If You Were A Map

by hadaka

It would say Here Be Dragons. 1st, Maps.

Disclaimer: Do. Not. Own.

Warnings: Rating for language, sexual concepts. This is yaoi.

Summary: If you were a map, it would say Here Be Dragons.

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You're not fooling anybody.

The thing to remember is that you did not take him to a love hotel. Just the idea of it was enough to make you want to hit someone, the stray, treacherous, aimless thought that such places were made for such things and no one would think to look for you there, your reputation is so impeccable. It hurt you that such blasphemy would even occur to you, to associate such places and such things with him. Then you felt like the dirty old man you are, and almost washed your hands of the whole affair.

Affair. At least it's not that, you tell yourself, over and over—you've been divorced for how many years? Nine? Ten?

Your children never forgave you for that.

They won't forgive you this, either, if they ever learn of it. Not your daughter, not your son. Especially not your son.

You often feel that this isn't reasonable of them, all their unwillingness to forgive or forget. You took care of them, didn't you? You didn't run away. You didn't flee for an international career and supermodels on each arm when everything started falling apart, you didn't place your signature and seal on that bare line below some completely irrational number representing the alimony she felt she was owed and then take off for parts unknown while a bitterly unhappy woman raised your babies. You didn't do that. You stuck around. You were a part of their lives. You were the one who remembered their birthdays, you were the one who went to see every school play, every Little League game, every piano recital, every awards ceremony. You were the one who tried to pick up the pieces when your ex-wife had her nervous breakdowns and her depressions, you were the one who allowed yourself to be hated by your children when they just couldn't hate their mother. You were the one who made monthly flights, who stayed in a succession of short-term apartments and hotel suites and sometimes no place at all because you didn't want your children to have to deal with their mother's erratic travel plans.

You were the one who held their little hands and tried desperately to hold their broken hearts together when their mother decided to remarry and suddenly there wasn't any room for them in her new home.

Your daughter doesn't like to talk to you. She's getting married in three months, and you're supposed to be there, but she still hasn't called to tell you what time or where or even if you're going to walk her down the aisle or if she's going to have a more traditional wedding. Maybe she won't call you at all, but send everything in a letter, stiff and formal, like the wedding invitation, along with the bill.

Your son—

He'll never forgive you for leaving, never, but only people who aren't fathers wouldn't know why you have to keep trying.

With all that, you are painfully tempted to rationalize what you've done. Ten years of chaste devotion to your fractured family and your career, which isn't nearly so illustrious or as profitable as your former agents tell you it could have been if you'd only agreed to go overseas, and aren't you entitled to some comfort? To some personal joy, every now and again, as long as you keep it quiet and discreet and hush-hush? Oh, there were the occasional women, over the years, women you met at parties and charity events, women who gasped and clutched at you in your car, in your hotel room, in a convenient coatroom, women you briefly dated and were featured with in tabloids and society pages, but you never took those women with you when you went to school plays, Little League games, piano recitals, award ceremonies. You never took those women to meet your children. So in your mind, those women do not count.

He is nothing like those women.

But no matter what sort of mental gymnastics you torture yourself with, you can't quite fool yourself into thinking that this is really all right or in any way something you have a right to. You are forty-three this year and too old for either professional baseball or denial. Denial is for people who don't know any better, for youth-in-rebellion and twenty- and thirty-somethings who still have a good ten years left to squander on things that they can't have. Denial is for people half your age who don't have two cold, emotionally unavailable children and a psycho ex-wife.

You used to wonder what it is that men your age see in women who are barely more than girls, almost twenty years younger than they are. Don't you understand, you wanted to ask them, that she was being born when you were a sophomore in university? You had a daughter the same age as some of these shiny young things your colleagues were showing off on their arms, and it always made you uneasy, if not sick. You are repulsed at the idea of grown men groping at these wide-eyed, leggy creatures who are little more than children, you've cut off acquaintances over these things.

As you got older, though, you began to be able to, if not accept or really be all right with it, at least understand the basic urges behind it. The allure of youth and youthful flesh is something that seems to only really impress itself on you as you get older, so that even if you always thought you would never act on it, you got to the point of understanding it when some of your showier colleagues started showing up to places with women ten, fifteen years younger than their last wife. There are parallels you can't help but draw: when you were a rookie, all the teams wanted new, young talent, those superheroes fresh out of high school or university who could throw a million miles per hour and crack out a homer every time; now, all those superheroes, aged has-beens twenty years later, also want new, young talent, with slightly different criteria, most of them fresh out of university but some, distressingly, just finishing high school.

He's in his third year of university. A junior. It kills you to know this.

It was your son who brought him home with him one day. This doesn't make it your son's fault, let's be clear, but it does seem to you that someone was being deliberately cruel when they aligned the coincidental stars just enough for him to step through your doorway.

You were picking up your keys from the side table in the foyer, already late for a meeting. The front door opened as you turned toward it.

"Dad," your son said, "you remember Raimon Taro?"

Of course you did. Who wouldn't? Those huge, starstruck eyes, the hero worship front and center in his face, the only boy ever to prove better at your son's chosen sport than your son himself. You liked him well enough, and admired him as much as you resented him on behalf of your own child, and that's not a crime, that's just you being a parent, but you were already late and you needed to go, so you shook hands and exchanged a few words—

"This is his roommate," your son said.

That was when you saw him. Standing quietly in the back, watching everything with a small smile. He bowed so politely when you greeted him, and excused himself so nicely in that old-fashioned way you almost never heard anymore. You remember thinking at the time that his parents had done very well for themselves.

You remember thinking, Look at those eyes.

Nothing happened. You left, the meeting was boring beyond all belief, and by the time you got home again, your son and his guests had left. You thought no more of it, or at least you think you didn't, your memory isn't what it used to be. You probably didn't, at any rate, you probably didn't think about those eyes more than you should have, you probably didn't notice the way his hair, a little too long, swept over his face, the way those eyes stayed downcast, like he didn't know where to look.

But then a month later—two months? A month and a half? Do you even know the year?—your son was home again when you returned from a long trip to Tokyo, and you could hear someone who wasn't your son laughing somewhere in the house. Here your memory misses something because surely you didn't walk straight into the office, surely you stopped to put your luggage somewhere, take off your coat, remove your shoes, put down your keys, those mundane little details that make up the minutes of a person's life.

You remember him standing at your bookcase, looking at a row of DVD collections, all of them baseball- or football-related, and the way he blushed when he realized it was you.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "I just—Taka said I could—"

"Don't worry," you remember saying, trying to put him at his ease, "I don't bite."

He laughed uncertainly at that, and the blushed stayed on his face.

For the life of you, you can't remember what you talked about next. The upcoming Koshien, maybe, or that year's Rice Bowl. The weather. You can't remember, because the important thing happened at the end of that conversation, when you both heard Monta calling from the hallway.

"Excuse me," he said, and was leaving when you did something you both sincerely regret and wouldn't take back for anything in the world.

"Come over and we can watch those sometime," you said, mildly, without any particular meaning behind it aside from being a good host. "I like a marathon every now and then."

His eyes were so wide. "Really?"

Did it really happen so easily? Most difficult things do, you suppose. Small incidents, little moments, all adding up to something that later threatens to crush you under its weight.

He showed up a couple of Saturdays later, after checking via a phone call that it would be all right. He brought those spicy potato rings with him, explaining with some embarrassment that he hadn't known what to bring and his roommate had recommended it, and you tried not to laugh.

You don't remember the games you watched, but you remember the moment he removed his scarf, and you stared without meaning to at the curve of his neck.

It occurred to you later to wonder what a twenty-year-old young man, who should by all rights have been busy with university and football and drinking too much and girls just throwing themselves at those eyes, was doing coming over on a Saturday to watch football games with his roommate's friend's father. But in your defense, you weren't quite so well-versed in these things at the time, and you'd spent so long being the closest to asexual that a middle-aged ex-baseball superstar divorced father of two could get that you didn't really know what to read into things like that.

Or maybe you did, and that would explain the way your heart raced, the way your mouth went dry as you stared at the exposed bits of his skin.

You sat on that couch with that absurdly young man next to you and you actually did talk about football for a while, watching Bowl after Bowl. You discussed the new preeminence of the left tackle, and how both of you hate the Raiders. You mentioned that you felt Saikyoudai had the Rice Bowl in the bag that year, and he surprised you with his polite but firm We'll see., which reminded you that you were sitting next to the star of the college team that denied the monstrous Saikyoudai lineup a shot at the Tokyo Dome the previous year, something that made you almost forget to breathe with how much it affected you.

He was laughing at a joke you made when he reached for another potato ring and his arm brushed yours.

You would think, you have thought a thousand times since, that it would take more than that. A well-timed joke and the spicy potato rings in the bowl on the coffee table and his arm briefly touching yours.

You touched his neck, because you'd been staring at it through two NFL Championships, and the blood rushed into his face and he glanced at you from under his eyelashes, and oh hell, those eyes. What were his parents thinking, letting him go unchaperoned through the world with those eyes?

"Honjo-san," he murmured, and you pulled him toward you by that neck and you kissed him.

You see? It was your fault. You made the first move. You guessed then, as you know now, that he would never have reached for you first. It's not in his nature.

A soft, pliant mouth beneath yours, not a hint of makeup or lipstick or anything but a spicy taste of powdered pepper, and you held him in place with a hand on the back of his neck and your mouth on his and you think it was the scratch of your perpetual five o'clock shadow that made him part his lips. Then you had your tongue in his mouth and you were appalled and aroused to find that he was a terrible kisser because he didn't know how, he didn't have the experience, he wasn't sure what to do, and maybe that would have been the end of it, you were going to pull back, you would have apologized and begged his forgiveness and hurried him out of your house and out of your life, except he put his hands on you, he clutched at your shirt with one hand and the back of your neck with the other, and then you were falling over onto him.

You pushed yourself up onto your hands, one on each side of his head, and you looked down at him lying on your den's couch and you wanted him. He was looking up at you, eyes wide and shocked, his mouth red and wet, and your bodies were pressed together and your legs were tangled. You could feel his arousal against your hip, and you knew he could feel yours. Your glasses were askew.

"You should go home," you remember saying, you did, you absolutely did say it, and if he'd agreed or even said nothing and just continued to look scared, that would have been an end, too.

But he shook his head.

You knew you should stop anyway. You knew the right thing to do was send him straight home. You knew at the time that he was a year younger than your son, that he is your son's friend's roommate, that he is a twenty-one-year-old college football star who has no business being here in your house, on your couch, much less underneath you. You knew that he was twenty years your junior and male. You didn't know anything about his experiences besides what his body was telling you, you don't know if he's gay or experimenting or bi or just confused.

But what happened was that you stood up, carefully extricating yourself from his young, young body. He sat up on the couch and stared at you with those eyes.

You left without another word, walked right out of the den with the Super Bowl XXV still playing on the flatscreen, and you didn't know if you were relieved or terrified when you heard him following you. You went up the stairs, not looking back, you didn't look back until you were standing in front of your closed bedroom door, the bedroom no one but you has ever been in.

You turned, and he was still there.

Looking at you. With those eyes. Standing there in those dark, fashionable jeans, the low-slung belt, the Ogre You Asshole t-shirt that you had to Google.

He was so beautiful. Painfully, hopelessly, unfeasibly. You couldn't—can't—imagine how he's stayed out of someone's clutches this long. Surely he has throngs of people just flinging themselves at his feet, the way they used to fling themselves at yours.

You reached for the door handle without having to look. You opened that door, your bedroom door, and swung it wide with one arm.

It was an invitation. You would not have it seem later like you were pulling or pushing him anywhere.

"You should go home," you repeated. One last-ditch effort at being a good man. At being a responsible father of someone older than this young man—boy? No, oh God, no—standing in front of you.

Your voice, you remember, was deeper than it usually is, thrust down somewhere in your guts with the weight of lust. You remember being utterly panicked that he was going to walk away, and desperately afraid that he wouldn't.

He glanced at the bedroom, at you. His eyes were wide.

Then he walked through that door, his step not hesitant at all but a little shaky, and his shoulder brushed your shirt at the chest.

You sometimes think that you wouldn't feel so awful about all of this if he hadn't been a virgin. Would that have been too much to ask? Three years of college and no one managed to get him into bed? You find that difficult to believe. But that first night, in that bedroom in which only you have ever slept in the six years you lived in that house, it's unmistakable. You were almost paralyzed from an unwillingness to hurt him at the same time that you couldn't even think about not touching him. And he moved so sweetly for you, so shy and anxious to get it right, he stammered such endearing questions at the same time that he touched you so wonderingly. He wanted you to tell him what to do, and you tried to be honest about what you thought would or wouldn't hurt, but the problem was that you'd never been with a man either, not before that day. Despite that, you were—are—the more experienced one, decades of sex with beautiful women under your belt, and you were the one who urged him on to things he wasn't sure how to do, coaxed him through the parts where a little pain was inescapable.

You are a larger man than he is. He isn't the stick figure he was in high school, the androgynous, underweight boy you vaguely remember, but he'll never be as tall as you are. His waist is narrower than yours, his shoulders not quite as broad as yours. You feel like a beast beside him, like something huge and powerful and unwieldy lying beside that slender, beatific being, flawless with youth and athleticism. You aren't ashamed of your body, you've managed to maintain the general shape you had even fifteen years ago in the prime of your life and no thirty-five-year-old would disdain to claim your chest, your stomach, your legs, or even your heart rate and cholesterol level, but he—he looks like something people write about, the thing that the Greeks must have been thinking of when they put chisel to stone. You think you've seen his image in art, in the sculptures of the Louvre, the Metropolitan, the British Museum.

You want to die of shame when you look at him, because nothing that young and glorious should be anywhere near a man as old and with as little to offer as you, but that doesn't stop you from having him in your bed.

We won't go further with the Greek analogy. You had to get very, very drunk before you had the courage to Google that, and you still don't like to think about it.

You wonder if it's normal to wake up one day after four decades of presuming to know who you are and finding that actually, you don't. You had no homosexual proclivities before this. Or maybe you did, and you just didn't notice? Maybe you wanted male flesh all along, but repressed it for the sake of the life you wanted, that your parents, deceased these ten years, wanted for you? Your marriage was so unhappy, your wife so dissatisfied with you. You'd always privately thought it was her, that she was the head case—but what if? What if she sensed all along what you failed to notice, and that's what drove her crazy? Is that your fault after all? Are your children right to hate you?

Except you're still attracted to women. You watch them pass on the street, if they warrant watching. You never took special notice of good-looking men before now, and you still don't. You examine those young men on the street who seem around college-age, and it's—academic. Cold. You try the same experiment on Takeru—once—when he visits, and the experience leaves you entirely disgusted. That is your son's best friend.

But when you think about him, when you remember his body under yours, the cries you cajole out of him with repeated promises that the house is empty and no one is there to hear him, then desire is like a river that rises through you, that floods its banks and inundates you with need, and you have to wait to stand.

There are days when you think you are a monster. Maybe you are. You are a forty-something-year-old man sleeping with a twenty-something-year-old college student. It's not good, but it could be worse. There are days when you feel like you are committing a crime, but the law says you aren't. But what does the law say about the fact that before you met him, he was a virgin, and after you met him, he wasn't, and everything he knows to do in bed he learned from you, a man old enough to be his father? There are days when you abruptly cancel the plans you had to meet with him that night, when you stop contacting him for a day or two with no explanation. There are days when you watch your phone until he answers your text, when you insist that you have to meet that night, even if he has other things he needs to do, when you are in a savage mood all day because you're thinking about all the sickeningly good-looking young people he's surrounded with on a day-to-day basis and you can't eat for the jealousy.

There are days when you think that you can't keep doing this to him, that you can't keep stringing him along in a quasi-relationship that is not going to go anywhere, that you can't keep exposing him to the scandal and danger of this becoming public.

That's something you can't think about too long without needing a drink. You don't have too much to lose, because your career is over and gone. But his—his is just starting. Whichever direction he chooses, he is at the very beginning of his life, with everything to lose or gain. Because he is so young, he doesn't understand the risks he is taking—he doesn't understand that the wrong rumor can destroy your life. Perhaps, in this new millennium, no one would care that he was gay, or at least not let it matter too much aside from the spiteful gossip, because talent has a way of silencing all opposition, but if it were to come out that he was having an—indiscretion?—with a famous ex-baseball star, with a divorced man twice his age whose own son is a friend and peer...

You cringe at the thought of your children finding out. Would they be disgusted? Would they be ashamed? Would they not care? Which would be worse?

Your children are your life. They may not believe it, but you know this to be true. There is nothing you would not do for your daughter and your son, nothing. You still pay your ex-wife to leave them alone, to keep her problems out of their lives. They don't know, and if you have your way, they won't ever know. You made the decision long ago to always put them first, to put them above yourself and any petty desires you may have.

There is nothing you wouldn't give up for them.

Nothing.

So, is there anything you've done for him? Anything, anything at all, to make up for the fact that he is letting you touch him, that he is in your bed, that you know the feel of him, the smell of him, the taste of him?

You didn't take him to a love hotel. There's that. You don't hang him on your arm and parade him around. That's impossible, even in this enlightened year. Back in your day, that kind of thing was enough to make you an untouchable. You haven't ever let the word love cross your lips, because that would be promising him something you can't deliver, and he has done you the same favor. You haven't gotten him an apartment and filled it with expensive furniture and brand clothing, as if he was a kept woman, a concept that simultaneously fills you with horror and morbidly fascinates you. Occasionally, because you're only human and you've always enjoyed getting people gifts you think they would like, you bought him something, something that you think would be innocuous and unobjectionable but which he always politely declined, so that you, feeling that to press it on him was impossible, had to make a second trip to return it.

You realized a while back that he doesn't ask you for anything. It made you sit quietly for a while, thinking about it. Almost every woman you've ever had any kind of congress with has wanted something from you. Jewelry, a particular restaurant, a favor, box office seats, tickets to this or that, flowers, a trip somewhere, lots of things—and, in the case of your ex-wife, everything you've had or got or ever will have, because you owe her that much for forcing her to bear your children and ruining her life.

Your children don't ask you for things either—though that's a comparison you are loath to draw—but they take things from you just the same. You can't remember the last time you refused them something they mentioned as necessary. And it's a benign sort of presumption that enables them to just assume you'll give them everything they want, whether it's four years at a top university with every conceivable perk or a grand wedding that will be featured in every newspaper from the Asahi Shimbun to the New York Times.

He never asks for anything.

The one time you asked him, and the memory of this still makes you burn with shame, it was when you were lying in bed together, breathless and lethargic after the act. So the whole thing was wrong and a mess from the start. You turned to him, your arm around his waist, and, in a surge of affection and sated desire and some irresistible urge to show him somehow that he means more to you than anyone else you have ever touched in this way, asked him, "Is there anything you want?"

He closed his eyes.

"It can be anything," you said. "Anything at all."

He wouldn't look at you. You remember this with a clarity that is excruciating. He turned his back to you, ignoring your perplexed questions and your hands and mouth trying to assuage him from something you don't yet see, and then he got up, dressed, and left. You were stunned at the suddenness of it, of the slam of the door downstairs while you were still sitting there naked with the sheets pulled over your hips.

He didn't come back for nearly a week, and you tortured yourself in the interim with the idea that he'd had enough of you. You texted every other day, because as a grown goddamn man, you have some restraint, and when he didn't answer any of them you had to use some of that hard-won restraint to not go running after him, to make up some implausible excuse to show up at his door and demand an explanation and then possibly apologize.

He did come back though, and you were so relieved when he fell asleep in your arms that night that you forgot to ask what you had done to make him leave. But you learned your lesson. You haven't offered him anything since.

It goes to show that even forty-something-year-olds aren't immune from unspeakable errors of judgment, and when you do finally figure it out, it's too late for you to do anything but be desperately, desperately ashamed.

Because he is young, so young, and he was a virgin when you met him, so he doesn't have the experience or the wisdom or the cynicism to separate the physical act from his feelings, but he is intelligent enough to tell the difference between something that is his and something that he is only borrowing. It hurts you to your heart to find that this is a distinction he has had to learn to make because of no one else but you, that out of everything you taught him, this is what he will remember of you. He doesn't want you to give him anything because the only thing he wants from you he knows you never will, and he thinks, with all the innocently self-destructive hope of his youth and his inexperience, that if he doesn't take anything from you and doesn't ask for anything from you, then maybe it won't hurt him so much when it's over.

You don't know what to do. He's in love with you and it's more than you should have or deserve, and you can't believe you didn't see this coming.

You don't want to give him up.

Don't feel bad. It's natural. Your children don't care for you and your ex-wife is a mad bitch who wants your money ten years after the fact. Your career is over and no one but you and your agents, who are bound by confidentiality agreements, will ever know how much of it you gave up on to be the family man you thought you should have been and failed so miserably at being. You're the chairman of the Kansai High School Football Association, a job at which you are undeniably good but which lost all its fun for you after your son went to university. Your house is empty and your hair is graying and your belly is showing a little and your vision gets worse every year. To weigh against all that you have just this: breathtaking, fugitive moments with him, this piece of your heart, who makes every other body you've ever known feel like a cheap copy.

The heart wants what it wants. You don't care if you don't deserve him. You don't care if it makes you a hypocrite. You don't care if people would call you terrible things. You don't care if it would ruin his career, his reputation, if it would drag his name and yours through the mud. You don't care if it's selfish.

You don't want to give him up. And nothing could make you do it.

Except.

You don't know how Taka found out. You don't think it matters. Taka's face is almost white, it's so pale, and his eyes are scalded with anger. Your son looks at you like he wants to hit you in the face.

"It's disgusting," says Taka—through his teeth, spitting it out. "You are twice his age. He's younger than I am. What were you doing? Sneaking around with him at—at love hotels?"

You look at Taka, without speaking. What can you say?

"End it," says Taka.

Ah. Here it is. The killing blow. The thing that both you and he have been waiting for, the thing that will separate you for the rest of your lives.

Do you think if you told Taka you were in love, it would make a difference?

"All right," you say. Wearily, resignedly. Without arguing, or hesitation. "I'll end it."

"When?"

"Tonight."

Taka looks at you, and he seems to be struggling. You've always hated seeing your children in pain, and it's shocking to you to see the feelings in his eyes now, the emotion he's trying to control. Your son's always been so self-contained.

"I can't believe," he says, his voice jagged, "you and—you and Sena—"

Your son. Who is always so calm, so cold. So controlled at all times, as if he can't bear to let anyone see what he's really feeling.

Taka says Sena's name as if it is shards of glass in his mouth.

And, because you are a father, first and foremost a father, you understand.

You want to throw up. You want to run out of the room. You want to shout until you're hoarse and maybe break everything you can get your hands on. You want to pull your son to you and protect him from all harm. You want to strangle your son to death. You want to scream at Taka, Why didn't you say anything?

You do none of those things.

You blink, sharply, because the tears sting at your eyes.

"Oh, Taka," you say, and can't think of anything else.

Taka looks at you for another long moment, and then he turns and leaves.

You sit on the edge of your neatly made bed, and you don't move for a while.