Retroactive

by BRK   

On the tenth anniversary of his best friend’s unsolved disappearance, a mysterious man offers Geoff the opportunity to see for himself what happened. He knows he shouldn’t trust the stranger, but can he really pass up the chance to learn the truth first-hand?

It was a Thursday night in October, cold and dry. At least, that was what it was like outside where the autumn wind was whipping the dead, brown oak leaves around the asphalt, like a bored cat toying with its prey. Inside Greco’s, a once-thriving dive bar out on 13, it was warm and close—like there were too many people breathing the murky air, despite the lack of patrons. It was pretty much Pete, the taciturn, potbellied bartender; a couple of hale, white-bristled truckers in matching old fleece-lined windbreakers, playing at conversational one-upmanship around the always-popular theme What’s Wrong with the World over the soft strains of Stevie Nicks seeping from the antiquated juke box by the door; and me in the corner, slump-shouldered over my fifth beer, sozzled, melancholy, and peeved at myself for even being here.

Get a grip, Geoff, Inner Me coached. You’re too pretty for this. I huffed humorlessly. Plus you’ve got stuff on the ranch to do tomorrow, Inner Me persisted, as though I might have forgotten.

I grimaced and fixed my gaze on the round, lightly stained printed coaster under my half-downed Carlsberg. It was October 15. Inner Me knew that. I’ve got stuff tonight, I thought back at Inner Me tersely.

The bar’s longtime mascot, a leering cartoon Zeus not unreminiscent of the jolly, hard-muscled Disney Hercules version, eyed me from around the base of the stubby, green-glass bottle I’d been thunking down on his face all night. I was buzzed enough I half expected him to start talking to me, like I was in some poignant streaming-service comedy where Will Ferrell or Ryan Reynolds learns the error of his ways with a little help from a chatty, rights-available corporate toon.

I glared down at Coaster Zeus. He looked like he was up for it, too, the bastard. “Don’t you start,” I groused at the daddy-god, frowning preemptively.

An amused voice spoke up unexpectedly from over my shoulder. “At least hear me out first,” its owner said cheerily.

Surprised, I started to turn halfway to look up at the speaker, but there was no need as he was already plunking himself down in the chair opposite me. I focused on him with an effort. He was a bit of a daddy-god himself: he was older then me, anyway, maybe forties to my thirties. Clean-shaven, average height to my tall, and where I was softening-but-still-trim he was seriously built, if the bulges filling out his heavy-duty denim jacket were any indication. His skin was tanned and a bit weathered, the short, Roman-combed prematurely snowdrift gray bangs standing out in contrast. His eyes were cornflower blue and, unlike mine at the moment, sharp and unnervingly perceptive.

Once he was seated he caught the bartender’s eye, who nodded, and a moment later he came to the table with a bottle of Beck’s. I felt Pete turn wordlessly my way, checking in, but I ignored him and he went away again.

I tightened my lips as I considered the man across from me, trying to figure out where I knew him from and what the dickens he wanted. At my best I actually was very pretty, in a masculine, high-end sweater model kind of way, and so got my fair share of unsolicited attention; but this didn’t feel like this was that, and I sure wasn’t at my best. The guy had to be local, or at least had been around long enough for Pete to know his usual. The face looked familiar, too, like I’d seen him around town, though I didn’t seem to have registered the compact, god-like gym aesthetics he was evidently sporting under his jacket and jeans.

Wait. God-like proportions…? I glanced blearily down at Cartoon Zeus suspiciously, but his expression remained cheery and innocent. I’ll deal with you later, I thought crossly at the tricksy mascot, then returned my attention back to my unasked-for table-mate.

He smiled gently before I’d gathered my words. “Perhaps you are wondering who I am?” he suggested, his blue eyes twinkling.

“I am,” I agreed proudly, as though I had passed some kind of test.

The man took a sip of his own beer, then set it down. “Name’s Zeke,” he said.

I looked at him expectantly, but no further information seemed to be forthcoming. “Okay?”

He leaned forward onto his forearms and peered at me with interest. “So, what’s got you down, buddy?” he asked, his smile soft and welcoming.

I’m still wondering if I wish he hadn’t asked.

“You see, I’ve got a kind of ‘ability’,” Zeke was telling me, audibly putting the words in quotes. The tracks of my attention, or memory, must have slipped, because we were outside now, our boots crunching across in the gravel parking lot. I hunched my shoulders hunched against a brisk north wind that wanted to crawl into my basic fall jacket.

Zeke elaborated on his statement as wandered directionlessly toward the fringes of what passed for civilization this far from town. “I can let people peep into certain moments,” he said slowly. “Events. See it first-hand.” He added, “I call it… shadow-walking.”

My expression must have been dubious, though even as I was trying to suss out what he was up to I had to fight down a part of me that was eager to believe him. This was obviously bunk and a scam, I told myself firmly. His name for the ability didn’t sound very original either.

Zeke seemed amused by my skepticism. “Don’t you want to know what happened to your best friend?” he nudged, one silver eyebrow lifted.

A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold trickled up my spine. Had I told him about Keith’s disappearance? Geez, I really had had too much to drink.

“Ten years to the day,” he went on conversationally after a moment with an eye on the night-shrouded horizon, his words confirming I had indeed blabbed that much. “That makes it easy.” He stopped and turned to face me, holding my gaze. “We can do it right now, if you want.”

I should have confronted him. Demanded to know who he was and what scam he was pulling, going around targeting vulnerable people in bars and offering them a moment of out-of-body voyeurism in the ethereal past as solace for their decade-long butthurt. My morose mood and self-recrimination on this, the anniversary of his disappearance, must have stood out like a beacon to a grifter like him. I couldn’t help thinking about the past. I was so clueless back then. What signs had I missed? What could I have done?

Not that I was too pleased with the way I was now. I was just as hard on me-now as I was on me-then. Mostly, I was angry at myself for even being out here. There was no way this man could be offering what he claimed, but he sure knew what buttons to push to get me to wish he was.

I decided on calling his bluff. That would end all this, or at least trigger the part of the scam where he revealed what he wanted from me. “Yeah, all right,” I dared him, squaring my shoulders before the self-alleged time-peeper. “Show me.”

Zeke didn’t hide his smile as he fished in his jeans-jacket pocket and pulled out what looked like an amber stone the size of a robin’s egg. I felt my brows furrow as he handed it to me and I took it, examining it in my palm. It was small, irregular but smooth-faceted, and generally not very remarkable. He might have just found it caving that afternoon, for all I could tell. I thought to myself what a shame it was it was dark out—I wanted to see how the thing caught the sunlight.

Even as I thought this, the interior of the amber stone seemed to glow, enough that the light was filling my palm and making it look all pink and semi-translucent near the stone. Alarmingly, within seconds the world around me suddenly started to devolve into dark, howling shadows, like the tones of a watercolor done all in grays were being gusted silently around me in a loud, unceasing system of winds and eddies.

I looked up at Zeke in shock, but the stranger was already dissolving into a charcoal blur in keeping with the transformed surroundings. Shadow-walking, he had called it, I thought suddenly, and this sure looked like a world of shadows. An eerie thrill rose in me as I understood: Zeke’s powers were real. This between-world was real.

“Walk exactly one thousand steps,” the time-peeper’s voice said, disembodied and, like his form, increasingly indistinct as the low-growling shadow world took over. “That will take you where you want to go.”

A thousand steps sounded suspiciously arbitrary, until I remembered the destination for this little vision quest was exactly ten years in the past. In that moment one hundred steps a year felt like it made a lot of sense, somehow. “And then what!” I shouted.

“Drop the stone!” the garbled voice replied, just before Zeke blurred into the shadows completely and was gone.

I blinked, alone, half-drunk, and adrift on the astral plane. No, not adrift. I had a course and a destination. A little roll of excitement danced in my belly. I’d finally see what happened to Keith. Solve the mystery, get closure, all the good stuff. I just had to do this thing. A quick trip to dip my head into the past, I told myself, and back in time for morning o-j. I gripped the stone tightly in my fist and started walking.

A thousand steps may or may not sound like a lot, but the real challenge was keeping track. I had to concentrate all of my attention on counting, letting the actual pace of my steps be as automatic as possible. My strategy was to break the tally up into hundreds, which I figured was easier—until I almost lost track of how many hundreds I’d counted already three quarters of the way in. But I was determined and doggedly kept on marching in rhythm, counting the steps out aloud while actively resisting the very strong urge to sing “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers as I walked. I really wanted to, but I couldn’t risk the distraction.

“Ninety-eight… ninety-nine… one thousand!” I announced at last. I looked around, but the blurs and gusting grays all looked disappointingly the same. Had the walking done anything at all? I looked at the glowing amber stone in my hand. Drop the stone, he’d said. Seemed simple enough.

With an internal shrug, I turned my palm over and let the stone drop to the ground.

The real world flared vividly to life around me—the more so as it was suddenly bright and sunny instead of the nighttime gloom I’d left behind. I looked around, disoriented, having barely had time to take in that I was now standing in the middle of Route 13 instead of in a parking lot that fed onto it, when suddenly—

“HOOOOOOONK!!”

I twisted around to see a semi tractor-trailer barreling toward me, close enough I could see the whites of the terrified driver’s eyes as he blared his air horn deafeningly at me. More out of instinct than volition I leapt out of the way, landing in a heap on the weedy grass verge just in time as the truck rocketed past me. The horn dopplered dramatically as the truck sped away from the idiot it had almost creamed.

I sat up on my haunches, brushing rough bits of asphalt from my palms as I looked around in amazement. Traffic whizzed by me, a lot more than usually went this way. Across the highway Greco’s appeared to be doing a booming business even at this mid-afternoon hour, cars turning into the drive from the highway ever so often and filling up the decent-sized lot. It looked a lot like people coming out from town for the dinner service I knew was no longer offered there.

I looked to the right and drew in a breath. The derelict Exxon next to Greco’s, abandoned for years, was similarly thriving. The air was acrid with the scent of gasoline and diesel from the gas station and exhaust from the busy, and very loud, travel conduit not fifteen feet away that I’d almost died on.

It was hard to take in. I was close to where I had been, but I was definitely not when I had been. Even stranger was the fact that where I had expected something called “shadow-walking” to involve me being a ghostly, insubstantial observer in the past, here I was feeling, smelling, tasting… It was like I was inside the moment I’d wanted to see, instead of just viewing it from a distance…

A sudden thought occurred to me and lifted up my empty palm, staring at it in alarm. Of course, I had already dropped the stone. I leapt to my feet, peering first around me, then into the lanes of the highway between the cars and semis. There was no sign of the amber talisman-amulet-whatever anywhere.

My heart pounded nervously as I considered the implications of this. Where was I, really? Was this place just a vision? A very palpable, smellable, almost-gets-you-killed-by-a-speeding-truck vision? Or was it real?

Or was I actually in the past?—And, if so, how the fuck would I get back?

Exerting my flickering willpower, I forced down the panic and took one more look around me for the stone. When this availed of nothing I squared my shoulders and started myself walking determinedly in the direction of town. If I’d gotten the timing right, then somewhere nearby was my best friend, not yet disappeared. That was a good thing.

And, I thought with a wry twist of my lips, I might just catch a glimpse of a younger me, tragic fashion choices and all.

Ignoring the steady wind as it whipped my dark jacket and tee shirt around me, I smiled to myself as I sauntered along the shoulder’s edge with my hands in my jacket pockets, mindful of the possibilities that awaited me. I may even have whistled.

It was a haul and a half back to town on foot without my truck, which, of course, I’d foolishly left in the future. (Could you drive in the shadow world? It’d be worth a shot, anyway.) I’d tromped a half mile already through the shadow plane as it was. Plus I was hungry, which fit with my evening of drinking and not eating; though, weirdly, I was no longer the slightest bit intoxicated. Had all the alcohol been bled off into the whirling grays? Were there shadow demons in the aether getting a buzz off my four-and-a-half bottles of Carlsberg?

Amused by this thought, I decided the situation warranted making a go at hitching into town. Dangerous, I know—don’t try this at home, kids—but the truth was people liked to give me rides. Perks of being so wholesomely VGL, I guess. An unthreatening, innocent-looking pretty boy in a land of truculent alpha Joes. All I had to do was turn around and walk backward for a ways, sticking my thumb out and breaking out the big brilliant smile, and—oh, hey, it worked.

My ride was a soccer mom in a gleaming burgundy SUV. Her teenage daughter was in her front seat. The daughter kept asking her mom why she’d picked up a stranger, and the mom kept trying to watch me in her rear view mirror. I don’t think she’d really thought this through.

Soccer mom dropped me off in town at South Highway and Meridien, complete with one last wistful stare from her and an accompanying dark glare from the kid. I smiled and waved, then turned and looked around the busy town center, trying to formulate a plan.

There were no newspaper vending boxes in town—this had never really been a newspaper kind of place, and we were kind of between two distant major cities, both of which ignored us. If I wanted a “Mr. Sandman” moment I’d need to borrow someone’s phone to check the date. Actually the phone itself would probably tell me—if they handed me an iPhone 5 or whatever I was definitely in the past.

The fact that it was daylight, and I’d left at night, felt like a clue. If I’d miscounted and walked a thousand and one steps instead of a thousand—and it seemed like the count and not the span of each pace was what mattered—then I’d potentially overshot my mark by a good three and a half days or so. If that was the case, then Keith wouldn’t disappear from the bathroom of Kay’s Diner until half a week from now. That seemed promising. Plenty of time to map out my next steps.

I decided I would eat first—I really was feeling famished—then look for Keith. I started down Meridien toward the diner in question, already salivating for one of their half-pound cheeseburgers and a side of thick-cut fries we’d partaken of religiously on a weekly basis. Maybe, once I found Keith, I could talk to him and get clues about what was going to happen, but somehow that wasn’t a high priority. As long as I was there with him at the time when the reports said he vanished, I could, I was sure, prevent whatever was going to happen.

My step faltered and I shuddered to a stop, causing someone behind me on the sidewalk to have to step around me with a curse. I had only come back to find out what happened, I reminded myself. When had I started thinking about changing things? Probably time was fixed and you couldn’t alter so much as the death of an ant anyway. And if I did alter Keith’s fate and prevent his disappearance, wouldn’t I be risking the future I knew, and potentially my very existence—?

I shook my head and started walking again. Surely, someone with the power that asshole in the jeans jacket seemed to possess wasn’t reckless or anarchic enough to send me here just to blow holes in the universe, or make me disappear up my own existence. This was a prank, nothing more. He was obviously just fucking around, and sending people through time for a laugh. Whatever I thought of that time-fucker, endangering reality had to mean he’d be in the shit too.

Still… I should probably limit my actual interaction with pre-disappearance Keith and twentysomething Geoff, if I could. I smirked to myself. No invites to the Fish Under the Sea Dance for me!

As it turned out it was a moot point, as the powers that be had other ideas. I dropped into one of the deep-upholstered booths at Kay’s, drinking in the amazing smells, and when Maude showed up, harried but friendly and with pencil poised over her pad, I quickly ordered the requisite cheddarburger, crispy brown pile-o-fries, and Dutch chocolate shake (served with the stainless steel mixing cup). No sooner had Maude departed to put in my order than I heard a once-familiar voice say, “How’d you get in here ahead of me?”

And then Keith was slipping into the booth. He tried to slow the descent of his butt as he clocked that I wasn’t the Geoff he was expecting to see, comically making it look like he was sitting down in overcranked footage. I was just registering exactly who I was gaping at for the first time in a decade when an even more familiar voice said cautiously, “Hey, who ya sitting with?”

A second later, another form rounded into the booth and dropped onto the seat opposite in slow motion, and a version of my own latte-brown eyes joined Keith’s vivid green ones in staring aghast at the ten-years-too-old Geoff sitting in front of them. Meanwhile I was staring back at them, because fuck me and the perspective you get from living an extra ten years. Not only had clueless then-me not quite realized just how hunky and altogether tall, dark, and handsome my very well-built, farm-work-conditioned, broad-shouldered, corn-fed, tight-white-tee-shirt-wearing best bud was and (as I now realized) how ridiculously big a crush on him I’d been hiding from myself all this time—but I had also never truly understood just how mesmerizingly gorgeous I was face to face. Evidently mirrors didn’t compare to the real thing from two feet away.

The differences in how the two boys’ reactions to me manifested was a priceless. Geoff—i.e., young me—was agape and amazed, eyes round and almost-smiling in that way people have when their surprised by an amazing coincidence—like, say, running into a random stranger who happens to look a lot like you, and, extra-flukily, also enjoys eating at your favorite fast-casual burger joint. Geoff was clearly gearing up to ask me a string of questions about myself, probing for more crazy, glitch-in-the-Matrix connections between us. It was frankly adorable and I kind of wanted to kiss him senseless just to see if he’d go with it, and if he’d notice that the spontaneous hard-on pushing against my hip as I made out with him was exactly alike, too.

My tall, dark, and brooding farm-hunk buddy, meanwhile, was eyeing me cautiously, his bright, skeptical green eyes measuring me for ominousness. I think that, more than Geoff, he reckoned I looked too much like his best friend for random chance to account for, and was genre savvy enough to guess that a stranger who looked like you wasn’t necessarily good news—or what you thought he was. At the same time I could also tell that he also very much liked what he saw, and that whatever he found boyishly sexy in his age-contemporary best bud was even more intensely arousing in the more mature version that now sat across the table from him.

I swallowed, returning his frank stare as blood seemed to heat in my veins. For some reason I found his suspicious, assessing, not unappreciative stare smoking hot. I could almost feel the table vanishing between us and Keith pouncing on me like a starved vampire, marking me neck possessively before teaching me how real, passionate, red-blooded men kissed the men that turned them on.

I didn’t think the collision of fates was supposed to involve loss of brain power from trying to ignore a hard-on, but maybe that was me not being up on my mythology. Cartoon Zeus was probably laughing, and fuck that guy. Because what brainpower I had was telling me I hadn’t miscounted, and this was, in fact, the day and the event I had come here to see—and, if I had the balls, to stop.

We stared at each other for a long moment, and, seriously, there hadn’t been this much sexual tension in a booth at Kay’s since Heather Allen, Whedon High School’s most notorious tramp, had scored a “study date” with both of the McKenzie twins.

Keith looked amazing. Under that skintight white tee shirt he had the body of someone who not only worked out all the time but had a carefully structured plan for developing each muscle group to perfection, which was all the more impressive as I knew for a fact that it was all from farming and ranchwork, with maybe a few push-up and sit-up routines thrown in here and there while he was waiting for the cattle to foal and suchlike. He was only lightly hairy, but his chest hair was dark enough it showed through the translucent white of his tee, and the hair on his arms looked appealingly dark against the tanned skin of his corded forearms. His jawline was firm, just starting to brandish a faint swath of stubble this late in the afternoon, and I found myself distracted by it and the patch of neck underneath it, imagining the taste and feel of it against my lips and tongue. He was growing his wavy hair out a little, just like I remembered, making him look slightly Eighties. The nearly-black locks made the little square fake-diamond stud in his left ear stand out out enticingly. His eyes, still wide and fixed on mine, looked almost crayon-green, and his mouth, slightly open, seemed to pull at me from across the booth.

Feeling myself growing hot with lust I tore my eyes from Keith, only to lock gazes with… myself, ten years junior. Geoff at 24 was smooth-cheeked, languid, and well-proportioned, defined but not buff, with smooth skin that tanned russet-red rather than brown and an almost hypnotic grace even when sitting still. If Keith’s mouth called to me, Geoff’s was so intense I could almost feel his cabernet lips against mine from two feet away. As I watched he licked his lips, slow and nervous, and fuck if just watching that didn’t feel like an actual, mouth-melding kiss.

My head insisted on reminding me that this was me I was practically drooling over. But my growing state of arousal was such that all I could do was think about how I could leverage with this information. Comparison with Keith’s more muscular frame made me self-conscious about my lack of brawn, so… maybe I could do something about that. If I managed to get decade-younger-me hooked on working out, loving the endorphin rush or whatever, the results would reverberate through time, right? And as Geoff got fitter and buffer-looking the effects would be magnified in my own bod. Though, looking at him I had to admit Geoff was already tight, firm, and altogether delicious-looking…

There was a clunk, and I realized Maude, the kind-hearted sixtyish waitress I remembered from dozens of meals at this establishment, was depositing the wide oval platter with my food in front of me. The shake, and steel canister with the leftover deliciousness, followed a second later, the heavy glass tumbler thunking dully against heavy oak. I looked up at her and smiled, embarrassed, and prayed she hadn’t caught me perving on myself and my innocent, completely-platonic-I-swear best friend.

As usual, my beaming face melted all hearts. “Aw, that’s where I knew you from,” she said, before turning to Geoff and asking, “I take it this one’s your big brother, dear?”

Geoff finally tore his gaze away from me, though whether he’d been riveted by the shock of seeing another him or the same kind of reaction to my beauty I’d had with his I wasn’t sure. He looked up at Maude in surprise. “Huh? No, he’s not—”

“You’re absolutely right, I’m the big brother,” I broke in, smiling warmly at Maude. “Just in from, er, Toronto,” I added, picking a faraway city more or less at random. I twisted my smile into a smirk. “He only likes to pretend I don’t exist because he’s jealous of my looks and accomplishments,” I told her with a wink.

“What? I am not!” Geoff protested.

I gave Maude a look, and she nodded knowingly before turning to Geoff and Keith. “What can I get you boys? The usual?”

“Remember the extra mushrooms,” Keith said automatically, and I had to smile at this almost pavlovian response.

“Do I ever?” Maude said, and a moment later she was gone.

As soon as she was out of earshot, Keith leaned forward with a determined expression. “Okay, who the fuck are you?” he hissed at me, only loud enough to be just barely heard over the afternoon hubbub of the diner. “And why did you tell her you were his brother?”

I shrugged expressively. “More plausible than explaining I’m him from ten years in the future.”

Keith and Geoff blinked at me. A moment passed. The noise of the diner lapped at our table like a gentle waves in a lagoon.

Keith narrowed his eyes doubtfully. Geoff, on the other hand, wasn’t as dismissive of the idea. “Is that who you are?” he said finally.

I was about to answer “yes,” risk to the timelines or whatever be damned, but then a blindingly obvious fact rather belatedly occurred to me. Geoff was a younger version of me, right? Everything was as before—except I didn’t remember this meeting with an older me. Not even a little. In fact I still remembered this lunch as it had originally happened, just the two of us meeting up here, sitting opposite each other in this very booth and gabbing about nothing important over burgers and steak fries. It being, in hindsight, the last time I’d hung out with Keith before he’d disappeared, that lunch was permanently seared in my memory. The fact that it had now no longer happened that way might mean that the future had been changed, or it might signify something else even more transchronologically abstruse. But it seemed clear that me not remembering it this way meant one thing for sure: this Geoff in front of me… was not going to turn into me. This me, sitting here meeting future-me, was not the Geoff that I had been or remembered.

This was a me that would become a different Geoff in a different reality.

Or, rather, in this reality, because he was the Geoff here, not me.

I deflated a little inwardly. So much for manipulating young Geoff here into growing me instant muscles, I thought wryly.

With all this realized in the space of a second, I sagely discarded the unqualified affirmative I’d been about to give him and answered, “Not exactly.”

Keith was incredulous at this temporization. “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” he demanded.

“I mean,” I said, “that… I’m hungry.” And with that I lifted my burger with both hands and got to work nomnomnomming—because I really was hungry, and also a bit confused by my raging erection. Meanwhile Maude knew her business and had fired the boys’ regular orders as soon as they’d come in so their food arrived mere moments later. For a while we all ate in silence while eyeballing each other like attendees at a spy convention.

I had no idea what they were thinking, but for my part I was starting to fall like my real reasons for being here were slipping away, increasingly irrelevant compared to a growing fascination with the idea I might get to spend some quality time alone with the two attractive men across from me currently trying to figure out whether I was Geoff McFly or a face-copying Hannibal Lechter.

I deliberately turned my brain off for a few minutes and just enjoyed the exquisitely tasty burger I’d been served. It was thick and deliciously juicy, the seasoned darkness of the charbroiled beef complemented perfectly by the sharp, gooey cheese, bright, cool tomato and crinkly romaine, and the hint of tangy sauce. I chewed happily, aware of the boys agonizing in my peripheral vision as they gathered the stones to confront me again.

I got a third of the way into the hefty sandwich without any developments, so I decided to mix things up a bit. I wasn’t the observer I’d thought I’d be, and with that idea gone I couldn’t help thinking that I might just be the catalyst instead. And with my reality no longer at risk, demonstrably divorced from this one and for all I even knew gone forever, I… kind of had nothing to lose. I’d been living with regret for too long. I wanted to make things happen.

Humming in satisfaction at my decision and the yumminess of my meal, I very pointedly set down my half-eaten burger, ostentatiously cleaned the juice from my hands with a large, sturdy paper napkin, and got up from the table, casting them one more passing look as I headed toward the back of the restaurant. I caught a last glimpse of them exchanging a confused glance, and then they were behind me, swallowed up on the controlled chaos of the busy restaurant. I felt reckless, overstimulated, and, maybe most of all, giddy with the prospect of a kind of liberation I hadn’t known I needed.

I headed down the back hallway I’d used a few times way back when to avoid a couple of girls with rather aggressive crushes. Bypassing the kitchen, my stride slowing as I got to bathrooms (marked “lads” and “lasses” for reasons I had never been able to figure out). Moving past them I kept going, heading straight for the rear fire door. The noise of the diner’s main space grew progressively muted behind me as approached the exit.

I didn’t go out, though. Instead I turned and casually leaned my butt against the fake walnut paneling and just lounged there for a few minutes, one booted foot up nonchalantly against the wall behind me, like I was a cowboy waiting for the rodeo to start. I didn’t have long to wait.

I’d expected Geoff, if only because he was on the outside of the booth and would have had to have gotten up anyway, so I was surprised to see it was Keith who came to find me. Now that we were both standing I felt the couple of inches he had on me, not to mention the twenty pounds of solid muscle he had that I did not. His presence had a powerful effect on me, like his physical form was a natural stimulant exercising a low-grade but insistent aphrodisiacal effect on anyone nearby and attuned to the masculine wavelength. His Crayola-green eyes bore into mine, my whole body reacting to the proximity of his solid, radiant self with delight and urgent desire.

Fuck, was it just my unique perspective, or was everything amped up to 11 in this reality? Was the unnatural energy declivity between me and my younger self just making us all extra-horny?

Because—seriously, how had younger me not consciously known I was a goner for this man?

My former obliviousness was even more inexplicable given Keith’s customary lack of respect for personal space when it came to me. He was always close, always brushing shoulders when we walked and pressing our thighs together when we sat. I watched him move in instinctively to get close with me, too, then check himself, remembering he wasn’t sure who I was. I finished the job instead, standing forward from the wall and moving in close to Keith. He didn’t back up.

“Who are you?” he said again quietly in his soft baritone. He sounded protective, like he didn’t his buddy to get hurt—but he was also curious and, I saw with a thrill, extremely aroused.

“You know who I am.” I tilted my head slightly, holding his gaze. “Another Geoff,” I said. “Older.” I dropped my eyes briefly to his lips, then back up, leaning in the barest few millimeters. “Wiser.”

He shook his head, eyes not moving from mine. “What are you doing to me?” he whispered finally, his voice barely audible over the semi-distant diner noise.

My cock surged in my pants, and I gave him a crooked smile. I couldn’t help myself. “Anything you want,” I said softly.

As if reenacting my fantasy of a few moments earlier, Keith pounced, warm hands rising to cup my cheeks as his mouth dove onto mine. I opened for him instantly, twenty years of half-recognized want exploding through me like a drug.

We were only at it for a few minutes when we heard an awed “Whoa” from somewhere close by. We turned as one to see Geoff standing there, inches away, watching us make out with reddened cheeks and darkened eyes. I flicker in my hormone-heated brain wondered if he might not be jealous, but it was pretty clear that my guileless, happy-go-lucky younger self was just uncomplicatedly turned on by the sight of two hot, oversexed guys macking in a secluded hallway.

My assessment felt vindicated a moment later when his response to me smiling at him and extending my arm, offering for him to join us, was a brilliant smile and ready acquiescence.

We had just brought him into our embrace, Keith and I both eyeing him hotly while he stared back at us with an expression of gleeful, anticipatory wonder, when all at once the world dropped away—replaced with whirling, screaming gusts of gray.

I panicked, gripping my men harder. “Don’t move!” I yelled over the howls, and they clung to me, scared. “Don’t take a single step!”

It didn’t matter. I felt the movement of the plane itself around me, rapidly whipping back through the unknown, even seeming to accelerate as we went like a rubber band released from its fullest extension. The sense of force involved was immense, as though driven by the mass of the shadow world itself. If any of us were flung off into the whirling nothingness, they’d be lost forever. “Hold on!” I cried, and we hugged as close and hard as we could.

Just as suddenly the real world lurched back into being, the shadows melting instantly away into the inky night like an unremembered dream. We tumbled to the ground as though tossed from a speeding car. Dazed, I found my knees and hands were pressing into gravel.

A sickening suspicion filled me.

Sure enough, as the three of us got to our feet we found ourselves standing on the edge of the nearly empty parking lot behind Greco’s, the dive bar I’d left from earlier than night and ten years in Geoff and Keith’s future, now closed for the night. Wee hours stars glimmered overhead from a black, moonless sky. There was little sound but for a few random passing cars and the buzzing of a pink neon Genesee sign left on in one of the bar windows. We drew closer to each other instinctively, Keith’s arm around my shoulder and both of us holding Geoff close to us, his back against us as we stared around in various flavors of confusion.

A movement caught my eye, and I glanced up toward the edge of the highway, maybe a hundred feet away. There, looking smug, was the compact, hard-muscled, silver-haired time-grifter who’s started all of this. “Asshole,” I breathed.

The others looked where I was glaring. I wanted to stride toward him, maybe grab him be the lapels of that stupid jeans jacket and shake some answers out of him, but I was unwilling to free myself from my guys’ embrace, not when they were this disoriented and vulnerable.

I might have shouted at him—”What do you want!”, something predictable like that—but I didn’t get the chance. As soon as we were all looking him he gave us a jaunty wave and stepped backward into the highway. As we stood there gaping, he vanished completely a second before an olive-black Jeep sped past, just missing their encounter with a manipulative time-fucker who’d just changed reality as we knew it for no good reason whatsoever.

Vote on this story

Phone sex fantasy by BRK Phone chat was never like this. 2,232 words Added Aug 2004 16k views 5.0 stars (9 votes) No comments yet •Huge Cock•Multi-abs•Multicock•Multiarm•Multilimb•Replication•Size Increase•Selfcest•Complete •M/M

Tuesday by BRK My best bud Kev and I have a secret. Okay, it’s a really badly kept secret—I grow extras. But when Kev starts to change too, we soon find out there are lots of secrets at my school. 7 parts 13k words Added May 2003 Updated 1 May 2021 31k views 5.0 stars (11 votes) No comments yet •Extra digits•Multi-abs•Multicock•Multiarm•Multilimb•Multipec•Replication•Stretchy•Incest•Twins•Selfcest•Body Swap •M/M•M/M/M/...

Secret Santa by BRK Joe’s crew at his new firehouse are destined to become very important to him, but the extent to which he’s more and more heart-thuddingly attracted to his handsome, well-muscled workmates worries him more than a little. 3 parts 15k words Added Dec 2016 19k views 5.0 stars (15 votes) No comments yet •Cock Growth•Huge Cock•Multi-abs•Multiarm•Multileg•Multilimb•Three Legs•Replication•Muscle Growth•Muscle/Strength•Always Shirtless•Incest•Brothers•Selfcest•Christmas•Complete •M/M•M/M/M/...

SpoogeQuest by BRK After pissing off his game-developer ex, Vlad finds himself inside an open-world gay erotic fantasy game where everything about him is up to 11—and, unless he undertakes a perilous quest, further changes will await him. 4,829 words Added Sep 2019 11k views 5.0 stars (11 votes) No comments yet •Cock Growth•Huge Balls•Huge Cock•Multicock•Replication•Muscle Growth•Muscle/Strength•Plausible Size Difference•Size Increase•Selfcest•Witch/Warlock/Wizard•Fantasy Realm

Me two by BRK Chris has some time off from his celluloid heroics as an A-list movie star and is going through fan mail when he finds a joke twin-making machine. Amused, he tries it out, with… unexpected results. 2,725 words Added Jan 2021 6,703 views 5.0 stars (16 votes) No comments yet •Multicock•Multihead•Multileg•Multilimb•Three Legs•Multipec•Replication•Incest•Twins•Selfcest•Merging•Complete •M/M

Opportunities and escalations by BRK Brothers Coren and Pranam are diverted from their usual slightly roguish pursuits by an accidental teleport to a highly secure space station. Facing potentially dire accusations, Coren’s pilfering skills put them in possession of a device that might just alter the balance of things—and give Coren a chance to indulge in a bit of mischief aimed at his attention-loving brother. 2,564 words Added Apr 2023 3,936 views 5.0 stars (2 votes) No comments yet •Cock Growth•Huge Cock•Replication•Public Nudity•Mouthcock•Incest•Brothers•Selfcest•Nonconsensual change•Space Travel•April Fool’s Day •M/M

Wormholing by BRK Corey has a secret ability to pull objects through space from one place to another. He doesn’t ever want his lover, Will, to find out, until one day he faces a temptation he’s increasingly unable to resist. 4 parts 14k words Added Sep 2022 Updated 16 Sep 2023 5,390 views 4.9 stars (14 votes) No comments yet •Replication•Selfcest•Witch/Warlock/Wizard •M/M

Joined by BRK Dylan wakes up kissing an incredibly beautiful man he’s never met before, and finds that he’s more connected to this man than any lover he’s ever had. 5 parts 23k words Added Sep 2017 Updated 6 Feb 2021 19k views 4.9 stars (31 votes) No comments yet •Cock Growth•Huge Cock•Extra digits•Multicock•Multihead•Multitongue•Multitorso•Replication•Muscle Growth•Muscle/Strength•Getting Taller•Size Increase•Selfcest•Nonconsensual change•Merging •M/M•M/M/M