Yet somehow this is evolving into something far more complicated.
I look over at Gabriel as he drifts deeper into sleep, and gratitude floods through me.
He saved me again.
This time not from paint splashed across my face or some idiot spitballing at me.
This time from a bullet, and against those, my defense systems cannot fully protect me.
I study his youthful, pleasant face.
The remnants of that predatory edge the fighting mode gave him are gone. He’s himself again.
I cannot resist. I lean closer and gently touch his face.
Am I hurting him?
It’s painfully obvious that he wants me, but he doesn’t understand that I cannot give him the kind of love people his age are supposed to have.
Passion. Reckless intensity. ‘You’re my whole world.’ Spontaneous trips to the beach to swim under the moonlight. Staying out all night dancing in clubs until your legs give out.Drinking beer or smoking weed, lying on the grass and staring at the stars. Waking up to the scent of roses scattered across the sheets.
And I know, I can feel it, that this is the kind of love he longs for. The kind from books. A real romance, made even sweeter by itsimpossibility. The age gap, the obstacles, all of it only drives him further because youth works that way. I know it does. Difficulties never frightened me either once. I barely even saw them while I spent entire days working, fighting to reclaim my reproductive system.
Hope belongs to the young.
But I am a bitter aging man.
That fire no longer exists inside me. My emotions no longer surge forward like a wild river. I carry responsibility for a company employing tens of thousands of people.
Responsibility… this word.
A concept youth is only beginning to understand.
I pull my hand away from his face and walk toward the window. In my room I usually keep only a digital cityscape projected across the wall, but a real view is something else entirely.
White clouds drift slowly over the city. It is still only afternoon. Traffic continues below.
I stare down at the skyline.
What can I give Gabriel?
My body?
I abandoned the pursuit of sex two decades ago, yet there is something about him that makes me reconsider that decision. Suddenly it no longer feels trivial or irrelevant.
Maybe I should approach it as an experiment.
But would I merely be playing with his emotions that way, because I cannot return them equally? I feel warmth toward him. Attraction. But what is love, truly?
A cascade of chemical reactions.
Everything else is just physiology decorated with poetry, humanity’s favorite fiction written across countless pages.
And… what if my interest in him has another layer beneath it?
What Storm hinted at?
My head buzzes. I turn away from the window and leave the room, leaving Gabriel asleep behind me.
