand the parameters to… to optimize.” He said it like he was discussing rep ranges.
I shook my head, a slow disbelief washing over me. But a part of me, the mischievous, curious part that had agreed to the jar in the first place, was captivated. He was so deep in it, so utterly serious about the most absurd thing. “Fine. You wanna know? It was college. Final year. Two girls I’d been dancing around for months. Ended up back at my shitty housemate’s room. One was a redhead, laughing, mouth like a….” I trailed off, watching him. His gaze was locked on my mouth. He wasn’t breathing. “It was just a lot of hands, and mouths, and heat. A perfect storm. Is that the data point you needed?”
His nostrils flared. He took another drink, but his hand wasn’t quite steady. “A threesome.”
“Yeah, Stu. A threesome.”
“And the visual memory of that event. Is it sufficient to trigger a high-concentration production now?”
My skin prickled. “Sometimes.”
He nodded, digesting this. His leg began to bounce, a quick, nervous tremor. The wobbly table trembled with it. The silence stretched, taut and quivering.
“And if the stimulus was… present?” The question was a whisper, almost lost in the distant wail of a siren. “Not a memory. Actual. Proximate.”
“What are you asking?”
He didn’t answer with words. He just looked at me. All the stolen glances over the past weeks, the clinical assessments, the bottled fascination—it all coalesced into this one, unblinking stare. It was full of a terrifying, naked want. It wasn’t about the gym anymore. It was about the source of the thing that made him stronger. It was about the well itself.
Slowly, deliberately, he shifted in his chair. The movement was subtle. The plastic legs scraped on concrete. His thigh, solid and densely muscled under his track pants, came to rest firmly against mine under the small table.
The contact was electric. It wasn’t an accident. It was a landing. A claiming.
Heat bloomed where we touched, searing through the thin fabric. I didn’t pull away. I couldn’t. The air vanished from my lungs. All I could feel was the solid, warm pressure of him, a line of connection that suddenly made the entire bizarre architecture of our arrangement real and heavy and undeniable.
He leaned in closer, his voice a husky scrape. “Would that work, Mikey?”
I could smell the pine-needle beer on his breath, see the faint stubble along his jaw. His serious eyes were wide, dilated, begging for the answer. My mind short-circuited. My mouth was dry.
Before I could form a word, a door slammed somewhere in the building below. He flinched, as if waking from a trance. His eyes cleared, flooding with a sudden, panicked horror. He jerked his leg back as if burned, the chair screeching violently. He stood up so fast the table rocked, nearly sending the bottles toppling.
“I have to go,” he muttered, not looking at me. “I have… I have to set my alarm.”
He turned and fled inside, leaving the balcony door swinging open behind him. I sat alone in the gathering dark, the ghost of his touch burning on my thigh, the echo of his question hanging in the cool air like a challenge I had no idea how to meet.