My Best Friend’s Father’s Red Swim Trunks

Diego and I were inseparable since elementary school. I spent more afternoons at his house than at mine, we slept in each other’s rooms on weekends, we shared secrets neither of us dared to tell anyone else. No one would have hesitated to call us brothers.

Things changed the summer his parents stopped speaking to each other. The arguments, at first veiled, ended up tearing the house apart from the inside. His mother left with a new lover for another city and took Diego with her. I lost track of him for years. There were nights when I thought I’d never see him again.

The one I kept running into around the neighborhood was his father, Mateo. He lived just around the corner, though his routine and mine rarely matched. By then I was eighteen and he was around forty-four. He had a body unlike the other fathers of my friends: tall, broad-shouldered, with a waist that was still firm. Sometimes I saw him go running through the park, his T-shirt soaked through, and I noticed several women turning their heads as they crossed paths with him. He wasn’t the only one looking.

That July afternoon the heat was unbearable. I was walking toward the newsstand when I recognized him on the opposite sidewalk. He smiled when he saw me.

“It’s been ages since we ran into each other,” he said, and gave me two pats on the shoulder.

We talked for a couple of minutes standing in the sun until he suggested we go into the nearest bar to cool off. I agreed without thinking. We ended up in a small, dim pub with soft music and a couple of couples in the corners. There was a boy and a girl, yes, but also two guys who didn’t even bother pretending. One of their hands disappeared under the table. That atmosphere did nothing to relax me.

Mateo ordered two cold beers and filled me in. Diego was starting university in September, in Valencia, and lived with his mother in a huge apartment near the port. I was glad to hear it. I was even more glad to see that the easy rapport with Mateo was still intact, as if the years had never gone by. We talked the way we used to in the kitchen of his old house, only now I wasn’t a kid and, looking at him properly, I realized how much I had always liked him.

Half an hour later he said:

“I’ve got boxes of photos from those summers upstairs. If you want, we can go take a look. You’ll crack up at some of them.”

I had nothing better to do, and the idea of spending more time with him appealed to me for reasons I preferred not to analyze yet. His flat was three minutes away. We climbed the four flights in silence and, as soon as he crossed the door, he took off his shirt and tossed it over the back of a chair.

“Make yourself at home, it’s like an oven in here.”

I lingered a second too long looking at him. The hairless torso, the defined shoulders, the dark line of hair running down his belly from his navel until it disappeared under his pants. He was very different from the hairy man I remembered from childhood photos.

He poured two drinks with ice and took three large albums out of the cupboard. We sat on the sofa, shoulder to shoulder, with the albums on the glass coffee table. He started turning the pages slowly, chuckling under his breath at some of the pictures. In most of the photos Diego and I were shirtless or in swim trunks. Young bodies, slim, still untried. It was no coincidence that he stopped on those pages; I understood that soon enough.

I still had my T-shirt on and was starting to feel my back stick to the fabric. I took it off and let it fall to the floor. Mateo glanced at me sideways, with a restrained smile, and said nothing.

“There you are,” I said, pointing to a photo.

It showed him on a beach, hairy, in low-rise red swim trunks. I took that photo. I remembered it perfectly. It had been the summer I discovered what kind of men I liked. I’d asked to borrow the camera under the pretense of testing the zoom, but the truth was I’d spent the whole morning looking for a decent excuse to get a close look at him.

“What a change, Mateo. You looked like a bear.”

“That was years ago,” he laughed. “I had it all lasered off. Feels smoother, doesn’t it?”

“I’m into smooth too,” I said, and my voice came out a little rougher than I wanted. “Though with you… I don’t know how far it goes.”

“All the way. Completely.”

“Damn.”

We sat there grinning at each other in silence for a couple of seconds. The temperature in the living room seemed to rise two degrees in thirty seconds.

“Do you still have those trunks?” I asked to break the tension.

“Not those exact ones, but I’ve got others like them. We’d be cooler like that than in pants, right?”

“A lot cooler.”

“I can lend you a pair of mine. Now something my size should fit you well enough. What you guys wore back then would look ridiculous on you.”

I nodded without speaking. My cock was already pressing hard against the zipper and we still hadn’t even touched.

He went into the bedroom and came back two minutes later with a pair of red swim trunks identical to the ones in the photo, worn on his body like a second skin. In his hand he carried another pair, the same, for me. He held them out naturally, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

“Change here. I’m not going to see anything I haven’t seen before.”

He was right, technically. We had seen each other naked when I was nine and he was pulling me out of the pool. But then I hadn’t gotten hard looking at him. I decided not to hide. I pulled down my shorts and boxer briefs at the same time and let my half-hard cock show between my thighs. He didn’t look away. Neither did I.

“I see you’re not lying about the smooth thing either,” he said.

I laughed. I put on the red trunks, tucked my dick to one side of the fabric, and we went back to the sofa, this time closer, our thighs touching.

He picked up another album. The first photo was Diego and me, from behind, bending over and mooning the camera on the beach. Our asses white from the tan line of the trunks, young, perky, ridiculous. It was obvious he had saved that photo for a moment like this. He’d been looking for it on purpose.

“I’ve always wanted to ask you something,” he said, resting his hand on my knee. “Did Diego and you ever do anything during those summers?”

It took me a second to answer. The hand on my knee weighed more than my own leg.

“Quite a bit. We experimented. No one’s ever sucked me off the way he used to back then.”

Mateo let out a slow breath.

“That day it took everything I had not to pounce on both of you and eat your asses. You seemed like the prettiest thing in the world to me.”

I looked him in the eyes. He didn’t seem surprised, but something inside me finally snapped into place. For ten years I had imagined he might have noticed, and at last I had it confirmed.

“You can do it now,” I said. “I’m of age. And I think we’ve both wanted it all afternoon.”

He kissed me before I finished the sentence. It wasn’t a soft kiss: it was the kiss of a man who had been holding himself back for years. His tongue came in looking for something and I gave him everything. I pinched his nipples, dark and hard, while he leaned over my torso to lick mine. It was the first time I’d felt a beard against my chest and in that instant I understood why people go back for more.

I let myself fall back onto the sofa and he came on top of me. I lifted my arms over my head and he took the chance to lick my armpits, slow, tasting the salt of the heat and the nerves. He worked his way down my ribs nibbling, sucked my belly, bit my hip. When he started pulling at the red trunks, I offered no resistance. He slid them off my feet carefully and let them drop to the floor.

My glans, rock hard, brushed his neck. He didn’t go straight for my cock. He stayed at the pubic mound, at the base, at my balls. He licked without haste, without mercy, measuring how long he could keep me waiting before the first drop slipped free. I stroked his hair, spreading my thighs as wide as I could. One foot on the floor, the other braced against the back of the sofa.

He ran his tongue along my perineum and, just when I thought he was going lower, he went up the inner side of my other thigh, down my calf, and ended up putting my toes in his mouth without ever breaking eye contact. He wasn’t especially delicate. It was obscene, direct, exactly what I wanted.

I grabbed his hand and sucked his fingers the way I would have sucked anything else he offered me. He used the saliva to stroke my ass, opening me just enough, stretching me at a rhythm that felt calculated to the millimeter. And finally, when I was reaching my limit, he took my cock into his mouth.

He sucked it to the hilt, relentless. He was positioned at my side, not between my legs, so I could run my hand over his back, his chest, reach the ass still covered by the trunks. I gripped it hard.

On the table, the album had been left open to the photo of Diego and me from behind. The last thing I could think about in that moment was Diego.

He turned his body without taking my cock out of his mouth so I could reach his ass, and I slid a finger inside. A moan escaped him against my glans that shook me through and through. I started moving it slowly while he, with the other hand, finished taking off the red trunks. When he let my cock go to breathe, it was only to ask me things I didn’t want to answer.

“Am I as good as Diego?”

“Better,” I told him, and it was true. “But you also have ten more years of practice.”

He laughed against my thigh. And then, looking me in the eyes, he asked:

“Fuck me.”

I had always imagined it would be the other way around with him, that I’d be the first to spread my legs. But it wasn’t the moment to argue.

“Ride me.”

He climbed on without waiting. He pressed my glans to his entrance, well lubricated with saliva and my fingers, and lowered himself slowly. I watched the head slide in, watched him close his eyes for a moment and open them again, pinning mine with his gaze. His cock, hard, pointed at my face. I pinched his nipples while he rose and fell without hurry, feeling every inch.

I stroked his dick with my left hand, not jerking him off, just rubbing him, so neither of us would finish too soon. He sped up and clenched his ass on each downward stroke as if he wanted to wrench something out of me. I was the one who came first, inside him, moaning with my eyes rolled back. He leaned over me to kiss me with his cock still hard between us, and I let my dick slip out of his ass on its own.

I wanted his cum. I said it without saying it: he moved forward until my glans was level with his lips and I didn’t need any instructions. He filled my mouth in one thrust. I didn’t swallow it. I held it there until he climbed off me and lay down beside me. We shared it in the next kiss, mixed with saliva, unhurried.

***

We stayed like that for a while, talking in low voices, remembering old summers. He confessed that a couple of times he had nearly caught Diego and me with our pants down. That afterward, when we left, he would go out looking for someone in the city who looked like us and pay them so he wouldn’t have to think too much. That the real reason for his divorce had been confessing to his wife that he also liked men, not just the lover she had.

While he talked, his cock stirred again. Both of them. I’d spent half the afternoon furious that it had to be my turn. We were out of saliva for anything else, so he stood up, went to the kitchen, and came back with the bottle of olive oil. I didn’t ask.

I knelt on the sofa, braced on the backrest, and spread his ass open with my hands shamelessly. He ran his tongue over the seam a couple of times, poured the oil from the small of his back, and spread it with two fingers. I oiled his cock while he prepared me.

He entered slowly. My ass was used to it, but his penetration was slow, deliberate, almost measured in rhythm if not in intent. He grabbed my waist. He started moving, soft at first, deeper after that. I felt him working his way inside while I clenched so he’d know it. My cock bumped against my belly button at the same rhythm his was fucking me. We could only moan. The living room must have been audible from the landing.

When he came he collapsed onto my back, puffing, laughing against my nape. I came too, without touching myself, my face pressed against the back of the sofa. His semen was spilling out of my ass. He told me in my ear, his voice hoarse:

“Next time we’ll make it to the bed.”

I let out a laugh loud enough the neighbors must have heard it. If they hadn’t already.

“So there is a next time?”

“As many as you want. And when Diego comes to see me at Christmas, if you feel like remembering old times, you only have to stop by. I promise I’ll warn you before I come into the room.”

I looked at him over my shoulder.

“I think by now we wouldn’t mind if you came in. Maybe we’d even like it if you stayed.”