Every summer I came back, and he was waiting for me

In this town it’s always hot. A dry heat that gets into your bones even in the shade, the kind of heat that asks no permission. I’ve been coming every summer for years, and yet every time I get off the bike and breathe in that dusty, still air, I think I could stay forever. My friends in the city don’t get it. They ask me why I bury myself in a place with no beach, no nightclub, nothing worth a damn. A tapas bar with three tables, the tobacconist’s where they sell yesterday’s paper, and the pharmacy that only opens on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I’ve never told them the truth. And I’m not going to.

What I have with my grandfather started years ago, when I was a kid of eighteen just turned, bored stiff on vacation. There was no pact, no conversation. It simply happened one day, and then it kept happening, like summer: inevitable, cyclical, and way too hot to reason about. He hasn’t forced anything on me, that much is clear. It all comes from an unspoken, unwritten understanding. I come. He takes care of me. And we both know why: so I can shove my cock all the way into him whenever he feels like it, and so he can hand me the cash I need.

I’m not going to deny that sometimes I feel guilty. Especially at Christmas, when we all sit down at the table and I look at my father without being able to hold his gaze for more than two seconds. I think he can tell, that something on my face gives me away, that he can smell that his own father sucks my cock every summer and ends up with my cum sliding down his chin. But he just says Grandpa spoils me too much. “With all those whims he indulges you with, you’ll never learn the value of things,” he tells me every year. And I nod and change the subject.

This summer, like always, I brought the bike. A good machine that my grandfather finished paying off in the spring without me asking him for anything, or hardly anything. It took nothing more than one afternoon in March, when he came to the city for a medical checkup, for me to open the apartment door in my underwear and fuck him against the bathroom sink. The next day the dealership called to say everything had already been settled.

***

I was out all day. There’s an area at the foot of the hill, before the road that leads to the water tank, where nobody ever goes. A couple of dry-stone terraces with a fig tree on one side and an open view over the valley. I smoke a couple of cigarettes there, watch the sky, and the noise inside me slowly dies down on its own. It’s the only place in the world where I truly relax, and it’s mine alone.

When my guts told me I’d been gone too long, I switched on my phone. Two messages from girls in the city I didn’t care about, a voice note from my cousin Darío, and three missed calls from my grandfather. He always does that when I take too long. I put on my helmet and rode back into the village.

Before I could even put the key in the lock, the door opened. He’d heard me arrive from two streets away, of course. The bike doesn’t go unnoticed here.

—Where have you been? —he said, leaning in the doorway in that striped apron he never took off, not even to sleep—. Lunch has been ready since two. Potato stew with ribs, the way you like it.

I didn’t answer him. I passed him, left my helmet on the hall chair, and went into the living room. He kept talking behind my back, listing the ingredients, how long he’d been cooking, how well it had turned out. I got tense, as always when he gets into that chatterbox mode.

—Go take a walk and let the trouble begin —I said without looking at him, flopping down on the sofa—. Less talk and more heating something up, I’m hungry.

—Yes, of course, right away —he replied, instantly lowering his voice.

That’s how I prefer it. Not complaining, just moving.

While he rattled around in the kitchen, I rolled a cigarette and watched TV. A quiz show, the same one as always, with the same host as always. After a while he brought the plate over and set it carefully on the coffee table, away from my things. He sat in the armchair opposite and watched me eat, with that loyal-dog face of his, waiting for me to toss him a bone.

—Is it good, Mateo?

—Yeah —I said, not taking my eyes off the plate.

A brief silence. Then:

—I talked to Fermín, the guy at the bar.

I looked up. I’d asked him to go speak to the owner of the only bar in the village because I needed my own income, I couldn’t live solely off the old man’s pension.

—And?

—He didn’t give me a straight answer. Says he doesn’t need anyone right now, but that you should go by tomorrow night, after he’s closed, around eleven.

—At eleven at night? What’s wrong with that man?

—That’s what he told me...

I thought about it for a moment. Truth is, I didn’t get up early. I went to bed in the middle of the night and got up when the sun was already high. So when I thought about it, eleven at night was almost a civilized hour for me.

—Fine. I’ll go tomorrow.

I finished dinner calmly, glancing at my phone now and then. Nothing urgent, nothing deserving immediate attention. When I pushed the empty plate toward the middle of the coffee table and leaned back on the sofa, I felt my grandfather’s hand settle on my thigh.

He didn’t say anything. No need. It moved upward slowly, testing the ground as always, until his fingers brushed the button of my jeans and went a little farther, pressing the bulge that was already starting to form under the fabric. Only then did I look at him. He had that expression I know by heart: eyes half-lidded, lips parted, that need he carries around like it’s part of his clothes.

—Who gave you permission? —I said.

This time he didn’t pull back. He was too needy for that. He pressed his hand against my cock over the jeans, feeling out the length with his open palm.

—I think I earned it, Mateo. I’ve had this on my mind since yesterday.

I looked away and let him do it. That was all I needed.

***

He unbuttoned my jeans with hands that trembled a little, that tremor he gets when he’s spent days thinking about this. I stayed still while he worked, staring at the ceiling. The floor lamp cast the room in that yellow tint old houses have when they never change.

He pulled my jeans down to my ankles and froze for a moment, looking at the thick bulge showing through my briefs. He has that habit, looking before touching, as if he wants to keep the image for the nights I’m in the city and he jerks himself off alone in this same house, thinking about what I do to him when I come back. I took my T-shirt off myself, knowing it would end up on the floor sooner or later anyway.

What started as a caress turned more determined. He knows me. He knows how my timing works, knows I don’t like being forced or rushed. He knelt on the floor with that careful slowness of someone protecting his knees and hooked the waistband of my underwear with his teeth, pulling it down very slowly. When the elastic passed over my cock, my dick snapped upward and knocked against his chin. He let out a rough little moan, as if that alone was enough to earn him half a night.

He started on my thighs, with his mouth. Slow kisses, his tongue drawing upward lines from my knee to my groin. He smelled my balls before touching them, burying his nose in the hair, breathing deeply as if he needed to fill his lungs with my scent. Then he stuck out his tongue and licked the base of my cock from bottom to top, following the thick vein that runs underneath it, very slowly, all the way to the head. There he stopped. He parted his lips and took the tip into his mouth, sucking only the crown with a soft, steady suction while looking up at me with those wet old-pervert eyes.

—Take it all, don’t be a girl —I told him, and buried a hand in his white hair to push his head down.

He obeyed. He took it down deep until his nose touched my stomach and my balls were pressed against his chin. He stayed there a few seconds, his throat clenched around the tip, breathing through his nose like an old dog. When he pulled back for air, a strand of saliva hung from his lip to the head. He went down again. And again. And again. He set a slow rhythm, sucking up and down, taking me all the way out to lick my frenulum with the tip of his tongue and then swallowing me back down to the root.

—Old pig —I muttered under my breath, and he made a sound that was almost a laugh, with my cock filling his mouth.

He went down to my testicles, worked them with his tongue while holding me with one hand, using his own saliva as lubricant. He took them into his mouth one by one, sucking carefully, while with his hand he jerked me slowly, squeezing the foreskin up and down. I leaned my head back against the sofa and let out my breath slowly. This wasn’t enough to push me over the edge, it never was, but it changed the state of things. I threw my phone to the other end of the sofa.

My grandfather took it as the signal it was.

He got up from the floor and stripped with surprising speed for a man his age. I noticed he wasn’t wearing underwear under his trousers: he’d taken it off before I arrived, waiting. His own cock, smaller than mine and not as hard, hung between his legs already dripping pre-cum. He went to his room and came back with the lubricant.

He applied it carefully, on me first, coating my cock until it shone all over, then on himself, sliding two fingers into his ass as he bent over me. He opened himself patiently, one finger first, then the second, moving them in circles, panting through his mouth. Watching a man in his seventies preparing his old ass so his own grandson can fuck it should have disgusted me. But I’d been used to it for years. And truth be told, it made me insanely horny.

Then he placed his hands on my thighs to brace himself and began lowering himself very slowly, finding the angle. He grabbed my cock with one hand, lined it up against his hole, and pressed down. The hardest part is always the beginning. When he reached the critical point, he stopped, breathing through his nose, with the head barely wedged at the rim.

—It won’t go in —he said through clenched teeth.

—That’s because you’re doing it wrong. Stop. I’ll do it.

He obeyed without a word of protest. He turned slightly, relaxed his posture, and I took control. I gripped his hips with both hands, lined the tip up properly against his ass, and pushed gently, centimeter by centimeter. I felt him give way, felt the sphincter open around my cock and take me in, warm and tight. He let out a long, guttural moan, his mouth open and eyes closed.

—Slowly, Mateo, slowly... you’re going to break it...

—I’m going slowly. Don’t exaggerate. I’ve been putting it in you the same way for four years.

When I was all the way in and his ass cheeks were resting against my thighs, we both went still for a moment. He let out a hard exhale, as if he’d been holding his breath since morning. I felt his ass throbbing around the base of my cock, adjusting.

—Move —I said, and gave his thigh a sharp slap.

And he started moving.

He would rise until I was almost all the way out, then come back down, impaling himself completely each time. The view from below was brutal: my grandfather, with his loose old belly skin and his white hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, riding my cock with a desperation his age should have made impossible to hide. His own old cock bounced against my stomach with each downward drop, leaving a trail of sticky fluid on my navel. I watched him from below, his broad back moving up and down, the moans escaping him uncontrollably.

—Oh, Mateo, my boy, what a cock you’ve got, what a fat cock you’re shoving into me...

—Shut up and work, old man. Your voice’ll go from all this fucking.

There’s something in that image that every year gets harder for me to understand and harder to leave behind. A contradiction I live with unresolved.

What am I doing?

The same question as always. And the same answer as always: keep going. Keep going until I cum inside him. Keep going until tears of pleasure run down his face, the way they always do when I get to the bottom.

He stayed like that a good while, riding at his own pace, saying things in a low voice I’d rather not repeat: that I was his grandson, that I was his man, that I should fill him, that that ass had been mine from day one. Until my brain decided it needed more. I put my hands on his hips and took control of the motion. I lifted him almost completely off the sofa and drove him back down, spearing him with a hard thrust. He let out a rough cry. I repeated the motion. And again. And again. Speeding up until there was no rhythm but mine, bouncing his ass up and down on my cock like he was a rag doll. The sofa creaked. The coffee table shifted. The sound of flesh slapping against flesh filled the living room over the TV news.

I shoved him forward, planting his hands on the armrest, without taking it out. I slid one arm under his chest to hold him and started fucking him from below, driving upward, burying my cock to the root again and again. I held his throat with my other arm, squeezing just enough—I know what he likes—and he gripped my forearm with both hands without asking me to stop. Quite the opposite. He clenched his ass harder around me, as if he wanted to milk me.

—Give me your load, Mateo, please, give it to me...

—You’re going to get it. All of it. Hold on, old man, not yet.

But he couldn’t hold on. I grabbed his old wrinkled cock with my free hand, jerked it three or four times while I kept hammering his hole, and he came before I did, staining the sofa armrest with weak, thick spurts that drew an animal groan from him. His ass clenched around the orgasm, squeezing my cock like a fist. A few seconds later I came too, driving it into him to the hilt and unloading inside him in stream after stream, emptying myself slowly while I kept him pinned against me. I felt every lash of semen shooting out into him, and he felt it too, because he moaned with each one as if he were counting them.

When I was done, I pulled out very slowly. A white line of my cum slid from his thigh to the back of his knee.

The silence that came after was the good kind. Just the TV in the background, a presenter reading the eleven o’clock news, and the two of us catching our breath.

***

I let him go and collapsed sideways on the sofa. I grabbed my phone, replied to my cousin Darío with a couple of words, and checked the rest without really paying attention to anything. My grandfather got up slowly, with that after-the-fact walk I knew well, legs spread so the semen wouldn’t drip down his trousers, and headed for the bathroom.

When he came back, I’d already put my briefs on.

—I need two hundred euros —I said without preamble.

He stopped dead.

—Two hundred? Mateo, I gave you one twenty last week. I’m not a bank. How much do you think a pensioner gets?

I looked him straight in the eye, unblinking. I wasn’t interested in arguments.

—I need it. I’ve got expenses.

He burst out laughing, and that really threw me. It had been a long time since I’d heard that laugh come out of him.

—You? Expenses? At twenty-two, what expenses exactly do you have?

The comment tightened my throat. I didn’t answer him. I found my jeans on the floor, put them on, and went out to the patio with my tobacco and lighter. The night air was still and smelled of dry earth. I smoked an entire cigarette staring at the stars, which in the village you can see like nowhere else.

When I went back into the living room, calmer, there was an envelope on the coffee table.

I opened it. Two hundred and fifty euros in folded bills. And a handwritten note, in that old man’s handwriting he learned with a fountain pen:

“Sorry about the tone. You know I love you, kid.”

I clicked my tongue. I hesitated for a second, the bills in my hand, feeling exactly like I always feel at this moment: unable to explain whether what exists between us is affection, habit, or something with no name. In the end I put the money in my pocket. That’s why I come, after all. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.

When I folded the note to keep it too, I saw there was something written on the back:

“Tomorrow night don’t forget to go to Fermín’s bar. At eleven, you know the time.”

I smiled without meaning to. Just for a second. Then I went to bed.