Prelude to Fighting

Here's just a small excerpt from a scene I'm writing with my pal Heath, who lives west of here.  The story's just beginning, as you can tell, and there's no telling where it'll go from here.  It's basically about two kids, former friends, whose competitiveness in MMA has driven a wedge between them that they plan to work on in a private match.  Or at least that's the starting premise.  Over the past months, we've done a few scenes similar to this one.

This is the part I just finished and mailed off to Heath.  No fighting yet, but the buildup is kind of fun on its own, I think:

Taylor pulled his shirt off as he descended the stairs.  By the time he got to the basement, lit by a bare yellow bulb in the ceiling, bright, even garish, Ryan was already stripped to his briefs and socks. 

The briefs were half-inch red and white horizontal stripes with a starred navy blue band round the waist—showy, like Ryan, who’d even been known to wear briefs with cartoon animals and floral prints, never giving a rat’s ass what anyone thought of it (a characteristic Taylor used to admire about him). 

Ryan tugged the white tube socks off and nonchalantly sniffed them before tossing them to the corner with his sneakers. 

Ryan was thicker than Taylor, most of it muscle, but a good bit of fat too, which Ryan wore confidently, never having felt the need to look Aberzombie and Fitchy.  Taylor, once just a slightly smaller version of Ryan, now looked like he’d just stepped off a Calvin Klein billboard. 

Taylor unbuttoned his cargo shorts and let them fall to his ankles.  Ryan, sitting with his knees wide apart on an old loveseat that used to belong to Taylor’s aunt, grinned appreciatively.  Taylor could almost feel Ryan’s eyes run up and down his new physique. 

“You sure got pretty.”  Ryan’s tone of voice was somewhere between awe and snarky.  “You’re not worried about me messing all that up, now, are you?  I can be pretty rough, you know, and my mom always complained that her pretty things were never safe with me around.  You won’t mind if I’m rough, will you, pretty thing?” 

Taylor blushed slightly, or at least he felt the skin temperature on his face rise about four or five degrees.  Ryan’s style of taunting had always been this way—sort of affectionately bullying … and funny.  Taylor caught himself almost cracking a smile. 

He said nothing as he rolled his socks down and off.  He folded one of them into the other and squeezed it into a tight hard ball in his fist; then he fast-pitched the ball at Ryan’s chest, which it hit with an audible thump. 

“Ow!”  Ryan mugged being more hurt than he was, though the impact had indeed stung a little. 

He chuckled as he stood to his feet and walked over to the mats, stretching the elastic of his briefs out to reach down and rearrange his cock and balls for comfort.  The match had not even started and he was already feeling a tingle up and down the bottom of his shaft—it was the feeling he had when something was about to go down.   It came to him before every fight, especially his old ones against Taylor.

Taylor stood and stretched his arms up over his head.  Ryan noticed that his armpit hair had gotten darker and thicker since their last match, months and months ago. 

A lot had changed since then, and Ryan and Taylor alike were anxious to see just how much it had changed.