SPH-THEMED EROTICA STORIES

I still don’t know what I was thinking. That’s a lie. I know exactly what I was thinking: that at twenty-six, with a body that looked like it should’ve been dealt a better hand, I was tired of hiding. I was in the city for work — three days of conferences and hotel food — and on the second night the streets downtown were blocked off for something. I asked a bartender what was going on and she lit up. “The naked bike ride. It’s tonight. You should do it, it’s a blast.”

I laughed it off. Then I had two more drinks and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Here’s the thing about me: I’m six foot one. Broad shoulders, decent arms, chest hair, the whole lumberjack silhouette. I fill a doorway. And then there’s the part of me that matches none of it. One inch soft. Two and a half hard, on a good day, when the stars align. And my balls barely exist — two little peas that never amounted to anything you’d call a sack, so mostly it just looks like I have nothing down there at all—a nub sitting alone on a smooth expanse. In locker rooms I’d become an expert at the towel dance, at angles, at timing. I hadn’t been naked in front of another living person in years.

So obviously, the correct response to that history was to strip bare and pedal through a city of half a million people.

The staging area was a park by the river. I got there early, heart slamming, and it took me twenty minutes on a bench to work up the nerve to undress at the body paint station. Here’s what nobody warns you about: the first thirty seconds are the worst, and then it’s… fine? Among the riders, it was fine. That was the part I didn’t expect.

There were maybe two hundred of us. Every shape, every age. Women with slogans painted across their chests, men with painted arrows and jokes on their thighs, a seventy-year-old guy with nothing on but sneakers and a smile. The vibe was pure acceptance — nothing to be ashamed of, literally painted on skin. For a moment I let myself believe I’d found my people.

Then I started noticing the other men. I couldn’t help it. I’d never actually seen other guys naked in real life — not enough to compare. Porn had warped my sense of what a normal soft dick looks like, because porn dicks are never soft. Here they all were, bouncing on bike seats, swinging with every pedal stroke, and every single one of them was bigger than mine. Not slightly bigger. Multiples. The seventy-year-old had inches hanging past his fist on the handlebar. A heavyset guy whose gut pushed everything forward still had a soft cock resting on the seat in front of him like a sleeping animal. And me — my one inch had retreated with the evening chill into basically a dot. A second belly button where a dick should be. The wind off the river found what little there was and shrank it further, like the weather itself was in on the joke.

A woman with LOVE YOUR SHELL painted across her ribs coasted by and slapped my shoulder. “First time? You look terrified.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“You’re doing the thing where you’re deciding whether to cover up. Don’t. Nobody here cares. That’s the whole point.”

And she was right. Nobody there cared. That’s what made everything else so much worse.

We rolled out around eight, sun going orange, and the first ten minutes were honestly euphoric. There’s something insane and freeing about it — wind where wind has never been, the whole pack whooping down a closed-off avenue. Drums on the sidewalk, kids on shoulders, someone blasting funk from a trailer. For a stretch I forgot what I looked like. I was just a body on a bike in a river of bodies.

Then we hit the first red light.

The pack compressed at the intersection and I ended up near the front, pinned against the crosswalk, fully exposed to the stopped cars and the crowd on the corner. And this guy — mid-thirties, backward cap, beer in a plastic cup — just started laughing. Not a chuckle. A full, bent-over, pointing laugh. Then he walked right up to the crosswalk line, close enough that I could smell the beer, and raised his phone. And he made a show of it. He pinched the screen and zoomed — slowly, deliberately, letting me watch him do it — until his camera held nothing but my crotch. He looked at the screen. Looked at me. Looked back at the screen. Grinning like he’d won a prize.

“Oh, that’s going in the group chat,” he said, loud enough for everyone around him to hear. A few of them laughed too.

I gripped the handlebars. My whole body went hot. Every instinct screamed at me to put a hand over myself, and I want to say I didn’t — but the truth is my hand lifted an inch before I stopped it, and he caught the flinch. It made his grin wider. He was still recording when the light changed.

“Have a good one, big guy,” he said—big guy. Six foot one, shoulders like a doorframe, and he said it, staring directly at the smallest part of me.

The route looped past the university. Of course it did. The next light caught us right on the edge of campus, and the sidewalk was packed — food trucks, string lights, students out for the evening. We sat through nearly two full minutes of red.

I heard it before I saw them. “Oh, my god.” Loud. Deliberately loud, the kind of loud that’s meant to travel. I turned, and there were four of them, drinks in hand, and one had her arm half-raised in a point, frozen mid-gesture. When she saw me looking, she didn’t put it down. She turned to her friends and said something behind her cup, and the reactions rippled through the group like a wave. Two of them clapped hands over their mouths — cheeks bunching, giggles leaking out between their fingers. The other two didn’t bother hiding anything at all. Full, open, ear-to-ear grins, eyes locked on my crotch, one of them nodding like she was confirming a rumor she’d heard about me specifically.

The one who’d said it called out: “It’s the cold, right? That’s just the cold.” Not a question. A mercy with teeth in it. An excuse handed to me that everyone present knew was worthless, because the evening had been warm for an hour. Her friends lost it. One doubled over against a parking meter.

I stared straight ahead at the light like it was a life raft. I counted seconds in my head. I could feel them looking the entire time. I could feel the exact moment each new person walking up followed their eyeline and found me.

After that, I couldn’t unsee it. Maybe it had been happening all along, and I’d been too euphoric to notice, but for the rest of the route, I was the show. I caught phone after phone swinging toward me — not the wide pan-across-the-pack shots everyone else got, but the ones that lingered, the ones that pushed in. I watched a woman film me, glance down at her screen, then physically tap the shoulder of the man beside her and hand him the phone so he could see. I watched him laugh.

People pointed. Actually pointed — arm extended, zero shame, men and women alike. A guy on a stoop elbowed his buddy and jerked his chin at me. A woman in a cardigan did a full double take and then stared, openly, for half a block.

And the mouths. That was the strangest part. The ride was loud — drums, music, whooping — so I heard almost nothing after the first two stops. But I could read lips. Over and over, as I passed: someone would turn to their companion, mouth moving, and I knew the shape of the words even without sound. Look at that one. I watched a pair of women say it in slow motion, one grabbing the other’s arm, the syllables unmistakable even at fifteen miles an hour. Look. At. That. One.

Eye contact became its own science. I started noticing the pattern: they’d look at my face first — at the tall, broad-shouldered guy on the bike, the one who looked like he should be packing — and there’d be a flicker of appreciation. Then their gaze would drop. And their expression would change—every single time. The appreciation collapsed into something else — surprise, amusement, pity, sometimes outright delight — and then they’d either snap their eyes back up like they’d been caught, or keep staring at my crotch with no pretense at all. A woman would smile at me, look down, and the smile would turn into a lip bite — not the good kind. A guy would nod at me, look down, and have to turn away to smother the laugh.

And between the crowds, there was the pack itself. For the first time in my life, I had a real sample size. I want to be precise about this, because I’d spent my whole adult life not knowing, and that night I finally got data. I rode in different positions within the group, and part of me needed to know exactly where I stood.

I did not find one man smaller than me. Not one, out of well over a hundred. Soft, they ranged from maybe two inches to six, swinging, slapping against seatposts. Even accounting for the chill, even accounting for shrinkage — and believe me, I checked my own constantly, hoping — I sat at the absolute bottom of the pack. The smallest soft dick I saw that night was still double mine. And the hard ones — because yes, a couple of guys got excited from the friction or the exhibition of it, and nobody in the pack cared; that was the body-positive part — the hard ones were five, six, seven inches, riding proud in front of two hundred strangers. Two and a half inches. That’s what I would’ve had on display if the friction had gotten to me too. I spent the entire ride terrified of getting an erection — and then, in a twist I still don’t fully understand, half-hoping I would, just so the crowd’s math would be complete.

Well below average. I’d always suspected. Now I’d measured myself against a hundred men in the flesh. I’m not below average. I’m not even in the conversation.

We looped back to the park as it went fully dark. Riders around me high-fived, hugged, glowed. The woman with LOVE YOUR SHELL found me at the bike racks. “You did it! How do you feel?”

“Free,” I said, which was the answer she wanted, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. The wind, the speed, the two hundred strangers who treated me like one of them — that part had been genuinely free.

But she’d ridden in the middle of the pack. She hadn’t stood at the corners. She hadn’t heard the oh-my-god, or watched a man zoom a camera onto the smallest part of me while his friends laughed, or spent two hours watching strangers’ faces run the same calculation: face — shoulders — down — oh.

I got dressed in the porta-john and, pulling my boxers back on — fabric over that little nub for the first time in four hours — it hit me with a wave of relief so strong it was almost shameful, like the whole night had been one long held breath.

Back at the hotel, I lay in the dark and replayed it all, frame by frame. Shame, obviously — a specific, chemical shame that sat low in my stomach. But it was tangled with something else, something I don’t have a clean word for, and the fact that I got a little hard in that bed thinking about a group of college girls covering their mouths — two and a half pathetic inches tenting the sheet barely at all — is the part of this story I almost left out.

The next morning I checked the local event page. Photos were going up. Group shots, mostly. Then, three rows down: a close-up of a rider’s crotch, cropped tight, no face, captioned by a stranger — “not everyone got the memo 😂” — with three crying-laughing emojis. One inch of me, soft, wind-shriveled, immortalized for the amusement of people I’ll never meet. Forty comments. I read every one.

I read them twice.

I did the naked bike ride to prove I had nothing to be ashamed of.

I proved something, I guess.

Just not that.

 

The End.

 

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