The Third Bosa Brother (Patreon)

Ryan Jones had always loved football, but the sport had never much loved him back. He’d been the star edge rusher back on his high school team and it was enough to get him scouted by a college and accepted onto a sports scholarship, but things had fallen off the rails since then. Well, since he’d decided that he wanted to be a football player and an openly gay man. Who would have thought that those two things were mutually exclusive?

If his time at high school had been heaven (and even that was a definite exaggeration) then his college career was mostly certainly hell by contrast. Ryan and his coach mixed like oil and water; the coach declared him insubordinate, the player found his coach arrogant and narrow-minded. As such, despite Ryan being the best option for the team, he found himself benched on a consistent basis in favour of a weaker teammate who had been all too happy to jump ahead.

The relationship between coach and player had only gotten worse when Ryan finally felt comfortable to be his true self and come out of the closet. He’d known that he was opening a hornet’s nest when he confronted the coach over his fondness for calling the team “faggots”, but his ideologies meant he couldn’t sit idly by and let such language be used. While he’d never experienced homophobic bullying, it was easy to think that there might be other deeply-closeted guys on the team who were continuing to repress parts of themselves out of fear of guys like the coach. While the word had stayed out of the coach’s vocabulary from then on, he had soured towards Ryan beyond the point of any repair.

All in all, by the time he was in his last year, Ryan had only participated in six games and his chances of going pro had been completely eliminated. There was nobody scouting him or creating a buzz about him ahead of the NFL draft and he didn’t have the resources to promote himself either. His dreams had truly dissipated and he had to manage his expectations. As loath as he was to do so, Ryan knew it was time to find some more humble goals to try and achieve.

Five years on from his dismal college experience, Ryan still loved football as much as he ever had. He’d settled down into a pleasant but ultimately unfulfilling job as a solicitor’s assistant that paid his rent and allowed for a few comforts. One comfort that didn’t have to come from his paychecks were his friends. He was lucky enough to work with good people and they had made him feel loved and supported when he’d come out to them. In a way they reminded him of his old college teammates, although he felt far more confident that these guys would back him up if their boss stepped out of line.

It was with two of these friends that Ryan found himself sat in a small booth in their local bar on the night of November 11th. Ryan had one side of the booth to himself, on the other side were Toby and Michael, his closest friends in his post-football life. The three men were all physically distinct and indeed shared few similarities in their personal lives, but something about the combination of the three simply worked. Ryan had retained a generally strong build from his days as an elite football jock, but his hard muscles had softened over time and his abs were most definitely a thing of the past. Toby had never been the athletic sort; he was tall and wiry and looked like a stiff breeze might knock him over. Michael, on the other hand, was an African-American man who regularly participated in half-marathons and was lean and muscular as a result. To an outsider they must have looked like quite the odd collection of young men, but they found safety in each other.

With an hour to go until midnight, the conversation progressed beyond their average work stresses and turned to Ryan’s past. He had shared the broad strokes of the story with his friends previously but had never really expressed the bitter resentment he held towards his college coach and everybody in that system who had refused to acknowledge his talent just because of his sexuality and his self-confidence. On the whole Ryan was a pretty happy guy but that was something of a miracle considering how little support he’d received from authority and parental figures throughout his life.

“Do you ever regret it?” Michael asked suddenly, “Coming out, I mean. You might have gone pro if you hadn’t. That could be you up there.” He nodded towards the wall-mounted television that was currently showing highlights of the previous NFL season.

Ryan paused for a moment to consider it, but deep down he knew what his answer would be. “Coming out was the right thing for me to do,” he confirmed, “Being gay is who I am, it’s just as much a part of me as my family. The sport just wasn’t ready for that yet, I guess.” He let out a long sigh and took a swig from his beer. “Besides, there’s nothing to say I would have gone pro anyway. A small town nobody like me at a college on a losing streak? I’d have needed a famous surname to get scouts interested. Who cares about a Jones when there’s a Watt or a Manning around?”

“Or a Bosa,” Michael chimed in, a blissful look washing over his face. It was no secret that he had a thing for both Nick and Joey, two of the best defensive players in the league.

“Or a Bosa,” Ryan agreed, toasting his friend. “Man, if only I was a Bosa, maybe then I could be a pro ball player and still be openly gay…”

What none of the men had noticed was that the clock in the corner of the television screen currently read 11:11, and Ryan’s open speculation triggered an incredibly rare phenomenon. Ryan felt an intense rush of adrenaline, followed by an extreme cold that made him shiver. In the moments that followed he was left to question just how much he’d had to drink as everything around him began to warp and settle into a new appearance. The rather low-key bar was adapted into a much more elegant establishment on the upper floors of a tall building with a beautiful view of an illuminated city. The lights were brighter, the decor was more expensive and the music playing was no longer the grunge rock of a long gone decade but smooth jazz created specifically to blend perfectly into the background.

As if the dramatic change in his environment hadn’t been startling enough for Ryan, the clientele of the bar underwent their own transformations: the physically diverse crowd were replaced by a predominantly young crowd, mostly people in their twenties or thirties, all of whom were incredibly well dressed in clothes and jewellery that probably cost more than Ryan or his friends made in a single month. 

Then, while Ryan continued to gawp at the impossible happenings around him, Toby and Michael were replaced by the familiar faces of two men who had only just been mentioned in conversation: Nick and Joey Bosa! Any trace of Ryan’s friends was completely obliterated, leaving behind a pair of titanesque jocks with strong jawlines, thick necks and heavy brows. The pair of brothers wore shirts that seemed to be almost painted on, accentuating each and every one of the strong muscles that made up their chest, shoulders and arms.

The sudden spread of a strange tickling sensation across his whole body alerted Ryan to the fact that he was an active participant in the stunning changes around him. He looked down at himself as the extra pounds he’d gained since leaving college dropped away, reverting his soft frame back into the hard body of an elite athlete. Indeed, his arms were more jacked than ever, and his quads had swollen to the size of watermelons while his pecs formed a muscular shelf above his sculpted abdominals. It was a shame that he was expected to wear a shirt in public because they were an absolute delight to behold!

There were a number of smaller changes that were difficult for Ryan’s eye to properly take note of during that quick inspection: his feet and hands were both slightly larger, his neck was thick and muscular, and his ass cheeks were rounder and firmer. Internally, even his taste buds were changed, reflected by the subtle changing of the logo on his beer bottle.

Once the changes had finished with his body, they made quick work of his face too. The features he’d seen in the mirror for his whole life were washed away and replaced by a cross between Joey and Nick’s, with the same superhero jaw and bedroom eyes. Fresh stubble sprouted across the lower half of his face and his wild hair was pulled back into a much neater cut.

Although the visible aspects of the reality glitch were completed, they continued to worm through Ryan’s mind. His entire history was rewritten in an instant; his miserable younger years with an unsupportive family were replaced by decades of love from the Bosa family and a close admiration of his two older brothers. Ryan Bosa was the youngest of three and in many ways was especially doted on by their parents, although he maintained a wonderful relationship with both Joey and Nick, who had taken him under their wing.

The love of his family had allowed Ryan to come out during his senior year of high school and although it had been difficult to navigate at first, it never deterred him from the new journey he was on. His sexuality was nothing but a footnote on his public profile, as he made a name for himself competing for a respectable college team and breaking records just like his brothers before him. It was hardly a surprise that he received an invitation to the NFL Combine and was then drafted as the fourth overall pick in the draft.

As the new reality locked itself in place, Ryan was left at something of a loss. For some strange reason he had a vague memory of being in some dive bar with two complete strangers, lamenting about his sad life, but none of that made sense. He only ever went to more respectable bars and the two men he was with were definitely his brothers, plus there was absolutely nothing about his life that could be considered ‘sad’. He’d just won the defensive rookie of the year award and was preparing to have a dominant second season in the NFL.

Pushing those incredibly strange thoughts aside, Ryan Bosa took another swig of his beer and relaxed back into his seat. It was a rare moment of brotherly bonding before the football season started up again and his brothers would no doubt give him shit if his attention trailed off. It wasn’t his fault he sometimes experienced strange daydreams (more like day-nightmares) of an unfulfilling life where he’d been shamed for his sexuality. Still, he knew it wouldn’t do to dwell on them. He was a Bosa, after all, and the whole world was at his feet!