A year or so ago I wrote here about a girl I'll be calling Liberty, a lovely strawberry-blonde bartendrix girl with whom I had a casual affair all through much of 2018. I wrote here about her first encounter with an Older Man--- in her case, she was sixteen and he was in his early thirties, the owner of a kayak shop in the Pacific Northwest.
Liberty told me this about Older Men:
[S]he decided she liked Older Men, or at least was comfortable with them. That made it easy when she and I first started talking a couple of years ago, when she was at the oyster bar. She thought I was interesting and the age thing meant pretty much zero to her. When I told her my age--- she just shrugged. What mattered, she said, was that I was interesting. We'll use each other for the stories, she said. We'll trade stories and we'll learn things.
I liked the word she used-- comfortable. I'd heard that before from girls when they were talking about affairs with Older Men. Comfortable. A friend who now divides her time between Edinburgh and London told me that having affairs at uni (yes, Oxford) with much older men felt so much simpler than dealing with boys her own age. She understood the terms of the exchange, and so did they. She could explore things with them and then lie back in bed and question them about so many topics. The whole Oxbridge vision of mentoring-plus-sex seemed perfect to her, and being someone's muse and pupil was a role she understood.
Another friend-- this one now in south Florida, but who'd been at USC for grad school --used the same word: comfortable. For her, that meant feeling free from drama and demands. She did laugh once and say that from sixteen on, she'd tried to avoid becoming involved with anyone who wasn't twenty years older than she was. It was never, she told me, about Older Men taking advantage of her. Older Men, she said, had always been willing to show her things, to talk with her about the world, to let her climb out of bed and go through their bookshelves.
Liberty said the same-- We'll trade stories and we'll learn things. That I could understand. I felt the same way about her, in a way. A neo-hippie girl with long legs and an aversion to wearing underwear who'd tell me about life in Santa Fe and about growing up in the Pacific Northwest...and, yes, teach me kayaking and all about estuary and gulf systems.
Liberty told me that what she liked about affairs with Older Men was that they all had kinks and obsessions that they'd rarely (if ever) been able to talk about with anyone. She was always willing to listen and learn...and not mock them. In Santa Fe there'd been the owner of some little Southwest Modern gallery who was very much a hidden foot fetishist, He'd been terrified to tell anyone about that. Liberty at eighteen had just laughed and asked him why he'd think she'd be disgusted by that. She remembered sitting on the back of his sofa, barefoot in tiny denim shorts while he used wet wipes to go over her feet and then licked her ankles and arches and sucked her toes. She told me that he was amazed that she'd run her fingers through his hair and tell him it felt good. She had no problems, either, giving him foot jobs or letting him cum on her bare feet. She liked the idea of foot jobs--- she always liked learning skills ---and she liked making him feel good. They'd have more standard kinds of sex, too, and she'd curl up next to him in bed or on his sofa and tell him (truthfully) that it was all fun.
When they weren't in bed, he'd show her about sketches and watercolors and how to paint and sketch. He was probably forty, she said, and all she felt about the age difference was that he had more stories to tell her and more things to teach her. I know how to paint desert light, she said, and I give great foot jobs. I expect to have my toes sucked, too.
When she was at uni, taking environmental science classes, she went on a field trip with one of her classes--- and at one point the class (eight students?) camped at a former state park, an 1812-vintage fort. There was a fair amount of weed smoked and bourbon consumed, and a lot of pairing off. Liberty spent the night in a sleeping bag with the class instructor. She remembered riding him while he told her about the fort and about the way the coastline had changed. At one point that night she was standing naked on a dock, wrapped in just the sleeping bag while he pointed out boats moving in the distance and told her about the early days of settlement on the coast. She took me kayaking there once upon a time, and she walked me around the fort and told me what she'd learned from those nights paired off with the instructor. I'm always the one who can talk about history and odd bits of the past, and it was wonderful to have Liberty being my tour guide, having a lovely girl be the one to tell me about things.
She told me that I was easy to talk to, that she liked that part of my being older. And she liked my stories. Maybe I'll make you a character in a novel one day, Liberty said. And I know this'll disappoint you, but you won't be the villain.
She is I think back in the Pacific Northwest these days. I saw a mutual friend who told me Liberty had sent her a postcard from Vancouver Island. That would've been just before the Red Death closed down travel. I hope she'll come back down here to my city. I would love to know more of her stories.
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