Read Online Two Thousand Pounds Per Square Inch (The Russel Middlebrook Series Book 5) by Brent Hartinger - Free Book Online

 
     
     
    I was deep underwater, miles beneath the surface of the ocean. I could feel the pressure of millions of gallons of dark, heavy liquid pressing down on me from above, suffocating me, slowly compressing my head and chest. Even if there had been air, the pressure was too much. I wouldn’t have been able to breathe.
    Then the nurse looked up at me and said, "Okay, that's the sample I need. It'll be about twenty minutes before we have the results, so why don't I let you talk to a counselor until then?"
    Okay, so I wasn’t really several miles below the surface of the ocean. My name is Russel Middlebrook, I’m a teenager, and I’d come to a gay health clinic to get a HIV test. HIV is the virus that causes a disease called AIDS.
    Let’s just say that getting tested had seemed like a good idea at the time. Or rather, it had seemed like a good idea before the time. Now that I'd come, I really couldn’t breathe. What if I was HIV-positive? Suddenly, it felt like I had two thousand pounds per square inch of pressure bearing down on me from above.
    Part of me wondered if I was being stupid. I mean, I'd only been with three different guys in my whole life—four if you count the latest guy, Wade, but that one is complicated. And I'd mostly had safe sex.
    Then I'd read this article about how many gay and bi guys actually have HIV. It turns out it's around one in five. In some cities, like New York and San Francisco, it might be closer to half. Half! And young gay and bi guys are getting infected faster than ever before, and almost half of them don't even know they have the virus.
    I hate to admit this, but let's just say that one of the three guys I was with, well, he seemed exactly like the kind of guy who might be HIV-positive and not know it. I'm not saying all HIV-positive people are sluts or whatever, but this guy literally tried to talk me into having unsafe sex. More than once!
    And I know that AIDS isn't necessarily a death sentence or anything, not like it used to be back in the 90s. Thanks to anti-viral medications, a lot of people with HIV and AIDS live normal lifespans. But plenty still do die—at least six thousand gay men every year. It's a really serious disease with a lot of really bad side effects. And the drugs you have to take? They're really, really expensive, thousands of dollars a year. Being HIV-positive also means having to go to the doctor and getting tests over and over again for the rest of your life. Then there's the question of having to tell every guy you ever date that you're positive.
    So I really, really didn't want HIV, even though I was now totally convinced that I already did.
    The nurse gave me a piece of paper, then led me down a long hallway to an office at the end. The linoleum was warped, and the air smelled like Indian curry. And as I walked down that hallway, I couldn't help but think back on the experience that had led me here in the first place. It was with Web, this guy I'd met the summer before when I was a counselor at a camp.
     
    "Suck me," Web said, lying back naked in the water at the very edge of the lake. It was night, and we'd been fooling around in this little hidden lagoon not far from camp.
    "Huh?" I said. I'd always had a way with words.
    He nodded down to the cock between his legs. It was stiffening again, rising up his stomach in twitches like some kind of snake charmer's cobra, even though he'd already cum about five minutes earlier. I'd cum too, but the weird thing was I was already horny again. I hadn't expected that. Having sex with a person wasn't like jacking off. When you came after jacking off, you stayed satisfied, at least for a few hours. But when there was a hot naked guy in front of you, especially a hot naked guy with a rapidly stiffening cock, it was hard for you not to get hard again.
    It wasn't just his cock. Web was just so hot. I mean, he was tall and ripped with a tattoo on his stomach (a little wreath of thorns around his belly button). He