heeeere's johnny

It was a few weeks until Peter Parker's seventeenth birthday. For the occasion, Aunt May had bought a set of number candles--purple one, green seven. She set these aside in advance, Peter said, along with three different cake mixes: devil's food, white, yellow; you're graduating, you're turning seventeen, it's a big deal!

He had told Tony these details both abashedly and with a nervous, self-effacing excitement. She's going nuts over it, he said, as though it was not something he--they--had been looking forward to for half a year. Half a year ago, when Peter had been sixteen still--sweet sixteen, an age that left a faint sugary film on the tongue, a fuzz on the teeth, cloying--that was when, upper lip shining with sweat, Peter had let their knees touch, had said I know this is dumb, Mr. Stark, but I just--you're just really--

Tony was turning forty-nine at the end of May. Another year and he would be fifty, a rounded number that held within it a certain kind of finality, however much Rhodey kept calling it nifty fifty, baby, nifty fifty. Other men, in midst of a midlife crisis, bought luxury cars, or fucked busty twenty-something blondes, or took up kickboxing and kale salads. They changed careers or took up hobbies built on nostalgia's scrapheap--tinkering with robots, flying remote-controlled planes. The problem was that Tony had done all of that already, and thus some primal, lab-rat part of his hindbrain--the part that hammered away at the proverbial pellet-dispensing button heedless of any consequences--wanted something different. Or the same--all the elements rolled into one--only more so: the risk, the childhood appeal, the sleaze and wholesomeness in equal measure. He did not want to think of waiting for Peter's seventeenth birthday as the locus of another--third? fourth?--midlife crisis, though. He did not want to think of it as a crisis at all.

It was only natural, then, when Peter had let their knees touch, saying I know this is dumb, Mr. Stark, but I just--you're just really-- (really what? Swell? Nifty? There was something about him reminiscent of 1950s comic book characters, with their collared shirts and sweaters and their neatly side-parted hair, a clean-cut look he had not until now found erotic.) It was only natural that he had said look, I know, kid, and had patted his knee, understanding, warmly but distantly paternal--but had not stopped Peter from reaching out and, with a palm clammy with the sweat of adolescent panic, cupping his face. He placated himself now, six months later, by telling himself he had tried to be stern. Gentle but firm in a way his own father had never mastered. (He had not: been stern, been firm. But then, he was not a father. It was important to remember that, sometimes.) It was true that he'd said you know we can't do this. Not right now. It was just that when Peter said what about later? he had not--as he might have liked to imagine himself doing, retelling this story, heroically, humorously, an anecdote for when Peter was older, as an uncle might--he had not stood up, brushed off the knees of his jeans, said well, kiddo, time to get you home. Almost midnight, wouldn't want you turning into a pumpkin. Something defusing, jocular and final. Instead, he had thought what about later, and had stroked his thumb along the back of Peter's hand. Out loud, he said let's keep it above board 'til then, alright?

He had let Peter kiss him on the cheek then, mouth closed; he had, in anticipation, wet his lips, and they left behind the slight impression of a warmth and wetness that felt almost unthinkably sexual in their innocence.

----

Tony had at first deemed kissing on the mouth off-limits, recalling the words of the erstwhile nanny he'd still had at age fourteen--none of that now. No hanky-panky. Hanky-panky, back then, had meant anything that went beyond the bounds of hand-holding. At forty-eight, however, no hanky-panky bordered on a kind of self-flagellation, a decorum that at his age was almost absurd. Faced with Peter squirming, pleading Mr. Stark, can't we please--what was he to do? Be the adult was the obvious answer, but that he didn't give in and fuck him then and there required a self-restraint he had never before had cause to exercise. Anything short of fucking him, then, was a sign of virtue--if it felt the way drinking chlorophyll smoothies instead of whiskey did, it was proof he was doing nothing wrong.

He revised his rules. When they kissed they were to keep their hands above the waist, as at a high school dance. (Did they still have those kinds of rules nowadays? He remembered prom, 1985, silver tinsel, pink balloons, smuggling a flask of his dad's bourbon under his suit jacket, sharing a furtive joint in the bathroom. That was thirty-four years ago now. Peter hadn't even been born.) There also was to be no neck-kissing, no love-bites, not even the unbuttoning of the top buttons of the shirt. (God forbid that anyone's collarbones be exposed. He felt as though he was living in a monastery. He felt as though he was wearing a hair shirt.) I just don't want anybody getting in trouble, okay? By anybody he had meant himself.

Boundaries thus expanded, what had once been appreciative look-but-don't-touch stares, pecks on the forehead, hugs with groins a circumspect half-foot apart, became slow, wet, lingering kisses in the backs of Tony's cars, the way teenagers might. (Though it was not might. It was not hypothetical. Peter was a teenager.) Tony remembered those encounters, at fifteen, sixteen, in his father's Benz (a stately, roomy, respectable car, one quietly assured of its worth, unlike any car he'd ever chosen for himself); he remembered the furtiveness, the sense of trespass, the erections almost unbearable in their intensity--though at age fifteen, Tony had not limited himself with kindergarten-style keep-your-hands-to-yourself rules. To think on Peter experiencing those same kinds of erections with no outlet nearly made him light-headed with arousal.

It was late November; they'd gone to the Museum of Natural History on the flimsy pretense of seeing an exhibit on spiders. He had spent the day wondering if it was a mistake, torturing himself with a hand between Peter's shoulderblades that, at a distance, could look appropriate, fatherly; sometimes he would let his hand rest at the nape of Peter's neck--the faint, damp warmth of the short hairs there having a perverse intimacy to them--and Peter would lean into the touch.

It's chilly, he said. I'll give you a ride home. He parked on a side-street and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, pretending to listen to the radio; Peter had said can I kiss you? I mean, like, really kiss you-- as though he was being chivalrous, as though Tony's permission was the one that mattered. When they'd gotten into the back seat, the word premeditated was all he could think of. It took him too long to notice that Peter's hand was on his thigh, lightly squeezing, a posture that in other contexts was harmless enough for grandparents in the sitting room; it made his cock twitch. He pulled out of the kiss. Peter breathed Tony against his mouth. (He had been instructed to call him by his first name, as Mr. Stark had too much of a Don't Stand So Close to Me vibe--young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy and all that. He was beginning to think that this, too, was a misstep--Tony had such different connotations. Tony was what he was called in bed.)

"Stop, stop," Tony said. "We have to stop."

Sitting as they were, hips chastely apart, Peter would have had a clear view of Tony's cock in his pants, straining against the zipper, surely imagining the size and shape of him. Tony, similarly, could envision in his mind's eye the wet spot on Peter's boxers. He could see him, afterward, in his tiny bedroom with its Star Wars figures, the baseball pennant on the wall, the thin lumpy quilt and algebra textbooks, a setting normally without any particular erotic charm; he could see Peter shimmying his jeans and boxers halfway down his thighs, stumbling, scarcely able to wait, jerking himself furiously, coming almost as soon as his back hit his bed. Whimpering, helpless, into the sleeve of his sweater.

"I think it's past your bedtime," was all that he said. I'll just--um-- Peter had then tucked his hard-on into the waistband of his jeans while Tony looked away. After Peter waved him goodbye, ensconced in the well-lit safety of his apartment's entranceway, Tony leaned his forehead against the steering wheel and breathed--in through the nose, out through the mouth.

Envisioning all of this later--the ordinary room, the details: the ravelling cuff of a sleeve, his hair sticking to his temple, the quality of his gasps (rhythmic but abbreviated), imagining Peter imagining him, how he might feel inside him, though this was as yet an unknown sensation, exciting and frightening in its possibilities--all these things together made Tony come so hard it left him with a pounding headache. He took two Advils and, ill-advised, a sleeping pill, and slept 'til eleven the next day, feeling when he woke as though he'd been hit by a truck.