Rick glanced at his watch once again and seethed.
How many times had he looked at the time this evening? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? He couldn't guess. His eyes went back to the novel he had been trying, without success, to read. As he took in the line he'd already read four times without comprehending, he closed the book and threw it aside.
"Little bastard!" he steamed, and looked once more at his watch. 1:37 a. m. When his son finally put his key in the lock this morning, he was going to be the recipient of a homecoming he'd never forget.
*****************
Timmie took his eyes from the road long enough to check his watch. 1:38. Oh, _s_h_i_t_. Perfect. His father's patience had been sorely tried lately. This was probably going to be the proverbial last straw.
He sighed, equal parts dread and resignation suffusing his 16-year old body. Well, that's just perfect, he thought. This will bring my whole sorry week to a terrific close.
He took the exit that lead inexorably toward home and hoped against hope that his dad was away. Asleep. Anything but what he knew in his heart would be the case: waiting for him, anger increasing with every minute. Timmie's hand shook slightly on the steering wheel and he breathed deeply in an attempt to quiet his racing heart.
Why had he done it -- deliberately stayed out hours past his 11 p. m. curfew? Well, he knew the answer to that as well as he knew that his father would not understand it. The truth was, he'd gone for a solitary drive at 8:30, his mind filled to overflowing with the thoughts and fears that had taken over so recently, and had stopped at a small park on the outskirts of town, where he got out and sat on a bank by the little stream, smoking cigarettes and thinking about his life. And when -- hours later, the night overtaking the day without his even registering the change - -he'd come to for a moment and had looked toward town and had seen, almost as a bolt from the blue, the digital bank clock reading 11:42, he'd groaned and simply given up.
All right, he thought to himself. As long as we're going to have the reckoning, it might as well be truly worth having. Coming in an hour late would not be worthy of the punishment he knew would be forthcoming. Might as well make it two. Two and a half. Who cares? Not me, not now.
******************
Rick got up from his chair and went into his bathroom. Pulling down his trousers and underpants, he sat on the toilet and tried to void his dinner, but angry thoughts constricted his bowels. He turned his eyes to the full-length mirror on the bathroom door that reflected him at his solitary task: a man of 35, still youthfullooking, still trim. He looked at his legs and his naked thighs. No fat. His eyes traveled to the cheek of his ass as it clung to the toilet seat. Still the buttock of an athlete, firm and hard. He felt his _c_o_c_k_, buried between his legs and pointing resolutely toward the bowl, begin to stir. He glanced away from his reflection then and tried to think of ice cold water being poured over his balls.
After a few more minutes of futile strain, he stood up again. He glanced at the reflection of himself once more, from behind. And what a behind it was, he thought with pride. Buttocks round and firm and powerful. The blood began to race toward his penis again and, embarrassed at being turned-on by the reflection of his own ass, he yanked his underpants and jeans back up over his exposed flesh. He flushed the empty toilet bowl and tried not to think of what his _s_e_x_ual stirrings actually meant. But he couldn't dismiss from his mind the image of his tidy, muscled lower half -- nor from the simultaneous fantasy image that aroused itself from his sub-conscious: of another naked, firm, male body pressed against his own.
He looked at his watch again. 1:56. _d_a_m_n_, he fumed to himself. That spoiled brat had better show himself, and soon.
He walked back to the living room and tried not to think of that second naked body any more, tried especially not to imagine its face metamorphosing into the sweet young face of his son, the hard body he yearned for becoming in his mind's eye the muscled yet pliant, naked body of his own boy. Tried to keep from his mind the flash of imagery fed from the 16 years they'd spent under the same roof, years in which he'd seen that boy grow from plump childhood to wiry, burgeoning pubescence and, finally, into un-self-consciously masculine late adolescence. The boy's body that had been exhibited to him over and over down the years in various states of dress and undress. The body -- the boy -- he desired now more than any woman he'd ever known.
He shook his head, trying to hurl the thoughts, the images away, and glanced once more at the watch. 2:00. God_d_a_m_n_, he was going to kill that kid.
******************
Timmie turned the car toward the residential neighborhood and slowed his speed to a near crawl. Just a few blocks more -- and then all hell would break loose.
He sighed again. How was he going to explain? His father, still young himself, who'd become a dad at 18, had promised to raise Timmie if only Timmie's mother wouldn't give the baby up for adoption. His dad, who d always said Timmie could talk over anything he liked with him, without fear of judgment. But the specter haunting the lean, golden-haired teenager was not something he thought he could bring up, even to his understanding dad. What was he supposed to do? Lift his glass of iced tea at dinner and casually say, Oh by the way, Dad, I think I might be a queer?
He couldn't talk about this problem, especially to his father. Because Dad was a big part of the problem. If his father said something adults like to say to gay kids: "How do you know?", was Timmie supposed then to own up to lusting after his own father's body with such a violent longing that he beat off over pairs of his dad's worn underpants he had begun retrieving from the laundry hamper prior to washing on an increasingly regular basis? That his waking and sleeping fantasy was to lie with his father in nakedness and touch and kiss and caress his own dad, live the ecstatic paradise of his only living relative making love to his teenaged body? That his greatest dream of the flesh was to have his father's hard penis between his young, nearly hairless, buttocks? Oh, and by the way, Dad, I'm not only gay but I want you to _f_u_c_k_ me. Right.
So he'd taken a drive to think things over for the millionth time in the past six months, stayed out hours past his curfew and was heading directly toward the confrontation he'd dreaded all along.
Timmie lit a cigarette and counted the blocks. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six. He slowed down as far as he dared without seeming suspicious at this time of night and trembled at the thought of what would happen in another six blocks. Five, four, three ...
He turned off suddenly and drove down a side street. At last he came to the 24- hour convenience mart -- where you've gazed in furtive lust at the copies of Playgirl by the counter, remember? -- and got out, waved to the young cashier who'd let him buy beer despite the certain knowledge that Timmie was underage, and got a bottle of Genessee Cream Ale out of the freezer. The clerk nodded, smiled in conspiracy, and asked if Timmie needed cigarettes? He did.
Transaction over, Timmie waved again and walked on increasingly wobbly legs to his car. He got in, started up and drove off. When he'd gotten a good distance from the store -- he didn't want to risk the cashier getting in trouble if he was discovered in the parking lot with an open beer -- he snapped off the cap and drank deeply. So his father would smell the beer. So what?, Timmie mused; he was in so much trouble now, what did it matter? So. _f_u_c_k_ing. What.
******************
Rick got up and went to Timmie's bedroom. He flicked on the light and stared at the walls of his son's inner sanctum. No scantily-clad women in states of undress, no Packers racing for the touch-down or Lakers making that final basket. Instead, posters for Sondheim musicals. Photos of Timmie's favorite movie stars. The bookshelves groaned with paperbacks -- classic novels, new fiction, copies of plays. He wondered, not for the first time, what sort of a boy it was he'd sired on that now-forgotten night 16 years before when he'd impregnated Timmie's mother. He loved the kid, no question, but sometimes he couldn't handle a teenager's problems. Hell, he couldn't handle his own. He'd been a mere kid himself when Timmie's mother had deposited her unwanted off-spring in his young arms with never a look back.
He sat on the bed. The room smelled subtly of the boy himself. He walked to Timmie's closet, and stared for long silent moments at the laundry hamper. Then he opened it, placed both hands inside it and brought out a wad of the boy's clothing: sweat-stained shirts, worn trousers, and white cotton briefs. He held the mass up to his nose and breathed deeply; the scent of his son's body -- sweat and genital musk and the slightly sweet yet acrid odor that emanated from the seat of the underpants -- filled his nostrils and he found his penis expanding once more.
A life-long bachelor, Rick had found his interest in _s_e_x_ -- his interest in women -- on the decline in recent years. He'd never been a raging _s_e_x_-fiend, and during Timmie's childhood he'd forsworn _s_e_x_ual activity in favor of parenthood. For a time, when Timmie was a toddler, the constant worry and care and work of having a child in his care had driven him to seek the company of one-night stands: beautiful women he'd loved for an evening. And, yes, he had to admit to it, the occasional guy, when he'd been drunk enough to pick one up but not too drunk to perform, and to enjoy the muted memory of that performance.
By the time his son was ten or so, Rick realized that the thought of entering a woman no longer aroused him at all. He'd even had a couple of nasty encounters during which his penis resolutely refused to rise to the needed dimensions. Well, some men were like that, he'd reassured himself. Nothing to worry about. When Timmie gets a bit older, Rick had thought, I'll start dating again. Get laid a little. Maybe even meet the right one, marry, settle down and --
And who am I kidding?
The only thing that had saved him from complete _s_e_x_ual dysfunction on those last couple of limp-_d_i_c_k_ nights was to fantasize that the women weren't women at all but hunky young guys. Only when he closed his eyes and the woman had become a firm, _s_e_x_y male beneath him had he been able to get hard, only when the moist cunt had metamorphosed into a glistening, oiled-up masculine asshole, had he been able to penetrate the women, _f_u_c_k_ them. After the second time, he stopped looking for the opposite _s_e_x_ at all.
His own private desires, however little _s_e_x_ he'd actually enjoyed in the last dozen years, had far from waned. And that was the problem.
Almost at the same time as his libidinous drive toward the opposite _s_e_x_ had flattened out entirely, Rick had found himself glancing more and more at the bodies of the men he saw. And with more interest than he'd ever realized he had. For a lot longer than it took to make a disinterested mental note of physiognomy. Showers at the Y had become events that registered more profoundly in his imagination than the sight of any bikini-clad female ever had. He memorized the contours of naked male flesh, noted with increasing panic how quickly his crotch responded to the stimulus around him, so that his post-swim showers had taken on the urgency of a race. A race with himself, to see whether he'd make it out of the shower and into his clothes before his body betrayed his thoughts. Christ, if any of the men there had seen an erection in the locker room he'd never be able to go to the gym again. Finally, just getting undressed had become a prelude to imaginary _s_e_x_, and since he was certain his unruly penis would betray him, he'd let his gym membership lapse without bothering to renew it.
As disturbing as all of this was -- and nothing could have seemed more disturbing to Rick -- what bothered him most was the way his eyes had begun to ravish the body of his own son. He found himself cursing winter and relishing spring, for the cold meant sweaters and heavy coverings, and the spring had revealed his boy's taste for short shorts that left _d_a_m_n_ little to the over-active imagination of a man like Rick. A man in the throes of desire more intense than any he'd felt in his life.
How could he begin to even consider such an idea? He was the kid's father! He wasn't some pedophile, some molester or rapist, or incest-driven bastard! And yet, here he was now, not only contemplating having to identify himself as gay but actively pursuing the naked image of his own son's young body!
He sat down on Timmie's bed and thought, not for the first time, of the jam he was in. And what about the other day, when Rick had been surprised by the boy's early arrival home, had been caught coming from the bathroom in complete nakedness, had seen the boy's eyes taking in the flesh before him in awe-struck wonder. And why, why, had Rick turned around at his bedroom door and stared into the kid's eyes? Had he meant an invitation to Timmie to join him?
He leaned back against the headboard and tried to answer his own silent accusations. But he had only one answer, he knew: yes.
****************
Timmie slowed the car at the block before his home and pulled over. He turned off the headlights and sat, remembering:
Remembering how one night last week, returning home earlier than his dad had expected him, he'd surprised him. His father was coming out of the bathroom naked. Timmie's eyes had gone from his dad's chest - hairless and sculpted, his well-defined and muscular breasts tapering to small, hard pink nipples -- to his thighs -- black-haired, taut, powerful - and had caught the first glimpse of his hairmatted crotch he'd seen since childhood when they had shared a basement shower in a house they'd abandoned before Timmie was eight. His mind reeled back to that time, and he instantly recalled the sight of his father's flesh before his childish eyes, and how - even while he did not know as yet its uses beyond the purely urinary -- he'd compared it to his own undusted little limp worm and had marveled at the size and shape of his -- to Timmie, then, enormous, long, fat -- penis and the thick bush of curly black surrounding it. How well he remembered it, its length and breadth, how the ring of flesh crowned the wide pink head. He had jerked back violently into the present then, realizing that he was staring again at his father's masculine _s_e_x_. His eyes shifted upward. He wondered briefly if Dad had seen his childish staring then -- do all fathers bear the undisguised wonder of their sons' awe-struck eyes fixed on their genitals? -- but there was no question now of whether Dad had seen and noted. Still, his father said nothing. His eyes met Timmie's, and a quick current passed between them and Timmie noted his dad's penis beginning to swell before the man turned and walked away, his small hard buttocks swinging with powerful masculine sensuality as he padded to his room, turned once again toward his son and, seeing him guiltily averting his eyes from his father's body, had exited to his bedroom and closed the door.
Seeing his dad naked had awakened in Timmie some nascent sense of self. The image of his father's flesh burned inside the boy's dazzled head, and more than once he wondered, fleetingly, before dismissing the thought, if his turning to Timmie had been a kind of invitation the boy had been too naive - or too guiltily terrified - to accept. The thought was absurd, he told himself. He's my father! His own desire to caress male flesh had projected onto his dad the same thoughts and feelings, and it was insane to even contemplate. Wasn't his father his father? And didn't that make his body somehow sacrosanct, off limits? And didn't it also presuppose his father's _s_e_x_uality? And even if it didn't, Timmie was a boy, 16, too young for a mature man's attentions. And yet he couldn't get the image to go away, and each time he considered it, Dad's flesh loomed large and Timmie saw the man's nakedness pressed against his own, his father s hands on his butt, his Dad s _c_o_c_k_ beating against his belly. As the image sharpened his penis engorged he would beat off, guilty and sick with desire. And if all this weren't enough, there was that other sick little twist to feel guilty about.
When Timmie was growing up, a constant, unmentioned presence lay in a side drawer of his father's massive roll-top desk, slender and wooden. It was a small, slim paddle. And though it had seldom been used on the boy, its terrible promise held keen sway over his childish imagination.
Although the paddle held a furtive terror in its promise of swift, painful attention to Timmie's buttocks, it had an equally strong pull -- erotic, he now realized, although as a pre-pubescent child he would not have suspected this to be the case. Timmie recalled with special vividness the strange thrill he felt fluttering in his stomach when he pulled the paddle from its third-drawer hiding place and stared at its kitschy cartoon violence. He d even swatted himself with it a few times, the sound of the blows muffled by the fabric his trousers. In his adolescence he'd even taken a few stray whaps at his own naked behind with the paddle while masturbating, and it always had a powerful effect on his libido. He came with more intensity when he spanked himself than at any other time.
The day after seeing his Dad's naked body, Timmie came home from school early. His father was still at the office. Timmie went to the familiar desk drawer, opened it, and held in his hands that object of childhood terror and erotic fascination: the paddle.
Timmie felt a series of terrible urges: the first was to somehow both relieve his erotic tension and at the same time to punish himself for his desires; the second was to go to his dad's room. His feet carried him, almost of their own volition, and he found his hands inside the hamper that held the clothing his father would launder during the week-end. Trembling, they lifted out a pair of his white cotton briefs. Timmie felt the fabric and his desire mounted. Heart racing, penis hardening, he pushed the underpants to his face and breathed deeply. The scent of his dad's body hit the boy like a wave of heat. Turning the briefs inside-out, he pressed the light skid-marked seat to his face and inhaled. The sweet smell of his father's ass infused Timmie s nostrils and he luxuriated in it before turning the cloth around and bringing its crotch to his nose. The musk -- the sweaty moist scent of his father's genitals -- hit the teenager's brain like a blow to the head.
Dizzy, trembling, Timmie lay at the foot of his father's bed with the briefs over his face, breathing in the scent of penis in the pouch and ass in the seat. Then he unbuckled his trousers and, slipping down his shorts in front but leaving his backside fully clothed, grabbed his aching _c_o_c_k_ and began to stroke. Putting down the briefs and kneeling by the bed, he'd reached for the paddle, turned his chest over his father s mattress and, thrusting out his butt, raised the wooden weapon high above his protected bottom and lowered it swiftly, smacking himself.
Pain shot through Timmie's buttocks and transformed itself into erotic heat, shooting electric sparks of current out the head of his _c_o_c_k_. The boy quickly slipped his trousers down in back and knelt again. Once more he raised the paddle and lowered it, fast, striking himself full across both cheeks. The sound -- a hearty, satisfying, cloth-absorbed SPLAT!!! -- echoed in the empty room. Timmie stood then, shoved his underpants off his smarting butt and glanced back at the full-length mirror on his father s bedroom door.
Timmie s buttocks shone hot and rosy-red, flushed crimson from the paddling. He stared at it in wonder and felt his _c_o_c_k_ throbbing harder. There was fluid on the head of it, and rubbing it around the tip with his thumb. He raised the wooden paddle and brought it down a final time, full across his naked ass. SPLATTT!!!! The pain exploded in his bottom, sending currents of electric heat down his balls and back up his _c_o_c_k_.
Timmie felt the sticky, gathering fluid on the crown of his penis. He knew release would be quick -- sudden, shuddering, without precedence. He lay down on the floor and came -- violently, in a rush of expanded sensual pleasure, his young _c_o_c_k_ spewing out white fluid and splashing his crotch, his belly, his chest. His body arched and fell, his hips jutting forward, his asshole spasming. He felt as though he d come for the first time. The sheer erotic power of his climax made him lie back, shuddering, as the last droplets fell. His breath was raspy and his chest rose and fell with his deep, gasping breaths.
When Timmie could sit up again, he'd quickly tossed his Dad's briefs back into the hamper and replaced the paddle in its drawer. Then he ran to the bathroom to shower away the spunk from his body, which was red both fore and aft: his face burned with secret shame and his young bottom, reflected in the full-length mirror as he glanced back, glowed a deep warm rose from the punishment he'd administered to himself. The intense stinging had gradually given way to a dull pain and now, as he stared at his handiwork, his backside was still suffused with a warm, tingling glow that matched the splendid color. Looking at his rosy bottom made his _c_o_c_k_ grow hard all over again, and he jacked himself off once more, stunned by the ferocity of his erotic desires.
That had been -- what? -- yesterday? Timmie sighed again as he saw the light burning outside on the porch -- and the one in the living room, the one in Dad's room and the one in his own bedroom. Dad was going to skin him alive. He pulled up before his house, and after shutting off the engine, sat in the night s silence and trembled. Then he screwed up his courage and got out of the car and headed up the walk.
******************