7. First Time
The next morning, I take Oliver’s bike down to the garage. The wheel is misaligned, and the tire’s flat, but both should be an easy fix. While my body gets busy working, it doesn’t take long for my mind to wander back to yesterday.
How long were we together? An hour at the most? In that short amount of time, I managed to make so many mistakes.
I shouldn’t have said the word “Daddy.” Anything but that word.
It’s just that cleaning his wounds and patching him up transported me back to the times I took care of him as a father, and the word just slipped out.
I didn’t mean anything by it, other than to reassure him. That I’d make things right.
But when I saw his face, I knew I’d fucked up. He knows. He knows about the other context in which that word can be used. I created a tension in the air that wasn’t there before. Maybe that was why his body reacted the way it did.
First, when I had his foot in my lap. Then, when I wrapped my arms around him, and he pressed his nose to my chest. Something else pressed into me, too, and I wasn’t going to say anything about it.
I shouldn’t have said anything about it.
God, why did I mention it in the car and embarrass him like that?
I said it’s normal at his age, but the way I remember, at the age of nineteen I’d largely gotten over the untimely boners. So why, then? Why did he get hard? I can’t allow myself to think too deeply about it, because the conclusion both disturbs and intrigues me, and that in itself is disturbing.
I’m his father figure, or at least I was.
It’s not appropriate for his body to react that way, and it’s certainly not appropriate for him to have those thoughts about me in the first place.
We were sharing a sweet moment of reunion and relief—maybe that was why his body reacted?
The more I try to make up excuses for it, the more the obvious reason seems more likely.
I don’t know what to think about it, but I certainly shouldn’t be so intrigued.
He’s your former stepson, for fuck’s sake. Not a potential partner. He might’ve been when he was a stranger on an app, but not now. No way in hell. Never. Not Oliver. Anyone but him.
This new, forbidden attraction only stands in the way of how I’d like our relationship to develop. I want to get to know him again, see him smile, and be there for him through thick and thin. That’s what I want. Be a father figure to him again, if he’d let me. Nothing else.
I spin the wheel of his bike, and the spokes make a satisfying ticking sound.
Good. Next, I get to work patching the hole in the tire, kneeling on a mat on the hard concrete floor of the garage.
It strikes me that he wasn’t wearing a helmet yesterday, and I make a mental note to go to the store before I text him and ask him to come over.
Mistakes aside, I’m really looking forward to seeing him again.
Just thinking about it makes me smile as I press the repaired tire back onto the wheel.
I lubricate the chain and make sure the brakes work as they should.
At some point, I get a little carried away, and by the time I’m done, the bike is spotless and looks brand new.
I stand back and admire my handiwork, and all I can think about is seeing Oliver’s smile.
“Did you fix it?” The moment I open the door, Oliver steps inside, buzzing with excitement.
“Come and see.” I lead him into the apartment, and when he sees his bike all fixed up and polished, his jaw drops in a gasp.
“Holy shit.”
I shrug, smiling at his reaction. “It needed some maintenance. I oiled the chain, made it run really smooth. And here.” I offer him the helmet I bought. “I want you to wear this from now on.”
His smile falls, and he looks like he’ll protest, but then he rolls his eyes and takes it. “Fine.”
By the look in his eyes, I know what he’s about to do before it happens. With the helmet in his hand, he all but runs toward me and wraps his arms around my middle.
“Thank you,” he whispers into my chest. And then, the faintest breath that I almost miss. “Daddy.”
My heart swells with pride and something else—something I can’t acknowledge. I didn’t expect him to call me that again so soon, unless… the word holds a different meaning than it used to.
It’s not the word itself but rather the way he says it: how breathy his voice is, how he burrows his nose into my chest and holds me tight. The memory of yesterday invades my mind, and I clear my throat and push him gently away.
“I was thinking I’d take you to lunch. There’s a nice place around the corner.”
He shrugs and bounces up and down a little. “Okay.”
“How’s your foot?”
“It’s fine.”
“Let me take a look at it.” I sit on the kitchen chair and tap my thigh, and Oliver rolls his eyes but sits down and lets me lift his leg into my lap.
Rolling the hem of his jeans up, I slide his white sock off to inspect his foot.
The swelling has gone down considerably, and there’s no more trace of blue on his skin.
“Told you,” Oliver says.
“How’s this?” I press my thumb and index finger against the sides of his ankle like last time and watch his reaction. He doesn’t scrunch his face up in pain, but a gasp falls from his lips.
“Still a bit sore?” I ask, and he nods.
I stroke his skin as if I’m trying to heal him by touch alone. When I shift my fingers to the sole of his foot, my brain supplies a distant memory, and my touch turns ticklish instead.
He yelps and yanks his foot away. “Stop,” he giggles helplessly, suddenly breathless.
He’s still as ticklish as when he was a kid. The thought makes me smile. At least one thing between us hasn’t changed.
For lunch, I take him to Murphy’s Coffee, a small café down the street. When Oliver realizes where we’re going, his eyes widen a bit.
I hold the door open for him. “Have you been here before?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “With Lane.”
I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t, so we order our food at the counter and take a seat near the window. Oliver taps his fingers on the table, gaze bouncing from me to his food to the people passing by on the street outside.
I eat my chicken teriyaki sandwich quietly, watching him.
In some ways, he’s like a stranger; he’s not the boy I remember.
Some of his mannerisms still remain, though, like the way his gaze bounces around when he’s nervous, and the way he leans his cheek on his hand and hunches over the table when he eats.
“Is everything okay?” I ask, wiping my mouth with a napkin and taking a sip of soda water.
Oliver shrugs and flashes a smile that looks more like a grimace. “This feels weird.”
“I know,” I say, though I don’t know exactly what he means.
He’s quiet for a while, tapping his foot harder. “Why did you want to meet me?”
I raise a brow. “To get to know you again.”
“No, I mean… before.” He sends me a pointed look, and my stomach drops when I realize what he’s getting at. “You saw my pics. You must have… liked them.”
“Oliver.” My voice comes out stern, and my insides simmer with discomfort. “We’ve been over this. I didn’t know it was you.”
“Yeah, but you knew he was… young. This person you were supposed to meet.”
“I thought he was twenty-three. Not nineteen.”
“There’s not that much of a difference.”
I don’t agree with his mumbled statement, but I don’t know what to say, so I take another bite of my sandwich. It tastes like nothing, my racing heart and the uncomfortable nature of this conversation ruining any enjoyment.
“How about you? You knew I was older. A lot older than you.” It sounds like an accusation, and I don’t mean it to be. For reasons I don’t want to admit, I just want him to confirm what I already know.
He shrugs, hacking his sausage roll to pieces with his fork. “Yeah, I like older guys. So what?”
The thought that he was about to meet a forty-three-year-old man—not me but a stranger—makes my stomach churn. I’ve tried not to think about the implications, but now they’re impossible to ignore.
“How often?”
“How often what?” His lips quirk into a little smirk.
I know he’s just trying to provoke me, and I hate that it’s working. “How often do you meet men for sex?”
He takes a bite of his sausage roll, chewing as he contemplates the question. “That was the first time,” he admits finally, and when he meets my eyes, he looks vulnerable, as if he’s afraid of my reaction.
“The first time… ever?”
He nods. “It would’ve been.”
In some ways, I’m relieved, but in other ways, that makes it worse.
His first time… So he was about to give his virginity to a stranger?
And he went to this stranger’s apartment without even communicating his inexperience.
If he’d met the wrong guy, God knows what could’ve happened. He could’ve been hurt.
“You need to be more careful.” My voice comes out harsher than I meant it to.
Oliver shrugs. “Yeah, but I was sick of waiting. I wanted to get fucked.”
I make a choked sound. When I look at Oliver again, he’s smirking with mischief, like he knows exactly what he’s doing. The little brat.
This conversation wasn’t supposed to be about sex at all. I was supposed to ask him about his life, not his sex life, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to find out he’s a virgin. Christ, how did this even happen? I should’ve shut it down from the beginning, but that wouldn’t have been fair either.
Gathering myself, I try to speak slowly, without judgment. “I understand you want to explore that part of your life, but your first time shouldn’t be with a stranger.”
“No?” He raises his eyebrows, like he’s waiting for something. He’s not protesting like I thought he would, and it makes alarm bells ring in my mind.
“No.” I decide this is the right time to change the subject. It’s now or never, because Oliver seems determined to catch me off guard. “How’s your mother?”
He gives an annoyed scowl, but it’s better to annoy him than to let him imply whatever he was implying earlier.
“She’s fine. Just spent the entire summer on a trip to Europe with her newest fling, Fabio.” He does the biggest eye roll, and it makes me smile. There’s my Oliver. “Let’s see how long it lasts.”
“So she’s had many partners?”
Oliver shrugs, staring down at his plate. “I’ve lost count. My boss is one of them—Guillaume, this annoying French guy. I work at his restaurant.”
“What happened with college?” We’ve already been over this part, but I want him to talk about it when he’s not so upset.
“Well… I got into MIT.”
“What?” This time, I find it hard to hide my disappointment. I want him to do what feels right for him—of course I do. I have no right to dictate his choices, but if he got into one of the most prestigious colleges in the country and still didn’t go, it seems like a wasted opportunity.
His jaw ticks. “I told you; it just didn’t feel right. And then I talked to Mason, and I…” He cuts himself off, gaze falling, and he looks so small and vulnerable that I can’t help but change the subject.
“How is he? Mason.”
Oliver’s mouth tenses into a straight line. “He’s great. Better now that he’s out of prison.”
My stomach drops. “Prison?”
“Yeah, and now that he’s together with my best friend.”
I hold up a hand. “Back up. Mason went to prison? Why?”
“Yeah, for beating up his boss. Aggravated assault.”
The words ring in my ears.
“But it’s fine now, I guess,” Oliver continues. “He’s out and living a normal life with Lane. He’s got a job and everything.”
“Who’s Lane?”
“My friend.”
I’m silent for a minute, massaging the bridge of my nose.
“Is something wrong?” he asks.
“First I hear you dropped out of MIT, and now I hear your brother went to prison for aggravated assault.”
Oliver shifts his gaze, fiddling with the sleeve of his shirt. “Are you mad?”
“No.” I shake my head with a familiar pain in my chest. “But I should’ve been there for you.”
“Yeah,” Oliver mumbles. “You should have.”
On an impulse to comfort him not only with words but also with touch, I slide my hand over the table and envelop his hand with my own.
He flinches, and at first, I fear he’s uncomfortable with the touch, but then his shoulders relax, and his jaw slackens a bit.
I stroke the callused pad of my thumb over his smooth knuckles, and he visibly shivers.
His eyes flash to our hands, then bounce back to my face, and he looks almost scared.
It’s the same expression he had after our hug yesterday. That deer in the headlights, mortified one. Is it happening now, too? Is his body reacting to my touch?
Clearing my throat, I pull my hand back. “Are you ready to leave?”
“Um, yeah. Just a second.” He squirms in his seat, cheeks bright red.
Knowing that this is how his body reacts to my touch now is more knowledge than I wanted to have. I don’t know what to do about it, and I don’t think he knows either.
After he’s ready, we go back to my apartment.
“Can I see you on Monday?” he asks as I wheel his bike toward the door.
“I have work on Monday.”
“Oh, sorry,” he mumbles, and I can tell he’s trying to hide his disappointment. “What do you do?”
“I’m back at the hardware store, but I’m a manager now.”
“Oh.” His eyes widen. “That’s nice.”
I give a shrug. “The paycheck is nice, but it’s a lot of responsibility.”
“I bet you’re good at your job.” His cheeks flush as soon as the words are out of his mouth.
“I’d like to think I am,” I say earnestly. “In any case, you can come for dinner if you’d like. I could use some help.”
His eyes grow comically wide. Cooking is one of the things we used to do all the time when he was small. To get him off his computer screen on the weekends, I used to say I needed help with dinner, and he’d shoot out of his room like a rocket and come join me in the kitchen.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah, I want to help.”
“Good.” I smile. “Are you sure you’re okay to ride your bike home? I could drive you.”
He shakes his head. “No, I’m okay. You’ve done so much already.”
I want to tell him I’d do anything for him, but even though it’s true, it would be too much. I spread my arms instead, and he jumps into my embrace with badly concealed enthusiasm.
“See you Monday,” he mumbles into my chest, and before our hug risks affecting his body in the wrong way, he pulls back, puts his helmet on, and disappears out the door.