"You've got to start working out, Ryan," I said earnestly. "You're front-man for the band. You're our image. And let's face it, rail-thin rock stars are out. Way out."

"I have been working out," Ryan said defensively. "It just doesn't seem to take."

I had to admit, it sure didn't. We were lounging around the student quad, taking a break between the class we shared and our regular Wednesday rehearsal. Me, Ryan, and Stuie, the drum player. Ryan was sitting on the grass opposite me, Indian-style, only a foot or so away. He was a fox, no doubt about it—he had a killer handsome face with perfect cheekbones and laser-sharp, ice-blue eyes; his jet-black hair fell perfectly across his forehead, cut short on the sides but long in the back, the latest look. It looked stupid on a lot of guys, but on Ryan it looked really hot. His sex appeal, though, as I saw it, stopped at his neck. His crisp white Oxford shirt just hung off his shoulders like it was hanging up in a closet. His jeans were the same. The group was doing O.K., and Ryan's performance was always intense if a little amateur, but I didn't need my friends' occasional comments—to the effect that more people would come to our gigs if there was more to look at on stage—to know that Ryan was the key to our future success. We weren't good enough to make it on talent alone—we needed to have a draw.

Of course I'd gone over this with Ryan, and he even agreed with me. Up to a point. "Anyway, Bri, you're hot enough for both of us," he went on. He grabbed my right arm and folded it to make the bicep pop. "Look at that!" he said, cupping the thick bicep with his warm hand. His casual, almost inadvertent caress sent a wave of warms through my thickly muscled body which eventually settled in my expanding crotch.

"'S true," Stuie said, watching us passively. He was sipping from some new age botanical drink, his latest obsession.

I glanced at Stuie, then at Ryan, who was flashing me a smile that made me want to melt, his eyes penetrating my soul. I resisted an urge to adjust my swelling member with my other hand. Damn him, he knew just how to manipulate me. He hadn't let go of my upper arm. Gently I pulled it free. "No one cares what the bass player looks like," I said for the hundredth time.

"'S true," Stuie said.

We both glanced at Stuie this time, then back at each other. "We'll work out together," I said. "Sometimes it helps to have someone pushing you."

"Fine," he said, "but it's not going to work. I just don't put on muscle like you do."

I felt a quick pang of guilt. It was true—I put on muscle easier than anyone I knew. I'd only started working out when I got to college—I was not one of the "in" kids in high school, and athletics were reserved for them—but in the eight months since I'd gotten to UMass I'd almost effortlessly built up enough muscle to have already outgrown most of the shirts I'd worn in high school.

"But I'll try," he added, looking me square in the eyes, so that for a moment I lost myself, immersed in his gaze. "The band means a lot to me."

A month of hard work passed. Every morning we went to the big gym on campus and Ryan and I worked out together, pushing each other hard. Ryan was an excellent work-out partner, but at the end of the month all he was was incredibly toned. Meanwhile I had gained ten pounds of muscle, most of it in my chest and shoulders.

I found myself being consoled by Ryan at the dining hall. He was sitting across from me. I had barely touched my food—though in fact I was tremendously hungry—and was sitting there all hangdog. Ryan seized my hand. "Look at me," he said.

I did, and his incredible eyes held me. Just they eyes turned me on. The face was incredibly cute, and the warmth of his hand was intense, but it was the eyes that really did it. This time I did have to adjust my dick, under the table. "It's ridiculous for you to feel guilty," he went on. "You put on muscle. I don't."

I felt weird nonetheless. The tightness of my shirt across my pecs, pumped from the morning's workout, was a constant reminder. The tightness of my pants, too—even before I started getting big, I was already startlingly well endowed in that department. All through high school I'd felt a little like a freak, because the popular guys were jealous enough to ostracize me, and because I knew it was weird to want other guys to hold it, make it hard, stroke it the way I did every night....

"Anyway," Ryan said, breaking me out of my reverie, letting go of my hand at the same time, "did you get a chance to look at that new song?"

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I've got some ideas." We went on talking about music for the band, the awkward moment nearly forgotten.

We had a few small gigs at taverns off campus in April, but the semester was building up to a big concert at the student center just before finals. We were opening for a real, actual, famous band, a recent Swedish retropunk breakthrough called Typo. Their album was climbing the charts, and the UMass gig was the big finale to their national college tour.

As the April gigs went by with reasonable success we were feeling confident, but wary. The last gig in April, started out as a total fiasco. None of the sound had been set up at the Old Kinge's Tavern, our "roadies"—slackers from the student programs council—hadn't shown, and there were wires everywhere around the ridiculously small "stage," a raised platform at the back end of the room. Ryan, Stuie and I ran around like maniacs, trying to set up everything. I was working on hooking up the power for the amps to the building electricity when Stuie bumped into my from behind, pitching me forward, tossing his drink onto both me and the ancient power coupling mounted in front of me. A massive surge ran through my body even as the coupling showered me with sparks. I blacked out before I hit the floor.

I came to almost immediately, Ryan and Stuie bending over me anxiously. Ryan's concern warmed me. "Are you O.K.?" he said.

"Geez, man, I'm really sorry," Stuie said.

"I'm fine," I said. My head was buzzing a little, but my body felt excellent—energized, in fact. That seemed wrong, but I sure wasn't going to question it. I climbed to my feet, steadying myself on their hands.

"You O.K., Bri? Really?" Ryan said.

"You guys going on or what?" yelled a gruff voice behind me. The owner hadn't seen my little accident.

"I'm fine," I repeated. "C'mon, let's go."

Ryan looked doubtful, but we hurried through the rest of the prep and started our set. The lights went down—the spotlight barely picked us out onstage—but I could feel the audience, feel the energy of the room.

In all the confusion Ryan hadn't had a chance to change. He was still wearing the loose, worn-thin school tee and sweat pants he'd come to do the set-up in. My hands seemed to be flying up and down the bass—Stuie was shooting me amazed looks as he played—but my slightly blurred attention was fixed on Ryan in front of me. That tee hung off him like there was no one in it.

Ryan was wailing, putting everything into his performance, and I found myself hating the girls and gay guys in the audience who, as far as I could see, weren't really paying attention because Ryan, in those sweats, didn't look like much.

The song was reaching its climax, and we just weren't hitting home. "If only he filled out those clothes better," I said, my voice lost in the noise of a rock-and-roll band.

I looked down to check my fingering. When I looked up that loose tee, those old sweats, were packed tight with muscle. Broad, thick shoulders, wide lats tapering in a dramatic vee to the waist where the shirt was still loose, arms stretching the fabric of the tee, a wonderfully full and rounded ass the likes of which Ryan had never had stretching the sweats taut, thickly muscled bicyclist's legs similarly filling the rest of the sweats. I could only imagine what had happened in front.

I blinked, unsure what I was seeing, while my fingers played blithely on. I heard the drums falter a beat, and I looked over at Stuie staring goggle-eyed. "Keep playing!" I yelled, then turned back to Ryan. He was still wailing, oblivious. We were nearly at the climax. The audience was suddenly with us—I could feel the electricity in the room. "Just keep playing, Ryan," I said under my breath. "Nothing unusual going on, nothing strange..." I was staring at the luscious ass, heavy and solid and rounded, two luscious bowling balls straining at his sweats. I wanted it badly. My big cock was rock-hard in my jeans, and I knew that that meant it was incredibly visible, but all eyes were transfixed on Ryan, who was singing hard and playing harder, his suddenly thick back drenched with sweat, as he carried the song higher and higher, bringing everyone with him. My fingers played the bass part like they had a mind of their own, which was just as well, 'cause my mind was consumed by the dream body in front of me. I wanted, needed, to have my cock in that ass, imagining it sliding further, deeper into him than I had ever managed with anybody. I didn't realize it at the time, but my steel-hard cock, pointing straight up and already directly behind my belt buckle, was lengthening as if it really were pushing further and further into that incredible ass.

He got to the guitar solo and started going to town, better than he had ever played it before, and he turned to face us for a moment as he played. I nearly collapsed. His tee was now straining to contain thick, wonderful, luscious pecs so high and heavy and rounded they reminded me of his thick, round, solid ass. The fabric was stretched so tautly across the tops of his pecs it was translucent in places. The tee pulled up at the waist to reveal taut, thickly muscled abs. And below, against one of the deliciously muscled legs, the outline of a long, thick, beautiful cock snaked most of the way down to his knee. His biceps bunched against the too-tight fabric of the tee shirt arms. He looked up at me and smiled—an it's-going-great smile, an I-haven't-noticed-my-body-has-turned-freaky smile. I smiled back, and he turned back to the enthralled audience. To them, I knew, the body thing was some kind of special effect—part of the theatrics of the song, part of the act, and they were screaming and cheering and impressed as hell.

Ryan was bringing it home, and as he turned back around I felt a sudden urge to free his constricted chest and arms from their bindings. Even as we reached the sweet chord—the climax of the song—and Ryan leaned back, drawing out the note, his tee melted away, and he was even bigger, his whole body enlarged by half—the guitar suddenly seeming small as he loomed over the audience, nine feet tall, his once loose sweats now painted-on shorts, his body a mass of huge, bunching, bulging muscles, enormous yet still graceful, beautiful, lithe ... mind-reelingly sexy, so that to look on them was, for me, deeply intoxicating. The crowd was going wild. They wanted to storm the stage and yet were afraid to, and many were simply entranced.

"Don't notice, don't notice," I muttered, for Ryan and Stuie. By now it was starting to dawn on me that somehow I was doing this, or seemed to being doing it. Either way we had to finish the song for the audience to believe it was all illusion. Three chords was all we had left.

My cock was achingly hard, creeping up my abs inside my shirt. Ryan turned around to bang out the three chords with us as always. He still seemed oblivious, and Stuie was either under the spell or controlling himself admirably. I stared at Ryan agape. He was so intoxicatingly gorgeous, with beautifully massive muscles gracing his enormous frame, pecs thick and ponderous casting dark shadows, excitingly bumpy delts and traps, long muscled abdomen leading down to the too-tight sweats, where a still-flaccid firehose bulged along one leg, the head just visible at the bottom of the sweats, right below the knee.

We slammed out the final chords, the crowd screaming, my cock throbbing, still growing, Ryan's muscles pulsing, still growing. Bang—the first chord filled the room, and the crowd cheered. My cock surged. I was staring at Ryan—he was filling my vision. Bang—the second chord reverberated through everyone, hanging in the air. Babang! The final chord electrified the room. Ryan's sweats finally tore open and fell away. My cock swelled with white-hot cum and exploded even as my fingers reverberated the last note.

Ryan grinned, thrilled by the crowd's reaction, unaware of the full nature of the show. That wouldn't last. Even as the note still filled the room and the crowd roared I imagined the lights out, and the room drifted into sudden darkness. The crowd loved that too. I imagined us all in my dorm room, worrying whether the enormous Ryan would fit, and suddenly there was no noise. My ears were ringing. The crowds were gone—we were in my dorm room, but my cock was still super hard from the image of the incredible enhanced Ryan wailing away in front of me.

Continued in The Band 2