getting older is sexy

My 20s are gone and now my 30s feel more alive, erotic and adventurous than I could ever have expected.

I rub my eyes and blink at the bright white light coming through fogged up window. It’s freezing and I’m naked. I turn on the heater and walk over to boil the kettle. While the water warms I grab the percolator. Twist the top, empty the old coffee in the compost, spoon out new coffee, twist the top back on and put it on the stove. I stand there, hypnotised, it starts boiling and steam billows out the side of it. I wave my hand through the steam, enjoying the feeling of warm air blowing against my skin.

I make a tea and bring it over to the couch, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders and I pick up my phone. Who has messaged me? I scroll through for about 30 seconds and, bored, throw it further down the couch. Instead I reach for my book from the glass side table.

I relax into the blanket as the room slowly warms. The sunlight streaming in hits the couch and I celebrate by taking a warm sip of earl grey. I feel the pressure and gentle prickle of the woollen carpet under my feet and my right hand, nursing the cup, is toasty.

I only started my book yesterday and am already obsessed. I was so close to staying in last night and finishing it, but peer pressure took me away. I want to be alone on the couch and I’m relishing you sleeping in. A morning stolen.

After a while, I hear the door squeak and your footsteps on the old wooden floorboards. The light hits your eyes as you step through into the room. You bring your hands up and start rubbing the sleep out of them as you squint into the room. Your hair, tangled from sleep, runs over your shoulders, and I notice the last of your tan from summer is starting to fade - your butt and hips only slightly more pale than the faded gold of your legs and back.

“It’s so bright,” you mumble, blinking and shielding your eyes still.

“How did you sleep?” I ask as you walk over to me. You straddle me, your skin warm from bed and being wrapped between two blankets. You gently finger my hair, trailing your hands down my neck as you nuzzle in closer. I put my book down and rest my hand on your hip.

“No! You can’t touch me. Your hands are freezing!”

I tell you there is coffee on the stove. I watch you walk over and I have the feeling that I am seeing you as though for the first time again. I notice a new freckle on your shoulder. Is that a grey coming through at your temple? The mole just above your hip, that I must have kissed at least a hundred times.

“You making coffee for me in the morning is the sexiest thing in the world.”

I share some of the blanket with you as you grab your phone and start scrolling, resting your head on my shoulder in between sips. I pick up my book and keep reading.

“You’re almost finished. Didn’t you only start yesterday?” You ask.

“I’m hooked. You have to read it once I’m done - it is so short but I’m obsessed with how it’s written.”

I tell you it’s about a millennial couple living the perfect digital nomad life in Berlin. That before they know it time gets away from them and the meaninglessness of their life pervades everything. That they’re now in Portugal trying on their next hustle and I need to know how it finishes, even though I sort of already know what will happen.

I read you some of the opening.

Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face-down on the seat.

“It feels like some millennials instagram from about 2017,” you laugh.

I put the book down and kiss you. Your breath is bitter from the coffee and I swear I can taste the cigarettes still from last night. I pull away and you put your fingers in my mouth. I bite down, a little hard, and you pull them back, slapping me slightly on the face.

“I need to shit.”

I spread myself out over the couch, stealing the warmth from where you were sitting, and turn back to my book

——

We’re walking home, just the two of us from the pub. The air is warm and smells like sweet and a bit tangy after the rain. I hear a tram on the main road and a cyclist passes us as we reach the corner on the way to your house. We’re laughing as she tells me about her work nemesis and there is the briefest pause as the the sky - a pastel sunset - opens up in front of us.

We stop and stare at the pink wispy clouds.

“Can I kiss you?”

She smiles and tell me that of course I can. She stands on her tiptoes and I bend down toward her and we kiss gently. Little more than a faint meeting of lips. We both pull away, leaving each other desperate for more.

She grabs my hand and leads me to her place. We step in and as I take off my shoes she turns on a series of lamps, and a diffuse golden light warms the living room. I step off the floorboards and onto her brown, shaggy rug and stare at the paintings on her wall - abstract hues slashed, dotted or dabbed on canvas, an entire wall of small paintings of boobs and hips. I admire her bookshelf - why is there nothing sexier than seeing someone through the books they read - and lightly finger her plants.

“I have a lot of friends who are artists,” she says, watching me look around her small living room.

I tell her Motherhood by Sheila Heti was one of my favourite books during lockdown, and that I read Bunny last year and it made me laugh so much, while making me so glad I never went to a bougie uni.

“Should we go into the bedroom?”

We move together through the door, our bodies already at ease with each other, no sign of the awkward dance that I’ve sometimes experienced. She kisses me as soon as we’re in the room, harder, hungrier than earlier and I kiss her back - matching her energy.

She pulls off my top and tells me to take hers off and we fall onto the bed, on top of the doona. I bring my hand behind her head and pull her face and lips toward me again as she fumbles with my belt.

I rub her nipples between my fingers as she rolls me on my back. Straddling my chest, she grabs me and starts playing with me as I’m pinned down underneath her, my jeans still half way down my legs.

“Fuck,” I moan as she keeps going.

“Your turn,” she tells me as she rolls off me. I scramble out of my jeans, tossing them beside the bed somewhere as I peel her jeans and undies off in one go.

Naked, our bodies press together as I lie back on the bed and kiss her again. My hands trail down her spine, feeling goosebumps rise as I drag them along. I pull back and roll her onto her back. Kissing her freckles and tracing lines between them, as though I’m trying to create a picture by joining the dots.

She reaches for me, pulling me back beside her.

“Will you ride my face?”

She bites my lip and pushes me on my back again. My neck trapped between her thighs as presses her pussy against my tongue and face. She starts rocking back and forth, her hands pressing into my ribs for support as she arches her back. I’m entirely consumed in the moment, tasting her, feeling the pressure of her hips and legs.

I try to speak - to say don’t stop - but can’t say anything as she starts rubbing faster and faster.

My body arches and writhes. She’s running down my mouth, my lips, my chin and I want to - need to - taste all of her. She cums, pressing hard against my tongue as she moans and her body tenses and releases.

“I need you inside me now.”

We lie there afterwards, pulling the blankets over us, her head on my chest.

“I love getting older and people knowing what they want,” I tell her. “It’s so hot.”

She tells me that she spent too long being ashamed of her desire and her body and at some point she just leaned into it - and that life is so much more fun when you do.

“There was something that just changed in my late 20s or early 30s where I realised this was my body and I should stop feeling weird or gross about it. And it’s so liberating.”

I tell her that I am not sure we are meant to say this, but that I love getting older. That it feels erotic - that our bodies are starting to reflect a life lived. I show her the grey hairs dotting parts of my beard and grabs my finger and runs it over the lines around her eyes.

——

I love the feeling of my own skin. I get back from a run and peel off my t-shirt, standing for a moment in the cool air, the damp cotton lying on the floor at my feet. I take off my socks and shorts and stand in front of the mirror. I look at myself properly, rather than just glancing as I pass.

I notice the slight tan line on my upper arms - the last of summer - from wearing t-shirts. Little black bug-spots on my neck and face, pasted there by dried sweat from running through swarms of them along the creek. I trace my finger over my cheekbones and beard, my mirror-self copying me in reverse. Blue eyes, brown-blond-red hair, wet and matted on my forehead, a beard made up of so many different colours - blond, red, brown, flecks of grey here and there. If I look hard enough I can see both my parents in my face. Are those my dad’s cheekbones? Maybe my mum’s nose and lips?

I linger a moment on my shoulders, looking at how years of yoga have broadened them. I trace my fingers down the smooth pale - too pale? -skin over my sides and chest that rarely see the sun. They continue down over the stretch marks around my hips. Bodily memory of puberty and growing, and over the scar on my thighs from bike crashes, soccer injuries, random sticks and branches while hiking.

I turn from the mirror, bending down to pick up my clothes and make my way to the shower. Feeling the strength in my legs. Is it weird I feel stronger, hotter and more myself as I get older? I wonder why we’re so primed to feel the opposite, when my experience is of growing into myself as the years fall by.

I turn on the water, wait for the temperature to stabilise and plunge my head under, feeling the stream pour over my body, off my neck, down my back, through the gap between my butt cheeks, off my dick, as though I am peeing, down my legs - flattening my hairs to my skin - and finally down the drain.

——

It’s a perfect autumn day. I lock my bike against a road sign, and turn to see him standing under the tree. I wave and laugh as a chill southerly wind sends bright yellow and brown leaves fluttering between us. I pull my jacket tighter and walk over to him. We hug and as I pull away I look at the people around us eating.

“I’m so hungry,” I say. “Hi, btw.”

“Let’s get a borek.”

We walk through the park, our conversation picking up exactly where we left off yesterday. I laugh and tell him normal people would get whiplash trying to follow along as we navigate the week - a book I’ve recently read, his need to quit his job and his new erotic explorations.

For months he and his wife have been testing out being open - he hit his mid 30s and the shame he felt around kink and desire melted away and was replaced by a thirst to explore all of it. He tells me about a new partner he was with on the weekend.

She was about 20 years older than him and he tells me the dynamic was electric. That there was something about being with someone who knew exactly what they wanted, who could hold tension without flinching, that he’d never encountered before.

“I can’t believe I spent so many years thinking about bodies and fucking, when true eroticism was sitting right there,” he tells me. “I’ve never felt that depth in sex before. We were skating right at the edge and it was thrilling and - if I’m being honest - at times overwhelming.”

We walk along the street, the pale sun doing its best to warm us, until we get to the borek store. I order a cheese and spinach and spicy potato, while he gets two lamb. Wrapped in paper bags warming our hands, we head back to the park.

I tell him I’m jealous of him experiencing something so new and thrilling for the first time. It’s rarer and rarer as you get older to have that explosion of excitement and joy at something so genuinely new.

“A little bit. But mostly, I’m just excited to keep exploring a part of me that I pushed down and hid for years.”

——-

There’s 30 of us, crammed into a tiny room above a restaurant. Teal walls broken by erotic paintings - a man with a stunning necklace pulling off a vivid blue dress; three bodies entangled together beside a river, framed in ornate gold. The rain lashes at the windows and I hear the occasional trams go by on the road outside.

There are speeches being made - the best friend of the couple - is telling us how much she loves them. That watching them grow together over the past 10 or so years has been one of the joys of her life. We toast and I take a another sip from my drink. For good measure, I fork some roasted beetroot onto focaccia, add some cheese and bring it to my mouth.

“I’m quite drunk,” I lean over and tell you. My face feels flushed, from both the alcohol and the warmth of the room. I tilt forward and awkwardly shrug off my suit jacket - maroon tartan that miraculously matches the floor tiles - and you help to ease it off my back.

“I know. It’s really quite obvious,” you say as you tilt my head toward you and pash me. Your lips are wet and full and taste like negroni, cigarettes and smoked fish.

“I never loved kissing smokers before you,” I whisper into your ear before the speech has ended.

I look around the room, the dim, flickering light of candles on the table matched by antique lamps dotted on furniture around the walls. Everyone here is so beautiful, I tell you. And it’s true. Our friends, friends of friends, and strangers, all looking confident and in their element. It is a room dominated by browns and maroons - laced tops, corduroy pants, plaid suits. Or blacks and blues - dresses, skirts, tops. The density and weirdness of the space, mixed with the heat and alcohol leaves me feeling as though I’ve been transported to a world where everyone is captivatingly beautiful.

But it’s a different kind of beautiful to what I’m used to seeing - not the kind correlated with youth. I’m drawn instead to the signs that people have lived. These are bodies that have been hurt, tossed around, partied until they’re exhausted. There are bodies here that have had kids, abortions, miscarriages. I look at the person opposite me on the table, who I have never met before, and watch how the faint lines of his face shift as he laughs or focuses on a conversation. I notice how effortless he is with his partner, her Mallen Streak strikingly framing her face.

It feels like a room of people who are starting to settle into themselves. I feel it in you too. I turn toward you as you place your hand on my thigh under the table. I lean in and kiss you and for a moment we exist entirely in our own universe.

“Another drink?”

We make our way to the bar, but the line is endless. People from the wedding upstairs and diners downstairs coming together. You kiss me, and I push my tongue gently against yours, causing you to moan softly. You put your hand in my pocket and grab my cock. I feel it harden as you squeeze.

“I need to go to the toilet,” you say loudly, making eyes at me.

You push me through the door and lock it, before I grab you and press you against the wall, bringing my hands up under your dress. I can barely focus as I pull your undies over your ass and part way down your leg, before running my fingers over your pussy.

“You’re so wet.”

You bite my lip hard and kiss me harder. I rub my finger against you, slowly circling your clit, as I grab your ass with my other hand. You tell me not to stop as I rub my fingers faster and faster, feeling you get wetter. Someone tries the toilet door, and in reaction you moan loudly.

Younger me might have frozen. Instead, I find myself not caring in the slightest - if anything, it turns me on more.

You keep moaning as you get closer. I feel your body tense and then quiver.

“Fuckkkk,” you breathe as you cum.

You drop almost immediately to your knees and unbuckle my belt, pulling my pants half way down my legs. You grab my balls before gripping my cock and teasing me with your mouth.

“Now it’s your turn to let them know the toilet is occupied,” you smile.

You grip me harder and lick me from my balls to my tip. I’m dying. I can barely keep myself together when you finally take me. I moan and you, looking into my eyes, tell me I need to be louder.

I kiss you afterwards, and we check ourselves in the mirror, before you open the door and walk seamlessly past the line of people waiting for the toilet. I follow a few steps behind, breaking into a grin I can’t help. Fuck, I think. This is what it’s all about. We head back upstairs to the crowded mess of people waiting for us.