Interactive: Make It A Double, ch. 1 (Patreon)

Ben turned the book over in his hands, absently fanning the pages.  For something he’d found laying out in the open it was in surprisingly good condition.  The brown leather of the cover and binding were scuffed and scratched with age, but otherwise the volume looked like something he pulled off a library shelf, not picked up from the forest floor.  

He’d found it on his jog that morning, near the end of the trail he’d run so many times he could cover it with his eyes shut.  He made the trek daily, his lean legs devouring the rough terrain in easy, graceful fashion.  Working in a crowded bar surrounded by drunks all night, Ben had never been able to stomach a busy gym for long, but a solid body brought in solid tips, so he needed to make sure he looked good behind the bar with his shirt off.  At twenty four it still didn’t require much effort on his part, and what his broad shoulders and sturdy arms couldn’t accomplish on their own, his charming smile and razor jawline more than made up for.

His lungs burning and his muscles aching, Ben had just made it to the top of the final hill when he spotted the book in the dirty roots of a fallen tree.  The thick, twisting oak was freshly toppled, as evidenced by the patch of earth that had been torn up when the ancient tree lost its hold.  There’d been a nasty thunderstorm that knocked out power all over town the previous night, so a downed tree wasn’t exactly a surprising sight, but a book tangled in the roots certainly was.  He’d stood and stared at it from a distance, wiping the sweat from his toned pecs and thick, brown hair while he tried to convinced himself he really saw what he thought he did.  

It wasn’t until Ben touched it that his brain let him believe it was real, but even then its existence only raised more questions.  He’d had to work it out of the gnarled roots, almost as if they’d grown around it, meaning someone hadn’t just left it there that morning.  But the confused young man also knew it was impossible for an ordinary book to be buried in the ground and come up intact and unsoiled.  Literally.  The damp earth and mud that eagerly clung to everything else seemed to shun the book, leaving the cover and pages without a speck of stray dirt anywhere in sight.  It didn’t even smell musty.  

Thumbing through the pages only added to the mystery.  It appeared to be a journal, but the handwriting varied from entry to entry, hinting at multiple authors, and the dates, on the passages that had them, made no sense.  Ben saw an early page with a date from nineteen ninety five, written with what looked to be a modern pen with modern handwriting, but then a few pages later there was an entry dated from eighteen eighty eight, written in elaborate cursive with flowing ink suggestive of an old fountain pen.  

And then there was the content.  Even a quick glance through the book made Ben blush as he skimmed passage after passage that left a person very different at the end than from when the detailed descriptions started.  He read about people being stripped of muscle and height, or being given excessive amounts of both, while other people were reduced to mindless slaves and eager concubines.  Ben felt a tingle in his tiny running shorts as he read a particularly detailed description of a man’s cock being inflated to mammoth proportions, wondering what it would have felt like for his own average organ to be dangling out the bottom of the thin material for everyone to see.  

He’d intended to leave it where he found it.  Whether he’d stumbled across an art project or the ramblings of someone off their meds, he wasn’t really interested in finding out.  Ben thought of himself as easy going, not the kind of angry person to scribble out an entry in a revenge journal, but as he jogged back to where he’d started he discovered the book still clutched tightly in hand.  He would have sworn he’d set it down, he even remembered doing so, but somehow it wound up coming home with him.  

It was all he could think about for the rest of the day.  The passages he’d skimmed through were fresh in his mind as he showered, imagining his own lean frame twisted in the horrifying ways as the men in the book.  He wondered what it would feel like in the moment.  If it was real, if the people writing those entries really could change someone, what would that be like?  Would it hurt?  Did it happen in the blink of an eye?  Did the writer feel better afterwards?  Was there anyone out there who’d want to do that to him?  

The last question made him shudder as he toweled off and gave himself a once over in the steamy mirror, the beads of water accentuating his ample definition as they cascaded down his muscled abs.  He wasn’t arrogant about it, but Ben knew he looked good.  His handsome face and perky ass were nightly targets of men at work, and he’d had more than his share of hook ups that he ghosted on afterwards, but he didn’t think he’d left anyone angry enough to dedicate a passage to him.  Or is that what all of the victims had thought?  

Towel wrapped tenuously around his trim waist, Ben sat at his kitchen counter intending to give the book another quick going over.  It was several inches thick and about two thirds full, and as he thumbed through the blank pages at the back, he started to second guess his initial reaction.  Was there anyone he wanted to write about?  There were more than enough annoying drunks that could stand to be taught a lesson, as well as a few of his more arrogant coworkers.  But did they really deserve the kinds of things he read about?  

“Oh, shit!”  Ben dropped the book when he caught the clock out of the corner of his eye.  He’d been sitting at the counter for hours, not minutes.  “How the fuck did that happen?”  He hopped off the stool, his now-dry towel falling to the floor, and scampered naked across his apartment to get dressed before he was late to work.  

**********

“Don’t think you’re gonna have much reading time tonight...it’s Wednesday.”

Ben waved at Adam as he came around behind the bar and gave the sculpted blonde a confused look.  “What are you…” he trailed off when he lifted his other hand and discovered the brown book wedged firmly in his grasp.  He blinked at it with the same disbelief as when he’d first discovered it, sure that he’d left it sitting on his counter at home.  He clearly remembered getting dressed, fixing his hair, and hurrying out the door, none of which included the book that somehow continued to follow him like a stray.  “Sorry man, it’s been a weird day,” Ben laughed awkwardly, stashing his belongings in their usual spot behind the bar.  

“Better get that game face on...gonna be lots of bros in here soon,” Adam sighed, rolling his eyes.  At first glance the muscle-shirted adonis, with his rippling back and brawny biceps, could easily be lumped into that category.  It wasn’t until someone got a closer look at the way he swayed his hips and stuck out his large, solid rear that they’d start to second guess themselves.  The handsome muscle man may have looked like Ken, but Adam was all Barbie deep down.    

“Why do we even have a “sports night”, anyway?  Trunks is a gay bar, not a fuckin' sports bar.
All we get are straight girls who drag their uncomfortable boyfriends here because it's the one night they'll agree to come.”  Ben forgot about the book and fell into his pre-opening routine with Adam, checking supplies and prepping garnishes while Zack, the young barback, flitted around sweeping floors and wiping tables.  

“At least they’re not as handsy,” Adam said, giving one of his solid globes a swat.  

“Yeah, but they don’t tip either.  And since when do you care about handsy,” Ben laughed.

Adam held a hand to his tanned, bulging chest in mock offense, pouting.  “What kind of lady do you take me for?”  

“The kind who’s been taken by every guy in here,” Zack called from across the room.  The lithe, dark skinned young man wagged his own ample bottom towards the bar as he spoke.  “Maybe you can land a few curious boys later?”  

“Weren’t you the one bragging about blowing that cute redhead who was here with the extra annoying girl last week,” Ben asked.   

Adam shook his head as if he were tossing his shaggy blonde hair.  “You mean Alyssa, who just, like, looooooves gay guys,” he mocked, raising his voice a few octaves. 

“Clearly, considering how quick her ‘boyfriend’ was to reciprocate,” Zack said with a smug laugh.  “And that was definitely NOT his first time.”  

“Bitch you never told me that part,” Adam said, winging a towel in Zack’s direction.  The nimble young man ducked out of the way and made a show of adjusting his hair.  “Leave out anything else?”  

Ben sighed and shook his head as his two friends chatted back and forth.  He was busy lining up glasses and checking bottles, but more and more he found his attention drifting back to the book.  His friends’ conversation turned into background noise as he thought about the passages he’d read, his hands itching.  

Ben tried to ignore it, but the harder he pushed the louder the voice in his head became.  It was going to be a long, crowded night with plenty of deserving patrons.  Surely there was someone he could write about.