I Started Wanting My Own Son at Fifty-Six

My name is Damián. I’m fifty-six years old, I live in a house that’s too big for the two of us who inhabit it, and until a few months ago I would have said I was at peace with myself. I was an industrial engineer, the owner of a small prototype workshop until a multinational bought one of my patents, and since then I’ve had a guaranteed salary and time on my side.

Money, I learned late, doesn’t buy happiness, but it does buy that strange freedom of shutting the computer at three in the afternoon and having nothing happen. I’m an orderly person, with simple tastes, no fuss. I’ve worn a mustache since I was twenty-five. I let the goatee grow out and shave it off depending on the month’s mood. I’ve got a bit of a belly, just enough for my belt to tell me the truth every morning, but otherwise I’m in good shape for my age.

Mateo and I live in this house. He’s twenty-one, studies software engineering at the public university, and still can’t decide whether he wants to finish his degree or head off to some faraway city to try his luck. His mother, Cecilia, died six years ago. The blow was brutal for both of us. We got through it glued together, almost never apart, and out of that grief we came away with a closer relationship than is usual between a middle-aged father and a teenage son.

When I talk about myself, I usually say that I’ve been heterosexual all my life and never gave anything else a thought. Not out of conviction, but simply because it never happened to me. I see attractive men the way I see beautiful trees: with the calm admiration of someone looking at a landscape. After Cecilia died I went over a year without touching anyone, and when I came back to sex I did it cautiously, with a couple of trusted masseuses who know my body and whom I visit from time to time so they can suck me off or ride me for a while until I come and leave.

That was my life until a few months ago. Until I started looking at my son.

Mateo looks like me when I was his age. The same slender build, the same way of pushing his hair back when he thinks, the same way of crossing his legs on the sofa. Seeing him is, in large part, seeing myself thirty-five years earlier, in another, lighter life.

That, by itself, wouldn’t be anything extraordinary. A father recognizing his own gestures in his son. Something almost banal.

The problem started one March afternoon, when Mateo crossed the living room in tracksuit bottoms on his way to the kitchen and my eyes went to his crotch. Not for any reason. The way you notice an imperfection without meaning to. He was wearing fairly tight gray pants and everything showed: the thick bulge of the cock hanging toward his left leg, and lower down the weight of his balls pressed against the fabric. I looked away immediately, uncomfortable, almost ashamed.

A week later I was looking again. And again. And again.

Let me explain, because writing it forces me to put it in order. I didn’t start by thinking about sex. I started by thinking about the difference between his body and mine at that age. Me, modest, always. Him, obviously not. Fashion, trousers, whatever it was: Mateo shows. And I, seated in the leather armchair with a book on my knees, began to notice every time he walked by.

Then it got worse. I started imagining.

I don’t want to dress it up. I imagined what he’d look like without clothes. I imagined the weight of it in a hand, how the hot shaft of his dick would feel closing my fist, how much of that cock would stick out above and below when I held it all the way. I imagined my hand moving slowly up and down until the head appeared wet from under the foreskin and he let out a low gasp of surprise. Then I imagined my mouth opening to take it in, my tongue circling the glans, saliva running down my chin, his balls bumping against my chin every time he shoved. After that, during a stretch when I barely slept, I imagined my own son throwing my head back against a pillow and sinking into my throat until I was choking a little and gripping his ass cheeks with both hands, spreading them apart, jamming a finger into his hole while he fucked my mouth, and begging for more with my eyes and with the tears running down my face from being fucked like that.

You can’t think this. You can’t even think this.

And yet I couldn’t stop thinking it.

My body responded on its own. It was enough for Mateo to cross a room, rest his elbow on the kitchen table, scratch the back of his neck in the morning with a sleepy face, for me to feel a tingle down below, a throb under my navel, a swelling that forced me to change position or pretend I had to go to the bathroom. My cock, which for years had worked with the discipline of an old dog, had woken up again the way it did when I was seventeen. Only now it was waking for the wrong person. It would go hard against the zipper of my pants, so hard it hurt, and I had to clench my teeth and wait until Mateo left the room so I could adjust myself with my hand.

The first thing I did was what any man does: I tried to wear it out. I masturbated. Once. Twice. Three times in the same day. The first was in the shower, with my hand full of soap, and I came in two minutes against the tiles with a dry gag of pleasure. The second was after lunch, stretched out on the bed on my back, my pants pulled down to my knees, spitting into my palm and working myself with a loose wrist, slowly, the way old men jerk off. The third was at dusk, in the armchair in my study, and by then I only got out a thick thread that dribbled through my fingers and stained my shirt.

I tried not to think about him. I thought about women, about some actress, about the masseuses. It worked for two minutes. Then my mind went by itself again to the back room, where Mateo slept with the door ajar, and I closed my eyes and, in the middle of jerking off, I saw him: I saw him naked, kneeling on my bed, his cock pointed at my face; I saw him sliding it between my lips without saying a word, gripping my gray hair at the nape of my neck; I saw him coming on my tongue with that young, abundant, thick load that no longer comes out of me the way it did twenty years ago. I came too, with a violence I hadn’t felt in months, a long spasm that shook my hips against the air, and afterwards I was left lying on the bed with my belly splattered with semen and my eyes full of tears and a guilt so huge I didn’t know where to put it.

“This is the last time,” I told myself every time, wiping myself with a towel I’d then hide. “And the next morning it would all start over again.”

I talked to myself for weeks. I gave myself the speeches a father and an adult man gives himself. That this can’t be. That he’s my son. That even if he never finds out, even if nothing ever happens, the mere fact of looking at him like that is already a betrayal. That I’m sick. That I have to stop. That I need to see a psychologist. That I need to leave for a while. That I need to get married again. That I need any damned thing.

None of those speeches did any good. The one in charge of this matter isn’t me.

***

The second thing I did was go back to Lorena, my masseuse of a lifetime. A patient woman, my age, with big tits sagging with the years and a cunt that’s known my cock since before Cecilia died. She charges what she charges, and she knows my quirks the way she knows any regular customer’s. I asked for a double session. I wanted to come out emptied, wrung out, with no fuel left. I wanted to go home so exhausted that the mere idea of thinking about another body would make me lazy.

I got to her apartment in the middle of the afternoon. She opened the door in her robe, with her usual smile, and took me to the back room. She undressed me without rushing, laid me on my back on the table, and started sucking my cock with that slow, practiced technique women have when they’ve sucked a lot of cocks and know what works on each one. She took it all the way out, took it into the back of her throat, spat on it, licked my balls one by one, made me draw air in through my mouth. Then she climbed onto the table, spread her cunt open with two fingers, and lowered herself onto my cock all the way. She rode me for twenty minutes, moving her hips in circles, squeezing me with the muscles inside, looking me in the eye because she knows I like that. I came deep in her cunt with a growl, and she stayed still on top of me until I went soft, and kissed my mustache and told me to rest a bit.

The second round, half an hour later, she sucked me slowly until I got hard again and then got on all fours at the edge of the table and asked me to put it in from behind. I gripped her hips and fucked her slowly at first, counting the thrusts, and then harder, slapping her cunt with my balls, until I felt the load rise again and emptied it on her back, a long white stream that slid down her spine and pooled in the cleft of her ass.

I walked out of there feeling strange, with rubbery legs, and that afternoon I slept eight hours straight. It worked. It worked the next day. On the third, Mateo came into the kitchen just out of bed, hair tousled and his pajama pants low on his hips, his hip bone showing and the line of blond hair running down from his navel and disappearing into the waistband, and my cock went hard under the table before I even realized it. Lorena wasn’t enough. Masseuses weren’t enough. Prostitutes weren’t going to be enough. The problem wasn’t in my body. The problem was in my head, and no wet cunt and no three-hundred-euro blowjob was going to get my son’s image out of my head.

The third thing I did was start looking at other men.

Near my house there’s a tree-lined promenade that cuts across half the city, with cafés on both sidewalks and benches every twenty meters. I started going out every afternoon to have coffee with a book, but the book was just scenery. I watched.

And in watching I discovered something new.

Before, when I looked at a man, I looked at him the way you look at an object that has no use for you. Now I looked at them the way I’d looked at women twenty years ago, with that specific attention that registers everything: the back, the way the shirt fills, the thighs against the pants, the bulge —yes, that too, the exact shape of the cock lying inside the jeans, the volume of the balls pressed underneath— and an automatic calculation of what would happen if that man crossed the promenade and sat down with me and said let’s go.

The younger ones turned me on for their rage, for that taut flesh that still doesn’t know what it’s capable of, for the idea of feeling a young, hard cock blowing out my mouth. The middle-aged ones, for something sadder and more complete, a body already lived in, able to read a glance in two seconds and settle it without words, able to grab me by the neck and fuck me against a wall without asking. The ones in between, around my age or close, gave me the curiosity of symmetry: what does it feel like to hold someone built like you, with the same emerging belly and the same slumped shoulders, two cocks in our fifties brushing against bellies while we kiss with tongue.

Hours went by. I drank coffee after coffee, my hands a little shaky and a half-erection uncomfortably inside my pants, and no one looked back at me because I didn’t know how to look. I didn’t have the code. I didn’t know how one gaze crosses with another so that something starts. I was in a foreign country and I didn’t speak the language.

In one of those cafés, one afternoon, I asked myself the obvious question. The one a man my age should have asked from the start.

This is on the internet.

Anything is on the internet. The good and the bad. Recipes and nightmares. Patents and forums of men like me, I guessed, because if I was on this drift I couldn’t be the only one. There would be thousands. There would be millions. There would be guides, manuals, places where a man who discovers at fifty-six that he wants to touch another man, that he wants to suck a cock for the first time, that he wants to get fucked in the ass even though he’s never tried it, can go read what he does first, second, third.

I went home that afternoon with a strange calm. The calm of someone who has just accepted that he’s going to do something he had forbidden himself to even think about until then.

Mateo was on the sofa, legs stretched out on the coffee table, watching a series on his laptop. He lifted his head and smiled at me in that way of his that is half boy and half man.

“How was the walk, old man?”

“Long,” I said. “I got tired.”

“We’ll have dinner early and you can go to sleep.”

I looked at his mouth a second longer than I should have, those lips he sometimes bites when he reads, and thought about how they’d feel closing around my old cock. I looked at his hands on the computer, long fingers, short nails, a little leather bracelet he bought last summer and never took off, and I imagined those fingers sinking between my ass cheeks, one first, two after, preparing me for him. I looked at the bulge under his tracksuit pants, that weight hanging to one side, and my mouth went dry. I closed my eyes for an instant, breathed, and went into the kitchen as if nothing had happened, with my hard cock tugging at the seam of my pants.

That same night, after washing the dishes, after kissing my son on the crown of his head and wishing him good night, I locked myself in the study, opened the old laptop I use for everything, and started searching. Forums. Apps. Meeting places. Stories of mature men who discovered themselves late. Saunas. Gay bars. Reviews. Codes. Vocabulary I didn’t know and wrote down in a notebook as if I were studying for an exam: top, bottom, versatile, bear, chaser, dark rooms, glory holes, poppers, silicone and water-based lubricants, how to prepare an ass before letting yourself be fucked for the first time.

I read until three in the morning. I didn’t touch myself, even though my cock got hard twenty times looking at photos of other men’s cocks, some thick and hairy, others thin and shaved, ass cheeks opened with fingers in front of the camera, thick loads falling down gray beards. I was going to do this right. I was going to study the terrain the way I’d always studied any technical problem in my life. Design first, prototype next, testing at the end.

I came out of the study in the dark, my eyes stinging from the light and an erection that still hadn’t gone down, and I peered into Mateo’s room. The door was ajar. I could hear him breathing peacefully, deeply, that rhythm I’ve recognized since he was a baby and I put him in the crib. I stood there a long minute in the doorway, watching him sleep. He was on his stomach, the sheet fallen to his waist, his back bare, and under the fabric the curve of his ass and the shadow of the cleft between them stood out. My own blood, there, wrapped around a pillow, oblivious to everything, with a young ass that I, his father, had begun to desire with an intensity that scared me.

I closed the door carefully. I promised myself, for the umpteenth time, that I wasn’t going to touch him. That I was going to look outside. That I was going to satisfy this new thing with other bodies, with strangers, with adult men who were free and willing, that I was going to let myself get sucked off and I was going to suck, that I was going to let myself get fucked and I was going to fuck, until I emptied myself completely, and that my son would stay out of all this, untouched, saved by my cowardice or by my conscience, it didn’t matter which one.

That was the promise I made myself in the hallway, in the dark, with my hand still on his bedroom doorknob and my cock still hard inside my pants.

We’ll see how long it lasts.

I’ll continue tomorrow.