Dr Z. Mesmer's Dynamic Body Program

"Hey man, back off. What's your problem anyway? We've got as much right to the beach as anyone."

It came out sounding pitifully weak but Ford wanted to say more. He wanted to point out they were all equals as human beings on the fundamental level. That no person had a right to lay claim to another or put others down just because they could. That was just Being a Decent Person 101, right? ...but he never got the chance.

"Don't mind Steph, boy." Mac said.

Ford couldn't help but to notice his arm wrapped around Marina's friend's waist was slipping down to grab the blonde's bare ass... hard. The hot blonde gasped and stared with big hungry eyes up into Mac's face. Then the man's hand slid further down into the bikini thong beneath it.

"She is still finding her feet as my new number one girl..."

The muscles on the Mac's forearms rippled and there was a soft wet sound as his hands did... something that made the sorority queen flush as a soulful moan escaped her rich, cherry lips. Ford's eyes widened as the gorgeous Steph trembled and clutched harder at the bullish man's side in a quick, uncontrollable wash of pleasure.

"...but if you want to talk to me about rights, String Bean? I'll teach you the only lesson any real man needs to learn."

Mac's big shadow seemed to blot out the sun for Ford as the giant loomed over him. Steph had slipped bonelessly down his side to kneel beside his feet. A meaty finger prodded into Ford's scrawny chest hard enough to send him stumbling backwards a step.

"The Right of Might is the only thing that matters in this world. It has been this way since the earliest caveman fashioned his first rudimentary weapon." Mac announced stepping in close and pushing Ford again. He tumbled backwards as though struck by a battering ram, his breath whooshing out of him.

All the beautiful women of the beach were standing now, facing and sending hungry, lustful stares at Mac. Hard nipples clearly tented sheer revealing swimsuits. Manicured hands played across their bodies in feverish desire. Fingers were being sucked suggestively between plush lips or roamed and teased tender flesh. More than a few had thighs pressed tight together and rocked a little as they stood, gently thrusting at the air as they listened to Mac's ludicrous monologue.

"The oldest and most primal law of man is the strong take what they want and fight to keep what they claim. Cyprus knew this, so did Caesar, Attila and Khan."

The towering man paused, bending down to pinch Steph's delicate jaw in one massive paw then kiss her long and soulfully, their tongues darting together. The college heart-throb moaned as he pulled away to stare back down at Ford sprawled out in the sand.

"Once you accept this one immutable fact you will see it everywhere in the world around us. Those in power do as they wish, great nations subjugate the weak as they always have and all those petty ideals set forth from the mewling, pitiful masses are just the weak trying to collar the strong in chains of delusional proprietary."

Ford looked desperately to Nick for help but his old "friend" was backing away from them with wide eyes darting about wildly like a scared rabbit.

"Don't look at him, look at me." Mac growled, leaning over Ford's prone form.

Ford dragged his eyes up and was horrified to see beautiful young Stephanie, that haughty campus goddess, had shuffled on her knees to the sand before Mac. She looked like one of those under-clothed slave girls basking at the feet of a sword wielding barbarian from an eighties film poster.

Then her perfectly manicured fingers pulled down the man's tight swimming trunks and freed Mac's big, throbbing cock. It was huge and Ford couldn't believe this was happening in right front of him. It was like some mad fever dream.

A waking nightmare.

Steph, the hottest girl on campus and a regular star in Ford's late night fantasies, was on her knees on a public beach taking this brutes giant cock into her perfect bow of a mouth. Her tongue lashed out as she took the angry, tumescent head of it between full, pouting lips. Her tight, rosebud nipples pressed excitedly through the sheer fabric of her tiny bikini top.

"That's a good girl," Mac crooned to hungrily sucking co-ed.

"Mmmmphmmm!"

He wrapped his hand in her long curtain of shining platinum hair and started stroking her face up and down his frightening length. His eyes remained on Ford though, his expression barely registering the fact he had one of the most gorgeous women Ford had ever known eagerly sucking and slurping at his dick.

Like it wasn't worth mentioning. As though it were his rightful due.

"How do you like my cute little cocksucker?"

Ford didn't know what to say, his mouth had gone as dry as the sand under his ass. Then he realized Mac was talking to Marina who was staring fixedly at his quickly disappearing length down her gorgeous friend's swallowing throat.

"Lose the face furniture and the dead weight, Doll. Then maybe we can talk business."

Suddenly all the titan's attention was back on Ford who was struggling to raise himself on hands and knees.

"Crawl away, Sprout and remember this lesson." He grunted before pulling hard on Steph's golden tresses to push her happily gurgling face further down his immense, rock-hard length.

Then, as if in afterthought Mac kicked a fan of sand into Ford's face, the salty grit stinging his eyes.

"You're not worth my time."

________________

Ford slammed his bedroom door and kicked over his laundry hamper in a fruitless fit of frustration. His soul was alight with fury at the way he had been treated on the beach but worse, so much worse, he burned with shame at how he hadn't been able to do anything about it!

It was as if (in a few short, violent moments) his entire life with all the hard work he had put into becoming the diligent, stoic, studious young man he was today had been weighed, measured and found wanting.

The drive back from the beach had been tortuous. They had fled the sands, Nick in a panic and Ford in shock tugging a dazed looking Marina behind him as she kept stumbling and looking back the way they had come. They hadn't even packed up the beach equipment. Lysiane had still been with the car and looked startled when Ford told her in no uncertain tones that they were leaving.

Like, right away.

Marina had sat in the back seat angrily ignoring everyone and everything as she deep-dived into her phone. Nick had ridden upfront looking bone pale and shiny with sweat that had nothing to do with the heat of the day. Lysiane's questioning gaze just flitted from one person to another but she had sensed the tense mood and remained quiet. Any and all attempts at conversation had been stunted, dying prematurely on the lips until they had finally pulled in out front of Marina's Sorority house.

Phi Alpha Theta. The place where Marina and Stephanie stayed.

Ford had walked her to the front door trying to think of something, anything to say but when he had opened his mouth to apologize she had turned to him with such a look of withering disappointment the words never left his tongue.

"Don't even bother, little boy." She had huffed and then slipped inside, closing the door behind herself without another word.

She hadn't been wearing her glasses, she had left them forgotten in the backseat of his car.

The whole run in with Mac replayed itself on an endless loop in his head. Ford's ribs hurt from where Mac had tossed him effortlessly aside and he couldn't banish the image of Steph on her knees eagerly suckling and servicing the awful man's massive dick.

Steph, Marina's hottest friend and sorority sister.

Steph who had never given him the time of day whenever Marina had brought him any of her social engagements.

Steph with her haughty smirks, that long luxurious white-blonde hair and mouth-watering cheerleader-fit body.

Steph, who had become a regular star in Ford's nightly rotation of fantasy girls he would stroke himself and moan in the shower to each evening before bed.

Steph... Marina... and others.

Despite himself, Ford felt a surge of arousal but it was all hollow and shameful. He felt washed out, emotionally exhausted and despite the early afternoon hour he collapsed into bed covering his face with a pillow to rest.

________________

Lysiane sat quietly in the empty living room, her heart heavy with concern. Something had been terribly wrong about the strange beach Beaford had taken her to today and after they had all left so abruptly no one had wanted to talk about it. What she had missed in her brief absence?

Lysiane was no fool and sometimes felt like she was treated like one because of her quiet, thoughtful nature.

She was far from foolish, she knew this to be true. English wasn't her first language, it was actually her third and she spoke it well, even if she lacked some of the nuances. She had earned her scholarship to L'Université de Bordeaux through long hours of study and scholastic excellence. As the daughter of a fisherman and a school teacher she had her core principles instilled in her from an early age and was grateful to her beloved parents for them.

She admired the hard-work, tenacity and devotion to family her weather-beaten father showed every long day he spent plying his trade in the waters off Saint-Jean-de-Luz. She learned to be contemplative, studious and compassionate from her endlessly patient saint of a mother. She had been taught to be observant too which is why she felt so flustered now.

Beaford was trying to hide it but it was clear he was very upset.

Lysiane liked Beaford. When she had arrived in America two months ago to begin her year of studying abroad she had worried that her host family would be like the brash, loud American tourists she would see in her sleepy seaside home. Instead she had met the kindly and generous Girard family and felt immediately welcomed into their modest home.

Mr and Mrs Girard were good people, that much was readily clear and young Beaford was cut from the same cloth. His birth-name was Beaford! It was French and so serendipitous that she simply refused to call him Ford. He was studious like her, he worked for the family business in his free time and even chose to attend a college close to home so he wouldn't be distant from his loved-ones.

He, like her, was quiet but Lysiane had seen flashes of a keen mind turning like spinning gears behind his often somber expression so she certainly hadn't mistaken him for stupid.

Which was why she had been confused when he had started seeing that silly slip of a girl a few weeks ago.

While Lysiane was sure that Parisian's didn't hold a monopoly on vanity, she was also certain that her father would have called that vapid, self-obsessed child la pouffiasse. A horribly unflattering term her mother would have scolded him over but one the blunt older seaman would have used none-the-less.

Lysiane wished she had her father's courage to speak his mind so freely. Instead she had watched in guilty silence as her new friend was led by the nose by some pretty young thing with a penchant for very short skirts and too tight blouses.

Beaford deserved better than that. Beaford deserved someone more like...

She was brought up short in her troubled musings by the sound of the doorbell chiming.

She looked about. Ford had cloistered himself in his room just as soon as he had got home and his parents were away in Los Angeles for the week on business.

Nothing else for it, she made her way to the front door and opened it. No-one was there but rather a small brown paper package tied up in twine sat on the welcome mat. Picking it up she frowned, the label on the front simply read "Ford Girard" with no address, postage stamps or postmark. Looking up and down the street she didn't see any courier or postal carrier, just the quiet neighborhood lit up in the golden glow of sunset.

"Hi Lizzie."

Startled, she turned and saw Nick, that strange boy from next door who always acted entirely too familiar with her, on his front porch holding an identical package and giving her a nervous little wave. His hair was greasy, unkempt and he still looked pale as a sheet from what-ever had happened earlier today. She gave him a tight smile and a small wave back before closing the door.

________________

"What is it, Beauford?" Lysiane asked.

Ford wished he knew, he hadn't ordered anything online recently. His own moratorium on frivolous spending had seen to that and there was no return address on the package. No addresses at all in fact, which was odd.

The waxy brown paper lay open on the duvet covering his bed. Revealed within was an old glass pill bottle that rattled when he shook it and a yellowing paper booklet in a plastic sleeve titled "Dr Zeus Mezmer's Dynamic Body Program''.

It looked ancient, all of it. The smoked glass of the bottle and the dull yellow plastic cap looked like something from an olde timey compound pharmacy and the picture of the posing strongman on the cover of the aged wrinkled booklet could have been plucked from the golden age of comics. The guy was hugely muscular, impossibly proportioned and only wearing a pair of leopard print briefs.

"I don't know, some kind of bad joke I suspect." He replied, carefully pulling the aged pamphlet out of the sleeve and flipping it open to read...

________________

Congratulations on ordering Dr Zeus Mezmer's Dynamic Body Program.

This instructional packet will give you all you need to transform your body and mind. Become the Dynamic Man today!

Using Zeus Mesmer's patented Mind over Muscle™ method you will see immediate results in three easy steps.

Step One: Visualization. See yourself as you always wanted to be! Dr Zeus Mesmer's unique and proven visualization techniques will help you remold your thinking to achieve your physical goals today.

Step Two: Implementation. Within this booklet you will find a fully illustrated fitness program to completely reshape your body overnight using the "Dr Zeus Mesmer's Dynamic Movement" process.

Step Three: Supplementation. As trialed by the U.S Army! One dose a day of Dr Zeus Mesmer's lab-approved chemical formula will boost your body's natural development and stimulate muscle growth like you have never seen before!

________________

Ford passed the booklet over to Lysiane to leaf through and opened the brown bottle for a sniff. It smelled stale, a bit earthy and he shook out a fat coffee-coloured capsule into his palm. Was he even considering this?

The shame he had felt earlier had become a bone-deep resentment at how he had been treated. Pushed around by Mac, sneered at by Steph and cast aside by Marina like yesterday's news... He hadn't deserved any of it.

The package before him was ridiculous, nothing could deliver on the ludicrous promises the booklet made. It was clearly some snake-oil medicine from a nineteen-fifties comic book advertisement that he had never heard of and certainly hadn't ordered.

...but it had been addressed to him, by name.

Lysiane was staring down at the crinkled pages of the pamphlet distractedly, not paying him any attention. Suddenly feeling impulsive, Ford popped the pill into his mouth, tilted back his head and swallowed.

________________

Lysiane stared at the pictures in the little paper book Ford had handed her. They were hand-inked illustrations of naked men holding various poses and mon dieu, there were a lot of pictures.

Her mother had once taken her to an art exhibition showcasing the French neoclassicist Denis Foyatier. She had explained how the artist had tried to capture the true essence of the masculine form in the lines and contours of the bronze and marble medium he worked in.

Somehow Lysiane was seeing that now, clearer than ever, in the stylized pen strokes on the yellowing pages before her. How did these cartoonish representations of men so perfectly capture the Olympian form?

Page after page had captured them mid-athletic feat. Raising weighty barbells in mighty grips, squatting with vast medicine balls upon their broad backs or holding body-contorting poses that defied the imagination.

The play of light and shadow across sketched muscles was hypnotic, the shadows especially. They had been cross-hatched not with simple straight inked lines but in complex spiraling fractal patterns of such intricate designs that befuddled the eye, making muscles seem to bend and fold into each other at impossible angles and junctures. Lysiane felt like she was falling.

Falling into the pages, into a bottomless ocean of male potential...

"Lysiane!"

Her head snapped up at the sound of Beaford's voice calling her name. She blinked rapidly bringing her eyes back into focus.

"Beaford?" She inquired looking up at him.

"You've been staring at that booklet for a while now and it's getting late. We should get dinner sorted." He said wearily.

Lysiane was surprised to see it was dark outside the bedroom window. When did night fall?

"Ummm, yes Beaford. Dinner sounds good."

________________

Lysiane watched Beaford eat. His parents had conscientiously stocked the fridge and pantry full before departing on their business trip but the lean young student had worked up quite the appetite tonight.

Dinner had been simple, neither one of them having the energy for much more than a reheated frozen pizza and garlic bread. Once Beaford had begun to eat though he only seemed to gather ravenous momentum. A second helping of microwave cheesy mac was fast disappearing into Beaford's flushed face as Lysiane watched on in puzzled astonishment.

Her own untouched plate was set to one side as her eyes kept straying to Dr Zeus Mesmer's instructional booklet where it rested on the table opened to the first page. She wanted to turn the page, to lose herself again in the images of those perfect men. Those demi-gods with their heaven-sculpted muscles that seemed to warp and swim on the page but that desire itself was troubling. She looked down at the introduction again.

Step One: Visualisation...

Lysiane didn't need to visualize the man Beaford could become. He was a great guy, she saw in him the same tenacity and strong drive to excel that she herself possessed.

She was suddenly angry at Marina, Lysiane had watched from the car as the vain little chit had dismissed Beaford at her front door. Beaford was a kind, considerate, studious soul who shouldn't be treated like that. Her eyes dropped to the pages again and thought of those pictures of naked men.

Beaford was a bit skinny though...

"Urp, sorry Lysiane..." Beaford covered a burp by wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, "I don't know what has come over me. I'm suddenly famished!"

Lysiane looked up from the pamphlet and gave him a shy smile. Then she pushed her own plate of pizza towards him.

"No Beaford, I think I understand now. Please, eat."

________________

Ford bent and stretched.

He was in his father's large workshop behind the house. Much of the old machinery, spare car parts and detritus of their families growing auto shop trade found retirement out here. He had the worn pages of Dr Zeus Mesmer's whatsit Program propped up on a cluttered workbench as he rolled out an oil stained length of fraying carpet to use as a workout mat.

The first few pages of the instructional booklet contained simple enough exercises. Something like calisthenics, though it was hard to tell at times.

He found that he could examine the strangely fascinating pictographs that outlined the motions he should make, step by step. He could start the movements to mimic the depicted exercise then invariably fall into a serene mental fugue state until he snapped out of it gasping for breath and dripping with sweat. The prescribed exercise was completed.