The Secret

1. Steve

SteveSix years. That’s how long I had been working at the firm. I started straight from school, deciding to earn money to help out my mum who couldn’t work and had given up most things to raise me and my sisters when our waster father buggered off. I was good with computers and spent more time online than in the real world some days. The work suited me perfectly because I got to do geeky stuff all day every day, and each evening I played rpgs or fought with and against other geeks all over the world. I was doing that before I left school, but it was a relief to find out that the hours I’d spent building and programming computers made me employable. Entry level at first but I soon learned the ropes.

I use the phrase geek advisedly. I know a lot of people don’t like it, but I really couldn’t think of myself as anything else. I had a better relationship with my pc than a lot of people did with their family. Not that I didn’t love my family, but they couldn’t take me to other worlds or absorb me for hours in a debate over Star Trek: TNG. See, I’m not only obsessed with computers, but I also love sci-fi. I never dress up, t-shirts and a pair of trousers is about the best I get, and most of the t-shirts display one or other of my obsessions.

I looked the part too. Glasses because I couldn’t get on with contacts, not horrific looking but certainly not male model material. My hair was a boring mid-brown and did exactly what it wanted whether I tried to brush it or not, so I usually didn’t bother. My eyes were a nondescript hazel. I was friendly to my colleagues but preferred being online with my friends there and didn’t have that many mates irl. In short, I was utterly forgettable. If you saw me in the street you’d just pass me over as another geek and no real notice would be taken. Not that I minded, I certainly didn’t want to be the centre of attention, but still it would be nice to get some attention once in a while.

Work allowed me to study and gain qualifications in programming so I was able to get more and more geeky as time went by. Not so much in my behaviour, that was already as far as it could get, but I was able to enter the really exclusive discussion boards online where any normal person wouldn’t have a clue. I spent time with online communities developing open source software and providing tech support to the newbies. More importantly though, my new skills got me moved to a different department and I started working with Dave.

It’s not as though I hadn’t met people in real life that were like me, but I’d never met anyone so much like me until I was introduced to him. He had the classic geek look too, although he was really slim and his eyes and hair were darker. He kind of looked like he didn’t often see the sunlight, almost gothy although he didn’t dress that way or wear makeup. I was kind of envious of his look because he was much more striking than I was, and I was particularly envious of his waistline, because sitting on my backside every day hadn’t done mine many favours. Not that I was huge, but you could certainly pinch an inch (or two) anywhere you cared to try. I’d like to think I was cuddly, but no-one seemed to want to.

It wasn’t so much the looks that made us similar, as our interests. We loved the same sci-fi programmes, and the same authors, we listened to the same music, and we played the same online games. When he told me his gamer tag I knew it straight away – I’d played with him a load of times but never realised he was in the same town let alone in the same building most of the week. I’d even chatted to him once in a while, but there were so many people I talked to online during games I doubted we had ever said anything of any importance so as we’d have worked out we could meet. He even had a hand in most of the same development projects as I did. It was quite freaky.

That was more than three years ago, and during that time we had gone from playing online occasionally to sharing a flat and sitting in our bedrooms with the doors open so we could chat as we teamed up playing some of our favourite games. All day at work we sat beside each other doing our tasks, often working together on stuff because we discovered that two brains, especially ones wired as similarly as ours seemed to be, worked things out quicker, and then our evenings were spent either watching our favourite tv shows and films or on our computers until we got too tired to keep our eyes open any longer.

Dave knew me better than anyone else, but there was just one thing I had kept from him. For all our mutual obsessions, there was just one thing that I was obsessed with that I never let him know about.

Him.

I can’t look back on it and pinpoint a moment it happened. It’s not as though suddenly one day I looked at him and instead of my geeky mate he was a s*x god. It’s just that over the long time I had spent with him I’d gradually come to realise that what I liked about him wasn’t simply that we were friends who had a lot of interests in common, it was also that I wanted him.

Like I guess every guy, and probably some girls, I had spent a good amount of my time online looking at porn. I liked the look of the female form and I used to have no problem getting off to pictures of naked women. Over time, alongside my growing attraction to Dave, I started to look at naked men and gay porn, and now it seemed to be the only thing I searched for when I wanted some hot images.

I guessed I was either bi or gay, but since my experience to date was one drunken snog with a woman at a school leaving party, I didn’t exactly have much practical knowledge to go on. By now I knew though that if there was ever a chance that someone would want to be with me I would be looking for a guy not a girl.

I wasn’t looking though, because in all honesty, the only guy I wanted was Dave. The more I examined my feelings, the more I realised that I was in love with him. Which was ridiculous, and I knew it. I’d been living with him for about 18 months. Not once had he shown any sign of interest in me, or even in men in general.

Once in a while I used his computer, and his search history always showed porn of the purely straight kind. I always made sure I deleted my searches in case he looked on my pc, and kept a couple of sites where I could ogle the men but there were always women in the pictures too. He’d think it was very weird if there wasn’t any porn in my history, I was supposed to be a red-blooded male after all.

I lost count a long time ago of how many times I imagined something happening that would get us together. A drunken kiss, a particularly intense game of truth or dare, a moment when I dared to confess my desires, but they never came about in reality. I dreamt of him taking me, making me his in so many different ways. It was strange that I usually pictured him taking me given that I was the larger of us physically, but something about the idea of being filled with his c**k turned me on every time I thought about it. My favourite fantasy was of him coming to my room late at night, hard and horny.

He would barely speak to me in my fantasies, just jerking back the bedsheets and taking in the sight of my naked body with a predatory smile on his face. His lust shone out in his eyes and made me hard even before he climbed on top of me and pressed me into my bed. I was his, and he knew it. He would touch and kiss me over my body, making me tremble with desire and desperate for him to take me. Sometimes it would be slow seduction, and other times he would just lift my legs and push himself inside, the hurt and the pleasure combining to have me screaming his name.

Every time I pleasured myself I imagined that it was him doing this to me. I would stroke my c**k wishing it was his hand on me, and press my finger inside my ass imagining it was his hard d**k making that same journey and giving me the ultimate pleasure. I usually came with his name on my lips, but I always managed to keep it to a whisper, conscious that the object of my desires was so close he could hear me if I cried it out like I wanted to.

Sometimes I even considered it, wondering what would happen if he caught me, covered in my release with my finger still inside me giving him all the clues he would need to what I had just been doing while thinking about him, but I was too afraid he would be disgusted by me.

It was always in the back of my mind that I was going to be alone for a long time if all I ever wanted and waited for was Dave to notice me the way I noticed him now. But I couldn’t seem to make the break from him. We did everything together, and if he was away visiting his family I missed him like crazy. It was better to have him close and never have anything with him than try and tear myself away. It might not be forever, and perhaps one day I wouldn’t be able to take it any longer, but for now he could be my world and my hand could be my lover.