I had known Kyle since college.
We weren't just two people who passed each other in the hallway or occasionally sat next to each other in class. We lived in the same dorm, spent evenings together, went to parties and the gym, studied for the same exams, and sometimes talked late into the night when the rest of the floor was already asleep, or pretending to be.
To most people, Kyle was simply that handsome straight guy everyone liked.
To me, he was a problem.
He had broad shoulders, a flat stomach, and the kind of body that didn't seem to require much effort to look good. All it took was for him to take off his shirt after a workout or stretch beside his bed in the morning, and I had to pretend I wasn't looking. But the worst part was his smile. Sweet, a little cocky, sometimes completely innocent. The kind that could disarm me faster than seeing his naked body after a shower.
I never told him.
Back in college, I was convinced Kyle was completely straight. He dated girls, joked around with the guys, seemed perfectly comfortable with himself, and never gave me any reason to think he might want anything more. And I wasn't willing to risk our friendship just because I caught myself looking at him for too long far too often.
So I buried it.
At least, I thought I did.
Years later, I reached out to him for a stupid reason. I remembered an old college textbook I'd once lent him for a class. I messaged him and asked if he might still have it, and Kyle replied almost immediately.
"I think so. Come over and we'll look for it."
When he opened the door, he smiled exactly the way he used to.
And suddenly, college came rushing back.
For a few seconds, we stood there in the doorway, both a little older, a little different, and yet strangely the same.
Kyle was wearing a plain T-shirt and sweatpants, but he still had the kind of body that made even ordinary clothes look good. He looked more mature than he had in college, broader through the shoulders, calmer in the face, but when he smiled at me and said my name, something inside me went right back to the place where I'd tried to bury it years ago.
"It's good to see you, Matt," he said.
"You too."
He let me inside. His apartment was ordinary, a little messy, with shelves full of books, boxes of old stuff, and a college photo leaning against one of the walls. I noticed the two of us in it immediately. Kyle had one arm thrown over my shoulders, grinning widely, while I stood beside him pretending the gesture didn't affect me at all.
"I can't believe you still have that," I said.
Kyle glanced at the picture and laughed quietly.
"Hard to throw away proof that we were once young and stupid."
"You were stupid. I was responsible."
"Sure. That's why you always came to parties with me."
The conversation was light, but underneath it, I could feel something heavier. Every joke pulled a memory behind it. Every smile reminded me how many times I'd stared at him for too long back in the dorm.
Kyle walked over to the bookshelf and started going through some old books.
"It was the one from Professor Harrison's class, right?"
"Yeah. The huge boring one nobody except us actually read."
"Speak for yourself. I'm pretty sure I only pretended to read it."
A moment later, he pulled a book from the bottom shelf and handed it to me.
"Here. Somehow, it survived."
I took it from him with a small smile. The cover was worn, the corners bent, and a few old sticky notes were still sticking out between the pages. I opened it automatically, more out of nostalgia than anything else.
That's when a folded piece of paper fell out.
I bent down and picked it up before I even had time to think.
At the top, written in Kyle's familiar handwriting, was a title:
Things I Wanted to Do With Matt in College
I froze.
I read the first item twice.
Jerking Off With Matt
Then I saw the next ones beneath it.
Matt's Massage and His Hand
Matt Blows Me
I Blow Matt
My heart started pounding. There were even more intimate things farther down the list, but before I could really process them, I became aware of Kyle standing beside me.
When I looked up, he was staring at the paper in my hand.
His face immediately turned red.
He didn't snatch it away. He didn't shout. He just stood there, completely still, looking so embarrassed it was as if I'd just seen something he'd been hiding inside himself for years.
I slowly looked up at him.
"Kyle... was all of this about me?"
For a moment, he said nothing.
Then he lowered his eyes and answered quietly.
"Yeah."
"I thought you were straight," I said.
Kyle gave a quiet laugh, but there was no amusement in it.
"So did I. I always liked girls. But with you, it was different."
I looked back at the paper. At the first item.
Jerking Off With Matt
"Where did this come from?" I asked.
Kyle rubbed the back of his neck. His face was still red, but he wasn't running away. He stood there like someone who had carried a secret for years and suddenly didn't have the strength to hide it anymore.
"Do you remember that night after Brandon's party?" he asked.
I remembered.
We had come back to the dorm really late that night. The hallway was almost empty, the lights in our room were off, and we were both too exhausted to talk. We each got into our own bed. Kyle on one side of the room, me on the other.
"I thought you were asleep," I said.
Kyle smiled faintly.
"I wasn't."
For a moment, he stared at the floor, as if it was easier to talk to that than to me.
"I heard you moving under the covers. I didn't know for sure what you were doing, but... I figured it out. And I was hard too."
Heat rushed through me.
Kyle looked up.
"I was lying a few feet away from you, trying to pretend nothing was happening. But what I really wanted was to ask if you were doing it. And if I could too."
I didn't answer right away.
Because I remembered that night too. I remembered not being able to sleep. I remembered Kyle in the other bed, his quiet breathing, the shape of his body beneath the blanket, and my own hand doing something it shouldn't have been doing while I thought about him.
"I was thinking about you that night," I finally said.
Kyle went completely still.
"Seriously?"
I nodded.
"Yeah."
For a moment, we just stared at each other, as if we'd suddenly discovered that for years we'd been lying on opposite sides of the exact same fantasy.
My eyes returned to the first item.
"Do you still want to do it?"
Kyle swallowed.
"Yeah."
I put the book down on the coffee table, but I left the list beside it, out in the open.
I didn't want it disappearing between the pages again. Not after what I'd just heard. For years, I'd thought that night in the dorm belonged only to me, to my quiet thoughts and my hidden hand beneath the blanket. And now Kyle was standing in front of me telling me that he'd been lying only a few feet away, hard, thinking about exactly the same thing.
"You really want to do this?" I asked.
Kyle nodded.
"Yeah."
We started undressing slowly, as if every movement mattered. Shirts first. Then pants. When I was down to my boxers, I could see that Kyle was already hard too. The fabric stretched clearly over him, giving him away before he could say anything.
He looked at me and saw the same thing.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
Then Kyle hooked his fingers under the waistband of his boxers and pulled them down.
My breath caught in my throat.
He was beautiful. Not just handsome, not just well-built, not just the same Kyle I remembered from post-workout showers and mornings in the dorm. He was standing in front of me naked and hard, real, with the body I'd once only been able to fantasize about.
"Matt," he said quietly.
Only then did I realize he was looking at me the same way.
I pulled off my boxers.
Kyle swallowed, and his eyes stayed on me longer than he ever would have allowed himself back in college.
We sat beside each other on the couch. At first, we didn't touch each other. Each of us was only supposed to touch himself, exactly the way Kyle had imagined it all those years ago in the dorm.
He started first.
He wrapped his hand around himself slowly, almost uncertainly, as if he was still testing whether he was really allowed to do this in front of me. I watched his fingers move over his hard cock, the tension in his thighs, the way he tried to keep himself composed.
Then I wrapped my hand around myself too.
Kyle reacted immediately. His hand stopped for a second, and his eyes lifted to mine.
"Is this how you imagined it?" I asked.
"Almost," he replied.
"What was different?"
His hand moved more slowly.
"It was dark back then. I couldn't see you. I could only hear you. Now I can watch."
The words made me tighten my grip and slide my hand from the base all the way to the tip. Kyle watched every movement I made, and I watched his. With every passing second, we became more confident, the rhythm of our hands beginning to match as if we were really going back to that night and fixing everything we'd been too afraid to do.
We moved closer. Our knees almost touched. Kyle's face was flushed, but he didn't look away.
"Did you think about me when you did this in college too?" I asked.
His hand sped up.
"More often than I should have."
I couldn't help it. I sped up with him. For a while, there was nothing but the wet sound of our hands moving and the looks between us that said more than all those years of caution ever had.
Kyle moved his hand faster, less uncertain now, finally giving in to what he'd denied himself back then. I did the same, watching him, his body, his hand, his face caught somewhere between embarrassment and relief.
He came first with a quiet, broken moan, never taking his eyes off me. The sight of it pushed me over the edge only seconds later. I came right after him, tightening my grip as it felt like years of buried tension finally spilled out of me all at once.
Afterward, we sat naked on the couch, dazed and far too quiet.
Kyle looked at me, his face still flushed but calmer now.
"Yeah," he said softly. "That's exactly how I wanted it back then."
I reached for the list and looked at it one more time. The first item had only been jerking off together, and yet it had already broken open something we'd both kept buried for years.
If that was only the beginning, I couldn't stop thinking about what the rest of the list was going to do to us.
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