Robert Glazer
I know I probably shouldn’t be doing this. Everything about this screams danger. His mother could spot us. His boyfriend could, too. Anyone could, really. But nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Not lately, at least. And I am reminded of it every time I am around him. If I felt attractions to people before, this is a natural gas explosion, the kind that is so big it evacuates a town.
It’s interesting: there’s something about him that is strong and a little needy at the same time. In the words of Britney Spears, he’s not a girl, not yet a woman. But then again, he is a man – ugh, I can’t figure it out. I want to protect him, but at the same time he’s fine on his own. But the biggest thing is how fucking weird this is. But every time we have one of these conversations, I am more and more intrigued. And soon I won’t be able to back away.
“God,” I say as we start paddling off around the lake. He’s in the front seat, which faces me. His blondish hair is dripping onto his shoulders, and his blue eyes are shining gold in the light. In this moment, I decide I have never seen a human look so beautiful.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Fine. You just look fucking irresistible right now.”
He blushes, then bursts out laughing.
“What’s funny?”
“Seriously, I’m just not used to this,” he says as he looks off at the forest. “My last boyfriend, or flirtation or whatever you want to call him, for my birthday last year he got me a packet of Red Hots. I don’t even know what it’s like to date someone who isn’t in grad school, and dead broke all the time.”
“You should open yourself to kindness, then. Let someone be good to you. I promise you, it’s not as scary as it sounds.”
“It is, though,” he says soon. “I don’t really like myself, so I always wonder why anyone else would like me, too. It’s an endless cycle – their affection disgusts me, because I don’t understand it.”
I wave him off. “That is just called being in your twenties. You’ll love yourself one day.”
“When? Sometimes it seems so hard…”
“When the road gets easier, and you get to know the guy in the mirror. It’ll happen. I promise. Did you ever even think you’d be on a family vacation with a man?”
“I mean…good point. Sometimes I thought I’d never be strong enough to come out and live openly. I guess I have made a lot of progress in that area. If you showed the teenage version of me a picture of this, I wouldn’t believe it.”
“And the progress will only continue. Cheers to you.” I reach out with my free hand, and we clink fake wine glasses, five feet apart.
“Toasting to myself when I don’t even like myself. I could get used to this.”
“So could I,” I say, with total seriousness. He blushes again and looks away.
“I want to know you,” I tell him after a beat. “But, you know, real things. Serious things. What do you do on a Sunday?”
“A Sunday? Hmm, read on my Kindle.”
“No. You’re a reader?”
“I am.”
“Get out of town. So am I. That’s rare to find, even with men my age.”
“Well, books are my escape. They’re the only way I can turn my brain off. At night I’ll probably turn on Real Housewives and get lost in that, too. My other escape. I can be smart and watch trash TV, too.”
“Interesting. I agree.”
“Why do you read?” he asks.
“To live lives I’ll never get to live in my own lifetime.”
“Wow. Deep.”
“I guess,” I shrug. “What are you reading now?”
“Something by this gay author, Devon McCormack.”
“How is it?”
“Good, but I kind of want to jump through my Kindle screen and fuck the author. He’s pretty hot. Just kidding, but not really.”
“Sounds hot,” I laugh. “I’d join.” Then I take a breath. “You know, I always hoped I’d date another reader one day. What do you want out of a relationship?”
I wonder if I’ve gone too far, but he doesn’t seem to care.
“I don’t know. Not to get cheated on, for one.”
“That would be a good place to start,” I laugh.
“Yeah. I don’t have any rules, though. But I don’t believe in marriage.”
“Why not?”
“I think it’s hetero-normative nonsense that doesn’t fit into the gay lifestyle. I believe in love. I don’t need the law to tell me I’m in love, though.”
“Wow,” I say. “All very good points. I have to say, you’re quite a catch, though. Someone at some point is going to put a ring on it.”
“We’ll see,” he says, and I can tell he doesn’t believe me. We’re circling back on the house, but I turn to head out into open water again. There’s still so much more I want to know, and I won’t waste this alone time with him.
“Tell me about your dad,” I ask soon. “Can I ask that? What happened?”
“Well, obviously they split up long before you, but he was still in the picture for a while. Did you hear what happened?”
“I heard bits and pieces.”
He gets a faraway look. “So, yeah. Go back to about eight years ago. He’s remarried, has a new kid, the whole thing. His wife hires a new housekeeper, from Singapore. Within a few weeks they’re already banging.”
“The wife and the housekeeper?”
“No, my dad and the housekeeper, duh. He announces he’s in love, and is leaving the family. But the problem is, he can’t get permanent citizenship for his mistress. So what does my dad do? Moves back to Singapore with her, leaves both of his kids high and dry. After a while I just stopped hearing from him completely. He came to my high school graduation, and we had one conversation. It was so sick, because he made the whole thing about himself. He said the calls stopped coming because he felt too guilty and didn’t know how to apologize, so in the end he just gave up. But that’s still making it about his own feelings instead of the son he abandoned, you know? He couldn’t even give me a proper apology. It was so backhanded.”
“Life is hard,” I nod. “So many of us don’t know the repercussions of our actions while we’re committing them. And coming from someone who’s a bit older, I can tell you that people never really grow up. Their bodies just get bigger. Children expect their parents to be these exemplary citizens, when in reality, we’re just as lost as everyone else. We just hide it better.”
“That’s a very good point,” he tells me soon. “But I don’t care, anyway. My mom’s third husband is a better father figure than my own dad ever was. So I’m good on that front. I don’t have weird daddy issues or anything. He walked out – that’s on him. I’m not going to ruin my own life over it, too.”
“It all worked out in the end,” I nod. “Rick’s an amazing guy.”
“Speaking of age,” he says as we hit the head of a creek feeding the lake. I push past some brush, and soon we’re surrounded by trees, heading upstream.
“Yes?”
He swallows his lip. “Would you ever…date someone who was…my age?”
I shiver. There it is – the subject.
“I mean…I date hearts and minds and souls,” I tell him. “The outside body was always just a detail…so yes, I guess I would be a hypocrite if I turned away from someone because of age now. It’s not a big deal to me, anyway. Everything young people think they know about age is wrong. People are just people. Time is like a conveyor belt, and different people come along at different intervals. That doesn’t make older people any different, any less worthy.”
“Doesn’t it make them wiser?” he asks.
“If you’re listening, yes, you will become wiser over time. The problem is that nobody is ever listening to what the universe is trying to tell them. We kick and flail through life so blindly, so impatiently, never stopping to try and listen to the winds. I meet just as many seventy-year-old ignoramuses as I do ignoramuses who are your age.”
His body glistens. His eyes do the same as he smirks at me. “What is the universe telling you today?”
“That I’m about to do some bad things on this boat, unless I control myself.”
He gulps and looks away – but his cock is hard beneath his short swimsuit.
Fuck, maybe I shouldn’t even be noticing that…
“So,” I ask. “One more subject. How did your mom handle it when you came out? And how did you know you were…like me?”
“Because I was dating girls and felt nothing,” he says a little sadly. “I always felt so different, like such an oddball. But I wasn’t odd, I was just gay. So eventually I put two and two together, and decided to stop denying it to myself. And as for my mom…um, she was…weird. We’ve still never really talked about it, in any meaningful way. Well, besides this one time when she told me I could love anyone I wanted, and it was my decision. But…she doesn’t know how to talk about it. She’s fine with it, we just sort of dance around the subject. I think she’s afraid, and didn’t want the same future for me that she saw you go through. But that’s so dumb. I’m fine.”
“I think that’s when she emailed me once, actually. When you came out. She didn’t mention you. She just said sexuality was on her mind, and she apologized to me, and said she should’ve been more understanding.”
“Really?” he asks. “I think she handled it pretty well, considering she unknowingly married a gay dude. And why did you even do that, by the way?” he asks then, a little awkwardly. I look away.
“God. So many reasons. Also, no real reasons at all. A decade or two ago, things were so different. You couldn’t really be as ‘out’ as you can now. So think about it – in your teen years, while all the straight people are running around dating and hooking up and getting all that out of their systems, I was closeted. I was at home, hanging out with my mom. So I was delayed. I didn’t hit that ‘slutty teenager’ phase until I was probably twenty-five. For gay men, there’s a major sense of arrested development.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Yeah. So…I just didn’t know myself. I thought I was going with the flow and doing the acceptable thing. I didn’t realize I was living against my own grain. Not at first.”
“Yeah.” He gets more serious. “So forget about all this for a second, and tell me…”
“Yes?”
“Pretend we’d never met. Pretend…none of the ‘before’ stuff had ever happened. Would you ever date me?”
First, I smile. I didn’t know he was even considering our future, and it makes me melt a little. Then I bite my lip again.
Honestly, twenty-two is young, regardless of the Mary Kate factor. I wouldn’t tell my friends about our former link until it became necessary, but honestly, they’d still tease me about his age. My friend Steven, who is forty-ish, recently went to his boyfriend’s college graduation, and honestly the pictures were just sad. Pathetic, even. In the group photos after the ceremony, Steven looked as old as the kid’s parents, and the parents looked mortified. I would never want to look like a cradle robber, desperately trying to stay young by dating guys who were half my age.
But then again, Eliot is a serious adult. Being raised inside a messy family ensured that he acts decades older than he is. He’s mature. He’s steady-handed. If I didn’t tell my friends his age, they’d probably assume he was in his early thirties. For now, it could be our little secret. Nobody would know the better.
“Robert,” he says in a very different voice. I realize I’m not even looking at him, and I turn and see something shocking: he’s staring at me very intently, like he’s scared or confused or something, and his legs are open even further than before.
“Yes?”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
My shoulders fall. Oh. That should’ve been obvious. Of course he can’t. He’s paddling around with his former stepfather. Of course he’s been weirded out. Fuck. I went at him way too quickly, I should’ve calmed myself…
“Fine,” I say as I start to turn around. “I can take us back now…”
“Stop,” he says. “I didn’t mean I wanted to leave. I meant I couldn’t sit here another minute without taking my dick out.”
My heart stops. “You did?”
He swallows. He’s so hard to read. “Robert,” he gulps, his eyes intense. “I have never, in my life, been so turned on by anyone before. Ever. Do you feel the same?”
I stare down at the seat. “Yes, I do,” I say quietly. “It’s probably even beyond that.”
“Then keep paddling. I want to start slow, so I just want you to watch me with my dick out. Don’t make a move yet. Okay?”
“Okay,” I gulp, my stomach convulsing and my forehead sweating.
As I watch, he reaches under, adjusts his suit, and then pulls out his semi-hard dick and lays it against his leg. I try to swallow, but my mouth is too dry. Because he has one of the most beautiful penises I’ve ever seen, well-shaped and thick. Not huge, not even big, really, but perfect in other ways. And since I’m usually a top, it doesn’t matter much to me, anyway.
But it matters now. That thing is magnificent.
“Now paddle, please,” he says. “On this boat, forget everything that came before. Forget we ever met. Pretend we’re like strangers.”
“Your moods – they jump,” I say soon, as I paddle. “You’re very hot-and-cold.”
“I’m just afraid sometimes,” he says a little more softly. “Conflicted. But not right now. Keep going.”
I sit taller and try to push us further upstream, my eyes on him all the while. He’s playing some sort of game with me, and I don’t understand it. The energy between us is intensifying by the moment, and although the woods look empty, there are trails that crisscross the creek everywhere. Someone – maybe even David or Mary Kate – could happen upon us at any moment. And yet that’s the thing partly lending us the electricity, isn’t it?
But soon I give up. I’m going to spurt into my swimsuit if I don’t end this somehow, or escalate it. I want him so badly I can feel him against my skin. So I’ll compromise. I’ll please him without really pleasing him.
In short, I’ll only touch him with my tongue.
I set down the paddle. “Eliot,” I say, “take off your bathing suit, and spread your legs open.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever had your ass eaten while you operated a canoe?”
“Um…that’s a definite no.”
“Well you’re about to. It’s a compromise, if you will. I want to do so much more, but if I limit myself when I start out, I’ll know my own parameters.”
“Well, that is my favorite thing, actually, to have a tongue down there…”
My heart pounds as I get up. I hand him the paddle, both of us with wide eyes. Then I lower myself to the floor of the canoe, which is thankfully clean, and slide out of my suit as he does the same. Then he sits on my seat. On my back, I creep backward until my head is under his hole, which is hanging just over the edge of the seat.
Fuck, it’s so small and delicious looking, I could do filthy things to this…I’m already overwhelmed…
“Start paddling,” I say.
“Why?”
“You’ll need something to distract you, so you don’t come too quickly.”
“…You mean you can make people come with only your tongue?”
I lift myself closer, closer, closer…
“You’re about to find out.”