“Nope,” Larry says. “Not a faggot in the house. Except for one. Guy named Steve. You wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with him. Came from a good old Texas family of oilmen down in Beaumont. Daddy was one of the founders of the fraternity, all his older brothers pledged Omega. Steve played football down in Beaumont, star quarterback, made all-state his senior year in high school. Big guy. Good-looking, sandy hair and muscles, had the chicks hanging all over him. Wouldn’t have figured him for a faggot. ’Course he didn’t know he was a cocksucker himself, not until we put the screws to him during Hell Week. Kind of an interesting story.”
“Yeah?” Ted’s mouth is dry.
“Yeah. You’d probably like to hear it. What do you say, cocksucker? You wanna hear what happens to a pussy like you in a place like Omega?”
Ted bites his lip again, unable to stop it. He should get up and leave; he shouldn’t stand for Larry’s abuse. But every time Larry calls him a cocksucker he feels a lump in his throat, and another lump between his legs, and a warm, loose feeling in his guts. Then Larry leans a little further back in his chair, just enough so that Ted can see the big, soft bulge pushing at the crotch of his jeans, and Ted knows he couldn’t move if he wanted to.
“Yeah,” Ted says. His voice is so hoarse it sounds like a croak.
Larry cocks his head and smirks. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I’d like to hear the story.”
Larry shakes his head, like a teacher with a half-wit pupil who just can’t get it right. “Seems to me that guys like you ought to call guys like me sir. Why don’t you ask me again. Ask me to please tell you about the cocksucker in Omega.”
Ted is chewing his lip so hard it’s almost bleeding. He counts ten heartbeats before he manages to open his mouth. Ten rapid, throbbing pulses like drumbeats across his forehead. He wants to say, Go to hell, asshole.
Instead he says: “Please—sir. Tell me about the cocksucker in Omega?”
Larry nods, baring his perfect white teeth. “That’s better, queerboy. Sure, I’ll tell you all about it. You just keep your hands away from your faggot dick while I’m doing it.” He gets up from the table and walks to a chest of drawers in the living room, rummaging inside. Ted looks after him, staring at his broad, tanned back, the deep silky cleft of his spine, the hard muscles of his ass and thighs packed into his skintight jeans. Suddenly his mouth is no longer dry, but slick and wet inside, the saliva gushing like a starving man with a slab of beef waved under his nose. “I think I got a couple of pictures of him somewhere,” Larry says. “Yeah, here they are.” He returns to his chair and tosses one of the photos on the table.
Ted picks it up, his hands shaking. The picture is a wallet-size color photo, a high school graduation portrait of an all-American boy in mortarboard and robe. Clean-cut, more cute than handsome. Coppery blond hair, bright blue eyes, and a bullish football player’s neck. Just a trace of baby fat in his freckled cheeks, bunched up to make room for his beaming grin. Like a face from a toothpaste commercial.
“Yeah, that’s Steve. And that’s him, too.” Larry tosses the second picture on the table.
The photo is a Polaroid lit by a flash, the background solid black, the foreground stark and grainy. Ted holds the two photos side by side and sucks in his breath.
He has to look hard to convince himself that the two photos show the same person. The smiling blond jock in the first photo, and in the second—a face even his own mother might not recognize. A face his mother wouldn’t want to recognize.
The Polaroid is a tight shot, taken from two feet away. The blond’s face is in profile, turned toward the camera just enough to show both of his startled blue eyes. His head is thrown back like a sword swallower’s—chin tilted up, shoulders scrunched against the back of his neck. Dark circles under his eyes. Eyebrows drawn together. Hair frazzled and damp. Cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s, bruised and smeared with sweat. Mouth opened wide, lips stretched thin—his whole face bent out of shape by the cock plugged down his throat.
The cock hangs downward, rubbery and thick, like a cock that’s already shot its load; half of it exposed, the other half buried in the blond’s distended throat—Ted can see the outline of the head bulging against his Adam’s apple. The rest emerges from the rim of his lips like a fat link of pale sausage, plump and greasy, arching upward and finally disappearing into a thatch of wiry black pubic hair matted with spit. The owner of the cock can’t be seen, except for a glimpse of his muscular thighs and washboard stomach; but Ted knows without being told that the cock belongs to Larry.
“Candid camera,” Larry says. He leans back and clasps his hands behind his neck again.
Ted can’t take his eyes from the photo. After the initial shock of seeing the blond’s contorted, cockswallowing face, it’s the dick in his mouth that Ted keeps staring at. Plump and swollen, not even fully hard, big enough to plug the blond’s throat with half the length—
“Yeah, Stevie boy turned out to be quite a dick lover. The kind that’ll crawl and beg for it. The kind that’ll sit there and let you call him cocksucker to his face.”
Ted looks up over the edge of the photos. Larry is staring at him, smirking, flexing the muscles in his arms and chest. The bulge at his crotch now extends halfway toward his knee.
Larry laughs, a low, growling chuckle. “Yeah, that was taken during Hell Week, two years ago. Shit, even a pussy like you must know a little of what goes on during Hell Week. That was my senior year. Stevie boy was a freshman, pledging Omega. Hell Week’s where we separate the men from the pussies. The usual stuff. Make ’em shave their crotches. Make ’em go to classes with a rubber plug up their butts. Get ’em drunk, load ’em in the trunk of the car—take away their clothes and make ’em walk back into town stark naked. Line ’em up, bend ’em over and warm their butts with a leather strap. A lot of the houses have softened up on Hell Week, but Omega is strong on tradition.
“And at the end of Hell Week comes the Gods Gauntlet. You ever hear of it? Any of those horror stories about hazing ever mention Gods Gauntlet at Omega House?”
Ted has been staring at the bulge between Larry’s legs. He tears his gaze away and looks into Larry’s eyes. Eyes as cold as steel. “No.”
“The final night of Hell Week. Draw ten names out of a hat, and those ten lucky pledges get to pass the Gods Gauntlet. Me and five other guys—we were the Gods that year. Top six men in the house. That was the year we came up with a little game called ‘Egg on His Face’ for the Gauntlet. You ever heard of that?”
Ted shakes his head.
“Egg on His Face. You line the pledges up outside the room, take ’em inside one at a time. Once you’ve got him alone, you make the pledge strip off his clothes. Knock him around a little, call him names, get him softened up. Then you give him an enema. Bend him over and stick the nozzle up his ass. That’s so his butt’ll be squeaky clean inside—just in case he loses the game. Lot of those guys never had an enema before, especially not with six guys looking on. They all blushed red as a beet, but you could tell that some of ’em like it. A lot of ’em got hard-ons, couldn’t help it. That made ’em blush even redder. Yeah, when it came his turn I could tell Stevie boy liked it. The way his little weenie stood up hard as a bone, poking up from his shaved crotch while we flushed him out.
“After the enema, you make the pledge stand naked in the middle of the room. Take a fresh egg, crack it in a cup, spoon out the yolk. Tell him to open wide, then slip the yolk inside. Make him hold it in his mouth. It’s only after you’ve got him bent over, grabbing his ankles with his butt in the air, that you explain the rules of the game—you ever been zapped with a cattle prod, Teddy boy?”
Ted raises his eyebrows. His heart races in his chest. “No.”