Who's Your Daddy?

Chapter 15

A couple of nights after his meeting with Sidney, Michael was sitting in his apartment feeling hornier than he'd felt in awhile. It was a very specific type of horny, not the kind that jerking off would satiate. Michael wanted to touch and be touched; to taste; to have those moments of anticipation where you don't know where someone's finger, tongue, or dick was going to go next. Michael wanted sex, and he decided that he wanted it with Ziggy.

Over the weeks since they'd been dating, Michael had come to more clarity about why he'd wanted to take things slow with Ziggy. It wasn't just that he wasn't that into hook-ups. That was true to a point. But the number of exceptions he'd made to that principle exceeded anything he could count with his fingers and toes. What he realized was that he had wanted to wait because of how much he liked Ziggy. He knew that if Ziggy had quickly broken things off with him after a few fuck-filled nights, he'd be back in that dark place where he'd resided for so long after losing Chase. He wasn't ready to return there.

But tonight, Michael felt almost as if his extreme horniness was a sign that he was ready to take the risk with Ziggy, a sign that he would be resilient enough to survive if the risk didn't yield longterm rewards. Something in him felt healed and strengthened.

"I'm ready," Michael texted Ziggy.

Less than a minute later, Ziggy texted back: "Be there by 8." Next to the words were three eggplant emojis.

Michael replied, "k."

Michael felt giddy for a moment, but then a mild panic set in. It was 6 pm. He had two hours to eat dinner, straighten up the apartment, change the linens on the bed, and make sure that condoms and lube were conveniently but not too conspicuously stashed in the top drawer of the nightstand.

In addition to everything else, Michael wanted to squeeze in some push-ups and crunches. He felt he had to be ever vigilant to stave off the middle-aged body's tendency toward puffiness or deflation.

Lastly, he needed to groom, a process that took longer with each passing year. Potentially embarrassing things increasingly seemed to be sprouting out of him, like the hair that now grew around the tops of his ears and on the inner lobe.

Then, when the presence of hair wasn't causing problems, it was the color of the hair or rather the lack of color. A few weeks ago, Michael looked in the mirror and thought he had something stuck in his nose. He blew his nose and was surprised when the thing was still there. He blew another time. Still there. He then made a sort of nose probe out of the tissue and stuck it all the way up his nostril, in and out, in and out. It was as if he were nose-fucking himself. He pulled the tissue out, tossed it in the trash and looked at his nostrils in the mirror again. The stringy white thing remained. Michael started to think that this particular nose-invader was made from some sort of Kleenex-resistant mutant mucous. But then he looked closer and realized that the shiny white thing wasn't a mucous at all, but rather a long gray hair that had taken up residence in his nose. A wave of grief and disgust came over him. Who even knew that you could get gray nose hairs?

He reached in the medicine cabinet for his tweezers, stuck them in his nose and plucked out a stiff, silvery strand of hair. He starred it down for a moment, almost as if he were in a standoff. He couldn't believe that this hair made him so furious. He was as embarrassed by his emotional response as he was by the hair itself. He decided at that moment that his approach to the unexpected curses of aging would be thoughtful strategy rather than spontaneous anger.

That was the reason why Michael was standing naked in front of his bathroom sink, mixing chemicals in a way that he hadn't since the days of his required college Chemistry. He was preparing a batch of hair dye for his pubes.