Tits Bro

 

Four minutes in and your sweat breaks. Small clear beads rise on your skin, then run together. A ribbon of perspiration that begins behind your ear courses down the side of your neck, forward over the rise of your shoulder, dips into your clavicle and then rides back out, cresting on its own momentum, collecting other drops. What began as a trickle is now a stream, now a small salt river flowing over your chest, straight over your nipple, which tickles, which hardens in response.

Sweat dripping from both your nipples now, rolling off to splash against your abs, which are looking pretty good these days, not totally there yet but definitely on the way.

You turn to your buddy and say, “Yo, check this out. My tits are sweating. Do you see this? Look. At. My. Tits.

Your buddy’s leaned up against the wall and his eyes are closed but now he opens them and rotates his head your direction in a long slow neck-cracking way. He checks your chest and nods. “Dude,” he says, then closes his eyes again.

There’s a girl in here, you just noticed, wearing a tee-shirt with the collar torn off, kind of eighties style, halfway off her shoulder with the pink neon strap of a sports bra showing in the gap. Some of the girls take their shirts off in the sauna when they’re wearing a sports bra. Not this one, though. Her tits must be sweating too, under that eighties shirt. You wonder what her tits are like. Smallish, it looks like, but hard to say.

You imagine putting your hand up under that shirt and hitting the sports bra. Don’t think about the sports bra; the sports bra is the opposite of sexy. It makes a good pair of tits look like a log. The sports bra is an impasse to the breasts. Which are sweating. Which are coated in such a sheen of sweat that if you leaned in, you could see the glow of your own nose bearing down on them. And if you were leaning in that close, you might as well lick one. Lick her nipple. It would taste like salt. But salt and something else, salt and—velvet. Go back. Velvet isn’t a flavor. You don’t mean velvet. Not Velveeta either, gross, off-track, totally wrong direction now. Caramels, maybe, salted caramels like at the state fair last summer: more slippery than sticky, more buttery than sweet.