You Came Back
I had come through this town once before, decades earlier. They were holding a spring planting festival, drawing residents from all around the county. Farming-themed costumes, from carrots and potatoes to livestock and farm equipment.
The local 4H showed off their prize produce and animals; old cars drove by, with one Model A banging and belching its way along; and not one but two live bands, a school marching band and a semi-professional assemblage of jazz musicians were all a part of it.
I was the requisite representation from city life, I suppose, which earned me an interesting mix of down home welcomes, awkward questions, and appeals to learn more about rural life. At the time I wondered if more people were talking to me than watching the parade.
Off on another vacation, I once more found myself stopping for a stay at the town’s one motel. Once more they were having a parade. This time it was celebrating the first crops of the year, and while much echoed the one I witnessed in my mid-30s, gone were the costumes. This was pure civics, with public officials aplenty, along with twice the musical sections and a larger crowd.
I stepped out for a walk about town before dinner, a habit I began some time ago in a seaside town in Greece. The dining options were few, as I already knew, but the residents speak volumes about the character of a place. These were hardworking folks, perhaps still a bit insular, but every bit as curious of outsiders as I had ed, and every bit as welcoming, too.
The summer air was warm, filled with the heavy richness of pollens that had always seemed to me the hallmark of less urban locales, and I watched the workers sprucing up the garlands that bridged lamppost to eave and tree trunk to awning, the colors shimmering in the early evening light.
The route ran right through the heart of town, though there was little to it but that. It was clear they were ending at the park, where the old rotunda overlooked a temporary dance floor. Speakers and sound equipment suggested speeches and live music.
I found myself at the same diner I had visited twenty years earlier. Neither the menu nor the decor had changed much; the former was typical diner fare of sandwiches and meat-and-potato meals, though updated with some healthier options and a seniors’ menu for which I had recently qualified.
I ordered and ate, interacting less than most, just soaking in the atmosphere as I watched the hustle and bustle on the avenue through the plate glass window by my booth. This far north, the parade was to start before I was done eating and wrap up around half an hour after sunset.
By the time I had finished eating and paid up, the requisite student band and the mayoral float had already gone by, but I had heard more than I had seen when the crowd materialized for the beginning a block away. A court of local harvest royalty was coming by, and the classic cars were right behind, the second band delivering bluegrass banjo and various percussion instruments in a distinctive local blend.
“Welcome to town!” one young man in his 20s cried out to me, arms flung high in greeting from two deep in the crowd. He quickly moved off, finding other people on whom to spend his abundant energy.
I walked a block on, moving slowly so the parade still moved past me. “You have just got to try these cookies!” One woman was telling any who would listen as she dove into the crowd with a massive box of baked goods. “My husband is thinking about opening a shop. Here,” she said offering me a sample, “you won’t find cookies this good in the city.” I took one and smiled as she headed off. One bite in I was prepared to declare she was right an out the cookies. Her husband would make a mint in any downtown at lunchtime.
Block after block I walked, each delivering one or two variations on that theme of exuberant greetings and acknowledgment of my being from someplace else. When I reached the park, the sun was setting, and I decided it was worth the time to see how things proceeded at the rotunda.
Even standing still as I listened to the heads of local fraternal organizations speak, people gave me friendly smiles and nods. It wasn’t that they didn’t greet one another, but those were always more familiar, a “Hey, Mary! Over here!” or “You made it down from college, Grady? Good to see ya!” types of things.
By the time the mayor had spoken and handed the mic over to the band, I was rubbing my eyes. The dust and the platitudes were getting to me, and the close quarters and evening warmth had sweat rolling down my shaved head.
As the band opened on some vaguely familiar pop cover, the crowd began heading out to the dance floor. Parents too their little kids’ hands and taught them a variant of the Twist off on grassy areas, and teens cautiously paired up. At least one drew gasps and covered giggles as their fellow students were introduced to them as a couple.
The band shifted to dome tune with a bit too much country for my tastes, so I took that as my sign to head back to the motel.
“You look familiar,” I heard someone say from nearby. I glanced to my right and spotted a man in his 40s looking my way. No one else in that direction seemed likely to have said the words. And he kept his eyes on me.
“Sorry?” I replied after a moment. I waved away a bit of dust that was swept up in a brief gust.
“You look familiar.” He smiled and waved his hand downward. “I see a lot of faces, so sometimes my mind plays tricks on me, but you’re not from here, yet you seem so familiar.”
I turned his way and closed most of the distance between us. “No,” I said. “Well, once, long ago, but that was long ago. I am taking a similar drive now, and it’s a convenient stop between home and where I’m headed.”
“Oh? Where’s that?” he asked tipping his head lightly to one side and seeming to have an interest that went beyond just the local hospitality.
It was good to have a conversation, something more than a high-energy drive-by. “North Dakota. Family’s from there. Well, going back a couple generations” I said. “Got a reunion in two days.”
He gave a tilt of his head and led me off toward a bench away from the crowd and farther from the speakers. I took the opportunity to half sit against the back of that bench to give myself a little break.
He took a moment to look over my face in the changed light. “I’m just not sure. Heck, it’s twenty years I’m talking about.” The band had shifted back to something reminiscent of an 80s power ballad. “That guy had a Lonny ponytail.” He jabbed his chin up to indicate my shaved scalp. It was clear it didn’t take much to maintain it.
I gave a laugh. “Oh, how the times have changed us all.” Small-town folk always seemed either to be terribly direct or strictly non-confrontational. There was no middle ground. “One guy talked to me by the parade route, asking me how I was doing. ‘Being invisible,’ I’d said, or something along those lines.”
“You could never be invisible,” he said, gaze resting squarely on my face.
I had to pause. “Whoa, yeah. That was it. Or something like it, anyway,” I said. With a laugh I added, “The phrase that echoes through the years, I suppose.”
He hasn’t even blinked through all of my recollection. “I said that to guy I spoke to back then.”
“Wouldn’t that be a hoot if those two turned out to be the two of us?” I joked.
“It was.”
I heard the mush. Change again, but it was like listening through a cardboard tube. “It was,” he said again. “I see it now.”
Something about that just struck me hard, and I had to shake my head and blink to clear up my ears, though the music still sounded far off. “Oh, I doubt it. That young man was flirting with me, but I had to head back to my girlfriend later that night.”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes locked onto mine, countenance unbroken. “Yes, I was flirting with you. And now you’ve come back. Alone this time, and free, perhaps.”
“What? Oh no, well yes, alone,” I stammered, “but free? I am flattered, bu…”
“Yes, you said that then, too.” I had said it. And he . He knew. He seemed to and know a great deal more than I, in fact.
I stopped and stared. The music seemed farther away then. The world sounded locked out beyond a bubble. I reached up and wiped my eyes, though there was no dust this time.
“And you are unattached now.”
“I am, yes,” I said, my mind coursing through the possibilities, trying to work out the odds of such an encounter. Twice. “But I do have that reunion, of course.”
He nodded again, slowly, with his eyes burning softly into me. “You have family to see I two days. But today is different,” he said. “You came back to me.”
My eyes remained on his, ears hearing the sound distant, and the words indecipherable, blood rushing through my head. “I came back to this place,” I said slowly. “Nostalgia. You understand.”
“To me.” His eyes brightened as he spoke. “You came back to me.”
“To you?” I gave a wan smile and squinted slightly as I tried to make sense of the idea. A woman, maybe. If I had ed me. A man whose memory popped up every few years because he was kind? No.
“To me,” he said again, his voice more certain each time he said those words.
“I can’t recall the face. I never knew the name. I couldn’t have come back to you,” I said, though I felt uncertain for some reason.
“You could,” he said. “You did. Can’t you feel it? Someplace.”
Feel it? I felt his soft stare unbalancing me. “I’m sorry. I think you’re quite kind and exceedingly flattering, particularly to a man of my years, but I can’t see how, or even why.”
He reached out his right hand and touched my cheek. It was gentle, adoring. “You came back to me, didn’t you?”
My eyes closed, and I turned my face into the touch, sinking softly against his palm. It felt smooth to my skin, warm.
“You did come back to me. I feel it,” he said. “You feel it.”
I felt something, to be sure, and I found myself nodding gently, my face turning to kiss the heel of his hand, my eyes still closed. The music was all but lost to my ears, my body feeling the vibrations through the bench.
He reached out to take my right hand in his left, and I felt myself turning, being led. But for his words, the world was silent. “Come with me,” he said as he guided me away. I knew where to step up or down, even with my eyes still resting shut.
I had lost all sense of space, of distance, of place. There were sounds once more, far off. Less light filtered through eyelids for a time, then more light. Then there was a door and then the silence of a room.
His fingers brushed my forehead, and I opened my eyes. There was light from behind me, and I had been turned so I was facing the door behind him.
His hands began to unbutton my shirt as I looked up and saw him clearly. He seemed younger, the image of the young man from twenty years before, my memory of that visit returning. “It is you,” I said, and he nodded.
“And you’ve come back to me. As I knew you would.” He seemed so young in my vision, and I felt my 55 years, and then some. He slipped my shirt off and let it fall to the floor, then gracefully removed his own. He took me in an embrace. bare chests meeting, my gut somehow not making me self conscious as it touched his more fit form.
Leaning to my left ear, he whispered, “You came back to me,” and I turned to kiss his lips softly. It was brief, electric.
“I know,” he said to words I didn’t speak. “But she is not here to hold you back. No one is. I was always going to be your first.”
My first? My first! How had he? Why would he even care? I mean, yes, I had thought of that meeting from time to time. And now he was here. Or rather, I was here. Again. My first man. And I felt small before him, older but inexperienced.
His hands slid behind me, pulling my hips forward. I could feel his hardness through his pants and mine. And then I felt something else in my misty thoughts. I felt my own hardness against his, the fabric not insulating me from the sensations.
“You came back,” he said, and leaned in to add right into my ear in a whisper, “to me.” I felt a twitch. He guided me. There was furniture, and we were sitting, his arms holding me.
“I feel,” I began. “I feel lost?” I wasn’t exactly certain what I felt. I couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t name it.
I could feel his presence leaning over me. It wasn’t a threat or even some form of dominance, but something ancient and subtly forceful. “You came back to me. You’re not lost. You are found.” He was there to guide my time with him, to escort me in these moments, with a form of love and care.
My thoughts swirled, their shape clear and regular but outside of my control as he unfastened his pants and mine. I could see in my mind everything that I was doing, that he was doing, that we were doing. It was as if I were floating above, outside of my being.
I had not wanted this, except sometimes after that first meeting, when I would wonder. Now I didn’t want it to stop.
“You came back to me,” he said again, almost without speech, yet no words ever had rung so clearly in my ears and in my mind. We were both naked, both impossibly hard, transcendent in our shared space as he kissed and touched me in ways no woman ever had ever, or maybe even could have. Nothing had prepared me for his touch.
And then he leaned back, and I my eyes found his eyes. They were like candles, a flickering glow deep within, his face radiant and warm in the near darkness. My gaze roamed freely, taking in his form: shoulders, arms, chest, legs, erection.
Erection? Yes, I had felt it earlier, but now my mind froze as I beheld it. I could feel it even more than see it, and I wasn’t even touching it. It was a glorious presence. “You came back to me.” The words no longer had an origin. I felt them enter my mind through my eyes. Their truth enveloped me from everywhere. “I planted those words so long ago, and their seed has brought you back.”
I nodded and said a simple truth, though I didn’t consciously think it: “I came back to you.” My voice sounded soft to my ears, small. Somehow, too, I sensed its easy resonance all around myself as it wore me down. I slid to the floor, moving to kneel before him, trying, I felt, to steady myself by sinking lower.
“You came back to me,” he said yet again, “and I shall plant a fresh seed in you, a stronger seed that will call you.”
I nodded. Of course I had come back to this radiant being, to this rapturous freedom from the burden of will, this liberation from thought and from choice.
I rose and turned to face him, so I could see all of him at once. He followed me with his gaze, tracking me while moving only his head.
I felt heavy as he looked at me, or maybe into me, with those flickering eyes. Vertigo, or something like it, washed over me, and I stabilized myself by sinking lower. He followed me still with his gaze. “You came back to me,” rang in my ears like bells ringing out a joyous tune.
My mouth opened in awe as my face approached his hips. He took one hand and presented himself to me. Any time before this, I would have recoiled, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I could feel his eyes on me, but mine were focused on the perfection he held up for me.
Then he was inside me, my lips surrounding him, feeling my first. He had said something about a first. This must have been it. Yes, this was it.
The flesh surprised me in that moment. It was so warm and giving, but taut, feeling almost rubbery as it stretched over his swollen cock. The words slipped into my head and triggered a shiver across my shoulders, an electric pleasure jolting from every direction and striking at my groin.
He didn’t have a flavor as such, but more of a tactile presence. There was a penetrating power, a rigidity with a little give. It was nothing I had truly thought to seek, and more than I could have wanted.
A primal sound rose into my throat. He stroked my smooth scalp and withdrew his other hand from himself, offering all to me. I took more and more, slowly exploring his size and shape with my mouth and tongue, savoring everything. My nose filled with a gentle musk and the metallic rush of adrenaline. I could feel my heart racing, and all of it made him seem more powerful before me and inside of my body.
In that moment, and for the first time in my existence, I was complete. As he filled my mouth so perfectly, I felt an emptiness I could not name and had never realized was there was suddenly satisfied and lifted from me, leaving me dizzyingly lightheaded.
Time no longer mattered. I held fast to his thighs and explored, learned, loved. It lasted like the summer nights of yesteryear, the novelty drawing out until minutes seemed like hours.
“You came back to me,” he repeated softly, over and over. Even as I felt him drawing closer to release, the tempo of those words never changed and their urgency neither waxed nor waned.
And then in an instant, he was not merely within me bodily, but spreading throughout all that I was. The abstract sensations of pure pleasure became salty and slick as I could taste him. I felt his presence moving down my throat and into my belly, taste the words as he kept repeating them, almost a chant: “You came back to me. You came back to me.”
When at last I could sense him inside my arteries, spreading his gift through my bloodstream and into my brain, we were one, fused, merged. He had made me his vessel and poured himself inside.
My own erection somehow had neither subsided nor released, but remained unflagging in spite of sensation. His hands lifted me by the sides of my head. He brought my mouth to his, a little of him dribbled down my lower lip as he kissed me, sealing us together, playing his tongue through the remnants of his orgasm that lined my tongue and the insides of my cheeks.
Time returned to me, but it was irrelevant. We kissed and held one another. And then I pulled my lips from his and gazed deeply to those candles behind his eyes.
“I came back to you,” I said, and I finally understood what he had meant each time. This time I controlled the words. I chose to speak them. I made them true.
He smiled and nodded. “Now I will show you why you will come back to me again.”
Those eyes flared for a moment, leaving the world suddenly very real. The room was in a Craftsman home, a dim overhead light above a dining room table behind me, the silence and darkness outside complete but for a street light half a block in the distance. Not even crickets stirred.
He was exactly as he had been when he first spoke to me as I stood by the road hours before, but I was different. I felt powerful, strong. As looked to him, I rose to my feet and saw his beauty. It was new to me, but it had always been there.
I extended my right hand, flexing the fingers and feeling everything once more for the first time. I touched his cheek as he had touched mine, and he smiled. Sliding my fingers through his hair and around to the back of his head, I drew his face forward as my shins pressed to the front of the sofa, my eyes not leaving his, holding him in my gaze now.
His head moved slowly, smoothly, inevitably closer to me, and his mouth opened. I followed all of it, and soon I saw his lips take me into him, his eyes slipping closed, the flickering glow shinimg through his eyelids.
I felt myself a part of him as he worked his tongue all around me. The delicacy of his touch, the softness of his lips, the warmth of his mouth were all there to enhance the intense sensitivity that I now felt. There was a power in that moment, a roar rumbling through me. “I will come back to you,” I felt myself say, with a rare confidence, though my lips never moved. He nodded as if I had spoken aloud.
I held my hips steady, gently cradling his head to keep it in place. I knew, though it was immediately apparent anyway, that he would do exactly what he needed and what I wanted. Or perhaps what he wanted and I needed. The two seemed as one. The world became more vibrant as he attended each nerve ending with care and focus. The darkness outside was almost like daylight as the pleasure lit up my brain.
He innately knew what to do, as if he could sense what I sensed, adjusting subtly to reveal new depths of my arousal. My other hand found his head. “I will come back to you,” I growled, insisting he believe me. The words came out of me in the tempo his had before, repeating again and again.
Time once more became fluid, and suddenly one touch broke me. Where once I had experienced great depths of pleasure without release I just as greedily erupted into him. Spurt after blast exited my body, and when all was done and he had slipped his lips off, it was all I could do to drop to the sofa, breathless and exhausted.
“Sleep,” he said. “You will come back to me.”
It was true. He had believed me. I had won the moment and convinced him. My mind faded to a fog and slipped down into a restful sleep. The final sight as I watched him smiling down to ne was his eyes. They re-lit themselves as my burst of power drained from me and ed back into him, as if it had always been his, just on loan in me.