"I feel guilty," Nick admitted. They were leaning naked against the pillowed headboard. His new friend, his sex partner, was smoking a menthol. The older man laughed.
"What about?"
"If my mother could see me now."
"Your mother? You live with her?"
Nick nodded.
"Is there a father?"
"Not that I know. No."
The man took a pull on his smoke and said, "Well that explains a lot."
"What?"
"Nothing. Sorry," he said, stubbing out the cigarette. "I like to smoke after sex."
"And when you drink."
"And when I drink, yeah."
"Can I have one?"
"A smoke? Yeah," the man's torso leaning right, and then back again until their bare shoulders touched. He lit the cigarette for Nick with a disposable lighter. "I didn't know you smoked."
"I don't. Usually."
The man clucked his tongue three times. "Sex with another man AND a cigarette? Your mother'll be disappointed."
"Dad smoked."
"I thought you didn't know him."
"I know he smoked." Nick took a pull on the menthol and explained, "When I was young and he used to visit, like once a year, he always smelled of cigarettes. He was a salesman. He traveled a lot."
"Is he still alive?"
"I don't know. Haven't heard from him in years."
"So you're twenty years old, at the community college and you live with your mother," the older man said, summing up what he knew about his partner. He passed him the ashtray. "And you like to go to nude beaches and meet other men."
"Actually that was my first time at that beach, and you're the only man I've ever been with."
"Really," the man said, somewhat in amazement. "You mean I got lucky today?"
"I don't know. If you call it luck."
The man patted Nick's slender thigh. "I think I got VERY lucky. A good-looking twenty year old in my bed? Did you enjoy it?"
Nick hesitated. "I didn't enjoy it while it was happening..." He went on: "But I'm enjoying it now. The thought of it. The memory of it. It makes me feel..."
"I told you. It gets easier every time. Right now you're very tight. But you'll open up with time and it won't just be pleasurable as an afterthought, I promise you." The man lit up another smoke. He had a smoker's voice: husky, somewhat short of breath. Nick guessed he was in his early forties. His three or four days' growth of beard was flecked with grey, as was his full head of hair. His beard had prickled Nick's upper lip and chin when they kissed, at the beach.
"I enjoyed sucking your cock," Nick admitted, suddenly.
"You're good at it. A natural."
"Natural?"
"The way you fondled my balls?"
"You told me to."
