Lover of a Much Older Man
I’ve dreamt of him since I was six, except I never tell him that. He won’t understand the words, and he’ll think me silly and childish, as opposed to childlike. Each time we meet, he burrows into my side like a wounded animal, and I lay my head, and forget deep down I, too, am a beast. For a little while, he appoints me his cub again, and dresses and pampers me in a way I’ve never been or known on this earth before. I let him.
Some days, I think that’s all he’s ever asked of me. That I let him.
I press my round lips to his oval eyelids, and feel him shudder underneath. His eyes run rheumy, the thought of funeral pyres bearing on his mind. His memory clouds over with tears never shed. For his father, or lost wife, I care not, but he twists his fingers like a schoolboy flicking coins in his palm, and I close my eyes, and shudder back.
Sweet, gentle, I trace my devil-dry lips over his cheek, sallow and forgetful, remind me of my father, remind me of moisturiser, remind me of yesteryear. Trace tit-tat until lips meet pair, and at once, unveil. Turn of my teeth to dance on his flesh, and I bite him tender, almost loving. Teasing out a response. I know well the appeal of childhood wears thin after so long, and come sundown, it’s not another toddler my lover carts around.
Overeager, only a pinch, begin to tear into his lip. His tongue slips into my mouth, and melts into worlds below to us unknown. His love wanders, and I with it, stand and strangle the perplex confines of merry hell.
Waxing lenient, I release him from his bind. Fall soft. Proud like an antelope, yet pliant. Breathe my young-flesh strength into his mouth. Bones unhurt, hands unscathed, as they run down the slow trickle of his old-man spine. I pass it on to him, our perverse leapfrog match, and lay back. It’s no longer my turn to be young.
In the morning, I return to self. Graceful, undaunted, as I pierce the side-walk, chasing dreams on yea high heels and cheap caffeine. At my age, I can afford a lover antiquated as he is, and as old as time, for I have strength and wit and vim to spare. Besides, the gratitude in his eye is a killer adjuvant.
He asks me one day, what will I be when I grow up. Except to me, that reads like loss of youth, life, and that must inevitably mean death. For a second, I toy with telling him that when I’m his grand, somnolent age, I’ll take a lover that’s just my size, and drown my worries in baby bottles. Instead, I tell him I’ll die, and he laughs, and shakes his head at all the silly things little girls sometimes say.
We stay in far too much, him and I; but there is nowhere for us to go. Nothing to see that he hasn’t yet seen, for the world is old to him already, and the way he tells it, I forget I ain’t seen it yet. There’s no one for us to meet in the outside world. To my young friends, he is an abomination. Anathema. A sacrilege to our youth, our shared flicker in time. I am the Vestal virgin who, in a stolen second of unrestrained ecstasy, saw the face of Jesus in her lover’s orgasm. I’m Martin Luther, rewriting the laws of our youth, and pinning them to my nipple. I am. I am. I… am.
To those old, already guessing the cool hand of death run up the inside of their thigh, I’m still a child. Foolish and impetuous. Out for a laugh, to shock my peers with my profane love. His friends, old also, made even older in their jealousy and icy, bitter sexes, have cast him out, and to my infinitely aged lover, their rejection stands supreme — the blue diamond in his defiant, balding lion tiara.
A masquerade and a facade, yet the dance carries on, and one day, my lover leaves me, for he is out of breath, and tired of my games. Grown suddenly cold in his absence, I trail the empty corridors of our shared, barren love nest. Stockings hang off the bedroom door. His underwear in an indolent heap. We share the shaving cream, but keep separate toothbrushes. Stretch, and lean in, Apply my night cream in the mirror, and realize I can’t find myself.
An infinitely old, wiry face. Skin hanging slack off stoop-rounded shoulders. And she stares back at me, and waits, like I, for our aged lover to come back to us.
It is only in his absence that he and I truly become one. It is only in his desolation that I pick up the stench of the funeral pyre, also. Suddenly frightened, I await his return, so that I might yet have someone to crouch behind, come bell toll.
And now, for something completely different :) Another facet of myself. Or perhaps just the old one in a new light. Thanks for reading.
I recently put out my first book (the first in a fantasy trilogy), and am working on the next two. So there’s a chance I’ll be talking about that, sometimes.
So if you’re someone who enjoys that kinda writing, well, why not subscribe? It’s free. And I’m desperate. So there, honesty.
