Sergeant — Chapter 1
It was supposed to be a father-son bounding weekend. He made me call him Sergeant before the jeep even left the driveway.
“From this second on,” he said, one hand on the wheel, the other checking the side mirror like we were rolling out on a mission, “you don’t say Dad. You don’t say John. You say Sergeant. You understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
John Peterson was forty-six, 6’2, athletic in the way men stay athletic after twenty years of being told to be. Super short military cut grey head. Thick neck. A voice that sat low in his chest even when he was just asking if I’d locked the front door. He still wore the uniform for the drive. Camo jacket, boots, belt. The divorced-dad version of a man who thought a weekend in the woods could fix whatever my mother had done to me.
I was twenty. Skinny. Glasses. Blond hair with the pink I’d put in two weeks ago and refused to take out. Black nail polish my mother said was just a phase and my father had looked at once, long enough to make a sound in his throat, and then not mentioned until now.
He mentioned it at the first red light.
“Those come off before we make camp.”
“Sergeant—”
“I didn’t ask. I told you. You’re not painting your nails in my truck and you’re not painting them in my woods. You want to do that shit, you do it at your mother’s.”
I picked at my thumb in my lap. The polish was already chipped. I didn’t say I liked it. I didn’t say I liked a lot of things he wasn’t going to want to hear. I’d never had a girlfriend. I’d never told either of them I was gay. I liked pop music. I liked men who looked like him. That last part I kept so far down it only came up when I was alone.
The jeep smelled like canvas and his aftershave and the coffee he’d poured into a metal thermos. He drove like he did everything else. No extra words. Eyes on the road. When a song I liked came on the radio he changed it without asking.
“You sit up,” he said, twenty minutes in. “You’re slouching like your spine’s optional. That’s your mother. Soft house. Soft rules. Soft kid. Not this weekend.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
He glanced at me. The look went from the pink in my hair to the glasses to the way my hoodie hung off my shoulders.
“You eat?”
“This morning.”
“What.”
“Toast.”
He shook his head once.
“We’ll fix that too.”
The campground wasn’t a campground. It was a fire road and a clearing he knew from years ago, before the divorce, before I was old enough for him to decide I needed this. He backed the jeep in, killed the engine, and was out of the vehicle before I’d undone my seatbelt.
“Out. Now. You carry the tent. I carry the rest. You drop it, you pick it up. You complain, we add laps.”
I carried the tent.
It was heavier than it looked. My arms started shaking halfway to the flat spot he’d already chosen with his eyes. He watched me do it. Didn’t help. When I set it down too hard he made me pick it up and set it down again.
“Controlled. You’re not throwing my gear.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
We put the tent up in silence except for his corrections. Stake that straighter. Pull that line. Don’t stand there looking at your phone. I didn’t have service anyway. He made me collect wood. He made me fill the water jugs from the stream. He made me do twenty push-ups on the pine needles when I muttered something about my shoulders.
I made it to fourteen.
He crouched next to my head.
“Six more. I didn’t say you could stop. Your mother lets you stop. I don’t.”
I did six more. They were ugly. My glasses slipped. A piece of bark dug into my palm. When I finished he said, “On your feet,” and I stood there with my arms dead and my face hot and something in my stomach that wasn’t just embarrassment.
It was him. The size of him. The way the uniform pulled across his chest when he stood up. The hair at the collar. The voice. I’d spent years looking at men like that on my phone with the door locked. Now one of them was my father, two feet away, telling me I was soft.
He took his jacket off in the afternoon heat. Undershirt. Dark hair on his chest where the neck opened. Sweat. He didn’t make a show of it. He didn’t have to. I looked too long and he caught it.
“Eyes on the work, Cass.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“You got a staring problem.”
“No, Sergeant.”
“Then stop.”
I stopped. Or I tried to.
Near four he walked off toward the trees without saying where. I thought he was checking the perimeter. I followed far enough to not get yelled at for wandering and then I saw him.
He was pissing against a pine.
Boots planted. One hand on the trunk. The other holding himself. I should have turned around. I didn’t. The sound of it hit the bark and the dirt and I stood there like an idiot with my mouth dry, looking at the thing in his hand.
It wasn’t just that it was big. It was the way he held it. Casual. Heavy. Unashamed. A thick, mature cock that made every boy I’d ever tried not to think about look like a joke. He shook it once, tucked it away, and turned.
He saw me.
For a second neither of us moved.
“You lost?” he said.
“I thought— I was getting more wood.”
“Wood’s the other way.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
He walked back toward me. The uniform pants were still half-settled. He stopped close enough that I had to look up.
“You were watching me take a leak.”
I didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t make it worse.
“You say nothing, that means yes.” His voice dropped. “A man looks another man in the eye. He doesn’t stand in the trees like a sneak. You understand me?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Then get the wood. And next time you need to look at something, you ask. You don’t hide.”
I got the wood.
My hands were shaking for a reason that had nothing to do with the push-ups.
We ate late. He cooked over the fire like he’d done it a hundred times. I burned my finger on a pan and he didn’t fuss. He told me to run it under the stream and come back. When I sat down again he was across the fire, undershirt damp, elbows on his knees, looking at me the way he looked at a problem.
“Your mother said you don’t date.”
I poked at the beans.
“I don’t.”
“Boys your age have girls. Or they try. You don’t try.”
“I just— I don’t.”
“That’s not an answer.” He drank from the thermos. Coffee, still. He hadn’t brought beer. “She thinks you’re sensitive. I think you’re hiding. There’s a difference.”
The fire popped. Somewhere in the dark a bird went off and then stopped.
“I’m not hiding,” I said, which was a lie.
“You paint your nails. You put pink in your hair. You don’t lift. You don’t care about NFL. You don’t run. You look at me today like you’ve never seen a man take his shirt off.” He leaned forward. “I’m not your mother. I don’t do the soft version. This weekend you learn what a man is. You don’t have to like it. You have to do it.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
He watched me for a long time.
“You sleep in the tent. I sleep in the tent. You snore, I kick you. You get up to piss, you say so. No wandering off in the dark. Clear?”
“Clear, Sergeant.”
I lay on my side after he put the fire down, as far from him as the tent allowed, which wasn’t far. He took up space even on his back. I could hear him breathe. I could smell the day on him. I stared at the nylon and thought about him against the tree and hated myself for how easy it was to see it again.
Morning was worse.
He had me up before the sun. Water on my face from the jug. No coffee for me until the work was done. He put me through a version of PT that would have been a joke to anyone in his unit and was not a joke to me. Squats. More push-ups. A run down the fire road that ended with me bent over, glasses fogged, spit hanging off my lip.
He stood there in the undershirt, barely winded.
“Again.”
“Sergeant, I can’t—”
“You can. You just never had to. Move.”
I moved.
By midday I was sunburned on my neck and my legs were useless. He had me sit on a stump while he checked the line on the tent. I watched the muscle in his back. I watched the way his belt sat. I watched his hands. When he turned I looked at the dirt.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“Doing what.”
“Looking at me like that.”
I didn’t answer.
He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Get up. Down to the water.”
The stream was cold enough to hurt. He told me to wash. I went in in my shorts and hissed when it hit my stomach. He stood on the bank in the uniform pants and the undershirt and watched me fail at being fine.
“All the way in.”
I went all the way in. The pink in my hair went dark. My nails looked stupid against the wet rock. When I came out I was shaking.
He pulled the undershirt over his head.
I stopped walking.
John Peterson without the shirt was worse than John Peterson pissing against a tree. Hairy chest. Thick. The kind of body that had been used. A line of hair down his stomach that disappeared into the belt. He unbuckled it like I wasn’t there, then looked up and saw that I was.
He didn’t cover himself.
He didn’t tell me to turn around.
He took the pants down to wash and I saw it again, softer now, still heavy, hanging against his thigh, and my own body gave me away before I could do anything about it. The shorts were wet. They didn’t hide anything.
He saw that too.
The clearing went very still.
“So that’s what this is,” he said.
I wanted the water to take me.
“Sergeant—”
“Don’t.” He stepped out of the pants the rest of the way, stood there naked on the bank like the woods belonged to him, and pointed at the ground in front of him. “You come here.”
I went. Wet. Cold. Hard. Humiliated.
He didn’t touch me. He didn’t let me touch him. He just stood there, this huge military man with his cock in the open air, and looked down at his son like he was deciding whether to end the weekend or turn it into something else.
“You been staring since the tree,” he said.
“Don’t lie. I don’t like liars.”
“I wasn’t—” I lied.
“You were. You watched me piss. You watched me in the tent. You watched me just now. And now you’re standing here with a hard-on in front of your father.” His voice stayed even. That was the worst part. “Your mother would cry. I don’t cry. I deal with the problem.”
He reached down and took himself in his hand.
Not to offer it. To show it.
He was getting hard while he talked. I watched it happen and couldn’t look away. It thickened in his fist, lifted, the same heavy cock from the tree, except now it was filling because I was there, because I’d been caught, because his soft pink-haired kid was shaking in wet shorts two feet away.
“This is a man,” he said. “This is what you keep looking at. You wanted to see it. Now you see it.”
He stroked once. Slow. Not for pleasure, or not only. For the lesson.
“You don’t touch. You don’t come closer. You keep your hands where they are. You look because I told you to look. That’s an order.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Louder.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
He kept his hand on it. He was fully hard now. Bigger than I had imagined even after the tree. The kind of cock that explained why he walked like he did. Why the uniform fit the way it did. Why every man I’d ever wanted looked like a copy of this one.
“You gay?” he asked.
The woods were too quiet.
“Yes, Sergeant.”
He nodded once, like he’d already known and had just been waiting for me to say it in his woods, under his rules.
“That’s why the nails. That’s why you never brought a girl home. That’s why you look at me like I’m a Greek god.” He squeezed himself, not shy about it. “I’m not a porn magazine. I’m your father. And you’re going to stand there until I decide we’re done looking.”
I stood there.
Water ran down my legs. My glasses were spotted. My black nails were fists at my sides because he’d said hands where they are. He didn’t smile. He didn’t joke. He just held his cock and made me look at it, the two of us in a clearing that suddenly felt a lot smaller than the forest around it.
“A real man isn’t ashamed of his body,” he said. “He doesn’t hide it. He doesn’t sneak around trees to get a look. If he’s going to look, he looks when he’s told. You understand me?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“You want to be a man this weekend, you start by doing what you’re told. You don’t get to have this. You don’t get to put your hands on it. You look. You learn. Then you get dressed and you don’t mention it at the fire.”
He let go.
It stayed hard. He didn’t tuck it away immediately. He let me see that too, the fact that he could stand there like that and still be in charge of the minute.
Then he pulled the pants back on, slow, and the undershirt, and the belt.
“Turn around. Get your clothes. We still have a hike.”
I turned around.
Behind me I heard him buckle the belt. I heard him pick up the jacket. I heard him say, almost to himself, “Soft kid. Jesus Christ.”
I got dressed with my back to him. My hands didn’t work right. When I turned he was already moving up the bank, uniform in place, Sergeant again, like he hadn’t just shown his son his cock and gotten hard doing it.
He didn’t look at me when I caught up.
“You stay on my left. You keep up. You fall behind, we do the run again.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
We walked.
The woods went back to being woods. Birds. Water. His boots on the dirt. My smaller ones trying to match. The thing he’d shown me was under the uniform again and I could still see it every time I blinked.
He spoke once, without turning his head.
“Tonight you sleep in the tent same as last night. You keep to your side. You don’t wander. Tomorrow we do this again if I decide we need to. Until then you don’t say a word about what you saw. Clear?”
“Clear, Sergeant.”
He nodded.
The trail bent. The jeep was a long way behind us. My father was a wall of camo and heat and that voice, and I followed him with my mouth dry and my secret out in the open and nothing touched but everything changed.
The bounding weekend wasn’t over.
He hadn’t said it was.
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