I sat nursing a bottle in the abandoned bar with my usual thousand-yard stare. I didn’t see him edge up beside me, only the whiff of perfume alerted me. He was about twenty with perfectly-groomed, gelled hair. His face shone with moisturiser and subtly-painted lashes highlighted his brown eyes.
I thought he was a rent boy: why else would he be talking to a sixty-three-year-old, flabby, balding man. I glugged down my beer and left for another bar to drink myself into oblivion.
My dreams were full of him; not only the acrobatics under the duvet but something more soulful. I fantasised a relationship with me as the older man mentoring the younger in the pleasures of the world.
I returned to the bar every night but the boy did not. Then, I saw him with young men and women his age in a pub I had never visited before.
Emboldened by my dreams, I caught his evocative eye and held my bottle aloft. He came over.
To my astonishment and delight he was seeking the same thing. He was a university student and not a rent boy. Our gymnastics under the duvet were muted by my age, but I began to guide him on literature, classical music and the difference between fine wines and Tesco Finest.
Three months later, he graduated and I never saw him again. A year later, I heard he died from HIV complications.
The medicines I now take celebrate the happiest days of my life.
Click here for more stories about old age
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 