Father Figure Read online

  “Wait,” I told him, pulling him back just before his mouth wrapped around me. “This time, I want you to jerk yourself off while you suck.”

  He frowned. He didn’t like to masturbate nor be masturbated by me. It was shame — the kind that became worse and ate away at him inside when he climaxed. I always made sure that he did.

  “Just pull out your cock,” I told him, running my fingers through his still-damp hair. “I won’t make you take off your pants.”

  It was a simple bargain, but he knew what it meant. It would have been easy to take everything away from him again. It didn’t take very much to remind him that he didn’t have any choice. When I told him to do something, it wasn’t a request.

  He complied, his movements slow. His face flushed as he pulled out his soft cock.

  “You need to get over your shyness,” I told him. “You can stop only after you cum, understand? Even if I’ve already cum in your mouth, you keep going until you shoot.”

  In that instant, I knew he was thinking of several things at once. One would be that he hated when I came in his mouth. I made him swallow and didn’t allow him to rinse his mouth out. The other would be that he was trying to decide how to make himself aroused and cum quickly, so he wouldn’t have to have me finish first.

  “Think of whomever you want,” I told him as I followed the shape of his mouth with the swollen tip of my cock. “I won’t be angry.”

  He wrapped his fist around his limp cock and pumped it. I watched him, allowing him a head start. He already appeared frustrated, unable to wring anything out of his flaccid shaft. The pink on his cheeks reddened as he closed his eyes to bring the needed images into his mind. Although I had promised him that I would not be angry, I was still irritated that he was thinking of someone else.

  I shoved my cock into his mouth so deep that his lips were pressed against the zipper. He froze, his eyes snapping open as if he were surprised. His throat twitched. He’d learned to control his gag reflexes, but they still came when he hadn’t prepared himself, and he hadn’t. His mouth had become very wet, his saliva running as his throat contracted, tickling the tip of my cock. It made me smile.

  “Concentrate,” I said, sliding out a little so he could breathe. The saliva that he couldn’t swallow dripped a trail from both corners of his mouth and onto his shirt. He couldn’t look better. I wanted to cum then.

  His hand was shaking when he started to work his own cock again. His movements were mechanical, pained. He couldn’t find any kind of rhythm until I stopped shoving my cock as far down his throat as I could and allowed him to suck at his own pace. His head moved back and forth, matching the cadence of his right hand pumping his own cock.

  I gave him encouragement in a voice made coarse by my arousal. His eyes were half-lidded. He appeared not to be aware of me after a while, as his pace started to pick up and I could hear his breathing becoming quick and shallow. His instinct to survive, even to bear what he construed as humiliation, was strong. His pride and ego bent just enough. It made him attractive; I was proud that he and I shared a bloodline.

  His breath hitched, as if he were trying hard not to lose focus on what was in his mind. I liked watching him when he was that intense, and I always pretended he was thinking about me.

  Easily excited when I thought about him in that way, I hadn’t realized that I was shoving into his mouth harder and deeper than I should. It was after I had come when I felt the sensation of his fingers digging into my thigh, trying to pull himself away. I separated from him and lifted his face. The teeth on the zipper had scrapped his lips raw. They were red, bruised. Tears were trickling from the corners of his eyes. Now that he could breathe, he panted hard — pulling air into his lungs as deeply as he could. He coughed, bringing up the viscous fluid that I had left in his throat.

  I ran my thumb over his hurt mouth and mumbled my apologies. A glance at his lap told me he had lost whatever erection he had worked up.

  “You can zip up,” I told him and gave him a kiss on top of his head. I got up and tucked myself in. I went into the kitchen and poured him a glass of water. After he drank it, I latched the chain to his collar and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

  “I’ll be away for a few hours,” I told him. “Be good and wait for me.”

  He looked puzzled, but he didn’t speak. I didn’t tell him anything further. After I pulled at the small length of chain again to make sure it had locked, I left.

  I took three days of trash with me. I needed to head to a nearby town thirty miles away to buy food and restock the first-aid kit. I’d probably need to buy a splint for his index finger since the cut kept bursting open. On the way, I did my work call-in and checked my messages.

  “Anything interesting happen?” I asked my partner.

  “Nothing special,” he said. “But, hey...someone was reported missing the day after you left. Forgot his name, but it’s kind of unusual. Anyway, he lived really close to you. You probably saw him here and there.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling. “That’s it? He’s just missing?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “George is handling the case. He just mentioned it in the smoke pit a couple of days ago because his address is the same as yours, different building number.”

  “Could you find out more for me?” I asked him. “Name? Who reported him missing? What’s the status of it now?”

  “Why do you need to know? You’re on vacation.” “He’s a neighbor. I might know something.”

  “Ah...sure, I guess,” he said. “Okay if George calls you then?”

  “Sure. Tell him to call me within the next four hours. Then I am shutting my phone off again for three days.”

  “Okay, okay.... You lucky bastard to be in Florida. It’s colder than Santa’s nutsack here.”

  “Yes,” I said, panning my vision over the snow covered fields on both sides of the near empty highway. “It’s very beautiful here.”

  My errands ran four hours long and I was already half way back to the cabin when George called. He apologized and blamed our supervisor for the delayed call.

  “Uriel Blackstone,” he said. I could hear him flipping through papers on his desk. “I think he lived at the unit kitty-corner from you.”

  “I know him.”

  “Very well?”

  “Casually. The complex’s mailroom is shared. I’ve seen him there. Who reported him missing?” “His son,” George said. “Said they always talk every other day. Never missed a single call. Called us from Germany and asked us to check. The super let us in, but everything’s in order in there. No sign of stress. His car’s in the parking lot but he isn’t home.”

  “No one saw him go into his apartment?”

  “According to his colleagues, by the time he left the restaurant it was already dark. Not many people pay attention when they can’t see shit,” he said. “It just looked like he came home, left his briefcase in the spare room where his son says he always keeps it. Then with his coat and gloves and his wallet and keys he left the place again, just not in his car.”

  “So he went somewhere on foot. There’s a convenience store two blocks away, maybe he went to get something, but didn’t want to drive such a short distance.”

  “Thought of that,” George said. “No one saw him. The guy just vanished. His cards haven’t been used since and no sightings. Gone. The son’s been given an emergency leave. He’s supposed to be back stateside tomorrow.”

  “Sorry I’m not of any help,” I told him.

  “Such a strange coincidence that the day you leave the area, a guy goes missing from your complex,” he said. “You didn’t take him did you?”

  For a moment I was confused, until he burst out laughing.

  “Good looking guy,” George said. “Saw his pictures in the apartment. Probably got picked up by a really hot chick and just went “fuck this” to his present life. Who knows.”

  “Yeah, who knows,” I said. “I’m going to turn my phone off
for a few more days. Maybe I’ll call you back to get an update.”

  “Sure,” he said and hung up.

  For the rest of the forty-five minute drive home, I drove half the speed limit because a snow flurry had started again, whiting out everything, lessening the visibility. I thought about what George had said and pieced together the direction the investigation would go in my mind.

  They had no leads. But then, that meant nothing. Witnesses could come at any time. The only detail that stuck out, the one George had joked about, was the unusual timing of my departure from the same place where a man I casually knew went missing. They had no reason to suspect me of taking him, but then human bloodhounds like George who had worked Missing Persons for eighteen years were able to sniff out connections that didn’t make sense until he connected them.

  Suddenly, I found myself curious about the son who had left Germany to seek any information about his father. Perhaps I would find 8X10 pictures of Father taped around the apartment complex, asking someone to call the police if they remembered anything. If there’s money promised, trace memories can be shaken loose.

  I was still thinking of those details, even as I drove off the road onto the beaten path. Fresh snow had covered any trace that it was there. The day was shorter and the sun was already setting, the white of the snow catching the dying day’s light.

  I had one plastic sack of food in my left hand while I used the tip of the car key to punch in the keypad with my right. I was still preoccupied as I pushed the door open.

  There was a thunderous impact and my vision went white. The pain that radiated from the side of my head, was what made my eyes snap open.

  The contents from the bag of groceries were scattered just outside the doorway, but somehow I had fallen inward onto the hardwood of the cabin. Father held a piece of what looked like round timber. A glance behind him where one of the chairs had been smashed and broken told me that he had wrenched off one of its legs. He was frantically glancing around the floor, getting down on his knees and searching for something. It didn’t occur to me what he was looking for until he saw them the same time I did — my keys, which had slipped out of my hand and slid beneath the bed when he hit me.

  My entire head hurt; it felt split open and blood was trickling down from my right temple across the bridge of my nose to pool on the floor. I lay still, pretending that I had been struck unconscious.

  He was barefoot, as he approached me tentatively. When I didn’t move, he stepped over me hurriedly. I seized him then, grabbing him by one ankle in mid-flight. He kicked my hold off, barely maintaining his balance and ran toward where the SUV was parked.

  He was only able to open the car door before I grabbed him by the neck. I realized then that he had somehow slipped out of his collar. I pulled him away from the door and slammed the side of his face against the car hood. He still fought, kicking and trying to free himself. I was in pain; I was furious; and I wanted to hurt him in the worst way.

  “You want to do this?” I said and slammed his head into the hood twice — no doubt denting the rental. “I was being kind to you and you do this to me?”

  I pulled him along behind me. He resisted, just like that first night, digging his heels into the snow, but he had no leverage and I was stronger than he was.

  “Please! Just let me go!!”

  His voice echoed, but no one would hear it. The snow was coming down harder, collecting in our hair. I pulled him onto the porch, where he knelt down, refusing to go any farther.

  “Please! It can’t be this way! We can be family, but it can’t be this way!” There was pain in his voice as he shouted those words. The corners of his eyes were wet, but he wasn’t crying yet. His body was shivering, the cold cutting through his clothing, but he didn’t want to go back into the cabin.

  “I’ve told you,” I said, jerking him up to his feet by a hard yank of his arm that nearly dislocated it. “There is no other way.”

  With that said, I shoved him through the open door. I followed, slamming the door shut behind me. He tumbled onto the floor and although the cabin warmed us instantly, he was still shaking from the cold, probably from fright, too.

  “Stay there,” I told him. It was hard not to shout at him. I had been angry with him on and off for minor things over the course of the days, but this was the first time I was so enraged that I wanted to hurt him badly, hit him until I saw blood and then fuck him until I churned him inside out.

  I distanced myself, stepping over the broken, splintered chair and to the small sink in the kitchen corner. He knelt, his body hunched over, hiding his face against his knees, rocking slightly back and forth. He might have been sobbing; I didn’t know. I washed the blood from my face and studied the injury. There was a gash from my hairline to my temple. It was still bleeding, even after I washed the area clean. It took me a while to dress it, winding a strip of gauze around my head to keep the thick cotton pad against the cut to staunch the bleeding.

  By the time I finished and had shed my blood-splattered shirt, nearly half an hour had gone by. I wasn’t as consumed by the madness of earlier, but I was still livid. The pool of blood by the door and the collar that had been left hanging against the wall served as good reminders. I kicked the broken chair to the side and went to him.

  “Wish you were dead?” I asked him. I crouched down and yanked his head up by a fistful of his hair. His face was wet. He had been crying, but it wasn’t from fright — it was despair, complete and utter despair.

  “This life as you know it isn’t worth living anymore?” I continued and pulled him up to his feet. I led him to the bed a few feet away and threw him on it. “It’s better to feel nothing than to love and be loved by someone like me?”

  He said nothing, and lay where he had landed. I looked over to the collar and saw a piece of metal wiring jammed into the keyhole.

  “Won’t your other son be sad?”

  A flicker of life came back into his dull eyes at the mention of his son. I ripped his shirt open, startling him.

  “Your wonderful son has already filed a Missing Person’s Report on you,” I said, and pulled his shirt off. His skin was cold. The shirt he’d worn was damp from melted snow. The look on his face said he was convinced that I had spoken of his son to pull him out of his misery. “He filed it from Germany after you missed two of your scheduled calls.”

  His eyes widened. “Let me go to him,” he said, sitting up. “Or at least tell him I am....” He stopped, uncertain. His eyes became glassy, welling with tears.

  “You only change your expression for him,” I said, hooking a finger over his belt line. “And you only cry for him.”

  He gritted his teeth, gnashing them to restrain himself from answering. He didn’t fight me as I undid his pants and pulled them off. They were also damp and his legs were cold, but his feet that had been ankle deep in the snow had turned into shades of red and pink.

  “What can I do...?” he asked.

  “If you could have the same feelings you have for that man for me...and you could genuinely shed those tears because you love me and miss me...then I will free you.”

  He stared at me, his softened look for his other son never changing, even in the face of his own mortality. I slapped him, my hand leaving a patch of red on his cheek. A flood of emotion — all of it negative and full of hate — came tumbling out in one gush when he said nothing.

  “I guess I wouldn’t mind sharing a father with a half-brother,” I said, undoing my pants quickly and angrily, kicking them off after I pushed them down. He knew what was about to happen and turned his face away. His breath caught, barely containing his sobs as I crawled between his legs and pulled his lower body up onto my lap by his hips.

  “Maybe we will make a nice movie for him, to show him how well you’re doing,” I said. I moistened two fingers in my mouth and pushed them into him. His body cringed and rose from the mattress slightly to stave off some of the pain that must have gone through him, but he didn’t fight
me or ask me to stop as he usually did, he knew this was part of his punishment.

  “To see how you and the other son are doing together, how we’re closing the gap dividing all those missing years.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut on welling tears. When he opened them again, he had shed the vulnerability that had looked out of them.

  “If you believe I have wronged you and that is why you have to do this to me, then do it,” he said. His voice had a tremor in it as he spoke. He was trying to be brave in spite of overwhelming pain and fear swallowing him whole in that moment. Don’t involve someone who isn’t connected to you in any way.”

  “Oh?” I said, pulling my fingers out and shoving them back in hard, up to my knuckles. It made him wince; it made me smile. “You wouldn’t want us half-brothers to have a loving relationship, too? Maybe all this time he’s been thinking about you in this way like I have, but just hasn’t had the balls to see it through.”