First Appearance (Chapter 1)

I shook his shoulder gently. "Hey Josh. Wake up."

His shoulder and forearm were really vibrating. He was also breathing faster than normal. Maybe he was in a fit or something.

I knelt over him so I could see more of his face and said, "Come on, mate..."

He didn't open his eyes. He kept shaking inside his sleeping bag, his breathing getting gradually faster, and grunted, "Fuck off..."

I was confused. Josh never spoke to me like that; he didn't speak to anyone like that.

I asked, "Are you okay? What are you doing?"

He kept shaking, his arm vibrating like he was scratching himself or something; his rhythm getting faster.

"You know what I'm doing... fuck off and leave me alone..." His eyes were still closed but his expression was angry; his mouth almost a snarl. He was almost panting and found it difficult to complete what he'd said in one breath.

I was a bit shocked by Josh's behaviour. This was so unlike his normal, laid-back manner. I wondered if I ought to fetch Mr Vaughan. Josh might be seriously sick.

I heard a slight slapping sound: skin against skin. Like a gentle applause coming from within the thick folds of his sleeping bag.

Then, as I stared at him, wondering what was happening to him, his eyes tightened like he was in pain and he gasped. At the same moment, his hips started bucking, making his whole sleeping bag move to the same rhythm of his arm.

I smiled. It was a joke. "He's pretending to 'cum'," I thought. One of our friends did the same act, impersonating his older brother who he'd supposedly overheard having sex. But in Josh's case the acting was more understated; less embellished and theatrical.

After five or ten seconds, his hips stopped thrusting and the rhythm of his arm slowed to a mere shudder and then stopped altogether. I expected him to turn to me and laugh but he just lay there, eyes closed, recovering his breath.

I moved away from him, still confused, and fished a pair of clean briefs out from my rucksack. Josh croaked from his sleeping bag, "What time is it?"

I found my watch. "Seven thirty eight."

I looked over at him, my underwear in my hand. He was rubbing his eyes, pretending nothing had happened.

Then he unzipped the side of his sleeping bag and got out from it. I saw that his briefs were pulled down slightly and that his cock was sticking out from between the bottom of his teeshirt and the waistband of his briefs. It was semi-stiff and looked very large; much larger than my own looked back then when it was in a similar state.

He reached forward to his rucksack and I saw that his right hand glistened like it was wet. Then I saw that the tip of his cock was also wet, and the bottom of his teeshirt had splashes and dribbles on it.

An unusual smell, thick and heavy, seemed to rapidly fill the air inside the tent. It was a smell with which I'd become very familiar with in the confines of the tent over the next ten days, but at that time I had no idea what it was.

I asked, "Did you piss in your sleeping bag, Josh?"

He grabbed something from his rucksack and wiped his hand on it. "Uh?"

I grinned. "Or do you just get really sweaty down there?"

He dabbed at his cock, gently drying the head of it. I looked down at it and noticed that the wetness he was wiping off was thicker and more gooey than sweat or piss. It was more like snot; like partially set jelly but creamy in colour.

I laughed, "It's like your dick sneezed."

He looked at me and glared. "What the fuck's wrong with you this morning, Stu? You know what I was doing... it's not like there's anything wrong with it..."

I guess I just stared at him, looking dopey.

He said, more gently, "You heard what Vaughan said... when you're living so closely with other guys you're gonna see them wanking sometimes... there's no need making a big deal of it..."

I flushed with embarrassment. "Oh right... yeah... sorry... I didn't realise that's what you were doing..."

He threw me a sceptical look. "What did you think I was doing?"

"I dunno... I thought you were ill or something..."

He hitched his teeshirt up a little and dried more of the sticky-looking white stuff from around his pubic hair. He smiled slightly and asked, "You thought I was ill?"

"Yeah... I dunno... the way you were breathing so quickly and the way your hips were kinda thrashing around, I guess..."

He looked up at me, his smile fading. "Everyone does that when they wank..." His expression was faintly confrontational; like I'd suggested there was something odd about him. He asked, "Don't you?"

I shrugged. "I've never really done it, actually. It feels too weird when I try..."

He stared at me incredulously and I felt embarrassed about what I'd just said.

I quickly added, "I mean... I'm probably just not doing it the right way..."

He kept staring at me and I felt my face flush.

I said, "Don't, like, tell anyone..."

He shook his head. Then he started pulling his briefs off. I saw that his cock was now totally limp and hung down over the top of his sparsely haired balls. He said, "Guys start at different ages. It's no big deal. I shouldn't have got arsey with you when I was doing it. I thought you were pissing about... trying to annoy me or something..."

"I honestly didn't know what you were doing..."

He pulled off his teeshirt. There were still a few dribbles of thick liquid on his belly and he wiped them off with his teeshirt before throwing it onto his sleeping bag.

Now we were both naked, kneeling in front of each other, looking at each other's bodies. Although Josh was my good friend, up until then I'd never been naked with him. At school, we did sport at different times and so had never had to shower or get changed together. We didn't stay over at each other houses. So shared nudity had never been part of our relationship.

But now that we were in this situation, we were both surprisingly comfortable with it. We were good mates; the fact we had our dicks out together, as Anderson would have put it, wasn't an issue.

I saw that Josh's body, like mine, was thin and firm. Muscle was starting to develop on both of us in areas which had, in previous years, remained stubbornly lean despite hours of labour. His underarm hair was thick and bushy, like mine, but we differed in that his chest was smooth whereas mine had a central clump of thin, soft hair.

I saw him look down at my cock, drawing comparisons, and I looked at his making my own. We were both hairy down there, though mine was perhaps slightly thicker, but that was where the similarities ended. His cock, even though flaccid, was large and thick and rested heavily on his small, insubstantial balls The colour of it was pink, no doubt from the attention it had just received from his hand, and his foreskin was slightly retracted exposing the moist tip of its round pink head.