Ben

Ben
by
Levi Holland
A part of the Flash Fiction Series

Ben

Grade school for me was always one of those times where the friends you made were your friends for life. There was little rhyme or reason to it—one day you met a kid you shared vague interests with, and then boom. Best friends for life. At least, that’s how it was with Ben.

The two of us were thick as thieves even though we were pretty different. He was big into hunting; I was more into playing indoors, video games, Nerf, etc. One thing the two of us shared a love for, though, was the playground.

We were lucky enough to grow up in a wealthy school district, and along with that came large playground areas with tons of jungle gym equipment. At nearly a thousand students split across six grades, it was needed, too. Unless you did something really stupid to get into trouble, you could pretty much stay invisible for half an hour every day.

During 5th grade, one of our favorite games to play was cops and robbers. Basically a team of cops chased the criminals, and after catching them, the bad guys were hauled off to one of the fences we used as the jail. We tried doing jailbreaks for a while, but we stopped because it always turned into chaos and nobody ever won.

Whenever a group was ready to play, Ben and I preferred opposite teams to each other. Why? Because that meant we got to chase each other. Sometimes one of the girls wanted to take turns chasing me or him instead, but that was never as fun. Girls were always so bossy and demanding when they tried to play, and besides, Ben did it best. There was nothing like the thrill of rounding a corner and your best friend leaping out from cover with his arms wide open to catch you.

Ben would bend my arms behind me, pinning my wrists together, just tight enough to cause discomfort. Obviously I could have made it less painful, but there was something exciting about being his captive. As time went on, I learned I was the submissive sort, but back then I just found it strangely comforting.

“You’re my prisoner now,” he’d say near my ear with a high-pitched growl as I pretended to struggle against his grasp. Sometimes to keep the game going, Ben would let me slip away, and the chase would begin again.

As 5th grade came to an end, something different started to happen whenever Ben captured me. I had scampered across the playground to one of my favorite hiding spots to bounce between, a plastic tunnel connecting two sections of the jungle gym. The tunnel was on the second story with a little viewing window on either end to see outside. In reality it probably wasn’t that high up, but to my eleven-year-old eyes, it was the perfect vantage point for keeping tabs on the enemy.

The only problem was that we were far from the only kids playing games on the playground. Often times other kids squeezed around me through the hot, stuffy tunnel. It wasn’t long before Ben used the pandemonium of screaming kids to sneak up on me, and this time, when he had my arms pinned, the tight quarters of the plastic tunnel forced his body right up against mine.

In the burgeoning summer and my looming adolescence, the moistness of his warm breath against the nape of my neck made all the little hairs on my forearms stand upright, and for the first time in my life, I connected getting a boner with something other than having to pee in the morning. It pressed uncomfortably against my shorts, but I loved every second of it as Ben dragged me from jungle gym and led me to prison. I thought surely everyone must have seen the way it jabbed out, but no one ever mentioned anything if they did.

After he brought me to jail, my face was hot and sweaty, way more than usual, and it wasn’t until he left that I finally stuck a hand inside my shorts to adjust myself. One of the girls with me in jail saw what I did, and her face made a disgusted frown, but I stuck my tongue out at her and told her to mind her own business. What did a stupid girl understand about boy stuff anyway?

When summertime came around, I was disappointed, since moving on to middle school meant we no longer had recess to play our games. I was too naive to consider what other opportunities might come up during the summer break. That was until one day Ben called and asked me to hang with a bunch of neighborhood kids out in the woods near his house.

Ben’s neighborhood was in an as-of-yet undeveloped part of town, so once we hit the edges of his street, a wide forest opened up for us to explore. Some of the older kids had constructed a shitty, but functional fort by using a mixture of fallen branches and old planks of wood. That was our prison.

Most of the boys there I didn’t recognize—some were in different classes, older grades, home-schooled etc. Ben was the only person I really cared about though, and like usual, we chose to play on opposite teams. Sure it might have been fun to chase down some of the other guys together, but I was secretly hoping Ben would catch me and take me prisoner like the last time we played cops and robbers. When the oldest boy called go, I ran for the hills, kicking up a flurry of dead leaves with every step. I made sure not to run too far without looking over my shoulder to make sure Ben was watching where I went. He was.

A little flutter went through my chest as I ran, not thinking too much about the fact that I wasn’t super familiar with these woods. When I finally slowed, it was because I found a thick, fallen log laying against the steep embankment. Right away I knew that was where I would hide. I smeared away some of the old leaves and hunkered down, pressing myself close to the earthy soil. I wasn’t in a panic—I knew I’d hear someone crunching through the leaves before they ever saw me.

I didn’t have a phone then, but my guess was about ten minutes passed before the leaves rustled from over the hill. It sounded like another robber had been captured. I chanced a peek over the rotted log to make sure it wasn’t Ben chasing someone else down, and when I saw it wasn’t him, I tried to tiptoe back into place.

“Freeze,” I heard behind me and nearly jumped out of my skin.

As I turned around, Ben stood with one hand on his hip, the other pointing a finger-gun at my face.

“Make me,” I half-whispered, delighted when Ben hoisted the imaginary gun and tackled me down.

Rolling around in the leaves during a hot, summer day—along with Ben’s body pinning mine against the ground—had the instant effect of giving me another boner. Only this time, he noticed right away because he stopped all of a sudden and glanced between our mushing bodies.

His breath huffed through his nostrils as he said, “Show me.”

Taking only a mild cautionary glance around me, I unsnapped the button of my shorts before zipping them down and lowering the waistband of my undies. My boner pointed up at my face, harder than it had ever felt before as it twitched. Having only just gone through some vague version of sex education, I knew there was supposed to be a greater purpose for my dick and a woman’s vagina, but you couldn’t have tortured me with a worse idea. Ben seeing me like this, however, was making little firecracker pops happen, and I didn’t know why.

A branch snapped from somewhere close by, and quickly I returned my dick inside my waistband and zipped up while Ben shouted that he’d found me. After that, it was pretty hard to slip away, not with some of the much older boys ready to pounce on any escaped prisoners. We spent the rest of the day in sweaty play, and by the end of it, believe it or not, I’d temporarily forgotten about the whole boner incident between us. We were still kids, and playing outside was one of life’s sacred gifts.

That afternoon, Ben suggested I spend the night with him. His dad had one of those jobs that took him out of town several days of the week, and his mom, while super nice and friendly, preferred the comfort of cooking shows rather than dealing with the chaos of two preteen boys. I say that to say, when the two of us retreated to Ben’s room after dinner, we were alone for the night.

As we booted up his Playstation, Ben was quiet during our first few rounds of Madden, which was odd because he was your typical trash talker when it came to any competitive game. I thought I had maybe done something wrong, but then he finally broke the ice.

“So, you know Rebecca?” he asked. “The one from Ms. Douglass’s class with the red hair?”

“Uhh…yeah?” I said, not sure why he wanted to talk about brace-face Rebecca all of a sudden.

“On the last day of school, she gave me a note that said she liked me and asked if I liked her back.”

“Okay…so do you?”

“Not really,” Ben said, and I couldn’t stop the little sigh of relief that escaped me. He kept his eyes fixed on the screen as we started up the next play.

“So, what did you say?” I asked.

Instead of answering, he hit the pause button, freezing up the screen so neither of us could control the players, and set his controller down to face me. The silence between us was making me fidgety.

“This is boring,” he said. “Let’s play a different game.”

“Okay, like what?” I scratched at the top of my knee, waiting for him to suggest another video game.

“It’s called Criminals. Someone pretends to be the bad guy and breaks into the other person’s home before tying them up.”

I had never heard of this game before, and I was too naive to think Ben was making up some bullshit game as an excuse to fool around, but already my heart was pitter-pattering in my chest. We didn’t have to talk things out. Instinctively, we both knew that he was going to be the one breaking in while I was the one who got tied up. There was no winning in this game, just getting caught.

Ben dug around in his closet until he found a couple of old pairs of shoes. It took him a few minutes to undo the laces, but soon he had what he needed. We decided to turn off the lights to the hallway and his bedroom, and he gave me the chance to hide while he went outside and closed the bedroom door.

Even with the lights off, I knew his room well. There was a nice space beneath his bed to wriggle beneath the bed frame, and I had just crawled under when the door squeaked open.

Thanks to the lack of hallway light, there was no silhouette as Ben crept inside and pushed the door shut again. Along with the carpet muffling all of his footsteps, I had no way of knowing where he was until he toe-jabbed the side of his dresser and cursed.

I snickered and immediately clamped a hand over my mouth, worried I’d given myself away. When a few seconds passed, I thought I was safe, but then his voice was closer than ever, and he couldn’t have been more than a foot or two away. “Oh, Jeremy…” he called out. He was like a stalker chasing down his victim, which was true in many ways, I thought.

I heard a dragging noise over the carpet and realized he must have been swinging his arm in wide sweeps. I shrunk back as far as I could, but there was a ton of other crap beneath Ben’s bed, and I cried out when his fingers finally brushed against the side of my head.

“Gotcha!” he shouted, his hands pulling me from beneath the bed as the two of us tussled against each other. Knowing what it would soon lead to, my dick was already hard in my shorts, and I shivered as the underside pressed into the soft carpet.

When Ben finally had me yanked from beneath the bed, he was quick to force my arms behind my back. I shouted out in mock distress as he leaned forward and shoved my face into the carpet.

“Say nothing,” he whispered low and threatening in my ear, “or I’ll go after your whole family next!”

I nodded in the darkness even though he couldn’t see me, so instead, I whispered, “Okay, I’ll do whatever you say.”

Ben tied my wrists with surprising expertise, even without the light to see. The rope of the shoelaces chewed into my wrists, but I knew I could wriggle free if I really wanted to, so for now I let them do their job. Next up was my ankles, and those actually hurt a little with the bony parts pressed against each other. When he was satisfied with his work, I wobbled until Ben rolled me on my side.

I couldn’t understand why Ben hadn’t turned the lights back on yet, but when his hand touched my stomach, I flinched and held my breath. It wasn’t until he slipped his fingers beneath my shirt and rubbed the bare skin there that my breath rattled free.

“What’re you going to do to me?” I asked, keeping up the pretense of the game we played.

In response, Ben moved close to my face, so close I probably could have bopped heads with him if I wanted.

His breath tickled my ear as he whispered, “Whatever I want.”

My arousal as Ben’s hand wandered to the front of my shorts left little doubt as to how I felt about being restrained. His fingers prodded my boner before he finally pressed his palm against it. Unable to control myself, I rocked against him to increase the contact and friction, but he giggled and pulled back.

“Ben,” I pleaded. “Why’d you stop?”

“I want you to say it,” he said in a playful tone, breaking character for a moment.

“Say what?” I growled in a mixture of horniness and frustration.

“You know,” Ben said. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to keep rubbing my dick,” I half-shouted, and in the expectant silence that followed, I added with an embarrassed, “please.”

“You’re funny,” he said, but his hand went back anyway, and he let me hump against him as he dragged his palm back and forth. The more we moved against each other, the more a strange feeling began to grow inside. It was like being tickled from the inside out. Normally I would have tried to move away from somebody’s fingers if they tried to tickle me, but this was unlike any tickling I’d experienced before. A growing pleasure spread from my penis outward. My legs began to straighten out and tense as I tried to chase wherever that ticking pleasure was leading, and soon I was fighting off the urge to pee.

I considered stopping, but honestly, I didn’t give a damn right then if I pissed myself or Ben’s carpet. Whatever was happening was too good, and all I wanted to do was keep experiencing it. Finally, it was like my body tipped over the first hill of a roller coaster as my abs clenched and I doubled over. That tantalizing, tickling sensation exploded everywhere, radiating good feelings all in my body.

I must have started making noise because without realizing it, Ben’s hand was practically smothering me as I panted and groaned out whatever breath was still inside. After what felt like the most incredible fifteen seconds of my life, the pleasure started to fade, but there was something nice lingering in its place.

Ben’s hand had left my dick and was shaking me instead. “You didn’t have a seizure or something, did you? I should get my mom.”

“No!” I shouted and remembered I was still tied. Being in the dark, there was no way for him to see that I was fine, so I asked him to turn on the light.

When he did, my eyes took a second to adjust as Ben untied the shoestrings around my wrists and ankles. When I looked down, I didn’t appear to be any different than I was.

Ben seemed to be thinking something along the same lines, because he asked, “Jeremy, what happened to you?”

I told him I wasn’t sure. Describing it to him lacked all of the magic and intensity that coursed through my body. For a few seconds, it was nothing but pure, physical joy.

Even still, as I finished explaining, Ben pinched the front of his shorts, and I wondered if he was hard from what I’d told him. This whole time I’d been so concerned with my own good feelings that I hadn’t considered how my best friend my benefit from this.

Looking down at the mess of shoestring on the carpet floor, I picked up the end of one of the laces and gave a grin.

“Wanna find out for yourself?”

The End

Copyright 2023 – Levi Holland
All rights reserved

If you have any short, snappy, or first time experiences you’d like to share, feel free to reach out to me at Leviholland@protonmail.com. Or just leave a comment here, and Jason will forward it.