sake

The realisation of just how few personal belongings your dad truly had only dawned on you when you returned home after his funeral and were left alone in the apartment that had been your shared home for the past few months, ever since he'd bought it just for the two of you. The place you'd always found so cozy, warm, full of life and small trinkets suddenly felt horribly cold, bare, with nothing to catch your eye and so uncomfortable that the thought of staying there for too long was making your shudder, stirring a desire to leave and settle into a room in some run-down motel on the outskirts of the state instead.

It turned out that the shelves and hangers in dad’s wardrobe were almost empty – he’d thrown out all his old and worn-out clothes as soon as he moved to the new apartment. It turned out that there weren’t as many decorative trinkets scattered around the house as you’d thought. You didn’t always bear in mind the fact that dad never even liked any sorts of knick-knacks, buying only what he considered necessary and practical, or things that rarely caught his eye: a small clay figurine of a wolf on the table in his room and a couple of small oil paintings depicting wildflowers – that supposedly was the extent of the decor in your apartment. He often joked that he couldn’t take those trinkets with him to the grave, so the was no point in buying so many, – the words of a man for whom death was not merely a semi-abstract concept that ordinary people of his age pondered with dread from time to time only, but something that had been with him for almost his entire conscious life, at first following him close on his heels, later walking side by side with him. Dad rarely spoke about the specifics of his work, not because he wasn’t authorised to let you in on state secrets or didn’t want to frighten you with stories of the living dead. It was that his home was the one and only special place for him where the horrors would recede, if only for a short while. Your embrace was the anchor that helped him stay on the right path, instilling a sense of security, because even you dad, a protector through and through, sometimes needed to feel safe and protected. For Leon, bringing his work matters home meant depriving himself of that sense of security and dragging you into the maelstrom of death and horror, breaking your heart, staining you with the smell of blood and rotting flesh. He would never have done that to his little angel. Even without this, he'd already found himself regretting being your father, not in the sense that he didn’t want you to come into his life at all, but in the sense that you’d come to him of all people, rather than to someone who wouldn’t be constantly teetering on the brink of death, risking leaving you alone in an empty apartment, where it was only after his death that you did realise just how empty it really was. As it turned out, it wasn’t that the flat was full of stuff before – it was simply that your father’s presence in it always seemed so overwhelming to you that you didn’t have time to notice the walls and shelves, which had been bare all along.

Now these cold walls are squeezing your body and mind in a vice, making you shiver as if with a chill, awakening a desire to shut yourself off from the whole world – from the concrete walls, from the empty apartment, and from the world where your father was dead, six feet under, whilst you, for some reason, carried on living without him. Perhaps it was precisely your desire to escape the cold that finally made you pick up his jacket which, of all your father’s belongings, seemed to be the most vivid reminder that he had once lived here. That jacket, which you were afraid to even look at after he died, because it reminded you of him too much, because it smelled of him and was practically part of his body, as he sometimes joked. Leather jacket with a fur collar, lying on his bed, exactly where he’d left it last and which he’d hardly ever taken off since buying it, turns out to be just what you need when the walls of the once cosy and bright home begin to weigh on you way too much. You throw the jacket over your shoulders and sit down on the bed, afraid to breathe, afraid to move, only feeling how your heart begins to beat faster. You gently rest your head on the pillow, wrapping yourself even more tightly in your makeshift blanket, and close your eyes as you feel warmer, as if the leather of the jacket still retains the warmth of your dad’s body, making you feel as though he’s lying right there beside you.

The warm collar of his jacket, lined with soft black fur, takes the place of his neck you used to nuzzle and breath in his scent that still lingers there: the scent of his aftershave, the scent of the perfume you gave him for his forty-ninth birthday, the scent of his sweat, barely perceptible. You place your hand on top of the leather sleeve and wrap it around your waist, just as he used to do when you fell asleep side by side, tucking your legs up to your chest and curling up into a foetal position, without, however, fully realising the ultimate purpose of your actions. You must've just gone insane, haven’t you? What is the grief-stricken daughter hoping to achieve when she wraps herself up like this in her dead father’s jacket? Is she craving the warmth of his body, which has long since faded from both the leather and fur, and to imagine that he's lying beside her, naked, flushed and sweaty after making love to her? Is she hoping that the scent of his clothes he used to wear when he was still alive will help her forget that he will never be able to touch her again? It all seems almost ridiculous – of course, the warmth of his jacket could never compare to the warmth of his body, even thinking about it feels almost like an insult to your beloved late father, but your hand still slowly reaches down, between your legs, pulling the sleeve of his jacket with it, and you’ve probably gone completely mad with grief, which has clamped itself onto your soul with a death grip and refused to let go for a single second since the news of your dad’s death divided your life into ‘before’ and ‘after’, but for a split second, that scent and that warmth make you banish the image of your father’s pale, lifeless face in the coffin from your mind and feel his living presence right beside you with all five (or six?) of your senses. The pad of the middle finger presses gently against your clit, making you shudder and gasp for air. You haven’t touched yourself since your father passed away, nor have you even thought about it, so that little mound of skin, starved of touch, immediately sends an electric shock through your body, forcing your brain to switch off and shift the command centre a little lower down. The fur on the collar of his jacket tickles your nose as you bury your face in it, and muffles your moans as you begin to slide your finger more intensely over your slippery clit, feeling a long-forgotten wave of arousal rise from your lower abdomen, one you last felt when you were lying in bed next to him. Your free hand grabs one of your tits, pinching your nipple between your thumb and forefinger, just as he always did while the fingers of his other hand caressed your pussy. It’s an almost perfect re-enactment of your late night peculiar family bonding activities, only lacking his heavy breathing tickling the back of your neck, and his whispers telling you how much he loves you, and perhaps a couple of wet, tender kisses on your temple along the way, but these are all secondary details, optional and not really significant, because what matters most now is the feeling of his hands caressing your body and his scent seeping straight into your brain. You clamp your thighs around your hand as all your bodily functions come to a standstill in the anticipation of orgasm, except for your heart, which begins to pound somewhere in your throat, cutting off the oxygen supply to your brain.