TORY STOOD at the sink, staring at his reflection, near shaking.
He wasn’t sure how he’d done it.
It had started easily enough. Yeah, maybe he was flirting a little. Or had meant to. But then—God—something happened. Something powerful.
Tory had no clue how he’d finished painting. Especially there at the very end.
God!
And he was hard. He couldn’t remember ever being so hard. Why, there had been times he’d gone home with someone and couldn’t perform. The flirting had been one thing, but when it wasn’t a game, when it was real and he was at someone’s house or apartment and the clothes were coming off, sometimes things didn’t… work.
Especially if it was someone his age.
“Is it a dad thing?” Cody asked him once. Once.
“Wh-what do you mean?” he replied.
“I mean… you lost your father so young. Is it like… you’re looking for a father?”
Ewww!
The thought made his stomach turn.
“No,” he said, voice going cold. He’d been teased about it before, but he realized Cody meant it. And quite suddenly he realized that most people who said it had meant it. He liked older men, so that equaled father issues? Really?
Cody wasn’t some kind of asshole, but dammit, Cody was his friend. A question like that meant people thought there was something wrong with you. It was like the ultimate idiotic things people asked gay men. Maybe if you had sex with the right woman? How can you not like boobs? Which of you is the man, and which of you is the woman? Did something bad happen to you as a kid? Are you a homosexual because you had a weak father and a strong mother?
Pure… stupid… bullshit!
In fact in his case, his father had been okay. Not father of the year. Way too religious—weirdly so in some ways. But okay. It wasn’t until he found out Tory was gay, shortly after Tory turned eighteen, that things suddenly changed. And it was that religion thing that did it.
Growing up he’d had no doubt he was gay, and he knew it would be trouble if his parents found out. Especially his father.
But it was never the boys, his peers, who he was drawn to. It wasn’t until he was well into high school that he saw that it was truly, only, always, older men. Somehow older meant more masculine to him. The same way that some of his gay friends thought big cigar-chomping men were masculine. Or cowboys or construction workers or policemen.
Men Tory thought of as strong and righteous and somehow holders of the secret of what it meant to be a real man. Men who could teach him those secrets. Out of bed as well as in. No. Especially out of bed.
But he waited. Waited until his eighteenth birthday exactly. And he snuck into a gay bar in Asheville, where he lived at the time, and snagged a man named Bruce—and hadn’t that struck him as hypermasculine?—who was fifty-five. They went back to his apartment, and Tory had been almost as hard as he was right now. A man without a supposedly perfect body. No six-pack. A bit of beer gut. Deep lines around his eyes. Gray at his temples. A man who had seen things. A man with worldly wisdom. Experiences. Who had good and bad things happen in his life and could truly say, “It gets better,” because he knew it did. A man who had experienced all that. And the experience to know what he was doing in bed.
That’s what Tory was attracted to.
He wanted to tell Cody to fuck off. But instead, he gritted his teeth and explained it all, and then he stormed off. He didn’t talk to Cody for weeks after that, but when he could finally talk to Cody again, they became close friends. Cody probably was Tory’s best friend.
Because Cody said he understood. Told Tory how he’d always been attracted to big heavy hairy men for a similar reason. And he said he’d seen things. Things that defied belief. Magical things, even. And Tory had almost believed him.
And now?
Now he had to face this thing with Charlie.
If Cody could believe in magic, couldn’t he?
With that thought, he went back downstairs.