Daddies, page 8
“God, you are beautiful,” Marc gasped.
“You too. You have no idea how attractive you are to me. No idea,” Logan said. “You’re so at the hot old guy level of Sean Connery, with more hair.” He laughed.
“What?” Marc was laughing too as he caressed chest and stomach. “Sean Connery must be at least seventy. I’m fifty-two.”
“Bad example, but he is hot.”
“A very good example, actually.” Marc kissed Logan long and deep, tasting the water and a hint of himself. “But maybe the wrong generation. I’m the one who has always had a thing for Sean Connery. Twenty years older with those eyes that could make you do anything.” From somewhere farther up the mountain an owl hoo-hooed. Marc lifted his head and answered it. Then he realized that it was something Douglas would have done.
“My fantasy has been you,” Logan said softly, a hand stroking Marc’s cock.
“And here you are. That sounds slightly stalkerish.” Marc now had Logan’s cock in his left fist. With a finger of his right hand he penetrated the younger man. Logan gasped as the digit slid in past the second knuckle.
“If Douglas had chosen to have children not long after we met, and we had had a son, he would now be your age,” Marc said, a second finger joining the first.
“And if you’d put a couple of grand in Microsoft then, you’d be rich now,” Logan said hoarsely, slowly rising to his feet in the hot tub. “Get over it and fuck me.” He leaned out into the darkness and came back with something in his hand. Something that glittered in the moonlight. A wrapped condom.
“My god, do you anticipate everything?” Marc was laughing again. Logan’s teeth flashed and tore the wrapper, and he rolled the condom expertly the length of Marc’s cock. The cool night air evaporated the water from his skin.
“They threw me out of the Boy Scouts for being too prepared.” Logan pressed a small tube into Marc’s hand. “Your turn, old man.” He turned and placed his hands on the side of the tub. Presenting. Marc hesitated, then stroked smooth flesh, the firm back, a curve of thigh. He applied the lube to a finger and slid it easily into Logan’s beautiful ass. Of course, it had been prepared. Logan moaned a primal, sexual sound. An owl answered.
It was gentle at first. Marc placed the tip of his cock against the opening and slowly, slowly pressed into Logan, waiting for any expression of pain. Logan keened softly, but Marc could tell it was from pleasure. From satisfied surrender. He withdrew until just the head was inside, penetrated until his hips were pressed against peach-perfect asscheeks. Again. And again. By the fourth time Logan was thrusting back, impaling himself.
“For god’s sake fuck the boy!” Douglas’s voice was in Marc’s head. He saw Douglas in the moonlight, balancing unsteadily on the varnished deck railing, naked with a raging hard-on. “Don’t tease him. Give him all of it. All of yourself.”
“I don’t think I can,” Marc whispered as Logan writhed and whimpered with wanting.
“Do it for me. Because of me.” Douglas grinned his Douglas grin. “What the fucking hell do you think I want you to do? Either you knew me, really knew me, or you fucking didn’t.”
Marc slammed his hips into Logan’s ass. Logan thrust back to meet him. A primal rhythm was reached. Marc almost howled to celebrate something caged that had suddenly been freed, but thought better of it. Martha and Frank were sleeping on the other side of the lodge, and they probably had a window open. Marc reached around Logan’s hip and found his cock, hot, hard, and alive against his cool, wet hand. He circled his fingers and took it prisoner. Leaning forward, he maintained momentum while letting Logan fuck his hand on the backstroke. Neither of them lasted long. They collapsed into the water.
“Well, this may seem mundane after that,” Marc heard Logan say after he had drifted into and out almost-sleep for what seemed like hours. “But someone is going to have to change the water and clean the tub tomorrow. Isn’t there a small group arriving in the afternoon?”
“The job’s yours,” Marc told Logan as they ate breakfast on the deck, a breakfast of cheese and potato omelets and fruit that Logan had prepared. “In spite of, not because of what we did.” He had returned to his room and immediately fell asleep, the easiest sleep in months.
“What we did? Had sex. We had sex.” Logan grinned, speared a slice of juicy peach on a fork, and held it up. “Come on, old man, you can say it.”
“Very well. We had sex, very good meaningful sex. Tender and lustful. Maybe even breaking though into making love,” Marc said.
“You think?” Deadpan.
“Yes, which is why I’m going to spend two weeks training you, and then I’m leaving,” Marc said, talking to the forest again.
“Leaving?” Logan said. A question, a statement, or just atonal echo?
“To the Caribbean, a place in Puerto Rico run by a friend. That was the reason behind hiring a manager.”
“I thought that you needed help. A…”
“A replacement for Douglas?”
“No, I didn’t think that. I just thought that, well—you would be here,” Logan said quietly. “I wanted to work with you.”
“You can work with me, for two weeks. And I may be back in a few months,” Marc said, watching Logan’s face. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. Now I need to get a little distance and see how things look to me from there.”
“With Douglas gone.” Not even a hint of a question.
“Yes, with Douglas gone.”
The two weeks went by quickly for Marc. Logan was brilliant, learning the existing routine quickly and immediately improving on it. Two large groups and one smaller one came and went during the period. Logan charmed even the most difficult, demanding visitors. A seventy-year-old psychotherapist, an overbearing, queenly, passive-aggressive terror during previous visits, was transformed by the power of Logan’s personality from a shrew into a courtly gentleman in a matter of a few hours.
“Douglas would approve of that,” the doctor told Marc, nodding at Logan, who had effortlessly defused another minor crisis without being either rude or subservient. All that Marc could think was that the age difference between himself and the therapist was less than the number of years between himself and Logan.
One night Marc and Logan made love in Marc’s bed for the first time. They kissed languorously, massaged each other, indulged in unhurried foreplay. Marc took Logan’s cock into his mouth for the first time, no latex between lips, tongue, and the sensitive inner flesh of cheeks.
“I’m safe, but are you sure?” Logan had asked. It was an odd question. Logan had blown Marc half a dozen times since that first day, and only the first time with a condom.
“I’m sure,” Marc murmured. Logan massaged Marc’s scalp and neck as Marc moved slowly, his hands on Logan’s ass. The living warmth of penis against tongue, the taste of resilient flesh, the feel of muscle under his fingers, Logan’s touch and his murmured entreaties and encouragement. All of it.
The easy intimacy of two people sharing each other’s body was what Marc missed most after Douglas died. They had always fucked with a condom but never used one for fellatio. “I need to taste you,” Douglas had said. “And I trust you.” With my life—unspoken.
Logan was passive at first, his fingertips brushing Marc’s face, tracing the boundaries of his lips. Then Logan’s hips began to roll, and Marc closed his fingers to his thumb, circling Logan’s cock to control the depth of his thrusts.
Marc sensed Logan’s orgasm building long before it arrived. The young man’s heartbeat thrummed through the cock in his mouth. Marc knew an explosion of cum was near, but he didn’t—couldn’t—let go, despite a kernel of fear. And then Marc accepted the salty jism cultured by the testicles of a beautiful boy-man, held it on his tongue, let the memory of it soak deeply, swallowed joyously, Only then did he look at Logan, arms extended in an attitude of surrender—or crucifixion.
“I need you to know that I don’t want to take care of anyone,” Marc said. “I don’t want to play father figure.”
“Where the fuck did that come from?” Logan’s eyes opened and he looked puzzled and irritated. “Do you think I need a sugar daddy? Do you? You think that is what this is about?” Logan, even mildly angry, was an impressive sight. From inches away, eyes flashing, Marc felt on the defensive. In the wrong.
“Well, it did cross my mind.” Marc stood up.
“Do you think I need to be taken care of? I am the best at what I do, and you think I would be happy as a houseboy whore or some shit?” No, Marc couldn’t imagine that. Then his arms were around Logan, and he was holding him.
“No, I don’t think that.”
“Goddamn it. Get past the age bullshit,” Logan said, pulling back and looking determinedly into Marc’s eyes.”
“It’s not our ages.”
“Then what? Oh.” Understanding dawned in Logan’s eyes.
“It’s Douglas. He’s still with me,” Marc said.
“Of course he is.” Logan kissed his sticky lips. “He will be with you until you die. But from what I understand, Douglas wasn’t a selfish man.”
“No, he was not.”
Marc left for San Juan on a Sunday afternoon, catching a ride to the airport with two teachers, Bob and Sammy, a couple on their way back east after a four-day retreat at Hunter Mountain.
“How long have you and Logan been together, Mr. Dove?” Sammy asked from the front seat of the rented car, soon after passing through the Eisenhower Tunnel. “You seem well suited.”
“It’s Marc, please,” Marc said. “Not long.”
“But you’re taking a separate vacation?” Bob asked.
“I’m hoping distance will make things seem a little clearer,” Marc said. It sounded like a practiced platitude to him.
“Sometimes you’re one silly bastard,” Douglas said from the seat beside him.
The phone rang four times before it was picked up. “Hunter Mountain Center, how can I make your day a little better?” It was Logan, sounding out of breath.
“It’s me. How are things?” Marc said softly.
“Things are pretty fucking terrific,” Logan said, sounding like he meant it. “Even though the irrigator is in the Gunnison County Jail on a charge of assaulting a police officer. Drunk and disorderly. I’ve been riding around on one of the four-wheelers setting gated irrigation pipe. The only ones having more fun than me are the dogs. And I’ve got sixteen New England land-use planners arriving for a retreat this afternoon, but I’ve got a nice brisket in the smoker out on the big deck, and I’ve hired another woman from town to help Martha.” He said all of this in a kind of an explosion of words, like a child recounting his day at school.
“Oh,” Marc said.
“How are things there? Fall asleep on the beach without your sunblock?”
“Ummm, no. Things are good, nice. Mostly nice. A small shark bit a twelve-year-old kid out here yesterday. It took a good chunk out of his arm.” Marc shifted the cell to his other ear and watched two young college age boys pass. One had a tattoo of a spider web on his shaven left calf. Douglas sat in the empty beach chair across from him with a bored expression on his handsome, semi-transparent face. “Scenery is good.”
“I’ll bet. A coyote tried for one of the turkeys, but the dog got there first,” Logan reported. “I really miss you.”
“What?”
“I-miss-you.”
“Oh…”
“Be a lot more fun if you were here with me, old man.”
“Oh.”
“So get back here; you’ve had your time off. You’re needed.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? Really?”
“Yes.” Marc focused on the firm butt of a brown boy of about eighteen carrying a yellow surfboard and imagined Logan lying naked on his stomach. “Douglas says to say hello.”
“Bring him too,” Logan said.
FOR LUCK
Jamie Freeman
My father picked me up at the airport, smiling and hugging me but having little to say as we crossed the tiny terminal to the lone luggage carousel. We stood a few feet apart, mutually apprehensive, and he asked me how finals went. I rambled on about my poetry class, about an unexpectedly familiar Keats poem that appeared as if by magic on the final, about term papers on the Russo-Finnish War, Bradbury’s metaphysical man in Fahrenheit 451, and gender stereotypes in Wells, Lawrence, and Forster. He smiled broadly; he loved this, my education. My father seemed so proud of my accomplishments that I steered the conversation to other topics.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Oh, she got called in to the plant.”
“Oh.”
We turned in silence as the luggage carousel came to life. The bags trundled out on the conveyor belt, and the crush of happy holiday chatter shoved us together until the toes of our shoes were touching. My father grinned and I laughed too. Karen Carpenter sang “The Christmas Song” overhead, and I could hear my father absently humming along. I picked up my garment bag, and we waded through the crowd to the outside doors. I reeled as a blast of warm Florida air slammed into me.
In the car, my father turned up a CD of Christmas music to drown out potential conversation, and we careened through the streets of my childhood in silence. I wondered at the amount of gray hair he had acquired since I saw him last. His jaw line was square, but the stubble was speckled with more gray. I realized the old boy was finally beginning to show his age, but his arms were toned; he must have been working out. As I watched his hands on the steering wheel, it occurred to me that his ring was gone.
“What happened to your ring?” I asked. Last time I had seen him he had been wearing a thick silver band on which were engraved a series of six linked circles. (“Six degrees of separation, eh, Dad?” “An antique,” he had replied vaguely.)
“Oh,” he said, wiggling his finger as if he had just noticed its absence. “I lost it at the beach last weekend. Your mother and I were over at Shelley and Don’s beach house for a barbecue and I went for a swim and, well, it was gone.”
When we turned onto our street, my stomach churned to assure me that I was indeed nervous about coming home. The house was the same as it always was, somewhat more dilapidated than the neighbors’, the paint sporting mildew in broad patches, the grass overgrown, and the trees obscuring most of the house from view. I stepped out of the car as if I was standing on land for the first time after a long sea voyage. You’ll only be here a week, I reminded myself as I pulled my garment bag out of the trunk and followed my father up the sidewalk to the front door.
The house was dark and silent. I expected my dog to come rushing out of nowhere, tags jingling and nose cold against my legs, but he had been dead for several years. As I closed the door, I wished fervently that I had not come back here.
I headed down the hall to the guest bedroom. The room smelled of fresh paint and the furniture all looked new, a startling contrast to the mildew smell of the front part of the house. I dropped my garment bag and backpack on the sofa. New television, too much expensive artwork, books everywhere, mostly things that a person could read in a weekend, short stories and travel essays.
I heard a pager go off in the depths of the house, and I knew that my father was about to follow my mother out the door. Five minutes later, he poked his head into the room and announced that he had to go in to work.
“There’s a note on the table for your mom. I’ll be back in about an hour.”
I wandered around the empty house and tried to read the paperback I bought at the airport. Then, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I fled. I still had the key to my father’s old Porsche, and the engine turned over on the third try. I coasted down the driveway and out into traffic, driving for a mile and then turning south on University Boulevard. I pretended not to know where I was going—just out for a ride—but my destination was fixed in my mind.
The History Building was silent and dark in the humid winter evening. I pulled into a secluded space off to the edge of the parking lot and slipped silently into the building. The lights were off and the hum of the air conditioners was the only sound. I walked silently down the main hallway to the back stairwell. I pushed the heavy institutional door inward and stepped into the darkness. At the bottom of the steps, I opened another door and, off in the distance, I could see the light that was my destination.
Movement caught my eye and I realized that the place was hopping. As my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness of the hallway, I could see the outlines of several pairs of men squirming in the recesses between supply cabinets or lone men leaning against door frames. A tall shirtless man in running shorts stood stretching himself, displaying the merchandise in the light of the restroom door. I walked softly down the hallway, brushing gently past the runner and entering the restroom.
The lights inside were harsh compared to the darkness of the hall, but dim enough to prevent intense scrutiny. I approached the sinks and looked deeply into the mirror, defining reference points behind me. The short black man in tank top and short shorts, the older man in Sansabelt slacks and shirt, a dark man in white shorts and shirt fresh from the tennis court, and finally, my dark prince for the evening. I wanted him instantly and irrevocably.
He was tall, older than me, with dark, perfect hair, graying around the temples, longish but impeccably controlled. He wore jeans so tight that even in the dim reflection, I could make out the outline of his sizeable cock, straining in welcome. A Rolex and D&G shirt set him further apart from the rest of the crowd. I looked at him in the mirror and realized that he was already staring quite pointedly at me. I turned around and he smiled.
