Tonight I think about older men. Older men with bodies developed beyond the musculature. Bodies that know ease, that know pleasure as a shudder, as well as an explosion.

It is easy, with older men, to spend more time going than coming. It is easier to ride older men. It is easier to be ridden by older men.

Death of the son brings the father to the brink. Death of the husband brings the wife. After Frank died, it made sense to seek out Jason. I felt my way to Jason’s home like a snail groping for moisture.

We said nothing. Frank had been dead just over 48 hours. I still felt anxious about leaving home without posting a note to Frank outside the door.

I leaned against Jason, settling my right side against the front of his torso. Neither of us lifted our arms. I began to rock against his belly, then felt a pang and turned into him.

We rolled into one another. There was something of the son in the father’s smell. Perhaps Jason smelled Frank on me.

His dick was hard but lazy. I brought him up between us and teased him like a belly dancer until he handled me down and speared me.

I thought of his wife, later, but I thought of her as Frank’s mother.

When I was in my late 20’s, long after my father had become “Maury”, and I had forgotten the feel of his fingers writing silky messages on my back, he admitted, from a drunken haze, that he would have, “liked to have taken your cherry.”

I was shocked that his generation used the word “cherry”. I was surprised that he would admit this to me. What he felt, though, didn’t surprise me. I wondered if he felt that way toward all his daughters. I assumed he did. I wondered if fathers felt this way toward their sons.

I tried to entertain pictures of my father introducing me, us, someone, to sexuality, and couldn’t. I knew of my father’s longing, but I did not know it from the inside out. I wondered if Mr. Graves had daughters. Who taught them.

There is something different about my need for Frank’s father. I don’t hesitate to imagine Jason inside me. And, he’s there.

I wonder if I have taken something from Jason that he can’t regenerate. I hope not. I don’t want his wife to miss this.

Text & Graphics © 2000 by Gail Rae Hudson

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