I was raised in a small town in the vast northern woods of Upstate New York. As I enter middle-age, I understand why my very capable parents chose to settle there. But, like most teens with some ambition, I could not wait to get out. I made it to Boston for college. There, some internships led to work as a freelance technical writer. By the time I graduated, it made sense to move to New York City and continue freelancing, unwittingly in the vanguard of the gig economy.
Unlike many of my contemporaries, I have no complaints from a professional standpoint. I have prospered and, with reasonable economy, have been able to save for the future. My personal life has been another matter. With a writer's natural shyness, alone in the foreboding City, where when I was not working alone, I was never in one office for more than a few weeks at a time, my life was a recipe for loneliness. Aside from a couple of brief relationships lasting a few months, I had little success with women.
For companionship, I turned to erotic masseuses, who provided bodywork capped with manual release. At first, I was seeking gratification without risk of disease, and I theorized that law enforcement was more likely to focus its resources on full-service providers. The fact that bodywork was cheaper than full-service was an added plus, and the more time I spent hunched over a computer, the more I appreciated the therapeutic aspects of a decent massage. Above all, though, I came to feel that, perhaps for some of the same reasons that attracted me, the masseuses tended to be friendlier and less guarded than the providers I met in my sorties in search of more outre fare. I never turned into any kind of ladies man, but I became a lot more comfortable talking to women.
I met Julie one Saturday at one of my regular spots. I was in my late 30s at the time. Julie was a couple of years older, but you would never have known it from looking at her. She kept her dark brown hair long and wavy. Her pretty face was unlined. Even undressed, she had the gentle curves of a young woman, softened by what might have been called baby fat on a teenager.
We hit it off, and I became a regular. Soon our sessions were ending with us wrapped in each other's arms. One day, she told me that she wanted to take care of me and thought she might be falling in love with me. I told her that I could not stop thinking about her. We began to see each other away from the apartment out of which she worked. Julie's shifts as a masseuse supplemented, or vice versa, a decent income at a nine-to-five job as an accountant. As a result, she had a beautiful apartment in Brooklyn Heights that was much more convenient to the downtown Manhattan offices where I not infrequently worked than was my own place in central Queens. Before long, we were more or less living together at her apartment.
Joking references to how we would spend our retirement, or how we might spoil our grandchildren, began to crop up in our conversation. And I believe that Julie had begun, as I had, to envision spending our lives together. In my mind, there was just one shadow darkening that idyll.
When Julie was still in college, she had had a son, Eric, whom she had raised on her own. By the time Julie and I started getting serious, Eric was a sophomore in college. In the abstract, this presented no issue for me. Most of my friends had children, and I was unfazed to be dating a woman with a son. The fact that he was grown relieved virtually all the pressure I would have felt if I had to contemplate becoming a stepfather to an adolescent.
However, I knew how attached mothers, particularly single ones, could become to their sons. Julie was no exception. One could not go more than a foot or two in their apartment before coming across a picture of a beaming Eric at various ages, often accompanied by a radiant Julie, or a medal or trophy from one of his swim meets, or some other memento of his childhood. Thus, from the outset of my relationship with Julie, I knew that it was important to establish a good rapport with Eric.
Unfortunately, our initial meeting had not been encouraging. It was at Thanksgiving dinner at his grandparents' home in New Jersey. It was a large crowd and hardly the environment for a heart to heart. Still, as he mingled easily with his family, Eric seemed to make an effort to avoid me or showing any curiosity toward the man who was dating his mother. I told myself that I was probably making too much of it. But, as Julie prepared a couple of weeks later for him to come home for his winter break, I was feeling the pressure to make sure Eric and I were on good terms by the time he went back to school.
I offered and hoped to retreat to my own apartment on the day of his arrival so that he and Julie could catch up. I genuinely wanted to give them some space. But, I also knew that Julie would be over the moon when he got home and figured it would be easier to establish some kind of connection with Eric in a less frenetic atmosphere, after he had been home for a day or two. However, Julie was adamant that I stay and even started to get upset, when she concluded that I was embarrassed to share her bed with her son down the hall.
As anticipated, when Eric came through the door, Julie was smothering him with hugs and kisses and hanging on his every word. They tripped over each other trying to catch up with every detail about Eric's classes and the swim team that somehow had been omitted in their frequent phone calls and texts. At least Julie let me fix them dinner, which allowed me the sanctuary of the kitchen for much of the night. When I was with them, my attempts to join their conversation were mostly met with a quick look and polite nod. I went to bed wondering if I was going to be a third wheel for the next several weeks and, if so, how I might ease myself away. But, the next morning, matters took an unexpected turn.
Julie left for work, and as often was the case, I set up with my laptop at the dinner table. It was after 10:00 when Eric finally began to stir. I heard his bedroom door open, and I looked up. I had a direct line of sight to the apartment's only bathroom, situated between Julie's bedroom and Eric's, and thought we might exchange morning greetings. But, when Eric stepped into view, he did not look my way, and I was speechless.
Eric had come out of his bedroom stark naked. For all of my lack of success with women, I always considered myself an ardent heterosexual, just not a particularly proficient one. The only time I had ever felt the least flicker of attraction to another man was a passing moment catching sight of my friend - muscles rippling beneath his olive skin - in the shower after gym class in high school. I had to turn away to hide my arousal, which subsided quickly at my potential embarrassment.
But, there was no denying that Eric was an Adonis. I would not say that he had a perfect swimmer's build. He was thicker than that, more like a football player. He did not have the inflated musculature of a bodybuilder. Eric was just solid muscle built through repetitious work, more like a hardened farmer or ironworker. He was also perfectly smooth, no doubt having shaved for his pool work. The milk white skin only added to the impression of a classical statue sparked with life. The only thing that disrupted the metaphor was an impressive cock that an ancient sculptor might have been too modest to render.
That all must have been running through my mind when Eric stepped out of the bathroom and noticed me staring at him.
"Can I help you?" he asked.
"Um," I quipped, snapping out of my reverie. "Going to be putting on any clothes today?" I tried to say lightly.
"It's my house," he said flatly. Eric took a step toward his bedroom, stopped, and then started walking toward me.
I had turned back to my work and kept my head inclined toward the screen. But from the corner of my eye, I followed his approach. My body tensed as I lost sight of him. He was behind me and clamped his thick hands down on my shoulders.
"What are you working on?" he asked, leaning over me so that granite abdominals pressed against the back of my neck.
"It's, uh, a personnel manual. For an insurer, an insurance company. I do a fair amount of work for them."
"Sounds a little tedious. Demanding, I mean."
"It's a living," I offered with a weak smile and trying to shrug my shoulders.
"You seem very tense," Eric said.
"I'm okay," I said.
"I think I know just the thing for you," Eric announced. "Why don't you come with me?"
He started to walk toward his room. When I kept my seat, he stopped and twisted his torso around to look at me, showcasing the ridge of muscle along his back spreading in a thick layer to his laterals. He gestured at me to follow him. Something about the thick wrist and fingers compelled me to rise.
Eric's bedroom was small, but surprisingly tidy for a college student, I thought. Of course, Julie had been maintaining it as a shrine up until a few hours before. Eric opened the door to a closet that seemed to contain much of the clutter I would have expected. Digging through the sediment at the bottom of the closet, Eric brought out a three-legged stool which he placed by his bed.
