Bedlam
The sound of knuckles on the door. Instinctively Billy pulled his pants back up.
"Are you okay?" It wasn't a voice that Billy recognised, it must be Teddy.
Billy had looked at the man for only a few fleeting seconds but it felt as though he'd been born knowing the image of him, his shape was something primal, a sense memory from the garden of Eden, revealing itself now but forever present. A large man, an obelisk with biceps like drainpipes, solar hair and opalescent eyes, his smile was wide and his gym clothes taut against his flesh.
Another rap against the door, surprisingly light; Billy couldn't help but picture the man, bent slightly at the waist as he was taller than the doorframe, trying to make his discus hands soft on the door, gingerly moving his wrist as little as possible. It would have been funny, had Billy not felt so lightheaded.
"Can I help you?"
There was only one way to make the man leave. Billy made the most convincing wretching sound he could, gargling his throat, tensing his uvula and holding the noise for much longer than he had ever produced it in real life. He paused for a few seconds and then repeated the sound, trying to make it even louder.
"I'll tell your boss you're not well."
"Thank you," Billy used a feeble voice, strung out and hoarse, to faciltate the ruse.
Once Teddy's footsteps had subsided, Billy waited an appropriate amount of time for someone to clean up a bathroom, flushed the toilet to complete the illusion and then discretely exited. He forewent changing back into his normal clothes, simply grabbing his things from his locker and heading for the exit at speed.
From the desk, David called "Is something up?"
Billy turned and nearly dropped to the ground; David's arms, pythons arcing powerfully and gracefully from his shoulders, themselves a mountain range of smooth muscle, were like a black hole, drawing Billy towards them, impossible to ignore, the destined end point of the universe. The perfect arc they cut akin to a golden spiral, inutterably gorgeous.
"I feel sick."
Billy managed to drag himself from the gym, feeling as though he had left his stomach behind with David and his short sleeves.
On the street, more vertiginous beauty: a man with tree trunk legs; another with a jaw to stop a train; a living mountain, stalking down the street, looking ready to grab anything in his path and snap it in two. Billy considered deliberately running face first into the man, just to press his nose against that stomach, to get a brief sniff of what would be hiding there. Wave after wave of nausea cascaded through him as he considered the men around him, the collective beauty of the masculine sex. He thought he might swoon; he wanted to swoon, so that one of the adonises around him might take him in their arms and press him close to their core, envelop him with their strength and keep him safe.
Billy shook his head and took a deep breath. Hailing a taxi, he deliberately kept his gaze down as he mumbled the address, in case the driver was another stunner, ready to sap Billy's ability to think.
The city blurred as they drove, the buildings and vehicles and people losing their edges, becoming an indistinct mass. The movements of the taxi felt good, the swaying reverberating deep within Billy, a counterbalance to the chaos in his brain, a pleasing, mellowing motion, like the lapping of waves as he floated close to shore or being dandled in the arms of a celestial parent. It felt so good. Billy shifted slightly, not wanting to be noticed, trying to reposition himself for maximum pleasure, instinct guiding him to budge his legs just so, to where his vagina sat pat against the seat. The engine thrummed right through him, rending him a metronome, made only to rock back and forth.
Billy suddenly realised what he was doing and immediately moved back, and sat in tortuous bedlam for the rest of the journey.