Handlebars

I'm writing you a letter that I know I'll never send, but it's not because I don't mean it. You and I both know I do, but I'm a coward. You didn't raise me to be scared of consequences, but it's one thing to do a bad thing and another to find the strength of character to look that bad thing straight in the face; I guess I'm struggling with the latter.

It started on the playground with your hand on my back and my too-small helmet pressing the sides of my head and the wind whipping at me. I pressed so hard into the handlebars of my bicycle that they left indentations in my palms. I screamed out of terror, but still wanted to go faster. As long as your hand was on my back, I figured I could go a thousand miles an hour. Faster, even.

You pushed. You let go.

I don't remember what happened next, but I do recall the sensation of your hands again. You pressed them into my shoulders and sat me up. You brushed me all over as you looked for injuries, and I slowly came to understand that I'd fallen. I didn't feel fear. I wasn't shaken up, at least not by the fall. What threw me for a loop was that your hands—rugged, strong, safe—were patting me down. "You're okay," you said. "You're okay."

You told me that I was okay all the way home, and you held my hand. My hand in yours felt like the only place I wanted to be. I didn't have words for how safe they made me feel. I still don't, but I'm digging deep here, Dad, and we'll see what I find.

I spent a long time after that hoping for incidental touch. So, I lingered around when you worked on your car, or did weekend projects in the garage. I'd hand you tools and when you'd take them, sometimes our hands would brush each other. I convinced myself that it wasn't food and sleep that I ran on, but those electric pulses that traveled straight through your fingertips and into my heart. It was a jump-start, a perfect, beautiful moment of clarity that set my pulse racing and made me hungry for more. I didn't know what I was doing or what I was wishing for, but I dreamed of you tucking me in at night, even after I got too old to ask for that anymore. You grumbled that big boys should be able to do that sort of thing for themselves. You didn't mean it to be cruel, I know, but I imagine being a parent must be so full of those casually devastating moments.

I didn't cry about it, but I wanted to. I thought that stoicism would show you I was big enough to know what I wanted; I had no idea what I wanted. But desire doesn't wait for you to be ready before it lifts the veil and upturns the apple-cart, does it?

The trouble started about the time that the other boys were fooling around with dirty magazines and websites. I did the same, naturally. I explored and found myself gravitating to middle-aged guys with salt-and-pepper hair. Not too gym fit or anything, just kind of…regular. Normal guys who might be, say, a hardworking Midwestern dad with a son just bursting with curiosity, nerves, and hormones. Sound like anyone you know?

My first orgasm was to a guy like that in a scene that would have made you blush, I think. It was too raunchy by several orders of magnitude. I crawled down the filthiest rabbit holes searching for something that would make take my mind off you. Occasionally it even worked, but typically my imagination took me back to your hand on my lower back, brushing dirt out of my hair.

"You're okay. You're okay."

I never came harder than I did while whispering those words to myself over and over. I spent a long time in this holding pattern: go to school, rush home, beat you through the door, then beat myself into oblivion with my door locked and a pillow muffling my moans. But my hands were too soft and when I came, no matter how hot, it wasn't the same. It didn't matter how many trees I climbed or how many sports I played. It didn't matter that I joined the rugby team, got the shit kicked out of me in Judo. I couldn't get my hands to match yours, and only in my most feverish fantasies could I reach the place that I knew—just fucking knew—you could take me.

They say that your teenaged years are just cravings as though those cravings are an illusion, as though they burn away in the sunlight, but they don't, do they? It's more like a dream that you sort of wake from in stages. At the deepest point you can't be convinced that anything else in the world, in the universe, is more real. It doesn't matter if pigs are cooking you dinner and a turntable made of syrup is playing your favorite song: you'd swear that everything was true and right. That's what I felt about my cravings, Dad, that even if they were wrong, there was nothing I could do. This was the hand I'd been dealt; there was nothing left to do but play it.

It didn't help that you were a deep sleeper. You always claimed to sleep like the dead, and it was true. So many kids my age would have loved to have a single dad who couldn't be woken under almost any circumstances. I understood I could sneak out to parties and drink, stay up all night watching porn with the volume on, or try any of the drugs that my buddies were starting to sample. And I did some of those things, but mostly I just fantasized. I fantasized about having the balls to go into your room while you slept and climb into the bed with you and put your hands all over me.

The fantasy made me so horny that I'd flush even thinking about it and get so hard. It didn't matter whether I was in chemistry or the locker room or on the mat in the middle of a Judo match. If I thought about your sleepy hands on my body, I'd throw a boner guaranteed. It was an automatic response that I couldn't do anything about. I got made fun of a bit, but it was regular guy shit. They figured I was sweet on some girl in our class, but I told them I liked someone a bit older.

I held out until eighteen, not out of some sense of nobility, but because our high school gym teacher got caught with a freshman and did jail time. Whatever my urges, I wanted to avoid fucking up our little family any more than an acrimonious divorce already had. It didn't help that you were getting fitter. Not anything crazy, nothing that would make it into the pages of Men's Fitness, but you started cracking jokes about wanting to be around long enough to see me graduate from college, and so you cut back on the drinking, started to slim down a bit. It made me shiver to think that all that effort was for me. It made me even thirstier for your attention.

I was starting college in the fall: sort of local, but still a hike. You wanted me to stay in the dorms, and I—for reasons probably obvious to you now—wanted to stay home. You thought the travel would be a distraction; I was already as distracted as I could be.

In the end, we decided that it was probably best for me to spend at least a semester on campus. You swore I would regret it otherwise, and half-grinning recalled your own campus days. Apparently, you were a holy terror. You'd gotten a little looser in conversations since I turned eighteen. You talked, elliptically, about college girls and I couldn't help but imagine your fingers inside them in darkened bedrooms. I wondered how they felt. Did you make them cum all over those big fingers of yours? Did they beg for it? I bet they did.

I dreamed of your fingers for most of that summer, and I grew increasingly desperate as the fall semester grew nearer. I'd soon be living away from you for the first time; I had to get bolder.

So, I was the one who suggested that you have a beer with dinner, even though we were watching a nature documentary and I knew you'd fall right asleep. It was easy to convince you. Work was picking up again, and you needed to relax. Night had barely fallen on the beautiful grassland on TV, and you were lying with your mouth open on the couch.

My heart pounded as I listened for your light, steady breathing. I waited twenty minutes or so, barely breathing myself and certainly not watching the gazelles. My dick was threatening to break through my shorts, so I carefully lowered them. Intellectually, I knew you wouldn't wake, but I couldn't convince my heart to stop pounding. I knew that I was doing a bad thing, Dad. But I also knew with absolute certainly that it was precisely what I wanted.

I watched you sleep, and I took my hard cock in hand. The TV threw bands of light across your face, across your chest, and your hands, which lay open and vulnerable. I sat in the loveseat across from the couch. I wasn't bold enough yet to move over and sit next to you, certainly not bold enough to touch you, but my fantasies activated, and I imagined us doing things together. Filthy things. I imagined you sliding finger after finger up into my hole. It was improbable, unlikely—I'd barely mastered two fingers—but in the fantasy you were shoving your whole fist inside me, and I was leaking cum all over the couch. I jerked my dick and imagined you pressing me down into the couch with both hands and speaking to me in that even tone of yours. You were rough and hungry to dominate me in the fantasy. I was wet and willing. Of course, that wouldn't surprise you, after all you'd always wanted this as much as I did; you just hid it better.

At least that's what I told myself as I spread my legs, sunk deeper into the plush loveseat and felt its fibers rubbing tantalizingly against my now sweating taint and ass. I wanted you to wake up and catch me. I wanted you to stay asleep, so I could watch you and jerk off to the fantasy of you. I wanted everything at once, and the weight of my fantasies short-circuited my brain and I came all over myself. I shot way the fuck up into my face and hair, all over the couch. I was breathing hard and still somehow unfulfilled. I climbed onto the couch, turned away from you, and licked up my spilled jizz from the couch while exposing my puckered asshole to you. I wanted you to wake up just then and, assuming that you were still asleep, take advantage of your son's virgin hole. I drew it out, slowly licking up every drop of cum that I could find while arching my back and wishing for your eyes on me.

Eventually, I had to leave the fantasy behind, and I went off to bed.

After that, you started spending more time in the love seat and I wondered if you could smell my essence. Could you, Dad? Could you sense where I had left my load for you? Fuck, the idea turned me on.

---

It took me a long time to learn to ride my bike after that first time falling. I was obstinate and a slow-learner. You couldn't understand why I was having such a hard time after showing such promise on our first outing.

"You almost had it until you fell," you said. "I think the problem is in your head, buddy. You're just afraid of falling."

You were half-right. The problem was in my head, but it wasn't because I was afraid. I wasn't worried about falling. If I was afraid of anything, it was the possibility that after I learned to ride my bike it would be some kind of split between us, and that you would disappear like Mom did. I never told you that. I didn't know if you would understand.

I remember your hand over mine on the handlebars and the deep, masculine scent of you as you leaned in to me.

"Just breathe and hold on," you said. There were another set of words that would come to lodge themselves into my dreams.

In a way, my fate was sealed just then. Or maybe I'm giving myself too little credit. Maybe we seal our fates a thousand times with every choice, every mistake, and every petty detail. Maybe we paint ourselves into a corner, then throw up our hands and call it inevitability. But Dad, I can tell you that by the night of your birthday, I was well and truly fucked.

You'd gone out with friends and then brought you home, loaded—of course, but wry, in the way you get when you're drunk. The boys: Billy, Hugo, and Archer were sheepish about the state they'd returned you in. I smiled at them like a housewife. Maybe I liked that idea too, that I was your keeper, and you were my responsibility. The boys certainly seemed to think so.

"Take care of your old man," Hugo said, a little wobbly himself. Luckily, Archer had driven. "He really tied one on."

I put an arm around your shoulder and accepted the weight of you. "I've got him, Hugo. Don't worry. I'll put him to bed."

"Good boy," Billy said.

I tried not to stiffen. They were all like you: honest, fundamentally solid men. If I didn't crave their attention as much as I did yours, then it's only a demonstration of how deeply, utterly, and completely I belong to you.

You were mumbling nonsense to me as I walked you to your room. I laid you down in your big bed and I undressed you. I worked quickly so as not to linger, but I'd made a fundamental mistake: I'd miscalculated what the suddenness of your nudity might do to me. I looked at your cock lying half hard against your thighs and your slightly puffy nipples; I suddenly wanted to do things to you that hadn't been invented yet.

With my eyes, I drank you in from top to bottom and I traced the line from your left shoulder down into the crook of your arm and further down onto your hand; your hand is what sealed it for me.

You were sleeping almost as soon as you fell into the bed, and I got undressed and laid in it beside you. I hadn't slept in your bed since I was a kid, and the feeling of security came rushing back. But there was a more pressing feeling that was getting harder to ignore.

Your hand was right there next to me. I got on my knees, took your hand in mine, and wrapped it around my cock.

In my head, you were saying how much I'd grown up. In my head, you were cracking jokes about how bold I'd become. In one breath I wanted you to understand me as a man, but in the next I wanted to revel in how much bigger you were: from the breadth of your shoulders to the size of your cock. The idea of taking it into my hands made my mouth go dry, but it seemed a bridge too far. I don't know why that's where I drew the line, but I suppose it had to be somewhere; otherwise there was no upward limit on what I might subject you to as you slept.

I know it was your birthday, but it felt like it was mine. Your hand was callused from a life of labor in the auto shop alongside guys like Billy, Hugo, and Archer. My mind conjured feverish images of you stripping down your jumpsuit to the waist and spitting into your palm at break time to pleasure your own heavy-hanging dick and balls. I envisioned you jerking off with long, hungry pulls and a thousand yard stare as you regarded your meat with something like reverence.

I pressed my hips forward and held your hand in place while humping into the impromptu tunnel I'd made from your limp fist. You snored lightly, didn't even stir. I felt sick with myself, Dad, but I'd come this far. I took your hand and used your finger—just a single finger—to brush my hole. My mistake, I think, was that I didn't take my other hand off my cock. There was a bolt of electricity that went straight from the weight of your finger against my hole through to my cock. I wasn't prepared for the kind of symbolic power such a moment might have for me.

I spewed my cum all over the head of the bed onto your face and your pillow. I swore, dropped your hand, and you frowned, cleared your throat and rolled over. I sat back on my heels, sweating with my heart racing and waited for what seemed like hours for you to go back to breathing slowly. I climbed out of the bed as gently as I could and picked up my shirt. I used it to wipe your face and clean your pillow as much as I could and then I stole out of your room like a thief, a heretic, an abuser.

I could barely meet your gaze for a week, and then I was off to school.

The distance felt worse than my guilt did, but luckily the two weren't mutually exclusive, so I got the worst of both worlds. We talked by phone, but it wasn't the same. Even our Skype sessions didn't quite fill the gap.

"I miss having you around, kid. I'm a slob without you," you'd said.

"Oh yeah? You'd better take care of yourself, old man!"

"I'm serious. I haven't even washed my sheets since you went down to school," you said.

There's no way you would have guessed how often I'd jerk off to those words. Almost every night I thought about my cum on your pillow, on your sheets, on the couch where you rested your head every night before bed. You were inhaling the smell of me every single day, and you had no idea. I wondered if it gave you an unconscious thrill, a frisson of eroticism that you couldn't quite explain. God, I hoped so. I hoped so over and over again with one hand choking my dick and the other fingering my ass.

I could have made friends, I knew that. I was fairly charming and good-looking enough, but I felt like I was in a world one step over from the one everyone else was in, and I didn't know how to bridge the gap. Some people on campus tried: cute guys, cute girls. Eventually, they stopped trying.

I started driving home every other weekend to do your laundry and my own. Washing your work clothes and your underwear brought up a minefield of desires. I wanted so badly to steal some of your things and take them with me, so I'd have more of you on my person, but I knew things were tight financially; I couldn't make you go out and buy new clothes, no matter how much I wanted to wrap myself in you.

I contented myself with jerking off into your soiled sheets or wearing your filthy undershirts under my own clean clothes.

And, of course, my nightly ritual.

I figured it was harming no one: you'd sleep through it anyway; you'd never know. I used your hand to jerk me off whenever I could. Occasionally, you'd be asleep on the couch and I sit up beside you and put on your old ball cap and pretend we were old jerk-off buddies. Or I'd use your hand at night and pretend that we were something else, something more intimate.

I know it's strange, but it had become a fixation. I tried to stop, but once you went to sleep my heart wouldn't stop beating at twice the speed. My head would go light. I promised myself that this would be the last time. I could rationalize it all I want, but I always slept so soundly after.

Until you woke up.

I don't know what was different that time. I honestly don't. The conditions were the same: you were deep asleep. I waited, listening carefully, until you were out. Maybe you'd taken a nap that day, and you weren't under as deeply as you usually were. Or maybe that sag in your mattress that you'd started complaining about recently—but had little free cash to replace—finally woke you up. Perhaps God had finally picked his moment to intercede.

Either way, my dick was in your hand as usual and my eyes were shut. I was thrusting hard, but no harder than usual. I maybe grunted a little under my breath. I kept your hand pressed tight against my dick with one hand and was using the other to tweak my nipple. I was close, but I wanted to extend the pleasure.

Do you remember what you told me when we read the story of Icarus together? You looked at me, ten-years-old or younger, and you grinned, and said, "Motherfucker got greedy."

I got greedy, didn't I?

I opened my eyes and saw yours. We have the same brown eyes. Everyone always says we do. At that moment, though, it was hard to discern color. It was so dark in the room, but it was unambiguous that you were looking up at me, blinking slow, waking up.

"I'm sorry," I said, and backed out of the bed.

You just kept blinking, staring. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry," I kept saying.

"Peyton," you said as I got near the bedroom door.

"I'll go," I said.

You didn't reply and that was that.

I drove back to school, and we didn't talk about what had happened in your bedroom. It was that easy. Two days passed, and you called me up and asked me how I was, and we went through the regular pleasantries: Someone had caught the flu at work, and now you thought you were coming down with something. People who were thinking about traveling for the upcoming holidays were crowding the shop, and you were really busy, so it was a bad time to get sick. You had to finally throw out the old mattress, and you'd bought a new one, it was nothing fancy, but it was comfortable enough.

At the end of the conversation there was a break in things and I heard you sigh over the line. "Thanksgiving is coming up, Peyt. You're coming home, right?"

"I wasn't sure… I don't want you to be uncomfortable, Dad."

"I'd be uncomfortable if my kid wasn't with me for the holidays."

"But…"

"I'd like you to come home, if you're comfortable with it," you said.

Even the weight of my guilt couldn't keep me from getting the hardest erection at that. "Ok, Dad. I'll come home."

There was a snowstorm coming, so I left campus early and drove all the way home without stopping once. As it stood, I arrived just as the sky started to disappear in a swirl of white. There was just a simple wreathe on the door and when I walked into the house it smelled like cooking. I heard some conversation and walked in to find you in the kitchen with a woman I didn't recognize. She was pretty, I guess. Maybe around your age or a little younger.

"Peyton, hey! Welcome home." You came over and gave me a hug and with one arm around my neck you introduced me to the mystery woman. "This is Kate. She's…well, a friend."

She said all the right things, she was polite and even funny. You blushed around her a lot, and she noticed.

Dinner was outstanding. You'd made it yourself from recipes you found on the internet and even if it wasn't the finest meal ever, it still tasted like effort, and it made my heart swell. At around ten, Kate said her goodbyes and got up to leave. You escorted her to her car like a perfect gentleman while I cleaned up. You were gone a long time, and I tried not to think about what you were doing with this new woman. It had been so long since you'd dated that it was hard not to feel like this was a personal message, a warning. I tried to swallow whatever was lodged in my throat, but the emotion proved surprisingly resilient.

When you came back inside, you were all smiles, for a while, anyway.

"I should have told you earlier about Kate. I wanted you to meet her before you judged."

"You think I'd judge?"

"Peyton, you judge everyone. You're judgmental."

"What? Please. I am not!"

It went back and forth like this a few times. It felt so normal, so typical,that the constricting force in my throat eased up. You were smiling again.

"I like her," I said. I didn't know if I did, but I know it's what you wanted to hear. It was an easy concession to make; I would concede anything for you.

You nodded, suddenly shy. "Yeah? Really? I worried, you know. It's not crazy serious. She has two young kids. It's…we're just friends. Well, you know."

I wasn't sure I did, but I nodded too. "Yeah, of course. 'It's complicated.'"

"Exactly. Exactly," you said.

And when the conversation petered out, I tried to keep my mind off anything that could bruise me. I'd been battered enough.

"Leave the dishes, Peyton. Let's have a beer. Just us."

I was reluctant to leave the dishes; I didn't want to sit across from you and look into your brown eyes and think of them opening in the dark room and seeing through to the inside of my perverse soul. But how could I say no? You cracked two beers, and we sat together in the kitchen. We talked about nothing, and Kate texted you to let you know that she got home safe. I wasn't trying to spy, but I noticed when she jokingly said that your son was more handsome than you, a real heartbreaker. It didn't make me like her more, but I saw how you lit up when she texted. Suddenly, it was easy to feel happy for you. Well, it was easier at least.

We drank our beers, talked shit about sports and work. I told you about my ridiculous class schedule, and you asked if I was seeing anyone.

"No," I said, and I looked you in the eyes when I said it. I wanted you to know about me, about what was in my heart, but I'm a coward, Dad, and I couldn't say it out loud. I didn't have the words and even if I did, I'm not certain that I could say them anyway. So I just said repeated myself and shook my head.

You took a long pull off your beer and set it down. You cleared your throat. "I don't know why I'm drinking beer. Probably shouldn't. I started taking some new medication for my headaches and the interaction makes me crash hard. Doctor says it's fine, but not to overdo it. I'm telling you, Peyton, I sleep like the dead on this shit."

My heart quickened and my dick hardened. I tried to speak, but my voice broke. "Really? Is it…are you sure it's OK to take that medicine?"

"Yeah. Doctor says it's fine. Just can't drink too much. Otherwise, I'll fall asleep like fucking Rip Van Winkle. But yeah, it's fine," you said, and reached for the beer again.

Your eyes met mine as you took a long drink and drained the bottle. "I'm glad you liked Kate, Peyton. Thanks for that. And, I should tell you that I love you. You're my son, and I'd do anything for you. I don't have to understand everything you're going through…at college…to know that I'd do anything for you."

You stared me down for a while and then slapped the table. "All right. Head's already swimming on me. I'm gonna' get changed and get into bed. Don't stay up too late."

I watched you walk away. There were so many things on my mind that I started writing you this letter, after I visited your bedroom and listened to make sure you were asleep and took off my boxers in your bed and slipped my cock into your hand. I can't give you this letter because I'm afraid of what it would mean, but I had to write down my thoughts anyway.

It's been more than a decade since you held my hands steady on the handlebars, Dad. You didn't know why I was crashing my bike when you knew damn well I could steer, but you never let go. You never once let go.

BENJI BRIGHT © 2022.

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