I was sitting in a rental car outside a large Queen Anne house. The rental was something small and economical, I hadn't really had the inspiration to look for something I'd enjoy driving, so I picked one of the unfamiliar models with a nasally whine to it.
The house was very familiar though. Very little had changed about it since the first time I'd seen it, some thirty years ago. Fresher paint, new roof, landscaping had been updated. The most recent time I'd been here was over 15 years prior.
I remembered the first time, getting out of the van that had dropped me and my belongings here. Seeing the imposing structure, it's pointed turret taller than any house I'd seen growing up. I'd stay here for the next two years through the first half of my undergraduate degree. My room was on the second floor at the northeast corner. It had a dainty yet functional balcony where you could take in the Virginian seasons as they changed in the nearby park.
In the room was a desk, a highboy dresser, and an uncomfortable twin bed. An old landscape painting on the wall, faded from years of being directly across from the large window.
I hadn't spent much time in the bed though. It was only a week after I'd moved in that I first saw Dale, the owner of the house and my landlord, burying his healthy cock deep into the rectum of one of the neighbor men.
I confronted him less than a week later, not in any accusing manner, but rather in curiosity. I'd felt my own burgeoning sexuality not taking any particular pathways and just the vision of what they'd been doing was burnt in my brain.
At first, he was reticent. He had a few issues with the idea of doing anything with one of his tenants, much less a person over half his age. I said that it could remain perfectly clinical, I was just curious, and would he rather I bumbled through life without guidance?
It hadn't remained clinical. There had been a great deal of study, make no mistake about it, but we'd gone from landlord/tenant to teacher/student to friends and finally to lovers. There was little two men could be involved in that I hadn't learned from Dale. I learned how to please a man, how to please men, and how to please numerous men while enjoying myself all because of Dale's tutelage.
But that had been 1990. It was 2020 now.
Dale had been 45 when we'd started our evolution of relationship. When my undergraduate led to a graduate program not offered at that college, I understood but was disappointed that I wouldn't have Dale with me any longer. I left but came back a few months later to a ravenous week of debauchery that they probably still warn about.
The next trip was six months. Then a year, then three. By that time, Dale had found himself a partner, and while we still went through a list of sordid acts, sometimes with Gordon and sometimes without, I didn't go back again for years.
I'd come up for his 65th birthday. It'd been a chaste weekend, men growing older and thinking of bygone days. I'd slept in the old twin bed, new mattress but still not where I'd remembered most of my nights.
Now here was Dale's 75th birthday, but there wouldn't be much in the way of celebration. A few weeks prior, he'd been diagnosed with a particularly malicious lung cancer.
...I remember a chilly February night. A long string of semen from my own six and a half inches stretched from my left nipple down to my groin. Part of another, larger load was cooling the right of my stomach with the rest on my balls, perineum and inside my rectum.
Dale walked naked to the window seat, his softening eight inches gleaming with slickness in the cool moonlight. He cracked the window and lit one of the Marlboros he kept there. "You know, those things are gonna kill you." I said.
"Something's got to." He'd answered...
And now it came to pass.
I cut the Hyundai off and walked to the side door. The door had been recently replaced, I noticed as I knocked several times.
The man who opened the door was probably late 20's, somewhat shorter and well built with a shaggy mop of light brown hair that reached down to the glasses over his brown eyes. "Oh, hey." He started, his voice comfortable with unfamiliarity, "You're Joe, right?" I answered in the affirmative, "Well, come on in, it's cold out there!"
He introduced himself as Jeff, "We need to be a little quiet, Dale's sleeping at the moment". He explained he was the nurse taking care of Dale nowadays. "He needs a nurse already?" I'd asked as we sat down around the kitchen table.
Jeff put his cup of coffee down and said, "He let it go too long. By the time he came in, he was already losing a lot of himself to it. He could barely get back from the hospital on his own. Decided to call the company I work for not long after." He stretched back in his chair. "My job is pretty much, 'make him comfortable'."
"Has he been on his own this whole time?" I asked, referring to Gordon's death some 6 years previous. Heart attack on a walk through the woods.
Jeff nodded. "He stopped taking tenants probably fifteen years ago. I guess it just got to be too hectic to deal with. Said he'd started to notice some health problems a couple years back, but would have rather not known than been told something bad." That sounded like Dale, dodging the bullet...or at least the noise of the shot as it was on its way.
We chatted a bit longer. He told me about his life, hometown boy who found something he enjoyed doing, but made no money so he became a nurse. I told him about mine, living outside Atlanta, married, two kids, three dogs. He seemed a bit surprised when I mentioned the wife, "Dale told me when you were younger, you were...kinda...together."
I chuckled in a warm manner, bringing my memory back, "Dale and I were. He was the one who taught me to never let my mind settle into a groove, so I never have. I dated a dozen men and a dozen women after I left here, and my wife is too adventurous to ever let me settle on anything."
"Oh really?" he said, an eyebrow going up. Heh, would THAT be a story to tell Melanie when I got back...
A few moments after that exchange, another young man came through the side door and into the kitchen. He was my height, about 5'9", with closely cut sandy blonde hair, somewhat heavyset. He wore scrubs that were much the same as Jeff, who introduced the newcomer, "Oh, hey, Joe this is Paul." He shook my hand, "Paul is supposed to be taking over my shift, so I'm technically off work now...but since it's Dale's birthday I opted to stick around."
"Good thing too!" a familiar, yet somewhat unfamiliar voice came from the dark hallway between the kitchen and the dining room, "God knows I could have slipped on a drop of water and died a horrible death."
Dale was always slender but his younger wiry, marathon runner self had been replaced by a stick figure. He looked about ready to break in five different places. His hair had lost what little brown it had 10 years previous and was completely white. His blue eyes were as bright as ever, "Hey Josey!" He exclaimed seeing me, "You'll never guess, I finally quit smoking!"
The four of us sat around the table, the younger two listening to the ramblings of the older. At some point, Dale had brought up a particularly embarrassing sexual moment, and after glancing to make sure nobody was offended, I guffawed back to him, "Look, you were the one who was drunk, it's not my problem your pullout game was weak that night."
"I just remember thinking, 'Am I pissing?' and I half pull-out, seeing this gush of pee come out all over my pants." Dale laughed, "And I'm going through a phase where I don't wear underwear..."
"Did you ever wear underwear?" I interjected
