☀️ Part 1: Heat
🧱 Chapter 1: The Hard and the Soft
In the final accounting of my parents’ divorce, the assets weren't divided by value, but by texture. Mom secured the linens and upholstery, the sympathetic friends and the dog. She took the soft, and left Dad the hard: his weights, his TV and classic rock station and his aggressively policed freedom.
And then there was me: the complicated prize they shared.
Other Italian guys like my dad—beat cops like him especially—named their sons for themselves. My dad, Leo Rosa, named me after a ballplayer—George Herman Ruth, The Babe. He named his only son after a stranger who was dead before he even took his first breath, rather than himself.
I guess he came by it honestly. His own dad was an amateur player. Could have been a pro, but settled down with a wife and kids, is what Leo said.
I never cared about the sport myself.
I was an uneasy mix of both parents. I had borrowed fractions of my mother’s muted emotional intelligence and my father’s athleticism, which I squandered on swimming. I took the raw material in that fertilizing cumshot that made me, and stretched it out, lean and smooth, in endless laps—a fluidity that I suspected grated on my father's sensibilities.
Dad was the sketch and I was the more refined copy. My mother’s genes had smoothed out his heavy Sicilian brow and tempered the nose he’d broken twice—once playing ball, once on the job. I was even an inch taller than him—an aggravating detail that made him square his shoulders whenever we stood close, as if I’d stolen it from his bones.
In their split, it fell to me to provide the balance each parent needed. Mom wanted a man around the house to handle the harder tasks, and Dad—whether he knew it or not—needed someone to soften his edges.
His new, temporary apartment wasn’t a home. It was a brick box, with his weight bench, bars and dumbbells where a dining table should be. Without Mom’s throws and rugs to absorb the noise, the cold clanks of his workout bounced off the walls.
The living room was centered on the flat-screen TV and Leo’s baseball gear—a worn glove and bat, a framed photo of Babe Ruth—the full extent of his sentimentality.
Leo hadn’t wanted the divorce. But the moment the paperwork was final, he zealously claimed the particular pleasures of unchecked freedom. This meant eating dinner standing up in the kitchen, pissing with the bathroom door wide open. His home wardrobe was simple: a clean pair of white cotton briefs, shirts optional.
He was middle aged, and handsome in a way that suggested low expectations, but excellent physical upkeep. He was slim, but his muscles swelled in all the right places, defined by discipline and the low-grade tension of his job.
His pull-up bar was bolted in the kitchen doorway, hanging there like a sign: “I may have lost my family, but I haven’t lost my core.”
My own core was undergoing a quiet, profound collapse.
I was gay, and the mix of my attraction to masculinity and Leo’s physical presence was lethal.
His fit body, always on display, felt like a narcotic. The tight curve of his obliques made me nearly drool. The diamond of glossy dark hair at the center of his chest spread faintly to cup his pecs—a detail I observed with a desperate, envious longing to do myself.
His focus on his fitness wasn’t limited to his own body. He commented on the guys he knew who—unlike him—let themselves go, got flabby. As if it were the ultimate character flaw.
My body, being made by his, did not escape his scrutiny.
One afternoon, coming home with damp hair, the Speedo in my backpack reeking of chlorine, Leo looked me over. His eyes tracked the flat of my belly and the taper from my shoulders to my waist.
“You’re still swimming,” he said, an observation or a question I couldn’t tell.
“Yeah, Dad,” I said. Did he think I naturally smelled like a pool?
He nodded, chin bunched. “That’s good. Your fitness is the one thing nobody can ever take from you. Look at me.”
You’d think he’d swum the laps himself.
He had another side, reserved for weekends. Saturdays meant softball with the guys he grew up with—now married men, or guys from the precinct or softball team who existed solely to throw pitches for him to hit with a crack or to drink domestic beer in companionable silence.
Afterward, when the guys went home to mow lawns and tinker in their man caves, Leo and I would brave a meal at some local diner. It was a ritual to remind us how free he was: no wife’s permission required or asked, no household chores assigned.
Dad sat across from me, and if the waitress was pretty and young—too young for him—he’d flip on that easy charm. He’d flirt, and I’d watch, feeling caught between embarrassment and envy, seeing the grime on his neck from the game, his crooked smile.
I’d wonder, with a private, sick curiosity, what it would be like to be that girl—to have that specific male gaze directed at me and to see him soften, just for a second. She got the smile; I got the silence.
This was the rhythm of my life. It was tense, but manageable, defined by the custody weekend’s length.
The real problem started when that schedule—and the weather—broke entirely.
🌡️ Chapter 2: Heat Advisory
The summer New York finally proclaimed me an adult made no difference to my parents’ belief in their negotiated schedule over my time, not even when it shifted to extended custody.
Mom was off on her honeymoon, then a long stay with her new in-laws. She’d finally have a full-time man around the house, handling chores and company. The timing—Dad and my replacement secured right before I left for college—felt either lucky or a sign of Mom’s own sharp-edged practicality.
Maybe the wins of the soft-hard split weren’t so clear after all.
I was stuck with Leo for the duration, which coincided with a record-breaking heat wave.
The old brick walls of his apartment banked the heat all day, to release it all night. Dad didn’t believe in air conditioning, considering it a crutch for weak people who didn’t know how to sweat. His solution was a single oscillating fan and his unhinged theory of a “cross breeze” that never actually came through.
Clothes, which had been optional, now became recommended against in our personal heat advisory. Dad would unbutton the uniform shirt with worn fingers as he walked in the door, revealing the white Kevlar vest strapped tight. When he pulled it off and dropped it on the table it landed with a heavy thud. Then came the soaked undershirt beneath that clung like glue for him to peel off.
My favorite striptease.
I filled the days lifeguarding at the municipal pool. To Leo, it wasn’t real work—just sitting in a high chair, blowing a whistle at kids. But it paid, and it kept me in a Speedo and swimming between shifts.
Dad maintained his routine—polishing his boots on the fire escape. While my skin turned golden bronze poolside, his olive skin turned ruddy under the unforgiving sun. Pumping out reps in the dining room, sweat would streak down his sides and back.
“Jesus fuck, it’s a hot one,” he’d mutter, wiping his forehead with a forearm.
I could see the dampness gather on him, and could feel the dampness of a different kind in my underwear. No shit, Dad.
As the apartment baked it shrank, trapping us like two angry panthers in too small a zoo enclosure. We circled each other in our overlapping territories, the friction fraying nerves. We were always on the verge of snapping at each other.
Whether Leo regretted the extended custody, my presence infringing on his freedom during that scorching summer, he didn’t say.
But he moved through the apartment with a jagged, restless energy. He slammed cabinets and scrubbed dishes with aggressive force, as if he were trying to sweat out a fever that had nothing to do with the weather.
On top of the heat, I was eighteen. My cock was a constant, aching hardness I couldn’t hide. Dad was forty, but in peak condition, and wound tight. I could tell by the arithmetic of days alone he hadn’t been laid in quite a while.
It all ratcheted up and tightened my already tangled feelings about him.
Most evenings we’d sit on the couch, TV blaring baseball, or one of the History Channel documentaries he favored—Dad in his white cotton briefs, me in my boxers, still unable to get comfortable.
Leo would sprawl, legs open to the fan, but constantly shifting. Agitated. I watched him out of the corner of my eye—the way his hand would drift down to tug at the waistband or readjust his package. The heat had burned away any trace of false modesty.
Once, he caught me staring at his lap. He didn't do anything to cover up, but just gave me a lazy once over himself. His dark, heavy-lidded eyes ran down my smooth torso, landing on the clean line of the Speedo tan, revealed by my loose and low boxers.
I don’t know what he thought at that moment, but I hoped he was realizing that the soft boy he remembered was gone—firmed into something else. And that even though I took up his space, air and attention, there might be some other benefits he hadn’t considered before.
Then he abruptly stood up with a scowl, muttering about getting a beer, and fled to the kitchen.
One morning, while Dad was banging out pull-ups I shuffled by with my cereal. The way his lats spread utterly hypnotized me. He dropped from the bar, didn’t see me, and we nearly collided chest to chest.
I felt every nerve stand straight up as I jarred backward, milk sloshing over the rim of my bowl.
“Jesus, George, watch it.”
His chest was pumped from the exercise, and sweat was dripping from his nose. We locked eyes for a heartbeat, and I wanted to believe the Dad mask slipped. I thought I could feel the heat of him, the tension in his jaw and eyes.
Then it was over, and he returned to his pull-ups, forcing himself through the rhythm, punishing his own body in what looked to me like a particularly masculine form of penance.
I knelt to mop up spilled milk mixing with drops of his sweat on the linoleum. The heat around us and between us was a spring wound tighter every day.
That tension broke late one humid night.
My room was sparse—a temporary setup—and the oppressiveness of the heat was merciless. Around midnight, I got up, unable to sleep, craving cold water. Passing Leo’s door, I noticed it was shut—strange for Mr. No Boundaries. I heard a creaking, rhythmic sound.
At that moment, I wasn’t an adult, no matter what the state said, just a drowsy kid at his parent’s door, as I’d been countless times as a child.
I stepped inside.
The air behind the door was even heavier there. Ripe.
Confusingly, Dad was naked, standing and braced against the dresser.
I thought I knew his body, but this was him completely bare, and in a motion I’d never seen before. There was a pistoning of his hips, and the motion displayed a kind of deliberate, tensile strength I’d only seen before when throwing a baseball.
But there was no baseball here, and no bat. The thing his hips were driving into was in his hand: a flesh-colored cylinder—a Fleshlight. I could hear the repeating, wet suck and release.
His face was as stripped as the rest of his body—no sign of the cop or the father. Just a man in a deeply private moment, racing toward some relief—and judging by his speed and focus, frantically nearing it.
There was something raw and unguarded about him in that moment that rendered him brutally handsome.
There was a sudden, sharp jerk of his hips, muscles tensed. Stiffened, he held there, with a groan caught in his throat.
Then silence, but for his breathing.
His hand slowly left the dresser as his posture shifted, reclaiming the control he’d lost.
He took in a breath and turned, just enough to see me over his shoulder, frozen, unable to move.
His eyes were the only cold part of his steaming body—a cop confronting a witness who saw something they shouldn’t.
“Get out,” he said in a throaty voice, the edge of anger only just suppressed.
I couldn’t move fast enough. I stumbled backwards, fumbling and the door clicked shut behind me.
My heart pounding, pubes slick with precum, I backed into my room. I fell onto my bed, sickened and thrilled at the idea that he’d follow me, swinging open the door.
I came in my own hand, fast and furious.
He didn’t follow. But it seemed he’d found a soft place for his hardness after all.
It was a piece of plastic, though. A dead, mute thing.
And I was very much alive.
🌓 Chapter 3: Opening Argument
If I had a different kind of dad, we would have had an excruciatingly awkward talk about what had happened. But I had Leo, and he had me, and for once, that was a relief.
And after seeing him that way—exposed, aroused, ashamed—my lust crystallized into a singular, awful preoccupation.
I thought I knew his pattern: the beat, the steak, TV and a beer. I added to it his nighttime relief. I counted the minutes until the rhythmic sound would start again. It came two nights later.
The heat hadn’t broken, and the hallway air was thick as syrup and still. Listening carefully, I heard the faint sound of that wet, cyclical smacking.
This time, I didn’t move with childhood instinct. I was calculating. Sliding from my bed, boxers tented, I crept into the hall. Leo’s door sat slightly ajar—a careless mistake, maybe, or a subconscious invitation.
I pushed it open.
He stood braced against the dresser again, hips driving. His bare ass clenched with every stroke in, and the sweat on his back caught the dim light from the streetlamp beyond the window.
I didn’t gasp this time. I stepped closer, crossing the space until I was nearly on top of him. Leo, sensing the change in his perimeter, slowly turned.
He saw me, hard, suppressing my own trembling. Once was an accident. Twice was intent.
He didn’t shout. Didn’t stop. But his rhythm faltered—I could see his brain trying to process the intrusion while his body refused to cool down.
In the most consequential act of my life, my hand reached out, landing on the flesh-colored toy in his grip. It was warm, and my hand worked with his to stroke up and down for a moment.
I pulled it back and his grip loosened, surrendering the thing to me, maybe in as much shock at my actions as I was.
The Fleshlight made a wet, slurping sound as it released his cock. I let it fall to the floor with a damp thud—the sound of the proxy collapsing at the approach of the real thing.
Leo’s cock jutted out, gleamed, with a clear, thick spread of lube, and I sank to my knees unevenly, heart hammering.
My mouth went dry before I even started. But the tasteless lube helped as I mouthed the slick, veined hardness. My free hand found its way into my boxers, gripping myself, while my other hand clutched his hairy thigh to steady myself.
His cockhead pressed the back of my throat, insistent, and I felt the impossible closeness of us. His thigh tensed and his cock stiffened as he erupted—not a trickle, but a flood.
He'd been seconds away from finishing on his own, I guessed, and the sudden heat of a living mouth tipped him over the edge before he could stop it.
I choked, but forced myself to swallow in wet, obscene gulps. His hands caught the sides of my skull, not guiding or forcing me, but anchoring himself as his knees buckled.
He was seizing up, overwhelmed by a biological imperative he couldn't control.
I groaned, the sound muffled around him, hips jerking as I came. My boxers filled with sticky heat, the two of us caught in a damnable sync.
Leo pulled back, his cock drawing a strand of spit with it. He slumped against the dresser, shaken. He stared down at me, eyes narrowed, looking less like a man who’d just cum and more like a man who’d been in a car wreck. But also like one who walked away.
“Jesus…” he breathed, the word cracking in the middle. “Jesus Christ.”
There was no Jesus there—only us, and his still twitching, dripping Sicilian cock. And whatever Dad’s opinion, the evidence was clear: it liked the first taste.
I stayed kneeling, mouth and chin slick, catching my own breath.
His silence was a weighty, unspoken admission that something irreversible had occurred.
In my mind this wasn't an ending. It was an opening—my first oral argument.
🔥 Chapter 4: The Parallel Honeymoon
After the rupture in his bedroom, the tension didn’t fade—it shifted.
We didn’t speak of it—of course not—but Leo glanced and I advanced. There was shame in his eyes, yes, but a dark, pragmatic calculation too.
The physical acts always began on my side. They usually started when he came home from the beat. He was working double shifts in a record heatwave. He’d walk through the door looking half ruined, and I’d be there, ready, before he’d even stripped off the Kevlar vest.
Maybe he was too exhausted to be a father, too drained to keep his guard up. He was just a man with a thankless job and a short fuse, looking for a way to come down, to feel appreciated.
I knew he didn’t want this—not really. If he could have snapped his fingers and had a woman, he would have. But he didn't have a woman. He had the exhaustion of his job, the apartment's oppressive heat, and me.
And no matter how iron-clad his resolve was, biology was a traitor, when his hardness melted in the hot, wet reality of my mouth.
I became his necessary evil—one he tolerated for the relief of the release. I knew it, every time his cock grew instantly more rigid for that brief moment when he’d flood my mouth.
But one night, when I was on my knees, working him deeply, Leo's hand landed on the crown of my head—not gripping, just resting.
Emboldened by that small surrender, I decided to push harder.
I lavished him with thick spit, then pulled up, straddling his hips before he could react. He froze, hands hovering, uncertain of the protocols. He didn’t push me off, but didn’t help me either, just waited, resigned to the collision course we were on.
I sank down onto him. It was clumsy. His cock stretched me until it burned. It was more a bad medical exam than sex. I gasped, bracing against his shoulders, freezing halfway.
Leo looked away, refusing to watch, disassociating from the act. But he didn’t push me off, didn’t stop me—not even when I rocked back and forth, drawing his hips up to meet me.
It started low and slow, but Leo moved into fuckingwith a steady rhythm. No passion, but his core engaged, humping up from his seated position. just grinding hard in place. I whispered against his ear, “Fuck me, fuck me,” hoping to urge him on.
He finished with a sudden, sharp and purely physical shudder, a stifled grunt.
I jerked off quickly with his cock still in me. He flinched when my cum splattered against the soft fur of his belly. He finally looked up to me with a gaze that was dazed and defensive. Then it was over.
But the dam had cracked. The necessary evil was becoming a necessary habit.
The next time, I didn't let him finish in my throat like he’d come to expect. I worked him until his hips were pumping forward into my face, his fingers loosely threaded in my hair, accepting the worship because he was too far gone to deny it.
Right at the precipice, I pulled back and dropped onto my back, spreading my legs in the limp sheets. I looked up at him, offering him the release he was so near—but on my terms. I banked on his biological imperative to plant that seed inside something—some warm body.
He glared at me, almost angry that I’d stopped doing the thing that let him be passive. I saw the conflict in his face—the cop and father who knew this was wrong, versus the man who remembered exactly how tight and good it felt to be inside me.
The sex won. It pretty much always did.
Leo knelt between my legs, trying to find the right spot, awkwardly pushing into me with just the spit I’d left as lube. This time, he didn't look away—couldn’t. He needed to see what he was doing. And then his eyes stayed on where we were joined. He watched his own hard cock sliding into the snug softness of his son, mesmerized by the mechanics of it.
He moved with more force, less hesitation than when I rode him. On his knees, taking a more active role, his body took over. He gripped my waist and thrust. A low, guttural sound gave way—the first noise he'd made during the act. Then, “Fuckk,” as he spilled in me.
But the real shift happened three nights later.
I was walking down the narrow hallway toward the bathroom, squeezing by— but Leo didn't let me pass.
He stepped sideways, blocking my path with a smirk—playful. He snagged my waist, like he was catching a runner off base. Gotcha. It was a dad move—rough, affectionate—but a little too strong.
He turned me, pressing me front to the wall, and pressed into my back. His hips checked mine, knocking my legs apart. What started as some playful blurred into something with a different intent—definitely not a dad move. Not most dads, anyway.
“You want this, George?” he asked roughly, against the back of my head.
I was already nodding yes as he shoved my boxers down and spat a thick slug into one palm. His free hand anchored my hips, held me in place.
He slicked himself and pushed up into me, rising on the balls of his feet. He fucked me, there against the drywall, his knees knocking into the backs of mine, arms around my waist and chest.
“Fuck,” I whimpered, sensing his growing wonder that I wasn’t just tolerating this. I got off as much as he did, every inch and drive.
His rough fingers dropped to wrap around my cock. He stroked me in time with his thrusts from behind. His voice dropped to a choked rasp. “You want that? You want that?” he growled.
I gasped yes, hands to the wall, as his mouth found the crook of my neck—mouthing hard enough to leave bruises I’d have to hide.
“Take it,” he grunted against my ear.
The words triggered his release. He stiffened, driving straight up, burying himself as deep as he could. His load rushed into me, and moments later I came too, in the grip of his pumping fist.
He peeled off of me and I turned to face him. His mouth was twitching into a grin, with the terrifying, thrilling realization of what we were becoming in his eyes, and how much I wanted it.
His hand clamped onto the back of my neck and pulled my face to his. He mashed his mouth against mine, tongue pressed past my teeth, all hunger.
I knew he was still straight—or whatever version of straight allowed for this. I didn’t have him. I had what he let me use. And that was enough.
The ugly truth was, I didn’t care what this was doing to his head, or to the fragile thing remaining between us as father and son. I didn’t even wonder about those things. I just wanted the hard, physical machine of him. I never thought about the cost.
Sue me—I was eighteen, and he was my goddamn father.
Post-orgasm, Leo grew warmer, softer, and unexpectedly funny. Slumped onto the sofa where the fan’s breeze passed over us, he told long, rambling stories about his patrol beat—petty thefts and parking disputes—while lazily running his hand over my chest.
It was then that I finally saw what Mom must have fallen for—the warmth and humor. The liveliness in him.
In the divorce, she’d won custody of the comforting things. But there, in this suffocating bachelor pad I was stealing them back.
It was a dangerous but convenient intimacy that couldn’t possibly survive the summer.
⛈️ Chapter 5: Summer’s End
The pressure broke the night before my exit to college. The record heat that had baked the apartment for weeks finally gave way to a violent thunderstorm.
We rushed into his bedroom, shedding boxers and briefs as quickly as we could, skin tingling with the electricity in the air. The thunder and rain outside roared, muffling the sound of skin on skin and the wet kisses Dad had taken to.
Leo collapsed onto the bed with me, hips between my legs, a hand fumbling for the bottle of slick lube. He pinned me, crushing his chest against mine, as his hands worked. I heard the wet smacking and felt his hard cockhead against me, and then in me, as we both gasped.
He thrust slow and deep, the sound of my shuddering breath filling the silence between the thunderclaps. It wasn’t the frantic energy of the hallway—this was more practiced and sure. More desire than testing the possibility.
He buried his face in the crook of my neck as he fucked, his bristled jaw and teeth scraping. The thin space between us was super-heated, our wet chests sliding against each other with our grinds.
We never said a word about it, but were trying to take in all of this new pleasure between us, as if we could store it for the coming drought, until Thanksgiving at least.
When he raised up on his arms I reached up to anchor myself against his chest. The way his pecs tensed hard and then released into a warm give had me almost cumming.
Seeing the look on my face, he grinned. “You like that?” he asked through heavy breaths, crooked smile and all. It seemed to surprise him every time he saw how fucking sexy he was to me.
I nodded and his pecs tensed, hard, and he thrust into me even harder. The jolt of his full size ramming was a deep, uncomfortable reminder of how we were a makeshift pairing. The unnatural fit was imperfect, working in only a limited way.
Seeing how close he was getting me, he shifted his weight, freeing one hand to reach down between us. His rough fingers grasped at my cock, matching the mounting rhythm of his hips.
He pressed his forehead against mine, eyes locked on mine in the dark.
"Dad," I breathed, the word lost in the storm.
He cut my words off. "Give it to me."
His thumb teased at the wet crown of my cock, breaking me. I shot against his stomach, my load hot and messy between us.
He rode through my aftershocks, his eyes dimming. He seized, tensed, muscle locking tight against me. His most urgent thrust went deep, and he held it there as he let out a long, loud groan.
He collapsed onto one elbow and pulled out. He lifted his hips to draw the last of his load, a weak streak, onto my belly, where it mixed with mine. Then he pressed his face into my shoulder, breathing easing.
The electrical crackle in the air, the thunder, marked the end of our parallel honeymoon, as surely as the heatwave brought it on.
The next hours passed in a panicked haze of last-minute packing, the intimacy evaporating with the rain.
By morning, Leo was the cop again, as if he had poured the heat between us into a mold and let it cool overnight. Concrete.
“You want coffee?” he mumbled, voice flat. The man who had let me worship him with his crooked smile was gone.
“No. Thanks,” I said, flattening to meet him.
With my bags packed small, we drove to the bus depot. Leo filled the space with comments about the trip and the weather. The words didn’t matter, but they kept the silence from swallowing us whole.
Two men who had shared the most intimate secret were now speaking the cool, impersonal language of logistics.
The bus filled behind me, and I could feel the moment closing in.
“Dad,” I said, voice tight, “about the summe—”
He cut me off with a shake of his head. Don’t say a word. The command was nonverbal, but final.
Instead of words, he pulled out his wallet, peeled off a thick wad of soft twenties, and pressed it into my hand.
“Go get smart, kid,” he said, eyes distant, releasing his hand from my shoulder as if unhooking a latch. A short, gruff sigh escaped. “Take care of yourself.”
I climbed aboard the bus to Providence.
I thought leaving would be our own private custody battle—that like Mom, I’d leave Leo with the hard things—the pull-up bar, the silence, and the feel of his body—and escape with a softer future ahead of me.
But as I looked toward the new life I would build, with new friendships, new intimacies, lusts and loves, I ached for the complicated heat I was leaving behind.
Maybe the division between the soft and the hard were never as divisible as I once thought.
⚾ Part 2: Fathers & Sons
🚘 Chapter 6: Recidivism
The plane’s wheels hit the tarmac with a jolt, shocking me back to New York. I checked my phone and sent a quick text: Landed. Leo’s place soon. Tell the cats I miss them.
I was twenty-eight, a Senior Associate at a firm that promised a future. I built cases and arguments for a living. I had a boyfriend, David—another lawyer, a Public Defender specializing in civil liberties. Emotionally present, a steely mind, sexy. By every measure, I’d balanced the hard and the soft lives.
Dad still lived in the same temporary apartment, patrolling the same beat, now staring down the barrel at fifty.
And somehow, he was content. The aggressive inertia drove me a little crazy. My idea of contentment involved never-ending laps, law journals, the risks of intimacy and talking—always talking. And moving two thousand miles away. Leo found it by just staying put.
We hadn’t stopped after that first summer. Over the last decade, I’d come back—for holidays or made-up reasons. Sometimes Leo’s ways—his inflexibility, his stifling silences—would irritate me so much I’d commit to staying away. But the gravity of desire always won me back. Hey, Dad.
My adolescent lust never went away, but only deepened, like veins in marble.
But the door wasn't always open.
Leo had his rotation, too. A thin but recurring parade of brassy, crass women—not at all like Mom, or me. Human fleshlights, I called them. Cheap, plastic. Disposable.
Whenever one of them was in the picture he became unavailable. Straight. Hardened, but against me, not in me. I was forced to wait on the sidelines until they inevitably failed, and he was left alone again. Then I’d get a call or a text. Hey, kid.
I liked to think he chose them for their impermanence, knowing I’d be back. We were a constant relapse waiting to happen.
Planning Leo’s fiftieth birthday turned into a long negotiation—a weekend trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Leo won the fight over covering gas and meals; I took care of flight and lodging, within his definition of reason—meaning cheap.
He waited for me at the arrivals gate. As usual, everything else faded when I spotted him. Jeans, worn bomber jacket, simple gray tee. Straight-up dad fashion. I scanned quickly for changes, signs of age. His hair was thinned only a bit, his midsection still flat-bellied.
God damn it.
He offered a quick handshake, then pulled me into a brief hug, hand clapping my back. It was a careful hug, testing the waters, gauging if I was "Son" this trip or "George," if he was “Dad” or “Leo.”
Honestly, he could have fucked me then and there at JFK, people weaving around us. I wouldn’t have cared. It had been eighteen months since our last "slip-up," and the drought was itching under my skin.
We walked out to the parking lot heat. Leo grunted as he peeled off the bomber jacket—a dad-noise I doubt he was even aware of—and tossed it into the back seat of the car. He was left in just the tight gray tee, inviting a closer inspection.
The sleeves clung to his tan biceps as he took the wheel. The afternoon sun glinted on the hair of his veined forearms. He wore his usual cheap watch—the kind you buy at a drugstore and replace when it breaks—the strap cutting into the flesh above his wrist. It shouldn't have been hot, but it was.
By the time we were on the thruway, the old heat hummed at the surface—for me, at least. I was eighteen again, sitting next to the forbidden engine of my desires.
On the road he tapped the steering wheel with a heavy hand, keeping time to his classic rock station—Zeppelin, Springsteen and the Stones providing the driving soundtrack to my internal collapse.
“How’s David?” he asked out of nowhere, eyes on the road.
I caught the meaning in the question. Leo wasn’t just curious—he was checking the perimeter. He knew the pattern: I’d get a boyfriend, I’d stay away for a year, then I’d show up single and hungry. Hey, Dad.
He wanted to know if David was a real wall, or just a speed bump.
“He’s good. Busy. Sent you a card.”
“Good,” Leo said. “Stable, huh? Good for you.” He nodded, thumb tapping the wheel. Still looking forward. “Stable’s good.”
The word stable was a final nudge, maybe he was daring me to prove I’d finally broken the cycle.
Leo was proud of me in his own way—proud of my job, the guy I’d found, the normal life I’d built. But it probably also stung. Attorney versus cop. Twenty eight versus fifty. Condo and career versus the beat. I had a partner; he had a weight bench and silence. The roles between us had always been tangled, and now they seemed reversed.
We stopped for burgers. My jokes and questions pinged against a shield of quiet. The solitude he’d carved out after the divorce from Mom had calcified.
“They’ve got Babe Ruth’s glove there, you know,” I offered.
“Yeah.” He checked his blind spots. “I know.”
After the counter-service meal, I ducked back inside under the pretense of forgetting my wallet, adding some cash to fix Dad’s skinflint tip. He shook his head at my absentmindedness when I emerged, and we hit the road.
I’d booked a cheap motel. I could have done better—would have—but this was what Leo was comfortable with. And it was the kind of environment where our dirty secret lived. So I swallowed my pride.
One must pay penance, after the sin, or—I hoped—before.
🛏️ Chapter 7: The Motel Room
The motel room was exactly what I expected: functional, depressing. It smelled faintly of cigarettes and existential dread. An unflattering fluorescent fixture cast a sickly yellow pallor over everything.
Leo scanned the room, eyes on the single bed I’d requested, like he was scoping out the scene of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed.
“One bed?” His voice held that familiar edge of dry humor.
He knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the same arrangement we’d had in Atlantic City three years ago, and the Poconos two years before that.
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Keep it simple.”
He smirked, dropping his bag. “Simple’s good.”
There was a pause, like we were both sizing up the space—and each other—waiting for the other shoe to drop. I shifted awkwardly in my jeans.
“Happy birthday,” I said finally, my hands in a ta-da gesture.
A grin spread on his face. “Thanks.”
He hooked his thumbs under the hem of his gray tee and peeled it off with that effortless motion of a man who knew his body was a tool that still worked—on me, at least.
I could see now that time had done its work. A strand of silver hairs at his collarbone caught the light. His arms were more vascular. He was still slim, but his subtle muscles looked denser—compacted by years of gravity—like a statue that had rested a little more into its pedestal.
Even with the long breaks and the changes between these reunions, I knew that body better than David’s. I knew it by heart.
I cleared my throat. “You... look good.”
He smirked again, a chin-up nod to me. “Still swimming? You filled out.”
“Trying,” I said, against the strain of my erection. “Keeps me grounded.”
I followed his lead, unbuttoning my shirt and tossing it aside.
I wasn’t eighteen. I was twenty-eight, and had come more into my own. Still broad shouldered and tapered, long limbed, smooth. But with a little more gravitas.
Leo watched me, his eyes tracking the smooth line of my chest and the flat plane of my stomach.
“Looks good on you,” he murmured, a nod and a note of appreciation in his voice.
We shucked our jeans in rough synchronization, the sound of zippers loud in the quiet room. When his white briefs and my boxers hit the floor, we stood facing each other in the harsh, buzzing light.
I swallowed hard at the sight—not just of his dark cock, but of him completely bare, in front of me. “Jesus.”
He chuckled low, stepping out of his pile of clothes. “I’m fifty. It’s all downhill from here.”
“Nah. You’re holding up.” My hardon spoke for itself.
The little exchange broke the tension just enough. He moved closer, brushing some hair off my forehead—a touch both familiar and surprising.
“Thought you gave this up,” he asked, his voice low and dry. “The old cop habit.”
I smirked. “You make it hard to quit.”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “Story of our lives.”
That laugh—that moment—it was like twenty-eight-year-old me and eighteen-year-old me blurred. We were just two men, with a shared desire. Not frantic, but assured. We knew who we were.
I pressed closer, my nose burying into the crook of his neck. It smelled of the four-hour drive—grit and cheap aftershave. I licked the salt from his throat, tasting the time I’d missed.
Leo took my shoulders and walked me back, pressing me down onto the polyester bedspread. He didn't shove, just leaned his weight into me until I went horizontal. His body felt right, the way we fit, just a little rougher than I remembered—the edges worn by years of hard living and hard work.
I felt the rough, dry cop hands gripping my smooth hips. His mouth met mine again, harder this time. He tasted like him—salt and stale coffee. Then he moved up, pausing briefly to meet my eyes before lifting my legs over his shoulders under the flickering yellow light. Hey, kid.
I had set a small, clear bottle of lube on the nightstand—a habit from my life with David, where things were smooth and prepared.
Leo didn't even glance at it.
He gathered a mouthful of spit and released it into his palm. He slicked himself with two rough, heavy strokes. The sound smacked in the quiet room.
He settled at my entrance and then pushed in about halfway with a single hard thrust. My fingertips instinctively pushed against his thighs, then eased as he pulled back. A crooked grin and he pushed in again. Deeper. Once more and he was in, to his full length. My body relaxed around him, recognizing its maker.
Feeling the depth of the heat and my want, he let out a breath—a heavy sigh of relief.
His eyes locked on mine and he moved with steady, powerful strokes. He liked to fuck, and more specifically, he liked being here, inside me, getting us both off. As I opened for him, my hips rose, matching his pace. The sounds of us joining echoed off the cheap walls.
His pace sped up and I could tell his climax was building, coming on fast after a long time apart. His mouth hovered at mine, tongue teasing, hard shoulders braced against my legs. My hand found its place between us. My cock twitched, precum slick and ready.
His thrusts became hard piston strokes—hard, fast and strong. A low, animal groan broke as he clenched, hips locked and he shot into me.
His deepest thrust and the knowledge that he was unknotting in me triggered my own load. I shot a white flag of surrender across my belly.
I could hear the fluorescent tube buzzing louder, bathing the truth of our bodies and our deeds in its unforgiving glow.
He rested heavy on top of me, breathing hard. His lazy kisses and chuckles in the post-cum quiet were the shared loot of a crime well committed.
After a long minute, he lifted his head, hairline damp with sweat. There was a hint of that old bravado in his eyes.
"Still got it?" he asked, trying to sound casual but failing.
I reached up and ran a hand through his subtly graying chest hair. "Yeah, Dad. You still got it."
⛪ Chapter 8: Pilgrimage
The following morning, we made the pilgrimage to the Baseball Hall of Fame—the reason we were there, but also something I wasn’t sure either of us fully expected.
What hit me first wasn’t the history, wasn’t the sport itself. It was the other visitors.
Fathers and sons everywhere. Older men pointing out plaques to younger, still-athletic sons with eager eyes. Some young dads, barely softened by time or responsibility, caps pulled low, soaking it in like a sacred rite.
For most fathers and sons around us, baseball was a language of hard stats and soft silences—a way to bridge feelings too vulnerable for words. A coded way to say they cared, just by trading the stats of the men on the walls.
I walked among them like an impostor or a spy. I never gave a shit about baseball, breaking the family streak—not even when I was a kid and Leo peppered me with it, failing to connect.
Those other fathers and sons had baseball to connect them. Maybe if I’d paid more attention, we would too. Instead we had the sweat, the grip on muscle, and the shared release.
I dragged my feet through the Gallery of Greats, enduring it. Every minute we spent staring at a bat behind glass was a minute we weren't back at the motel.
I found myself checking my watch, calculating how long until we could return to the heat we’d generated under that yellow fluorescent light. How many more we could get in before we had to leave.
That was the real pilgrimage. This? This was a distraction—the intermission between the acts that actually mattered.
But Leo moved through the exhibits as if walking through a temple. The reverence he showed here wasn’t anything I’d ever seen from him. He passed glass cases crowded with news clippings and yellowed contracts as if they were holy relics.
We stopped before the exhibit for my namesake—George Herman “Babe” Ruth. Leo froze in front of the glass case.
Inside, the heavy wool uniform stood upright, pinned in place as if the man himself were still inside it. But there was no body there—just the hollow shape of greatness. A ghost in pinstripes.
Leo stepped closer. The harsh overhead spots cast deep, sharp shadows across his face as he stared at the empty shell.
He didn’t speak for a long time, communing with a man who wasn’t there.
“My dad,” Leo finally said, voice distant. “He tracked down Babe’s widow, Claire, in the ’70s. She was old then. He told me he just wanted to tell her Babe Ruth was the only man he ever loved. Saying it to Claire was the closest he could get to telling the Babe himself.”
He caught my gaze. “Only one man.” A swallow. “And it wasn’t me.”
His eyes were glassy, red-rimmed. My impatience vanished instantly. I felt the sharp sting of tears welling too, the world blurring before I blinked them away.
“I’m trying to do better. Loved three men, George.” His voice was hoarse, dragged out of him. “My old man—never said it to him either. The Babe. And you.”
That raw, unguarded truth—putting me on the same level as his distant father and the ghost of a legend—hit me like a punch. My throat seized tight, a hard lump. I let the wetness show in my eyes, and the gap between us faded.
It was the deepest truth he had ever offered me, and he offered it in a crowded, public shrine.
Leo wiped his face hard with the back of his hand, sniffing once—a sharp punctuation mark to his confession. I mirrored him, rubbing the grit from my own eyes. We stood there, our new intimacy exposed in the harsh gallery light.
We did the only thing guys like Leo could do in the face of that kind of raw emotion: we went to find red meat.
There was a steakhouse not far from the Hall, a dim place where Leo slipped back into his old groove—a quick, performative flirtation with the blonde waitress. He put on glasses—cheap drugstore readers—to scan the menu, then gave up and just ordered a huge ribeye, rare. The kind he always went for.
But something was different—he wasn’t the same.
“People forget he was a pitcher, George,” Leo muttered, chewing as he spoke. “Before the hitting. He knew how to control the game before he knew how to break it.”
For a solid forty minutes, he rattled off stats—RBIs, averages—and details about Babe Ruth’s life. Ruth’s own father was an alcoholic who put him to an orphanage at age seven—a bleak fate for any kid, especially in those days. What is it with fathers and sons and baseball, I wondered?
I watched Leo—the way his hands cut the steak on auto-pilot. The rise and fall of his Adam's apple, the flicker of silver at his collar. He caught me once, my eyes on him. What?
I’d thought all I wanted was Leo’s body.
But sitting there, watching him lay himself bare through numbers, I realized the hunger went deeper. My cock pressed against my jeans like it had a mind of its own. I’d never been this hard for him before, not even when I was eighteen and more of a walking erection than a man.
His tough, worn frame still pulled me with a gravity like no other. But it was complicated by the terrifying, dawning knowledge that what we had wasn’t only sex; it was love—buried under a mountain of baseball stats.
♥️ Chapter 9: The Gift
On the drive back to the motel, silence still ruled between us, but its weight had shifted. It wasn’t tight and tense anymore. It was the kind of heavy quiet that presses down—pulling you toward bed.
The motel room was exactly the same— unflattering, threadbare bedspread, chemical smelling—but we were not. Outside, the distant hum of a passing car punctuated the quiet.
We undressed without words. I pressed him back onto the bed, kneeling between his legs, feeling the lines of muscle and sinew beneath my fingertips.
I didn't go down immediately. I pressed my hands against the solid weight of those pecs I’d envied since I was a teenager. I buried my face in the diamond of hair at his sternum, inhaling the scent of him. When I scraped my teeth lightly over his flat, ruddy nipple, then sucked, his abs clenched in response to the greed of my worship.
My tongue down the centerline of hair to his navel. “Happy birthday,” I whispered, looking up.
I lavished attention on his cock. I swirled my tongue around the sensitive ridge of the head, tasting the bloom of him in the piss slit. My lips hummed against the vein that throbbed along the underside. I used my hands to stroke him, to cup the weight of his balls, while my mouth worked him slow and deep. I wanted him to feel like a king.
You only turn fifty once.
I swallowed deep, triggering quakes through him, his hands tangling loosely in my hair. “Oh fuck.”
A low rumble vibrated deep in his chest—a groan of appreciation that pulled at something inside me and I felt him stiffen. But I couldn’t get the earlier look of his face out of my mind.
A flicker of doubt passed through me—was this enough? The insufficiency gnawed. I pulled back, wiping the slick from my mouth.
Leo blinked up at me, eyes glazed with pleasure, cock wet and twitching like a live wire.
“Don’t stop now, kid,” he said, his crooked grin softening the plea.
I hesitated, swallowing hard. “I have to. Because after today—after today—it feels… dishonorable to not tell you what I actually want.”
His shoulders stiffened. Cop instincts.
“What?”
“I want to fuck you,” I said, slow and heavy. The words felt like a foreign language in his presence, but deeply true. “I mean… me… to fuck… you.”
He looked at me sideways, skeptical.
“George. I’m fifty,” he said, like that number was some sort of weight limit—a building’s maximum load.
“Exactly,” I said, pushing my hands up his sides to his chest, feeling the firmness beneath the hair. “You’re just so fucking hot. And I don’t want to just serve you. I want to be… in you.”
I felt just as exposed as he’d been at the Babe’s temple, heart pounding. Had he braced for my rejection the way I did for his?
But then, with a deep breath I saw the nod—a wall crumbling. He rolled over, burying his face in the pillow.
He was lying flat on his stomach, tight and—no pun intended—straight. His muscles were locked, compliant as his body language shouted panic and unfamiliarity.
His body was used to pitching the heat, not catching it.
I knelt beside him and gently pushed his hips up, guiding one knee out and pulling his torso slightly sideways to create a better angle, one that I knew would be easier—would feel better. That was the point, after all.
I reached for the bottle of lube I’d brought and poured a generous puddle, warming it in my palm. I pressed it against his entry. One finger, then two in the hairy knot of him, I worked carefully, easing the inside and out until resistance softened and gave way.
For fifty years, Leo had built a concrete exterior, but there, where I pushed in, slow and deep, he was ruinously soft.
I mounted him from behind. The first inch made him rumble. His arms tightened around the pillow, clutching it like an anchor. I began to move. But my rhythm was nothing like Leo’s piston pounding. I was a slow tide, fluid, searching for that spot in him he might not know himself. I wanted to drag the pleasure out of him and to bring him through every pulse of it.
I felt the exact moment the sensation shifted for him. I hit a spot deep inside, and a surprised noise lifted out of him. His grip on the pillow eased, then tightened again, but in a different way. He wasn't bracing against me anymore; he was pushing to meet me, finding the rush in the surrender.
But looking down on his back, even his half buried profile, I knew I was still letting him hide.
“Leo,” not Dad, I breathed, my lips brushing his ear. “Turn over. I want to see you.”
His muscles tensed—seconds of hesitation—but momentum pushed past the doubt. He adjusted, rolling onto his back, opening himself for me.
The sight knocked the breath out of me. His unguarded dark eyes and parted lips—the vulnerability tangled with want was devastating.
I moved closer, settling between his legs, searching again for that place where we fit.
Pushing in, feeling him take it, I cradled one leg and looped the other around my waist. My free hand wrapped around the satiny, leaking cock resting against his stomach. The connection was complete—I was inside him and holding him at the same time.
“Jesus,” he choked out as I struck deep, hitting him from a new angle.
His hands gripped my triceps, fingers bruising. Inside, I felt the impossible soft around my cock as I pushed in, then the clutch as his body tried to hold tight on withdrawal.
I knew I had him then, hitting that spot in him where soft and hard collided.
My pace picked up as I saw the wave coming over him, eyes glazing. My hand stroked him in matching rhythm. I shifted to faster thrusts, teasing my own cock and his hole. We didn’t have long.
He raised his arms to push against the head of the bed—leverage to meet my slams. His control shattered, face twisting in the overwhelming sensation, and I felt his already hard cock swell
I glanced down to see thick ropes of semen shoot out, hot and stark white across his furred belly and chest. It overwhelmed me—the knowledge that I’d fucked that out of Dad.
I followed fast, seizing, groaning—giving everything I had as deep inside him as anatomy would allow.
And then it was done. Or almost.
I felt that tight, milking grip as I pulled out slowly, the seal breaking with a wet, slack sound. I ran my fingers over where I’d just fucked him. For a second it felt like a soft, open confession, and then his body finally remembered to close itself up.
We lay there in that timeless post-fuck way, as the energy drained away.
Leo’s legs draped loosely over mine, chest rising and falling, eyes on the ceiling. I reached out, brushing the hair on his sternum.
“I love you too,” I whispered into the sweat on his shoulder.
He didn't say it back—he didn't have to. He had said it in the museum. And by staying there, soft and open in the wreck of the sheets, he was saying it again.
🔒 Chapter 10: Home Before Leaving
We left Cooperstown early the next morning—preparing for re-entry, not into each other, but into the world outside our bubble,
The drive back to New York was marked by a deeper silence than the one on the way there. The unspeakable history between us had knotted in a new way, neither of us knowing where it would lead.
Forty-eight hours of complete exposure behind us, the highway mile markers slipped backward, counting us down to zero.
We pulled up at his apartment building mid-afternoon, about three hours before my flight.
I called an Uber, but didn’t go inside. The risk of facing that particular reality was too much.
Leo rested my bag on the sidewalk. He asked about flight times, meals. Our usual parting routine—two men who had shared the most intimate connection imaginable extracting themselves with the clipped language of travel details.
He hesitated, eyes dropping to scuff his boot against the cracked concrete. “Things with David,” he asked, voice low and carefully neutral, “they’re good?”
“Yeah, Dad,” I said, meeting his eyes steadily. “Really good. He’s a keeper.”
I meant it. I needed him to know David wasn’t a consolation prize, but someone I truly loved. It wasn’t about choosing one over the other. Leo and I weren't an alternative. We never could be in the real world, not for either of us, except in these fleeting moments where we overlapped.
But it wasn’t cheating either. You can’t cheat on your life with your own history. Leo was baked into me—the rough draft of every desire I’d ever known. Without Leo there was no David, even if I could never explain that to him.
Leo nodded, conceding to the answer. He took the news like a cop taking a statement, just the facts, filing it away. His eyes swept me up and down one last time—an appraisal.
“Keep swimming,” he said, eyes lingering on my shoulders. “Looks good on you.”
He extended his hand. I shook it—a brief, hard grip like a sudden business deal.
Then he pulled me in—a dense and crushing hug, with that always surprising dad strength.
It wasn't like David's embrace, which was warm and enveloping. Leo's hug was bone and muscle, a prison that I secretly wanted to never escape. His face pressed into the crook of my neck; for a moment, I stiffened and folded into his.
“Good trip,” I whispered, unsteady. “Good birthday?”
He held me tighter, voice hoarse. “Best ever.”
“Me too,” I said, the truth plain and absolute.
He pulled back just enough to look me square in the face, eyes searching mine one last time, then pushed me lightly away.
“Go,” he said, pulling up the last shred of composure. “Go, before I make a fool of myself.”
I nodded, words gone to me, and walked to the waiting car without a backward glance.
I knew what I was returning him to: the silence, the weights, the beat and the rotation of cheap women who would never really know him.
For now.
Sliding into the Uber, I closed the door, shutting out the history, the heat, and the enduring love left lingering on the curb.
“Take care, kid,” Leo called, his voice dulled by the closed windows. The voice of the beat cop, fitting for a father sending his son off to build a life.
The car pulled away.
I watched him in the rearview mirror until he was just a speck of gray, and then gone. I was one of three men he’d ever loved. The other two were dead, and I was the survivor, walking away.
I was heading back to the life I was building with the other man I loved—a life full of care, best intentions and deep honesty—except for the one enduring secret I carried with me: that for the rest of my life, the closest I would ever get to home was always the moment right before I left it.
END
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