Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

And you want… there really was almost no way to say it. You want your father. You want to settle in with your Dad and you want…

Though he's a Catholic he was born semi-circumcised so the head of his dick always shows and it's always clean and before I sleep and when I wake up I think of the head of that cock in my mouth. It's all I want.

You have to stop it, Michael. This is crazy. Go on home at the end of summer and get over it. That's all he wants. Go home and let the whole idea of living with him in America dissolve.

What are you going to tell him? Are you going to say, Dad I'm a faggot and I'm in love with you and I want to live with you like a pair of hairdressers? No, you're not going say that, so what the fuck are you going to say?

You're going to say, Dad, I've changed my mind, I don't want to live with a dumb Marine. I'll say I've decided that English universities are better.

He'll pretend that's OK, OK with him, and he'll cough to clear his throat instead of crying, and he'll put on those mirror shades so I can't see his eyes, and when he drives he'll thump the steering wheel hard for no reason.

Real great, Michael. Superb. Either way, you're going to hurt him. Aw shit, what have you done?

It was a long time to stay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Michael was not strong. He slipped back into reverie. He imagined that Louis was not his father at all, and that they had gone backpacking in the wilds, washing in lakes, and holding each other at night. He imagined them making love, imagining trailing his face down his father's body. He masturbated, imagining making love to him, and mopped up with the tissues he now kept by the bed. He fooled himself with imaginings. He went to sleep and woke up, lulled and soothed, with the feeling that it would all be OK somehow.

Michael walked out to the kitchen later, in his Y-fronts with a morning hard-on.

'Man, you look like I feel,' said Dad, a remark open to interpretation. He reached for the coffee-pot. 'You're like me, you can't wake up without caffeine.'

Flawless, unchanging California sunshine came through the windows. It would be another beautiful day, with Oceanside ten degrees cooler than anywhere else.

Michael couldn't even remember why he had been so concerned.

His Dad went to work, and Michael lay on the bed and masturbated again, dreaming of him. The dream this time was more direct: they were still father and son, but no one knew anything. They lived together as partners, they slept in the same bed and Michael swung his bag of books into the car every morning and drove off to UC San Diego. It took people years to realize what was going on. They were shocked at first, Mom, Michael's uncles, but when they saw it was love, they got used to it. They grew to understand. It was the image of sleeping all night, his face cushioned on his father's breast, that made Michael come.

Then he got up and looked at the curriculum covered by the SAT test, and made a list of American textbooks and thought of joining summer school. And after that there would be nothing to do except loll on the beach all day dreaming of his father. And he would go to the camp, and see his father in the nude, and run with his father and dream with his father of the life they both wanted to build together.

Driven mad by the imperatives of love, Michael became sure his father wanted the same thing.

As they started the run, Dad slapped Michael's butt. He looked at Michael in the shower and said, 'Man, what do you call that thing? Is that a dick? It looks like it belongs on a horse, man!' His father walked on the pier with an arm on Michael's shoulder. He hugged him as they watched television on the sofa.

The liquid looks of love, the hugs, the sudden rufflings of his hair, the kisses sometimes even on the mouth, thrilled Michael, and warmed his heart, and made him dream, and convinced him that they were, in everything but consummation, lovers.

Michael did not imagine, even in his daydreams, that they would proceed immediately to sex. Sex would emerge almost as an afterthought, almost as a by-product of complete intimacy. They would share meals, share showers, share food, share beds, and at some quiet moment, foreheads touching, they would proceed to make love.

Michael dreamed of the moment that his father would finally say something. He imagined it in some detail. His father would begin quietly, shy. It would be no easy thing for a Marine to admit that he – and he would look down, smiling – that he loved Michael. He knew such a thing was a bit unusual but he had seen something in Michael's eyes, something that at first he wanted not to see.

Michael was romancing.

He began to be sure, from his father's eyes. He was sure from the totally comfortable way that he would sometimes break into terrible campfire songs that he loved him too. His father was too shy to say so. His father had always been so masculine; so conventional. It would be hard for anyone to accept, let alone a conservative man whose utterly traditional American values were underpinned with an equally unforgiving Catholicism.

The thought came: you have to help him, Michael. You can't leave him in doubt. It'll be easier for you, Michael: you're from the younger generation. And then it will be in the open. And then it will happen.

Michael began to rehearse how he would do it. He would sit and start a serious, adult conversation. Dad, he would say, let's be honest about this… what's happening. Let's just say it. Dad, you and I well… we are…

Every time, imagination faltered. Every time the words, the magically correct words, would not formulate themselves. The right words were like the Loch Ness monster, expected, believed in, but swimming in the depths.

Michael convinced himself that it was his duty to make the situation clear.

And all the while love grew stronger. Michael would deliberately make his bed with his father's old sheets. Night after night, he would breathe him in. Michael would take his father's underwear, his swimsuits, anything personal and touched by him. He would take the swimsuit to bed with him and press it up against his face. Or he would wear his father's underpants, to feel his genitals cradled where his father's had been cradled. He would wear them secretly all through the day, as he drove to UCSD library to see what a university science course really expected you to know. It was as if he could feel himself cupped by his father, held.

By the end of those two months, everything about his father, from his name to his eyes, to his hands and feet, to the spreckles of his urine on the toilet seat, to his dirty knives and forks, to his hairs in the hair brush, to old photographs of him when he was Michael's age, to his letterman's jacket, to his tight jeans, to his loose shorts, to his white running socks, to the warmth he left behind him on the sofa, to his footprints in the sand and the imprint of sand on the bum of his wet swimming shorts, to the sand that fell from his feet when he dried them on the landing of the condo – everything about him made Michael feel loose and shivery, could moisten the tip of his penis.

It became, simply, an overwhelming, instinctual imperative. Michael needed his father to penetrate him, to leave his seed.

Every time his father laughed, every time he lightly touched Michael, every time he wrestled with him out of sheer high spirits and physical boisterousness, intertwining arms and necks and legs, Michael became more convinced.

His father wanted it too.

Why couldn't either of them say anything?

You're old, Dad; you come from a religious background. You're a big bad Marine, Dad. All of that makes it hard for you. I'll make it easy.

The words fail because they just say it, and that makes it sound weird and strange and it's not. It's just love. So why use words?