Measure of a Man

[6 word request: Jock Loses Bet, Becomes Nullo]

[I added the word Quarantine on my own]

After the second month of quarantine, Richie found himself plopping into his couch with a six pack earlier and earlier. It became a 12-pack, then a case. What the fuck else was there for him to do? A lot of his teammates talked about how much they were jerking off. Those conversations made him ache and contract his hip flexors. God damn, he thought; if I could jerk off I’d do it all damned day!

If there was a benefit to his current situation, it was that he could pound back beers without needing to make a bathroom trip. After his third beer, when he would normally be on his feet heading to piss, he just let it go wherever it went. 

Back when this all started, he remembered that first time he needed to pee; he rubbed his now smooth groin, wondering where the pee was going to come out. There was no hole! Would his bladder eventually burst? Would he pee out his ass? He remembered crouching in the bathtub, stripped from his waist down, unclenching and squeezing his eyes shut.

But nothing happened. He felt the relief of urinating but he had no clue where his bladder was emptying. It didn’t take him long to stop caring.

Then he started missing the bathroom trips. He started visiting the toilet, yanking down his sweatpants, and pretending to grip and aim the dick that wasn’t there. If he avoided the mirror--the image of just a tuft of pubic hair where there used to be a good-sized tube of meat and two big balls--he could almost feel normal again.

Coach called him out over Facetime; said his face looked fat. “It’s always been fat, I’m a fucking lineman,” Richie said, trying to ignore the obvious jowls that had formed and the extra chin. His head looked swollen and his face looked tiny. But it went beyond that: his eyes were bloodshot and heavy-lidded  with dark circles beneath them. His cheeks were permanently rosey.

“If all you're doing is drinking yourself silly everyday, dammit, I can’t have that,” Coach said to him. Richie agreed he’d take it easy with the booze and hit the team’s private gym more.

On the one hand, Richie was grateful that this--the dicklessness, not the quarantine--happened during the offseason. He shuddered every time he imagined navigating the locker room looking like a Ken doll that ate two other Ken dolls.

But on the other it was hard for Richie to think of a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Without the two things he loved most in the world--football and his cock--what the hell was the point of living?

*

Not a day passed when “the tweet” didn’t cross Richie’s mind:

“You fucking sheep libtards. Guaranteed this quarantine stuff will be over in a month, I bet my cock and balls on it”

Exactly 30 days after he sent that tweet, he awoke to find his cock and balls had vanished. He noticed the absence when he rolled over and crushed nothing. At first, as he ran his fingers desperately through his pubes before he’d gotten a look at it, he tried to figure out what he was feeling; such a familiar part of his body had been reshaped in such a dramatic way. He still felt a “ghost” dick, but there was nothing there. When he finally saw it with his eyes, his heart pounded. He expected to see a scar, evidence of some sort of surgery, maybe signs of leprosy; but no, his “manhood” was gone as if it had never been there.

His dick didn’t come back when he deleted the tweet. He wasn’t going to go to the doctor about this, either. He thought maybe after a month his junk would reappear. When it didn’t, he considered going to the doctor; but what was he going to say? “I bet my cock and balls and they lost.” There was no way that news wasn’t going on ESPN: “NFL’s Biggest Bully and Dirtiest Player Now a Cockless Freak” or something just as sensational and career-destroying.

Obviously, whoever made his dick vanish had read his original tweet. He wondered if tweeting an impassioned plea could get it back. A few drunk nights he tried to write something that called out the dick thief without explicitly saying what was going on. He saved each one as a draft, lacking the balls to send it.

*

The cup Richie wore to the gym actually made it look like he had something down there. Once, while he was squatting, it shifted to the side, but he fixed it before anyone had noticed. He would reach down, grope the hard bulge there and imagine his steak and potatoes were crammed behind it. It made him feel normal.

But his squat was plummeting. From repping 5 plates a side to 4 plates. He blamed it at first on the inactivity during the lockdown, but after four hard weeks of training he had to lighten it to 3 plates and a 25 pounder on each side.

He just lost his drive. He would shotgun a Bang before each workout, snort preworkout, and stomp into the gym, guns blazing, ready to wild out on those weights, but he just didn’t have that drive. On the sixth or seventh rep when the pain would set in, when his lungs screamed for oxygen, when his big legs and ass flooded with lactic acid, all he could think about was racking the weight and getting out from under it. He tried to tap into that grey part of his head, the haze that went over him on the field and in the gym when the pain got to great; it was the animal side of him that made him such a great player, such an animal on the field and such a beast in the gym.

He didn’t want to admit it was gone, but he stared at his body, even after six weeks of hitting the gym as hard as he could. Coach hadn’t mentioned anything about it, but Richie knew he had noticed something. Richie’s body had a softness to it. He’d always been a hefty guy, always with a big layer of blubber over a diesel chassis--the perfect lineman body!--but now the hard edges seemed to be dissolving.

Every part of his formerly solid stature was starting to sag. His gut had gone from a solid keg-belly to a sagging paunch. In the locker room, he was grateful no one else was around as he examined his “physique”--he looked like he was melting. But when he stepped on the scale, he shuddered to see he had lost thirty pounds, despite looking paunchier and far more bloated.

Coach sent him a text. “You’re losing your edge. Your career’s in jeopardy. I’m sending you a guy.” Richie was grateful he didn’t have to pull down his pants to demonstrate to Coach that his all start guard’s egg-sized testosterone factories were gone.

All those pussies he called soyboys on the internet--did Richie deserve this?

*

The guy who came into Richie’s house wore a mask. “Yeah, I don’t believe in that shit,” he said. He yanked off the mask a second thought; that was enough to win Richie over.

Like most NFL players, Richie’s concept of “big” was drastically warped, a side effect of spending most of his time around men whose weights started with a 3 and whose heights started with a 6. Still, the guy coach sent over--Hank--was a BIG dude, one of those tattooed muscle-beach kind of guys who had a needle in their ass and a steady diet of steak and heavy weights from age 13 on. His massive torso was covered in tattoos. He had a stink to him--not B.O. exactly, just a strong manly scent, one that Richie was sure Hank couldn’t wash off, even with soap.

Richie used to have that smell.

Hank asked Richie to drop his pants. He did so, careful to hide the front. One quick prick in the ass and Hank headed for the door. Richie offered Hank a beer but the big guy strutted out the door, turning sideways so he could fit his beefy shoulders through it.

“Damn, you look like you’re wearing pads!” Richie commented. Hank must not have heard him.

In the shower he furiously rubbed the spot where his dick was going to be. It was no more sensitive than any other part of his body. He had wondered if he could do it, rub the null spot until something inside him clicked and the perpetually rising sexual need would finally drop for at least a short while. But there was no hope. He would have just as much luck rubbing his shoulder or his neck.

Tweaking his nipples did a little something, but not much; it just made him hornier and more frustrated. FUCK, he thought, if I had a cock I would be crushing pussy right now!

He lay in bed afterwards, grinding his blank spot against the bedsheets, desperate to feel something down there. In frustration and exhaustion--he got tired so easily, nowadays--he collapsed into his pillow, sobbing.

*

Hank commented that Richie was looking better. “You ever, uh, see me play?” Richie asked as Hank gave him his shot. Big man just shrugged his freaky shoulders. Hank said he wasn’t big into football.

“Oh, well, whatever you’ve been shooting in my ass has got me back in game shape,” Richie explained. His strength was back up, his weight was rising, and his body as gettting heavy and hard in the right places again.

The mood swings had stopped as well. No longer was Richie crying in the morning before he got out of bed every day, or raging at his TV screen in the evening. He finally felt good again--with one exception.

“You really never juiced before?” Hank asked as he started to pack his stuff up.

Richie gestured down at his body. “Most of this was just genetics and training. 30 years of eating nothing but football will do that too you.” It felt so good to look like an elite athlete--almost everywhere, that is. “Is it supposed to make you hornier?” he asked.

Hank chuckled. “I jerk off five times before I go see my girlfriend,” he said, bouncing his heavily tatted pecs. “Part of the game. It’s what having all this juicy male hormone coursing through your veins; men gotta do four things: lift, eat, sleep and FUCK.” He flexed his biceps when he said the final word; Richie felt a charge from his enthusiasm.

“But, uh,” Richie said as Hank headed for the door, “what if I can’t, y’know, jerk off?”

Hank eyed him suspiciously.

Richie couldn’t believe it when he pulled the blinds and dropped his pants. Since quarantine had started, Hank was the only person he had seen regularly, the only person he wasn’t afraid to be around since his dick vanished… Hank was the closest thing he had during a friend, at least since the world--and Richie’s world in particular--vanished.

“Jesus,” Hank said, leaning in. “You saying you used to have something there?”

Richie nodded.

“Mind if I… feel? It’s like I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” Hank’s rough hands ran over Richie’s groin, lingering over the spot where there should’ve been a thick veiny shaft and two swinging balls.

“You must be horny as fuck,” Hank said with a chuckle. “I think it’s time to start getting in touch with your other side, bro. Men have a prostrate for a reason!”

It took Richie a minute to figure out what Hank was saying. “You mean… I should…”

“I’ll text you the place I order dildos,” Hank said. “Fuck, dude, if you haven’t fucked around with your ass before, it’s like you’ve never had a real orgasm!”

Richie went white at the idea of something going in his ass, but he felt his phone vibrate, then stared at the link Hank had texted.

“Oh, and if I were you,” Hank said as he headed toward the door, “I’d think ahout shaving that bush of yours.” He pulled down his own shorts to reveal his shiny, veiny groin, giving his big cock a wag in Richie’s direction. “Way I see it, dick or no dick, shaving off all that hair is the way to go. Think about it, big man.”

*

Richie wished he could have done it all blindfolded. The dildo he’d ordered was small--had it been attached to a guy in the locker room, Richie would have mocked the “tiny-dicked little bitch” mercilessly--but the idea of sitting on it… his stomach ached, but his heart pounded. He was so desperate to cum he didn’t think anything else.

He squeezed some lube into his hands and slatered the shaft of the thing--damn, why did they have to make it look so much like a dick?--and adhered it to the edge of the tub. Then he slowly lowered himself to it.

As soon as the point touched his hole, he yelped. He took a deep breath, focusing on only his desperate need to get off, and let himself sink down what felt like six inches but in reality was barely one. He stood up and paced around the bathroom, throwing a punch that left a massive hole in the wall.

No way was Richie going to call Hank, he knew--he wasn’t going to ask for advice on how to use a dildo… but he was desperate. And so fucking horny.

Instead of a text response, Richie’s phone rang. He almost smashed the thing, but instead answered it.

“You start with your fingers like I told you?” Hank’s gruff voice asked. Richie had; the night before, he had pressed his face into his pillow and reached around his massive ass. He tickled his own crack for a bit--that felt nice--before sliding a finger in to the first knuckle. That hadn’t been so bad, so he went to the second knuckle, then added a finger. He could feel a hard nut in there--damn, whatever that thing was had a powerful connection, because every time he stroked it he saw lightning bolts and his whole body tingled.

He imagined the thing was a doorbell and he sat there, pressing it repeatedly, as he drooled into his pillow and moaned incoherently. He did it for nearly an hour--the stimulation was incredible, but there was no release.

“You sure you can cum?” Hank asked when he heard the story. “I mean, you might not be able to cum with no dick or balls.”

Richie’s face fell at that realization. “I just figured,” he said, “if I can pee without a dick… then I must be able to cum, right?”

Hank chuckled. “I wonder if your dick didn’t vanish, but it’s just sitting on some guy’s shelf somewhere. I bet he has it aimed in a bucket. Maybe he’s a real freak and he aims it at his face.”

Richie chuckled at the image, then filled with rage--what if someone DID have his cock? The idea wasn’t enough to distract him from his need.

“Look,” Hank said, “I’ll do it with you big dog.” He hung up and called back in video chat. Richie watched as the massive, rippling man positioned his vascular tree trunk legs above a dildo three times the size of the one Richie couldn’t seem to handle. He couldn’t deny the musclebound brute was pure masculinity. Richie was shocked to see the big oaf bouncing up and down on his dildo, sneering, licking his lips, grunting like a bull. Hank taking it in the ass may have been the manliest thing Richie had ever seen.

“That’s right big fella,” Hank coaxed as Richie took a deep breath and slid onto his own little dildo. “Soon as it starts to hurt, that’s when it feels good. Just like deadlifting!”

With Hank’s coaxing Richie kept pushing until he felt his ass touch the cool edge of the toilet. He couldn’t believe he had it all the way in. He couldn’t believe how full he felt--and he couldn’t believe how many nerves that thing was lighting up!

Richie sat there, savoring the feeling of fullness, before he slowly stood up, then sat back down. He was panting. Dollops of drool were pouring down his chin. He reached out for the dick that wasn’t there, then slapped the side of his tub in frustration. Fuck, he had been so desperate for this for so fucking long--all those needs, raging full-blast all day long. How had he functioned with all that background noise? How could he form one single thought that wasn’t attached to his desperate need to cum?

Things rose to a crescendo. Sweat poured from his body. Fuck, nothing felt better than this. He never wanted it to end. Fuck, was he even breathing at this point? So focused on maintaining the rhythm, feeling this forever, that he forgot where or who he was. Eyes on the prize, he hurtled toward the edge--then toppled over it.

Richie ROARED when it finally happened. The orgasm engulfed him. It seemed to start from the tips of his fingers and toes; it pulsed through him, bounced back the other way, then pulsed through him before. FUCK, he had never felt this good before--never on the field, never fucking a women… FUCK how had he never felt this way before!

When it was over, he was shaking. He stood up, the dildo slurping out of his ass, ending with a pop and a splatter against the floor. Richie leaned against the bathroom wall, gasping for breath. Fuck, his vision was blurry. Hank was talking but he couldn’t understand him. Richie couldn’t remember what year it was; he couldn’t even remember his own name.

When the quarantine was over, Richie would once again take the field. His physical conditioning--he was a bigger brick shithouse than ever before--would blow minds, but his moves on the field would redefine his career. But not even his outstanding performance would overshadow the fact that Richie would play without a cup, his tight football pants displaying to the world that, half a revolution from his enormous ass, there was no cock or balls to speak off. He would strut on the field, big as a mountain, strong enough to level a herd of buffalo, ready to tear men in half, and everyone would gasp and gawk at the smooth spot where his manhood should be.

By then Richie would have learned: his BODY was his manhood; his ability to be a 350 pound human wrecking ball of explosive velocity and come up from a smile on his face, was his manhood. It was the fact that when he squatted down before a play, no matter how much the other team mocked him, he was focused on one thing: winning. In the future, Richie would know that his ability to get the job done without giving a single fuck was his manhood, not some squishy little set of meat on the front of his body.

But until then, Richie would train hard in the gym and even harder at home. Hank would start hanging out after his injections. “It’s only gay if you cum inside,” Hank would say with a wink, and they would take turns offering up their asses for the other to penetrate with whatever toy tickled their fancies that day.