His Best Friend's Secret

"Hey Craig, you down there?" Matt
Harris called out as he started down the basement
staircase.

"I'm in back, Matt," called out a strong
masculine voice from the bottom of the stairs.
"Come on down."

Quickly, the five-foot-eight teenager made
his way down the stairs leading to the basement of
the Longwood house. The room at the foot of
the steps had been converted to a small apartment,
complete with kitchenette and bath. It was
exactly the kind of place Matt wished he had in his
own house. It was the first time he had been
down here. Previously Craig's parents had rented
out the small room, but turned it over to Craig
two weeks ago as a graduation present. He was
still in the process of moving in.

"I'm in here, Matt," came the voice from
the outer room.
As Matt stepped through the doorway, he
could see that this half of the basement was much
more like the one in his own house: rough, bare
cement walls, exposed pipes, ceiling beams. Part
of the basement had been converted to storage
bins. Another third was taken up by the boiler and
water heater. All the way in the back, near the
outer door, was a weight bench and several rows
of barbells. It was on that bench that he found his
friend.

"I'll be with you in a few minutes."
Craig puffed as he lifted the heavy barbell
as high as he could.
"I only have a few more sets and I'm
done."
"No problem," Matt replied as he looked
down on the muscular youth on the bench. "I
guess I'm a little early, anyway."

Craig Harris, at eighteen, was six months
older than Matt. He was also five inches taller
and about twenty pounds heavier. Clad only in a
thin pair of blue gym trunks, most of his tanned
body was exposed to view. More than half the
girls in their graduating class would've been
willing to drop their pants in a minute if they were
standing in Matt's place.

The younger teen took a moment to add
up the weights on the barbell Craig was using,
quickly deciding that it was far more than he could
ever lift. It wasn't that the blonde-haired young
man wasn't in good shape. In fact, he had been on
the high school's baseball team. Matt had more of
a lean, athletic build, while Craig had been
working out with weights since his early teens and
had played football for that long as well.

He watched his friend complete a few
more sets and realized with a small shock that he
was staring at the steams of sweat running down
his well-developed chest and arms.

"Why don't I take a look at the computer
while you finish up here?" Matt said as he began
to turn away.
"Good idea," Craig said, as he paused for
a moment with the heavy weight again fully
extended at arm's length. "All the stuff my uncle
sent over is piled up on my desk."

Back in the small apartment, Matt sat
down on the computer, which had been set up on
the desk and hit the on switch. It wasn't long
before the screen came to life and filled with the
old familiar windows 3.1 setup. The computer
had been given to Craig by his uncle when he got
a newer system. The computer wasn't the top of
the line model that you'd find if you walked into
any store today, but it was more than Craig
needed. Matt was a firm believer that no one
really needed all of that crap that was stuffed into
computers nowadays -- at least not for home
use. He picked up the spec sheet and quickly ran
it down: 33 MHz cpu, 8 Megs RAM, 540M hard
drive. It was still a good machine, no matter
what anyone said. It fact, the only reason Craig's
uncle had gotten a new one was that the older
machine had a problem with a lot of the new
upgrades that he wanted to hook up. It was
cheaper in the long run to just buy a new one.

The one upgrade that the young man was
glad to see was the 28.8 bps modem that Craig's
uncle had put in. The spec sheet said that it had
originally come with a 2400 bps modem. Matt
cringed at the thought of showing his friend how
to get online at that speed. He quickly brought
up the File Manager and checked what was in the
hard drive.

"Over 300 Megs available," Matt thought,
then smiled. "They did a good job of cleaning up
the drive."

The last time he had volunteered to help a
friend set up an old computer, the drive had been
so crammed full of junk that it had taken him
hours just to delete all of it. Since the main thing
that Craig was interested in was getting online,
Matt brought up the copy of Netscape that had
been left. The account information in its memory
still belonged to Craig's uncle, so Matt deleted it
and entered the info for his own online account.
Once Craig learned how to get around online,
he'd call up TIAC and get his friend his own
account.

"Now where did he put those notes?" he
asked himself as he searched a desk filled with
manuals and printed sheets. "Craig could learn a
few things about organization."

Finally he spotted the folder he was
looking for on the far edge of the desk. He
reached out for it, but bumped the pile of papers
and the folder fell behind the dresser, next to the
desk.

"Shit," he muttered as he got up out of
the chair to retrieve it.
Matt had to pull the bureau out a little to
reach down and behind it. He spotted the folder
resting next to a pile of magazines that must have
fallen down there earlier on.
"Craig really has to learn how to pick up,"
Matt laughed, as he grabbed both the folder and
the books, pulling them up.

Dropping the four magazines onto the
nearby bed, the red-shirted young man was about
to turn his attention back to the computer when
the title of one periodical caught his eye.

"Fuck!" he exclaimed loudly, before he
could check himself. He quickly looked over his
shoulder to see whether his friend had heard him.
After a few seconds Matt turned his
attention back to the magazine. The banner on
the top read "Hombre." Underneath it was a
picture of a well-developed Hispanic man wearing
only a pair of cut-off jeans. Flipping through the
pages of the book, Matt saw that it was filled with
similar pictures of men. Only they weren't
wearing any jeans. They weren't wearing anything
else, for that matter.

"Damn," he whispered to himself, ever
conscious of his friend's presence in the outer
room.

Matt quickly picked up the second book.
It was called "ebony and Ivory." Unlike the first
magazine, this one had much more than nude
shots. The men in this book were black and white
and they were engaged in various sexual activities.

He stopped on one page in particular that
showed a young white teen, who couldn't be more
than eighteen years old, kneeling in front of a
muscular black man in his forties. The young man
had his mouth wrapped firmly around the older
man's cock.

Fueled by curiosity, he turned to another
publication called "Young Men In Lust." Unlike
the other two books, this had no articles. It was
filled, instead, with glossy pictures of teenaged
boys having sex with each other. All of the boys
in the book looked to be about his and Craig's
age. In fact, there was a picture of a young man
taking a cock up his ass that Matt thought looked
a little like him. So much, in fact, that the picture,
following all the others, had given him a hard-on.
He was about to see what the last book was about
when he heard steps behind him.

"How are you making out, buddy?" Craig
asked as he stepped into the room, drying his face
with a small towel. "Got it all ready to ..."

The tall, dark-haired athlete stopped in
mid-word as he looked at his friend sitting on the
bed and spotted the magazine spread open to a
two-page centerfold. The picture was of two
guys in a tight embrace, sharing a hard kiss while
at the same time playing with each other's cock.
"Where did you get those...?" Craig asked
in a slow, hesitant voice.

"I found them behind the dresser," Matt
explained, a little ashamed to have been found
looking at them. "One of the folders fell behind
there and I had to move it to pick it up."
The color seemed to fade from Craig's
face, despite the tan he had been working on since
the beginning of the Summer. The look on his
face was one few people had ever seen, one of
utter devastation. In one brief catastrophic
moment, his entire aura of self-confidence was
gone.

"I suppose you're wondering what I'm
doing with magazines like that?" he asked in a
defeated voice.

"What you're doing...?" Matt repeated.
"You mean, these are yours?"
"Whose did you think they were?" Craig
asked in return, cursing himself for not thinking.
He might've be able to explain them away if he
hadn't said anything..

"I thought they might've belonged to the
guy who was renting this place from your parents.
The way they were wedged in against the wall, I
figured he'd dropped them there and forgot them
when he moved out."

"Oh shit, shit, shit," Craig muttered as he
realized that Matt hadn't made what he thought
was the obvious connection -- that the books were
his.