“Baby Boy” and “Big Guy”
An SPH Experience by gagmewithyourpride.
—
Rehab isn’t where you expect to make friends. Or maybe it is—I wouldn’t know. The first time I went, I didn’t talk to anyone. The second time, I talked too much. The third time, which was about two years ago, I landed somewhere in the middle: quiet enough to listen, open enough to connect. That’s where I met him.
His name doesn’t matter. What matters is the shape of him: five-foot-eight, stocky, broad across the shoulders, thick forearms covered in old tattoos that had faded to the color of dried leaves. He had a deep voice—the kind that came from somewhere in the chest rather than the throat—and a laugh that was too loud for the rooms we were in. He was forty-four then. I was forty-two. We were both there for the same reason, more or less. Drinking. The kind of drinking where you stop being able to count the reasons why.
He was straight. That was clear from the beginning. Not in a way that mattered—I wasn’t there to flirt, and he wasn’t there to be flirted with—but in the way he talked about women, in the way he carried himself, in the particular casual confidence of a man who’d never had to think about whether other men were evaluating his body. He talked about his ex-wife, his girlfriend before that, a woman he’d been seeing on and off who worked at a body shop. He talked about them the way straight men talk about women—with a mixture of desire and frustration and genuine affection that I always found a little fascinating, the way I find any emotional architecture fascinating when it’s built differently from mine.
We became friends the way you become friends in rehab. Slowly, then all at once. We sat next to each other in group. We walked the grounds together during free time. We ate at the same table. We talked about the things you talk about when you’re stripped down to your scaffolding—fear, failure, family, the specific shape of the hole you’d been trying to fill. He told me about his daughter. I told him about the time I lost my apartment. He told me about the first time he blacked out. I told him about the last time. We built the kind of intimacy that only exists in shared crisis—fast, deep, slightly artificial, but real enough in the moment to feel like it would last.
It did last, surprisingly. We exchanged numbers on the last day. He lived three states away. I lived in the city. We texted. At first, it was the standard recovery check-in stuff—How are you doing today? One day at a time. Made it to a meeting. Then it evolved. We started talking about normal things. Sports. Movies. Work. The ordinary texture of life that returns when you stop drowning in it.
He was good at normal. Better than I was. He could talk about a football game for forty minutes without it feeling like small talk. I admired that. I’d spent so long in my own head that normal conversation felt like a foreign language, and he was a native speaker.
—
Last summer, I got my Prince Albert done.
I’d wanted one for years. Since my thirties, at least. There was something about the idea that appealed to me—the permanence, the commitment, the fact that it was a piercing through the part of the body that most men protect with their lives. A Prince Albert is a statement. It says: I did something deliberate to my cock, and I chose to do it, and I live with it now. I liked that. I liked the agency of it. I liked the idea of having a cock that was modified, decorated, marked as mine in a way that went beyond the default.
Also, if I’m being honest—and I think I have to be honest, because this is the whole point—I liked the idea that it might draw attention away from the size. A Prince Albert is interesting. A four-inch erection is not. If someone was looking at my cock, I wanted them looking at the ring, not the length. I wanted a distraction—a sleight of hand. Don’t look at how small it is—look at the metal going through the head.
So I got it done. I went to a studio I’d researched, I sat in the chair, I breathed through the needle, and I walked out with a curved barbell through the head of my cock and a soreness that lasted two weeks. I loved it immediately. Even soft—even at my unimpressive one and a half inches—the ring was visible, a small circle of steel nestled against the head, catching light, drawing the eye. It made my cock look intentional. Designed. Like it was supposed to be that way.
I told him about it the day after. We were texting, and I mentioned it casually—or as casually as you can mention a piercing through your dick to a straight man you met in rehab.
Got a Prince Albert yesterday, I typed.
What the fuck is that?
I explained. I sent him a Wikipedia link. I waited.
The three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.
Through your dick? Through the actual head?
Yep.
Did it hurt?
Yes.
Why would you do that?
Why would you get a tattoo?
He laughed. I could tell because he sent haha in caps and then a string of emojis that didn’t quite match the energy but were close enough.
Then: I wanna see it.
I stared at the message. I read it three times. I wanna see it. Four words. No hedging, no embarrassment, no self-consciousness. Just the direct, uncomplicated request of a straight man who wanted to see another man’s pierced cock—not because he was attracted to men, but because he was curious, and curiosity, for him, was a simple thing. He saw something interesting. He wanted to look at it. He asked. That was it.
I should mention something here. I’m six-foot-one. I’m gay. I’ve been out since I was nineteen. I’ve been with enough men to know where I fall on the spectrum of desirability, and I know that my cock—four inches hard, one and a half soft, thin, with a Prince Albert that does its best to compensate—is not the kind of cock that gets compliments. I’ve seen the reaction. I’ve lived the reaction. The glance, the polite neutrality, the moment where a man’s face does nothing because he’s choosing not to react. I’ve had men touch it with two fingers, the way you’d touch something you weren’t sure was clean. I’ve had men ignore it entirely, working around it, focusing on everything else. I’ve had one man laugh—not cruelly, but reflexively, the way you laugh when you see something unexpected—and then apologize, and then leave.
I know what my cock is. I know what it isn’t.
And now a straight man I’d met in rehab wanted to see it.
I took the photo in my bathroom. I was hard—I’d been thinking about sending it, and the thinking had done its work, and my cock was at its full four inches, curving slightly upward, the Prince Albert barbell visible through the head, a thin line of steel that caught the light. I angled the camera to show the piercing clearly. I didn’t try to make the cock look bigger. I didn’t use perspective tricks. I just held my phone at chest height and took a photo of my cock as it was: small, hard, pierced, mine.
I sent it.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared.
That’s wild, he wrote. Does it feel different? When you jerk off?
Yeah. Better. More sensitive.
What about sex?
Same. Better. The ring rubs inside.
Huh. A pause. Doesn’t it get in the way?
You get used to it.
Looks like it hurts just sitting there.
It did at first. Not anymore.
Cool, man. That’s hardcore.
That was it—no commentary on the size. No damn, that’s small, or I was expecting more, or even the polite, measured silence that I’d learned to read as disappointment. He just moved on. He asked his questions, got his answers, and filed the piercing under interesting things my friend did, and that was the end of it.
Or so I thought.
The nickname started about a week later.
We were on the phone. He called more than he texted—he was one of those men who preferred voice to type, who liked the rhythm of conversation, who thought better out loud. I was cleaning my apartment. He was driving somewhere.
“So how’s the baby boy?” he said.
I stopped. “What?”
“Your dick. The piercing. How’s it healing?”
“You called it baby boy.”
“Did I?” He laughed—the big laugh, the one that filled the cab of his truck. “I guess I did. Well? How is it?”
“It’s fine. Almost healed.”
“Good. Take care of the baby boy.”
He hung up. I stood in my kitchen with the phone against my ear and the dial tone in my ear and a strange, electric feeling in my chest.
Baby boy.
He’d said it casually. Offhandedly. The way you’d name a pet or a car or a project—how’s the baby boy?—and the thing was, I knew what he was doing. I knew it the way you know the weather is changing before you look outside. He’d seen my cock. He’d registered its size. He hadn’t said anything at the time—not because he hadn’t noticed, but because he was polite, because he was kind. After all, in the moment of seeing it, the social contract had required him to respond to the piercing and not the penis it was attached to.
But now, with distance, with the safety of a phone call, with the plausible deniability of humor, he was telling me what he’d thought. Baby boy. My cock was a baby. Small. Little. Not a man’s cock. A boy’s cock. A baby boy’s cock.
And he was calling me that now. Every time we spoke.
“How’s the baby boy today?”
“Baby boy doing all right?”
“Take care of that baby boy.”
He said it with affection. That was what made it complicated. He wasn’t being cruel. He wasn’t mocking me. He was teasing—the way friends tease, the way men rib each other, the way a straight man who’s seen his gay friend’s small cock processes the information through the only channel available to him: humor. He’d seen my cock. It was small. He couldn’t unsee it. And the only way to integrate that knowledge into our friendship was to turn it into a running joke. Baby boy. A nickname. A term of endearment that was also, quietly, devastatingly, an assessment.
I should have been angry and/or embarrassed. Or hurt. I should have told him to stop. I should have drawn a line.
I didn’t.
I let it happen. I let him call me baby boy, and every time he said it, I felt the same thing—a flush of heat, a tightening in my chest, a stirring in my groin that I didn’t want and couldn’t stop. My cock—my baby boy, my four-inch, Prince-Albert-pierced, pathetically small cock—responded to the nickname the way it responded to being seen: with arousal. With the specific, sick, electric arousal of a man who knows his cock is small and knows someone else knows it and knows that someone else is naming it, out loud, repeatedly, and there’s nothing he can do about it because he’s the one who sent the photo.
I sent the photo. I showed him my cock. I did this to myself.
And now I was hard every time he called.
—
It went on for months: every call, every text. Baby boy. I started to anticipate it. I’d hear his name on my phone screen, and my cock would twitch before I even answered. I’d feel the flush start before he said a word. I was conditioning myself—Pavlov’s small-dicked man, salivating at the bell of a straight friend’s nickname.
I talked to my therapist about it. Not in detail—I wasn’t ready for detail—but in the abstract. “A friend has a nickname for me that I find… complicated,” I said. She asked what I meant. I deflected. She let me deflect. We moved on. I didn’t bring it up again.
What I didn’t tell her was that I was jerking off to it. Not to him—not to the thought of him, not to his body, not to some fantasy of the two of us together. He was straight. I knew that. I wasn’t attracted to him in the way I’m attracted to men. But the dynamic—the straight man who’d seen my small cock and now called me baby boy—that was the thing. That was the material. That was what I used when I was alone in my apartment with my hand around my four inches and the Prince Albert clicking against my fingers.
I’d replay the calls. His voice. The laugh. How’s the baby boy? And I’d stroke, and I’d feel the shame and the arousal braided together like wire, and I’d cum—fast, always fast, the orgasm sharp and thin like everything else about me—and then I’d lie there and feel the sadness. The same gray heaviness. The sense that I’d taken something real and turned it into fuel for a fire that would never warm me.
—
Then I asked to see his.
I don’t know why I did it. That’s a lie. I know exactly why I did it. I needed the comparison. I needed the context. Baby boy was a judgment, but it was a judgment without a reference point. I needed to see what he had—what a straight man who’d called my cock a baby boy was working with—so I could understand the scale. So I could know, concretely, exactly how small I was relative to him.
We were texting. Late. He’d been drinking—I could tell from the looseness of his typing, the way his messages got longer and less punctuated. I was sober. Two years. But I was in that space—the late-night, slightly reckless, emotionally exposed space that used to be where the drinking happened and was now just an empty room I sat in alone.
Please send me a pic; I typed—Fair’s fair.
Of what?
You know what.
A long pause. The longest pause. I watched the three dots appear and disappear so many times I lost count. I thought he was going to say no. I thought I’d crossed a line. I thought the friendship—the real, valuable, post-rehab friendship that had kept me sane for two years—was about to crack because I’d asked a straight man to show me his cock.
Then a video appeared in the chat.
I tapped it.
It was short. Maybe ten seconds. He was in his bathroom—I could see the same fluorescent lighting, the same white tile. He was holding his phone with one hand, aimed down at his body. He was hard. His cock was standing out from his body, thick, straight, veined, the head flushed dark. He moved his hand along it once—not stroking, just showing—his fist wrapping around the shaft, and his fist was big, and his cock was bigger, and there was still cock visible above and below his grip. Eight inches. Maybe more. Thick enough that his hand didn’t close all the way around it.
Ten seconds. That’s all it was. Ten seconds of a straight man’s hard cock in a bathroom, recorded because his gay friend had asked to see it, sent because he was drunk enough to be generous and confident enough not to care.
I watched it four times.
The first time, I felt nothing. Just information. That’s his cock. It’s big. Okay.
The second time, the scale registered. I held my hand up to the screen. His cock was twice the length of mine. More than twice. My four inches against his eight. My thin shaft against his thick one. My Prince Albert—the little ring I’d gotten to distract from my smallness—against his bare, unmodified, unapologetically large cock that didn’t need decoration because the size was the whole show.
The third time, I got hard.
The fourth time, I started to cry.
Not sobbing. Not dramatic. Just a tightness in my throat and a wetness in my eyes and the sudden, overwhelming understanding of why he called me baby boy. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t even teasing. It was accurate. Next to him—next to that thick, heavy, eight-inch cock—my cock was a baby’s. A little thing. A starter cock. A cock that hadn’t finished growing. A cock that was, in the hierarchy of men, at the bottom. Below him. Below almost everyone. A baby boy’s cock.
I typed: Thanks, big guy.
I sent it before I could think about it. The nickname arrived in the chat—big guy—and it sat there, small and true, the mirror image of baby boy. He was big. I was small. He was the big guy. I was the baby boy. The names fit. The names were correct.
He responded with a single emoji. A flexed arm. Then: lol fair enough.
—
That was a few months ago. We still talk. He still calls me baby boy. I still call him big guy. The names have become part of the friendship—embedded, natural, the kind of thing that would sound strange to an outsider but makes perfect sense to us. He asks about my piercing. I ask about his girlfriend. We talk about recovery. We talk about life. Please don’t discuss the photos or the video. We don’t talk about the names. We just use them, and they carry the weight of everything we’re not saying.
I’ve jerked off to that video more times than I can count. I feel sick every time. Not during—during, I’m too far gone to feel anything but the arousal, the shame, the specific heat of being small next to someone big. After. Always after. The gray heaviness. The sadness. The sense that I’ve taken a friendship and a video and a pair of nicknames and turned them into pornography, and the pornography is about my own inadequacy, and the inadequacy is the only thing that makes me cum.
He doesn’t know. He’ll never know. He thinks baby boy is a funny nickname for a piercing. He thinks big guy is a compliment. He doesn’t know that every time he says it, my cock gets hard. He doesn’t know that I’ve measured his cock against mine on the screen of my phone, holding my own erection up next to the image, seeing the difference—seeing it, really seeing it, the way you can only see something when it’s right next to its opposite. He doesn’t know that I’ve cried about it. That I’ve cum to it. That I’ve lain awake at night thinking about the fact that he’s eight inches and I’m four and that the difference between us is the difference between a man and a boy, and the names we use for each other are just the truth wearing a costume.
He doesn’t know any of that.
And I keep answering the phone. And I keep saying, “Hey, big guy,” in a voice that sounds normal. And he keeps saying How’s the baby boy? in a voice that sounds like affection.
And I keep being small. And he keeps being big. And the names keep fitting. And I keep cumming to the difference. And I keep being sad about it after.
And that’s where we are.
The End.
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