He would burst into the office, a literal bear of a man, pull his mother from our station and tantalize her away for an hour. Once, in a flurry of hair, fur, and some warm smell he manufactured under his skin, he told me he was pleased that he could take her out to lunch, now that I was working there. His name was Dan.

Shirley invited me to her home for dinner after we’d known each other about six months. I walked up the back steps and through a screened porch into the house. Dan came down the hall, swooped me up and held me securely for moments, as though we had once been lovers and had been separated by war.

It surprised us, a magnetic reaction neither of us had been prepared to prevent. We both looked at Shirley. She didn’t seem to have noticed.

He sat next to me through dinner. We exchanged barely a word and never touched as we passed dishes of food. I was willing to forget the incident. When I left, I came to know that Dan was not.

He met me at the door to my car as I was leaving. He said nothing to me, just looked at me and smiled. He kissed me, licking my face, my nose, my eyes, my lips, licking my teeth, my tongue. I suggested that he come home with me, spend the night with me. He stared at me and asked if I realized what that would mean as far as his mother was concerned.

“You’re very brave,” he said. He kissed me deeply and pulled and patted my body into him. When we separated he told me to wait for him, he would be back shortly.

We did not spend a lot of time together. I’m not sure why. Maybe we were both embarrassed.

He loved what he called skinning; rubbing all over each other; exploring a body with a body. He came easily and revived quickly. I teased him once and told him he was like an eighteen-year-old. He seemed hurt, and then fucked me like a thirty-year-old, he said. I often needed hard, overwhelming fucking; foreplay had to end in penetration. A sexual connosieur would have found me boring. All I wanted was someone to bore into me. He was driven to penetrate me in every way he could think of.

Next morning I went into work alone. Shirley always arrived a quarter hour before me. We were an office of habit.

“He’s six years younger than you,” she said.

“I know. He knows more than me, though, Shirley.”

“He could have AIDS. He used drugs, once,” she said, her voice flat.

“He still uses marijuana, Shirley,” I told her.

She swiveled in her chair and looked at me, her eyebrows arching above her glasses. A suppressed grin played at her lips.

“His daddy was younger than me.” I knew she wondered if I’d caught the softening of her voice. “Them Tlingits,” she told me, shaking her head, “sure know what they like!”

I laughed. “You’re son is a true Tlingit,” I confided.

“I thought so,” Shirley confirmed, “I kinda thought so.”

I look him up before I leave Seattle. He is getting ready to move to Alaska. He has become interested in finding relatives on his father’s side. The life of the Tlingit is still semi-nomadic. He wants to lead that kind of life.

I could live in cold, in snow, I think. But not in Alaska. I decide to pick up my life from the floor of the Puget Sound and move to Phoenix.

Text & Graphics © 1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

Background by