BIGGEST BROTHER, rep 1: Pet Project

Brandon begins to shrink at a secluded fitness lodge with his younger brothers. (M/m)

[‘Biggest Brother’ is the story of Brandon, an uptight young man who clings to his identity as eldest brother in a family of butting male egos. When his overbearing half-brother Mitch invites the men to work at a remote fitness retreat, he begins to lose his brothers' respect as his size disappears and theirs swells. This series focuses on macrophilia, size theft, muscles and intense humiliation. Later chapters include sex and incest.

The full series is available on Gumroad   now as an e-book (epub, mobi, pdf) which includes a 5k-word bonus chapter titled ‘GABEY’. I am also posting the chapters  gradually on Coiled Fist.]



BIGGEST BROTHER:
The Warmup


“So is he actually my brother-brother?” Gabe said as we pulled up in front of the house.

“Yeah, buddy. Half-brother,” Dad said in his clipped way. He was always awkward about explaining Mitch, who is the same age as me but grew up in another country with another mother.

“That’s crazy. He doesn’t look like us at all,” Gabe said.

It was true. The man stepping off the porch was around 6-foot and broad shouldered, built more like Dad in his Navy days than me and my brothers, with some other family’s honey-blond hair and sharp features. He would never be mistaken for a member of our soft-bodied, muddy-haired pack.

Mitch had grown a lot since the last time I saw him, at a family gathering when we were 14, but he sauntered up to the car with the same puffed chest and braced arms as I remembered, and I knew before we exchanged a word that I was going to find him just as insufferable as I did back then. I steeled myself for the coming three weeks.

“Papa Dean!” he laughed, trading smacks on the back with my father. Gabe and I got out and introduced ourselves, explaining that Wayne was already up at the lodge with his friend. I found his tight handshake was as suffocating as his personality.

“Oh yes, I spoke to Wayne this morning, very polite young man. Let’s hope they’re not trashing the place as we speak,” Mitch joked. It was odd but not surprising that he would refer to my 20-year-old brother as a young man when Mitch and I were just 26. I remembered his habit of subtly condescending, the way he angled his prominent jaw to grin down at people, constantly looking for some invisible purchase to pull himself just an inch higher in status or maturity or intellect.

“We should go if we want to make it to the lodge by dark,” Dad finally said. “Brandon, give Mitch the front seat, will ya champ? He’s bigger.” I was already ducking into the car when he said this and I tried not to look awkward as I stood back up.

But Mitch pointed at me and made a warning sound. “You stay right where you are, Brandon. There’s plenty of leg room for me back here. I will however let you take this bag, I couldn’t fit it in the back.” He slung his black duffle bag at me and I huffed as I caught it in my arms. “Thank you, champ,” he winked then folded his big square frame in beside Gabe.

The remainder of the drive was just a couple of hours but it felt claustrophobic. Mitch had a deep, over-projected voice that filled the car. He talked animatedly about his time studying ecology at the University of Cape Town and then his two years in the army, where he realised his passion for fitness and changed career plans. Dad seemed deeply impressed by this. He praised Mitch’s courage in changing course after working towards something for so long. When asked about his parents Mitch was warm and diplomatic. “Mom’s great. She’s really enjoying her freedom since the split. And Nigel is, well, he’s Nigel. We keep in touch. He says he’d love to visit when the lodge opens.”

“Oh, that’s great, I’m glad to hear that,” Dad said.

Mitch’s duffle felt like it was filled with wet laundry. It pinned me to my seat, smelling faintly of the same Summer musk that had emanated from his body as he stood too close to me on the lawn. This was another habit of his I would notice over the coming weeks – He would always take a step closer to the person he was talking to, even if they took a step back, in an endless herding pattern. It was like he was always quietly measuring his ground in the dynamic.

“So are you the baby, Brandon?” he asked, hunched in the back, and I felt my hackles raise.

“I’m the eldest actually,” I said. “Gabe is the youngest.”

“I’m baby,” Gabe said.

“Wow, that’s a surprise. You’re almost as tall as me,” Mitch said to Gabe. “Are you six feet?”

“Five-eleven,” Gabe shrugged.

“So basically as tall as me, and you’re only 18. Still a growing boy. I’m sure you’ll be bullying Wayne and Brandon before long.”

Gabe laughed, seeming to blush a little. I wondered if he was embarrassed by the joke at his expense (he was a very long and very feminine noodle, it was clear he wouldn’t be bullying anyone) or if he’d taken the flattery at face value. He would see through Mitch’s bullshit soon enough, anyway.

“So you’re the eldest,” Mitch called to me in his booming voice. “Are you the shortest as well?”

“No. I’m around five-seven. I think Wayne’s five-five. It’s a family thing,” I said. I wished he and Dad would go back to carrying the conversation so I could tune him out. There was something cocky and grating about his Cape Town accent that got under my skin.

“Around five-seven? Bro, you can’t be losing track of inches when you have so few to spare!” he laughed, smacking the backpack between him and Gabe. “I’m only joking, don’t be offended. So you’re the eldest in your clan. Benevolent dictator, eh? When’s your birthday?”

I knew immediately why he was asking. “October 28th,” I said. “You were born in December?”

“That’s right, December fifth. So you really are numero uno,” Mitch replied. He gazed out the window for a minute, at the passing grassland and spots of wandering cattle. “Oh, but you were born quite early, weren’t you? Yes, I think I remember my mom telling me. So in a way you cheated to be firstborn,” he laughed. “Do you have any physical issues from being premature? I guess that’s why you’re small. Any other developmental problems? Seriously, I don’t want to work you too hard if you’re fragile.”

“I’m fine,” I said tightly.

“Brandon’s fine,” Dad swooped in, chuckling. “Don’t go easy on him, or us! We’re all strong as ox and excited to help you open this health club of yours.”

I appreciated Dad defending me. Of course he was leaving out a detail or two. I had a small neurological kink that messed up my coordination sometimes, gave me vertigo and made it hard for me to drive, which I never learned to do. But other than that I was fine. Sure, I was shorter than Gabe and skinnier than Wayne, but so what?

“Oh, that’s really good,” Mitch said magnanimously. “I just thought, because you’re so little, that there might be other problems. But I’m pleased to hear that.”

The rest of the drive passed mostly in silence.

“I know Mitch is a lot to take,” Dad would tell me later, privately. “He’s not as sensitive as you and your brothers, but he’s a good man. He just grew up in a different culture. I hope you can get along as my two eldest. You know, you might get something good out of this experience. Mitch might even want help running the place once it’s open.” I shivered at the thought of being employed by my half-brother, having to endure his company and take orders from him full-time.

We would be in the woods for three weeks, working on Mitch’s health club which was due to open soon and which my dad was an investor in. We were told that if we buckled down and the contractors were good, we might even be done in two weeks, free to enjoy the rest of the Summer.

Little did I know that I would never walk out of Mitch’s club. In a way this Summer would last for the rest of my life.

*

REPETITION ONE:
PET PROJECT


We got to the lodge as dusk was setting, so as we drove into the woods it felt like we were penetrating night itself.

The lodge was a two-storey log building which looked finished from the outside but inside appeared gutted: holes in the walls, hanging wires, stacks of plywood and paint cans. Our job would be to help the contractors as much as possible over the next three weeks while not making any extra mess or burning the place down. I inferred that my unofficial job was to keep my younger brothers focused and out of trouble.

“So is it going to be a gym or more like a retreat?” Wayne’s friend Lou asked on the first night, as we sat around on the kitchen floor eating chicken from paper plates.

“That’s a really good question,” Mitch said. “It’s actually going to be a men’s health club with a focus on strength and muscle-building, sort of like a retreat. There are rooms upstairs where the guests will stay, and they’ll eat specially-prepared food and follow a tailored workout regime, and by the time they leave they’ll be bigger and stronger than they ever thought possible, all without the use of steroids or any rubbish like that. There’ll also be a sauna and recreation to keep their minds active. You’ve probably noticed there’s no reception out here – that’s intentional. The lodge will be a place for men to get out of their heads and into their bodies.”

“I’m gonna go out of my head with no Wi-Fi,” Gabe said.

“You won’t miss it for a second once we get to work, I promise you that,” Mitch said. “You know, guys, I really appreciate you helping your dad and me with this project and I would love the chance to help you back by sharing some of the great stuff I’ve learned about health and muscle-building with you. If you like I can teach you how to eat and sleep and work out to become stronger men on every level.”

I made eye contact with Wayne over Mitch’s shoulder and he did a quick jack-off motion, thank God. I needed to know I wasn’t the only one cringing over how conceited this guy was.

“That’s a very generous offer, Mitch. Thank you. Wow,” Dad said. “The boys could definitely use some shaping up. Although I’m sure a few weeks of hard work will do that all by itself.”

Listening to Dad praise Mitch, it struck me how my brothers and I must look to him, this former Navy SEAL in his 50s who never slept past 5am and ran every morning regardless of the weather. Here I was, his pale and sensitive firstborn, soft-cornered and uninterested in sports or anything remotely physical. I had just moved home until I could get my graphic design career back on track and make some money. Then there was Wayne, a drop-out who skated and played basketball but more often got high and ate Doritos, and was somewhat potato sack-shaped as a result. And then Gabe, a fidgety wisp of a boy who preferred modern dance to traditional athleticism, and who as an unspoken rule was never left alone one-on-one with his male friends. How did we compare with the sons my father once imagined having? How did we compare with this tanned, statuesque go-getter who was in many ways a stranger but at the same time shared Dad’s entrepreneurial spirit, his wink and his way of holding himself?

After dinner I found Wayne sitting on the front steps, staring at his phone and vaping. “You know there’s no signal anywhere out here,” I said. “You’ll have to drive all the way into town to check your girlfriend’s OnlyFans.”

“Suck my penis,” he muttered slowly, swiping through images, his eyes glassy as hell. “I was trying to get a photo of this weird butterfly. Craziest shit ever.”

“Jesus. You know what, let me try that.” I snatched the vape pen, already needing to mellow after a few hours in our half-brother’s presence. I could hear Mitch’s booming voice travelling from upstairs, where he was showing the others the sleeping quarters. I inhaled and an immediate wooziness rocked me where I sat. I had to steady myself with a hand around Wayne’s arm.

“God, are you seriously that big of a pussy?” he jerked his arm out of my grip and took the pen back, blasting out a thick cloud.

I was still rocking slightly in place when I saw it: a butterfly with gold, orange and yellow wings, rising from the carpet of leaves just a few metres from us. It had to have the wingspan of my chest. The thing was huge, straight from an Alice in Wonderland illustration. “Holy shit, can you see that?” I said.

“Where?” Wayne’s gaze floated up. “Yes! Yes, that’s what I saw. Butterzilla.” He lifted his phone and touched the screen a few times, then gave up. It was too dark out. We could have walked over for a closer look – the giant butterfly didn’t seem to be going anywhere, only flapping slowly across the forest floor, rising a foot into the air at most before flopping back into the foliage – but for some reason we stayed put. We just watched as the dazzling thing rose a little and flopped, rose a little and flopped, off into the dark.

*

Dad had to go back into town the next morning for some work thing but promised he’d be back by the end of the week. In the mean time it would be me, Gabe, Wayne and his friend Lou helping Mitch with heavy lifting and odd jobs, pretty much anything that fell or spilled outside the scope of the contractors.

The contractors were a group of young and older men who showed up each day after breakfast and worked busily until late afternoon, mostly speaking amongst themselves in a language I didn’t know. I felt a funny kinship with them when I noticed the careful way they avoided Mitch whenever possible. They would answer his questions and take his directions then neatly close their circle to him. He liked to strut around the building with his arms folded, looming over people’s shoulders, making empty jokes and pointing out tiny mistakes as they were made.

“Straighten your back there, champ. Straighter. Don’t hurt yourself. That’s better, good work,” he said to me on the third day as I lifted a box with Gabe. There were thirty-odd boxes of gym equipment unloaded in front of the lodge, and it was our job to move them into the long mirrored room downstairs. The boxes were unbelievably heavy and took hours to transport. Of course rather than use his six feet of fitness-guru muscle to help us, Mitch spent the whole time casting his shadow over me, offering advice in his deep, chipper voice and smacking me on the back when I did good. The worst part was that I didn’t have enough breath to ward him off with a hostile comment, or the body language to give him the cold shoulder. Grunting and grappling with the massive boxes took all of my focus, meanwhile I simply had to endure his clammy hand on my back and minty breath in my face like a dumb animal blinking under its burden.

Whenever I caught my breath for a moment I used it to shout at Wayne, who was meant to be lifting boxes with Lou but stopped for constant breaks and sat on the front steps chatting. Each time he would mimic my voice back at me in a childish lisp, then return to work.

I would have liked to order Mitch around the same way. He spent that day patrolling around in battered stone work boots and a thin blue muscle shirt, watching imperiously over us and the workers, making his presence known with slow and heavy steps. He liked to take the omnipresent toothpick from the corner of his lips and point it at some detail that needed fixing, often echoing what one of us had just said. Looking at him, I couldn’t imagine how his work clothes got so worn in. His body was clearly the product of exercise in a climate-controlled gym rather than hard labour. He looked chiselled and polished, his muscles evenly tanned and globular as a GI Joe’s, not the salt-of-the-earth man’s man he cosplayed as.

After the boxes were moved, I helped Mitch install shelves in some of the guest bathrooms then I joined the guys downstairs where they were working on assembling the gym equipment. Gabe sat in one corner, frowning at a metal bar while across the room Lou hovered over a treadmill base and Wayne talked his ear off.

“Gabe, come help me,” I said, grateful for the chance to sit down. “Wayne, you go shower. Lou can handle the rest of that, right Lou?” Lou gave a little salute.

“Why me?” Wayne shot back, never missing a chance to challenge me.

“Because you didn’t shower last night,” I said, “and you stink. You’re funking up the gym.” It was true. There was a sour smell wafting off of his pit-stained graphic tee. I knew he’d kicked off his Vans shoes the moment I walked into the room, even before I saw his big toes poking through their yellowed socks. “Go wash up, we’ll handle this.”

He threw down the instruction manual he was holding and huffed past me, hissing, “Fag.”

Wayne had always resented taking orders from me. Although he was the middle brother he was the most athletic and for a minute he was taller than me. He seemed to think this entitled him to be higher in the chain of command Dad raised us with. I knew that if Dad were in the house that night Wayne would have gone straight to him and complained about me. I would hear him grumbling my name from up the hall as I often did, then his whining voice would waver impotently as he didn’t get his way and became emotional. Poor Wayne. If he could get over his boyish ego it wouldn’t be so often bruised.

“Take your shoes with you, stinky,” I said. “I mean it. I’ll throw them out if you leave them here.” I listened to him stomp back the way he came and huff off again, shoes in hand. It was hard not to laugh at his little tantrums.

“You know, we did have a system going,” Gabe said as I squinted at a page of instructions.

“And now we have a better system going. Hand me that screwdriver?”

“I wonder who made you king,” he sighed, handing it over.

“Mitch did, actually. He asked me to keep your asses in check. Also the fact that I’m older than you… I’m big and you’re small, I’m right and you’re wrong, and there’s nothing you can do about it, Gabey,” I said, paraphrasing the bully from our favourite childhood movie.

Gabe pouted for a while after that and I enjoyed working in silence. He didn’t like it when I called him ‘Gabey’ because Wayne had recently started using it as a portmanteau for ‘gay baby’. But I’d been using the nickname for Gabe his whole life and I wasn’t about to cede it to Wayne’s immaturity.

What I said about Mitch putting me in charge was true, basically. Upstairs he had thanked me for helping, and for being here to wrangle our brothers. It was weird to hear him say “our brothers” – he had always seemed like a distant cousin to us, having grown up on the other side of the world with his mother, the woman our father had the affair with.

Mitch had also mentioned that he was starting a meal plan with the guys, meaning my brothers and Lou. He was going to help them “reach their physical potential” by dictating everything they ate and how they slept and exercised, beginning with the next weeks’ labour. After the lodge was finished they would stay for two more weeks as his first guests, to help test out the equipment and facilities and continue their fitness program. What I heard was that he wanted to turn them into little clones of himself and they had agreed for the time being, though I knew that before long they would bail, if not to escape Mitch’s overbearing personality then to rejoin the world of Wi-Fi and junk food.

“I’d be very happy for you to join in,” Mitch said. “I could help you a lot with your confidence, beef up these skinny arms for instance,” he gave my bicep a quick squeeze in his fist and I felt a flash of humiliation that his fingers nearly fit around its circumference. I reminded myself that he had abnormally big hands, a little ape-like. “Just say the word and I’ll be happy to make you my pet project.”

I don’t know how I managed to answer without snapping at him, but I surprised myself with how evenly I told him I wasn’t interested. Maybe I was too tired to be insulted. I told him I appreciated the offer but I had a life to get back to so I wouldn’t be staying on as a guest.

“Up to you, champ.”

Before I went downstairs he showed me one of the electric scales in a guest bathroom. He pried off his peeling grey boots and stood on the little platform. Numbers appeared on a wall-mounted screen above the scales, revealing among other things that his weight was 208 pounds and his height was 6.2”. I was surprised, I had thought he was six-foot-even.

“Your turn. Come on,” he snapped his fingers and pointed to the scales. I hesitated, then declined. But he insisted. He nodded toward the scales matter-of-factly. “Come on. Up. Let’s see your numbers. Now, Brandon.” He placed a hand on my back and I nearly allowed him to steer me onto the scales, I think because his self-assured tone reminded me of Dad in a weird way. But then I pulled back.

“I don’t need to. Thanks,” I said, more assertively this time. “I’m going down to help with the gym equipment.”

I wonder what I would have done that day in the bathroom, if Mitch had told me that before long I would be craning my neck all the way to look up at him, and that when he snapped his fingers at me I would rush to obey, begging on my knees like a pet, licking his boots, praising his superiority. Would I have run for my life then? I guess not. I was too proud at the time. Headstrong.

He shrugged at my defiance, seemingly unoffended. “This is why you should take my help while I’m offering it. You wouldn’t have anything to be embarrassed about.”

*

That night I laid down on top of my sleeping bag and felt like I was floating. With each passing day of work I was increasingly bone-weary, and rest became more blissful. Of the few finished guest rooms I was staying in one of the singles, Mitch being in the other while Wayne, Lou and Gabe shared the bigger room. An amazing breeze came in the window, smelling of birch wood and light Summer rain.

Before my featherlight body settled I got back up and crept into the bathroom, and stood on the scales in my underwear. The wall-mounted screen lit the room in an eerie blue, giving me my numbers.

HEIGHT: 5’5.2”
WEIGHT: 133 lbs

I stepped off and back on, fixing my posture, but the same numbers appeared, followed by my BMI and miscellaneous other details. Damn, I’d been measuring myself wrong for a while. I was in fact the same height as Wayne. It was kind of humiliating that I no longer had this tiny thing to hold over him.

I would feel a little relief when I came back to the same spot the next night and the scales told me that I was 5.4”, 128 lbs. Of course they were faulty. Who knew what kind of cheap trash Mitch was furnishing this place with?

I looked forward to mentioning this funny aside to Dad, the lodge’s biggest investor, when he got back.


Check out the full series on Gumroad.