The nurse signaled and moved into the corridor. When the door to the hall was shut and Rich was assured there was someone on the lookout, he rose from the deep, vinyl-upholstered chair where he had been keeping vigil while reading a Gore Vidal novel and moved over to the hospital bed.
He looked down at his older partner of the past six years, Miles Trent, and reminisced a few moments on how good their life had been. And it reminded him how well Miles had taken care of him up until his recent series of strokes that had left him entirely incapacitated in some ways but fully functional in others. Life could be so cruel. It had been good to them for over half a decade, but now this.
He supposed it could be worse. Miles might have resented having different appendages that wouldn't work.
Miles was fully awake, his eyes following Rich around the hospital room, his oxygen mask burbling merrily in the rhythm that Rich had come to be able to interpret over the past couple of weeks as wakefulness rather than repose—excitement even. Miles knew what was coming next. They did this two or three times a day when Rich could manage it—when he was able to arrange enough private time.
Rich moved around to the side of the bed facing the window wall, drawing a round-seat metal stool with him, which he rolled in line with Miles' thighs and sat on. Reaching under the sheet, he gently rolled Miles' pelvis toward him. Miles had a hospital gown on under the sheet, but it was fully open in front, the ties having come undone. He was in full erection, as Rich knew he would be.
Miles made a muffled sound through his oxygen mask that Rich had learned was encouragement rather than anger. Miles hadn't been able to speak for weeks. He probably never would be able to speak again. His whole left side was paralyzed, and, ironically, he was left-handed. All attempts to get him to communicate through writing, using his right hand, had gone for naught other than unintelligible scrawl. And now he had grown so weak that it was an effort for him even to raise the right hand. At fifty, entirely too young to be dying, Miles nevertheless was dying.
It was, perhaps, a curse that it was happening in stages. Rich wondered if he would fight it—or if he'd welcome the emptiness if he'd gotten in this condition. Thus far Miles was fighting it—fighting it as if there was something he had to do before checking out.
He'd always been so alive. He had had no trouble keeping up with Rich, who was barely twenty-six now. He had had no trouble, in fact, in dominating Rich and keeping him satisfied, even though Rich had a condition of needing attention frequently—several times a day to keep him from some form of withdrawal symptoms. If anyone had suffered more in that way over the past few weeks, it was Rich rather than Miles. But Rich had made sure Miles, at least, was regularly satisfied, just as he proceeded to do now.
He encircled the base of Miles' cock with his fingers, cupping the older man's ball sac in the palm of his hand, licked up one side of the erect phallus and down the other, and then opened his mouth over the bulb and started to suck. Miles' oxygen mask was gurgling merrily. There was nothing wrong with Miles' mind, and there had been no damage to the connection between his cock and the pleasure zones in his mind.
There also was nothing wrong with his ability to create and expel cum.
Miles was enjoying the blow job as much as he did earlier in the morning or last month or last year or when he originally picked Rich up in a bar on the Norfolk waterfront. Rich had been a Navy sailor just mustered out and celebrating that, but with little idea where to go from there. Miles had moved in on him, taken him back to his Hampton home, and fucked him three times during the night. As it happened, he had quickly discovered Rich's special needs—he needed to be dominated, and he needed to be fucked three or four times a day to be humming along at cruising speed. He'd had no trouble getting that in the Navy—sometimes from more than one sailor at a time. Miles had been able to satisfy both needs. Right up to his first of several strokes in the past three weeks.
Somehow Miles managed to move his pelvis, toward Rich and then away—then back—enough to be participating in the blow job. He was gently fucking Rich's mouth, and he managed to bring his right hand down and lay it on Rich's cheek to express his gratitude at his younger lover's loyalty and sustained attention to the need his strokes had not yet taken from him.
Miles managed an ejaculation, his oxygen mask merrily bubbling away. Rich swallowed the cum, cleaned the cock with his tongue, and kissed the palm of the hand that had been cupping his cheek. Then, almost reluctantly, knowing there should be more but also knowing there wouldn't be, he rose, pulled the sheet back from Miles' chest, kissed him on the nipples, and kissed up to the older man's cheek. It had been more than a week since Miles had been able to tolerate a kiss on the lips. He would be gasping for air and turning blue if they tried that now.
Rich sat back down on the stool, took Miles' right hand between his hands and looked into Miles' face, conveying all the love that he was able to put into an expression, but also fighting not to let Miles see his tears. It was a special day. Valentine's Day. At one point the doctors had said Miles wouldn't be here to mark the day. But he had proved them wrong. He was hanging on for some unknown reason. Although he'd never voice it, Rich wished Miles would just give up—for his own sake.
For the first week in hospital—not the initial few days, but the week following that—Rich had managed, with the nurses' help as a lookout, to climb onto the bed, hold his body over Miles' body, and fuck himself on Miles' cock, to the satisfaction of them both. They had done this three or four times through the day and night just as they would do at home. But eventually the private-duty nurse had said this was too much for Miles, and Rich had had to scale back to giving Miles regular blow jobs.
This met Miles' need, but not Rich's.
"Happy Valentine's Day, lover," Rich murmured, impressing upon the older man that he had made it to February 14th. "Or, should I say," he whispered after a moment, "Happy Valentine's Day, Daddy?" It occurred to him that this was the day the adoption papers went into effect.
He wasn't just Miles' younger live-in lover anymore—the personal assistant to the prolific pop-song music composer, which was the fig leaf thrown out to the public. He legally was Miles' son now.
"And thank you for that, Daddy," Rich murmured. A change in the bubbling of the oxygen mask assured Rich that Miles had heard and understood the conveying of the thanks. It had been something Miles had put into train many months ago, when the doctors first told him what likely was coming in his failing health. He'd gone as far in the process as he could without Rich knowing, because, his lawyer had told Rich, Miles was afraid Rich would leave him when he learned of his failing health. But at some point an adoptee needs to know and accede to the process.
To Rich's credit, he hadn't hesitated in hanging in there with Miles. As Miles' strength had lessened, he'd had to force Rich to go out to the bars again in those months of Thanksgiving into January to be serviced when Miles was having a bad day. Rich had an equally bad day on any day he wasn't fucked at least once. But even when Rich went out, he always returned to cuddle with Miles and give him a blow or hand job.
He had always thought of Miles as his daddy—but not literally until today. Miles had taken care of everything for him since picking him up in the Norfolk bar. Of course, Rich had taken on a full share of household chores and had functioned fully as a personal assistant. The world at large had no opportunity to question whether he was doing that job. And he'd always put Miles first and lived in his shadow.
What was he going to do now, without Miles? Could he live anywhere but in a man's shadow? What was he going to do without a man who took care of his need several times a day?
Could he—should he—even reveal that over the past four years, many of Miles' most popular song tunes actually were written by Rich? No, he couldn't—he wouldn't—do that to Miles' reputation—his legacy—especially not now when Miles had arranged for him to inherit everything the songs had provided. Luckily, there was no immediate family to challenge the move.
So, was what he'd just done incest now, he wondered, with a jolt that brought him off the stool and moving around the bed to go to the door and let the nurse know the deed was done—again—for at least the next several hours. If it was, he didn't really give a shit, he decided. Let others worry and ruffle their feathers about that, if they wished.
Opening the door, Rich signaled to the nurse, Dave, a strapping, big-boned, ruddy-cheeked, redhead.
"He's done. Now me," Rich said.
