Baby Boner
An SPH Experience by MrSmallish.
We met freshman year—during orientation week, standing in the same interminable line at the campus card office—and just clicked. Not romantically. Never romantically. We were cut from the same cloth: same sarcastic humor, same willingness to talk about anything, same complete inability to filter ourselves around each other. Within a month, we were the kind of friends who finished each other’s sentences and had zero boundaries.
By sophomore year, we were talking about sex constantly. Not in a charged way, not in a flirty way—just openly, the way you’d talk about any other topic. She told me about her boyfriend’s stamina issues. I told her about my girlfriend’s refusal to go down on me. We compared notes, gave each other terrible advice, laughed at our own disasters. It was great. Tessa was the only person I could be completely honest with about that stuff, and she was the same with me.
We stayed tight all through undergrad. Four years of late-night diner runs, cramming for exams together, being each other’s plus-ones to events neither of us wanted to attend. When graduation came, and she headed off to do her master’s at a university three hours away, it felt weird. Not bad weird. Just… a quiet kind of sad.
We texted every day, though. Called a couple times a week. So when I drove up to visit her about two months into her program, it felt like no time had passed at all.
—
Her apartment was small—a studio in a converted house near campus. She’d decorated it with the same chaotic energy she brought to everything: posters taped up crooked, a mismatched thrift store couch, candles everywhere. We sat on that couch with beers, catching up, falling right back into our rhythm.
She told me about her program. She told me about a guy she’d been seeing—some poli-sci PhD who talked too much but was good in bed. I told her I was single and not particularly happy about it. The conversation drifted, the way it always did with us, into more personal territory.
She was talking about the PhD guy. “He’s tall,” she said. “Like, really tall. Six-four.”
“Good for him.”
“It’s good for me,” she said, grinning. “Tall guys are just… better. In general. You know.”
“In bed?”
“Everywhere. But yeah, in bed.”
I snorted. “That’s not a real thing. That’s like saying blondes are more fun.”
“It is a real thing. It’s science.”
“It is absolutely not science.”
“Okay, it’s not science science, but it’s… observational data. Every tall guy I’ve been with has been proportional.”
“Proportional to what?”
“To his body. You know what I mean.” She made a vague hand gesture that was somehow both abstract and extremely specific. “Tall guys have bigger dicks. It’s just how it works.”
“That’s ridiculous. That’s not how anatomy works.”
“It’s how my anatomy experience works.”
“Your sample size is, what, four guys?”
“Five.”
“Five guys. You’ve conducted a study with five data points.”
“And every single one confirms my hypothesis.”
I took a sip of my beer. “You’re full of shit.”
“I’m really not.” She pulled her legs up onto the couch, tucking them under herself. “Tall guys are proportional. Short guys are proportional. Medium guys are proportional. You get what you pay for, height-wise.”
“So what am I?”
She looked at me. Up at me, really—even sitting down, my frame made me feel like I was taking up more than my share of the room. I’m six-one—broad shoulders. I’ve played sports my whole life. I look like I should be… well. You know.
“You,” she said slowly, as if savoring what she was about to say, “are disproportional.”
I stared at her. “Excuse me?”
“You got unlucky. You’re tall, you’re big, you’ve got the whole… thing going on.” She gestured at all of me. “But I bet you don’t match down there. I bet you’re… not what people would expect.”
I laughed. Actually laughed. “You’ve never even seen my dick.”
The words came out before I thought about them. And the second they left my mouth, something shifted in Tessa’s expression. Her eyes got this glint—this familiar, mischievous, absolutely terrifying glint that I’d seen a thousand times before she delivered a devastating comeback.
“Remember that time I walked into your dorm room, and you had a boner?” she said.
My stomach dropped.
—
I remembered. Of course I remembered. It was junior year—a Saturday. I’d been up late the night before, slept in, and was lying in bed completely naked because that’s how I slept and it was my room and I could do what I wanted.
I never locked my door. Nobody did on our floor. People walked in and out constantly—it was that kind of dorm. You’d leave your door propped open with a shoe so friends could wander by. It was college. It was chaos. It was fine.
Until it wasn’t.
I was on my back, dead asleep, having what I can only assume was a pretty good dream because I was fully hard when I heard the sound of someone sitting down on the bed next to me. The mattress dipped. I opened my eyes, blinking, disoriented, and there was Tessa, cross-legged beside me, staring at the ceiling with her hands folded in her lap and the most rigid posture I’d ever seen her hold.
I looked down. The sheet had slipped off during the night. I was naked. I was hard. Everything was on display.
I rolled over so fast I nearly fell off the bed, grabbing for the sheet, yanking it around my waist. My face felt like someone had held a heat lamp to it.
“Tessa—what the—”
“I knocked,” she said, still looking at the ceiling. “You didn’t answer.”
“So you just came in?”
“The door was open!”
I buried my face in the pillow. “How long were you sitting there?”
“Like two seconds. I just sat down. I wasn’t… I wasn’t looking.”
But she had looked. I could tell because her face was bright red—Tessa, who never blushed, who talked about sex with the clinical detachment of a gynecologist, was blushing. And she was trying not to smile and trying very hard not to smile. Her lips were pressed together so tightly they’d gone white.
“Are you—” I started.
“I see you have a baby boner,” she said.
The words came out in a rush, like she’d been physically holding them in and couldn’t anymore. And then she did smile. And then she laughed. Not a huge laugh—a small, compressed, trying-to-contain-herself laugh that came out through her nose.
“Baby boner,” she repeated, like she was confirming it for the record.
“Get out.”
“I’m going, I’m going.” She stood up, still not looking at me, still smiling. “Put some pants on. I’ll be in the lounge.”
She left. I lay there, sheet clutched to my chest, staring at the ceiling, replaying the moment she’d said “baby boner” in my head over and over.
I got dressed. I went to the lounge. We hung out as if nothing had happened. She didn’t bring it up again for the rest of the day, and I thought—I genuinely thought—she’d forget about it.
—
She had not forgotten about it.
“Remember that time I walked into your dorm room, and you had a boner?” she repeated, sitting on her studio apartment couch with her beer, three years later, looking at me with that glint in her eye.
I set my beer down. “Tessa.”
“Because I remember it. Vividly.”
“You said you weren’t looking.”
“I said I wasn’t looking while I was sitting there. I looked when I first walked in. Obviously I looked. There was a naked man on a bed. You look. It’s human nature.”
“It was dark.”
“It was two in the afternoon. There was a window. Sunlight was pouring in. It was practically a spotlight.”
I rubbed my face with both hands. “So you’ve seen my dick.”
“I’ve seen your dick.”
“And?”
She tilted her head, considering. Making a show of it. “And… it confirmed my theory.”
“What theory?”
“The disproportional theory. The tall guy, small dick theory. The—what should I call it—the baby boner theory.”
“It was a boner. A regular boner. The ‘baby’ part was unnecessary.”
“Was it, though?”
I looked at her. She looked at me. She took a sip of her beer, maintaining perfect, serene eye contact.
“How big are you?” she asked. Just like that. Like she was asking my shoe size.
“I’m not telling you that.”
“Oh, come on. We tell each other everything.”
“We don’t tell each other that.”
“I’ve told you about every guy I’ve been with. In detail. I told you about the guy who was so big I couldn’t—”
“I remember. Vividly. You drew a diagram.”
“And you won’t even give me a number?”
“Five,” I said. Then: “ish. On a good day. Five on a good day.”
Tessa nodded slowly. “Five inches.”
“Five inches. Which is normal. That’s in the normal range.”
“For a guy who’s five-seven. You’re six-one.”
“Height doesn’t correlate with—”
“In my experience, it does. And your experience—well, I’ve seen your experience. And your experience is five inches. On a good day.”
“On a good day, yeah.”
“What about on a bad day?”
“Are you seriously asking me about my bad-day size?”
“I’m just trying to get the full range.”
“Four and a half. Maybe four and three-quarters. I don’t know. I don’t measure it daily.”
She nodded again, looking genuinely thoughtful. “So you’re five inches on a six-one frame. That’s like… that’s a fun-size candy bar in a king-size wrapper.”
“Oh, my God.”
“It’s a sample. A teaser. It’s the movie trailer of dicks.”
“Tessa.”
“It’s a fun-size situation.”
“I regret telling you this.”
“No, you don’t. You love talking to me about this stuff. I’m the only person you can be honest with.”
She was right, and I hated that she was right.
—
We talked about it for another hour. She was merciless, but it was the same way she was merciless about everything—funny, sharp, never actually cruel. She made me explain what it was like being a big guy with a small dick. Did I feel like I was misleading people? Had women reacted? Had anyone said anything?
I told her the truth. Some had. Not in words, usually, but in that look—the one where you can tell they’re recalibrating. The one where they’re clearly adjusting expectations in real time. I told her about one girlfriend who’d been very sweet about it and then, weeks later, made an offhand comment about her ex being “a lot to handle” and I knew exactly what she meant.
Tessa listened to all of this, beer in hand, nodding like a therapist who was also your funniest friend.
“See, that’s what I mean about disproportional,” she said. “If you were five-seven and five inches, nobody would think twice. But you’re this big, tall, athletic guy. People see you, and they assume…”
“They assume I match.”
“Exactly. And you don’t. You’re a mismatch. You’re a truck with a lawnmower engine.”
“That’s a terrible analogy.”
“It’s a perfect analogy, and you know it.”
I did know it. That was the worst part.
—
Later that night, we went out to a bar with some of her grad school friends. I was introduced around, making small talk, being my usual affable self. One of her friends—a girl named Dawn—was clearly flirting with me. Touching my arm, laughing at my jokes, the whole routine. I was enjoying it.
Tessa watched from across the table, sipping her drink, saying nothing.
Later, on the walk back to her apartment, she said, “Dawn was into you.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“You should go for it.”
“Maybe.”
A pause. Then: “Just… manage expectations.”
I looked at her. “What?”
She held up her hands. “I’m just saying. She’s going to see the big guy, the shoulders, the height, and she’s going to expect… you know. The full package. And you’re more of a… sample size.”
“You’re the worst friend I’ve ever had.”
“I’m the best friend you’ve ever had, because I’m the only one who’ll tell you the truth.”
“Your truth is biased and based on one glimpse from three years ago.”
“One very clear glimpse. Two in the afternoon. Spotlight conditions.”
“It was a boner. Boners are supposed to be full-size. That was me at full capacity.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s my point.”
I shoved her. She stumbled, laughing, and shoved me back.
—
I didn’t end up doing anything with Dawn. But every time I thought about it—every time I imagined the moment of reveal, the moment where the big guy turns out to be less than advertised—I heard Tessa’s voice in my head.
Baby boner.
Fun-size candy bar in a king-size wrapper.
Disproportional.
The thing is, she wasn’t wrong. I’ve known my whole life. I’ve seen enough locker rooms, enough porn, enough real-life reactions to know exactly where I stand. Five inches on a good day on a six-one frame is not what people expect. It just isn’t. And Tessa—my closest friend, the person who knew me best in the world—had seen it, named it, and filed it away in that steel-trap memory of hers.
She’d bring it up periodically after that visit. Not constantly. Just… when it was funny. When I was getting too full of myself. When I was acting like a big guy who had everything together.
“Remember,” she’d text me, out of nowhere, “you’re disproportional.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
“Just keeping you humble, big guy.”
“Big guy” became her nickname for me. Said with a specific inflection that made it clear she meant the opposite. Said with a smile in her voice, which I could hear over the phone.
“Hey, big guy. How’s your day?”
“Hey, big guy. Did you work out? Looking good. You know what they say about guys who work out a lot.”
“What do they say?”
“Compensating.”
She’d cackle every time. Every single time.
—
I visited her again a few months later. We were walking through a park near her apartment, and she was telling me about a new guy she’d started seeing. Tall, apparently. Very tall.
“How tall?” I asked.
“Six-five.”
“Of course.”
“And before you ask—yes. Proportional. Very proportional. Gloriously proportional.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I’m happy. There’s a difference.” She bumped her shoulder against my arm. “You should try it sometime. Being happy.”
“I’m happy.”
“With your fun-size situation?”
“I’m happy with my fun-size situation, yes.”
“Good. That’s good. Acceptance is the first step.”
“The first step to what?”
“Peace of mind. Serenity. Coming to terms with being a lawnmower-engine guy in a truck body.”
“You’re never letting that analogy go, are you?”
“Never. It’s going on your tombstone. ‘Here lies a big guy with a small dick. He was disproportional, but he was loved.'”
I stopped walking. She stopped too, turning to look at me. I was trying to keep a straight face. I couldn’t. I started laughing. She started laughing. We stood there in the middle of the path, two idiots laughing about my dick.
“I hate you,” I said.
“You love me.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
We kept walking. She linked her arm through mine—because she was short and I was tall and she said it was ergonomic—and I let her because she was my best friend. Because she knew everything about me, including the things I wished she didn’t, and she stayed anyway.
“Hey, big guy?” she said.
“What?”
“Five inches is fine.”
I looked down at her. She was looking straight ahead, expression serious for once.
“Really. It’s fine. Anyone who makes you feel bad about it is an asshole.”
“Even you?”
“Especially me. I’m the biggest asshole. But I’m your asshole.”
“That’s the nicest and worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I know. It’s my gift.”
She squeezed my arm. I squeezed back. We walked in silence for a while, the afternoon sun warm on our faces.
“Hey, Tessa?”
“Yeah?”
“It was not a baby boner. It was a regular boner.”
“Sure it was, big guy. Sure it was.”
I didn’t push it. Some battles you just can’t win.
The End.
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