9781618857569GettingitAllStorm

by Troy Storm

  His plaintive impersonation of one of Matt’s oldest customers and nosiest friends, forced Matt’s jaws to tighten against an outright guffaw. Buddy’s croak was dead on.

  “That’s her professional diagnosis. ‘Tell Matt it’s kinda wheezy, Buddy.’ Ha! If I was as old as that car, I’d be wheezy, too.”

  Matt tried not to smile too broadly. “We’ve kept that car running for her since her old man bought it, Buddy, and we’ll…keep—”

  The young man pulled up a straight back chair as Matt’s smile slowly faded. “Old man Mendle’s been gone ten years, Matt, and Miz Mendle’s still at it, getting around, having as good a time as she can have. Moving on.”

  “Yes, and she’s doing it without another husband too.” Matt’s lax jaw clinched.

  “We’re not talking about you getting another husband,” Buddy chuckled. “We’re just suggesting you might be a little more sociable. Like Miz Mendle’s got her friends. She still chauffeurs them around.” Buddy shook his head. “They’ve got more guts than I have to get in that boat with her still driving around in high heels. You…” He chewed on his lip, knowing he was pressing his boss. “Don’t get around much anymore, as somebody made a fortune putting music to. It’s been—”

  “I’ll get around when I’m ready to get around, Buddy.” Matt’s voice started out as hard as it usually was when his young friend tried to mess with his life, to drag him back into action, but the tone quickly softened. “You’re a good friend and I’ve yelled at you long enough about sticking your nose…no, I mean, about trying to get me to get my ass back in gear.” He sighed. “You’re right. Alice would’ve wanted me to. Eventually. I know that. We all know that. But…you were never…” He didn’t want to twist the knife, but had the kid ever really known true devotion? Undying…caring…that once ripped from you…left an empty space that just plain…hurt.

  For a long, long time.

  The young mechanic’s pained look as he studied his filthy fingernails caught at Matt.

  “Damn, Buddy, I’m sorry. I forgot. You guys were like brothers.”

  A muscular forearm scrubbed across the young mechanic’s instantly damp eyes. “And they didn’t have to go, like Alice did,” he muttered grimly. “The cancer didn’t take them. They just felt like it was the right thing to do for ‘their country.’” He swallowed his loss and his anger. “Sometimes I wonder if the country’s good enough for what an awful lot of guys and good-looking, tough-minded gals are doing for it.”

  Clearing his throat, the young man hoisted his full frame from the chair. “Well, I guess I better get back to that carburetor, or whatever it is that’s wheezing. Do carburetors wheeze? We don’t even have carburetors any more! I forget what they told us in Keeping Dead Cars Alive 101.”

  He was back to his jokey self, the moist eyes dry, the grin wide as he headed for the door.

  “An’ you’re right about me keeping outta your business.” He suddenly turned back. “Though I wouldn’t have minded sitting in on that sex classes proposal thing you went through. Outright living-color porn, I heard. Whoo. Mercy. Who woulda thought our mild-mannered chairman of the board of education in this dead burg woulda got people so hot and heavy. I hear you really put it to ‘em.”

  Matt settled back in the ancient wooden desk chair, rubbing his tense neck. “Boy, that one really hit me right between the eyes. Here I’m supposed to be the objective one. To keep my cool. I thought high school kids already knew about that stuff. It never dawned on me…I thought the guys were just being asses, getting those girls pregnant. Seems like us so-called grown-ups were being pretty uneducated too about how to raise our kids.”

  “Ha.” Buddy chuckled, starting out of the office again. “I get treated like that all the time. Uneducated.” He turned in the doorway, grinning, sashaying his overall-clad hips. “No problem, honey, I tell ‘em. Just point to what it is you want and I’ll try and figure it out.” He hooted.

  “I’m thinking about giving up that board of education thing.”

  Buddy’s head cocked, eyeing his older friend carefully. “That’s great, boss. Let ‘em stew in their own juice. Give yourself some space to start…moving on. Moving on.” He chanted it like a mantra, fingers pointing skyward. “That fine head of hair is starting to look a little thin,” he threw a smile over his shoulder, ducking out of the way to miss the pencil Matt sailed through the open doorway. “Get on somebody else’s board. Alice would agree. Let ‘em stew.” He ambled away.

  Matt grimly got up to shut himself off from the increasing noise level as the work bays revved up to start another workday of repairing and maintaining the local automotive inventory.

  Waving a morning greeting to the men outside, the proprietor and manager of the CoveHaven full-service auto shop slammed the door a bit more forcefully than he had planned. Buddy meant well, though his words still rankled. They all meant well. And they all had their own burdens to bear. His wasn’t that different. Many in the town had lost one or another loved one to the grim reaper way before their time for one reason or other. And those left behind kept on going. Most of them.

  He was supposed to set an example. Roped into being the town volunteers, he and Alice had managed to keep the members of the school board on a fairly even keel pretty good for the years she had been alive, and he had done okay by himself up until the sex education brouhaha, but it had become more and more stressful. Maybe it was now time to cut that tie. Move on.

  Matt sat down and opened the bottom drawer of his desk to pull out the padded envelope and its contents.

  Well, he’d be damned.

  It was some sort of microfiber stuff. And it wasn’t women’s underwear as he had thought.

  “It’s for a guy.” A micro brief, he read from the label. “With shape-enhancing seaming.” Matt held up the garment in front of him. A card fell out.

  From your secret admirer, the looping cursive script read.

  He felt his neck heat and the temperature rise in his plain boxer-brief encased center section. There had been a time when he wouldn’t have been too surprised to get such a “gift.” He had been a good-looking man. Attractive. Well put together. A good catch. Very desirable.

  Sexy, even.

  He sure as hell hadn’t felt desirable in a while…or sexy. But lately…maybe…

  He looked around. He was alone.

  He wondered if the briefs would fit, if he could squeeze all of his assets into the flimsy appearing, soft caressing fabric with the “enhancing” crotch

  His dick wondered too. Jeez, he was thickening up, getting hot under the balls.

  Matt shook his head in disbelief. Somebody out there still thought of him as a sexy man and that this probably ridiculously priced piece of merchandise would turn him on.

  He sure as hell couldn’t go to the john in the shop to change. One of the guys might need to take a quick leak.

  He sure as hell shouldn’t strip in the office. All he needed was for Buddy or someone to catch him wiggling his butt into black, silky undies…

  Shutting the door firmly, Matt quickly yanked off his workboots, shucked his jeans, and peeled down his baggy boxer briefs.

  The black microfiber was anything but baggy. It snugged him in all the right places, lifted, and more than enhanced his happy dick and balls that after all those lonely months seemed to be regaining the rightful attention they had long been denied.

  It cuddled and perked up his ass. He’d have to get used to the cut of the fabric and the seaming that separated his butt cheeks. He felt practically naked. Like he was putting it all out there.

  Damn. He felt like a dude. Ready.

  He slid his jeans back on, the sturdy denim gliding like a spring breeze over the smooth, silky fibers.

  Matt glanced out the dusty front window of the shop office, almost completely obscured with whatever posters of local events he had been talked into displaying. He looked closer. Some of them were years out of date.

  Cleaning a circle of the glas
s with a grungy rag, he noticed what a great looking day it was outside. He hadn’t noticed when he came to work. He hardly ever noticed the scenery or the weather much anymore. But today suddenly looked great.

  Maybe he could afford to take a little break. Get outside for a while and take a little walk, maybe a drive. Check in with Leo at his barber shop. Hell, he hadn’t had a decent barbershop shave in a coon’s age.

  Yeah, that was what he needed.

  A decent shave.

  * * * *

  “Leo, do you think my hair’s getting thin?”

  Matt stared at his reflection in the wall-sized mirror of the barbershop as the proprietor, Elias “Leo” Brubaker, clipped away at his customer’s full crown of chestnut waves. He had just had Leo’s special—a close straightedge razor shave that made his jaw feel like a baby’s butt…encased in silky microfiber. Like his ass. Then he had moved on to his regular twice-monthly trim.

  “Buddy’s been messing with your head again, huh?” came the droll reply.

  “No. Well, maybe he did mention I might be starting to get a little thin on top.”

  “Huh. Buddy’s the one that’s always been a little thin on top,” Leo chuckled. “If that’s the best he can do, no wonder you’re still not dating.”

  “Jeez, Leo, is that the only thing people in this town have to gossip about? ‘When is that poor, sad widower going to get his life back together and start going out?’ You’d think we’d have more important things to concern ourselves with. As a matter of fact, the town does have more important things to think about.”

  “Yeah, heard about that speech of yours. Seems like you took everybody in town to task for not paying enough attention to our kids’ sex education.”

  “I’m thinking about resigning from the board. It appears the poor ole widower with no kids is the dumbest one of all as far as keeping up with what’s happening on high school hayrides these days.”

  “Yeah. Heard you might be quitting.”

  “What? How could—”

  “Buddy told that kid, Archie, that hangs around your shop, who told his brother-in-law who’s got a kid in high school who knows that kid that works in the library who runs the town blog—”

  “But I just mentioned it to Buddy this morning…”

  “Used to have to at least go through a buncha wires,” Leo mused. “Now just shoots through the air.” He nodded toward his smart phone, lying on the counter. “Still can’t quite figure how all that works. That’s sure changed, for sure, but the hayride thing, that’s pretty much the same as it’s always been.” The older man took a moment to adjust his glasses and make an assessment of how the haircut was progressing. “We just don’t put the fear of God into the kids like my old man used to do with me and my brothers. We might not have had all our facts straight, but we sure knew the consequences if something went wrong. Mess up and we’d pay dearly right in front of the whole town. In those days it sure wasn’t a one-way street.”

  He mused for a moment. “’Course that was before we started getting so fancy, so up-scale. Or at least the housing part of this town.” He glanced outside the barbershop’s large front window, taking in the still-to-recover Main Street business district. “Scale the economics up and sometimes it seems like you scale the values down.”

  Matt checked the back of his head in the hand mirror Leo held behind him. “Oh, I don’t know. The more you think you’ve got to lose, sometimes the more you find yourself focused on the wrong things.” Or not focused at all, he thought to himself. Sometimes you just start to let things slide.

  Leo began buzzing the electric clipper over Matt’s neck. “You mean like your hair?”

  “What?”

  “Thinking about your hair when you oughta to be thinking about how life might be passing you by.”

  “Leo, have you and Buddy…”

  “I’m just saying…” He began wielding the neck duster.

  “I haven’t even touched a woman since…” Matt muttered.

  “Want some aftershave?”

  “Yeah, I guess…no!”

  “Too late.” Leo smacked the astringent lilac scented liquid onto Matt’s neck. He was instantly flooded with memories. Years of growing up in a small town, attending a small town’s barbershop with his dad, comfortingly bathed in masculine grooming scents, enveloped by deep, rich laughs and chuckles. Safe. Protected.

  “Getcha self a massage. You’re seeming a little more tense these days.” For extra measure, Leo shot a squirt into his palms, briskly rubbed them together and immediately grabbed Matt’s hand to firmly pat the residue onto each of the man’s wrists.

  “Get a what? What are you doing?”

  “I’m gonna have me a massage parlor.” With a grand gesture, the barbershop owner unclipped the hair cape covering his only customer of the morning and swept it aside.

  “Leo!”

  “Heh. Thought that’d get your attention. Up-scaling. Gotta keep up with the times.”

  “Leo, what the hell are you talking about?” Matt pushed his trim frame out of the barber’s chair.

  “In the back room, kid’s back there painting it right now. He talked me into it. I figure if it doesn’t work out, at least I got the place cleaned out and painted. Been meaning to do that for about twenty years.”

  He banged hard on the door to the back room with the palm of his hand. “He’s probably got on them earphones. C’mon out here, son,” he called loudly. “I may have got you your first customer.”

  Matt stood waiting as the back door opened and revealed a tall, muscular, half-dressed young man clutching a paintbrush, removing earbuds.

  “What was that, Leo?” His voice was deep. He was anything but a kid.

  “This here’s Matt, who’s the big dog behind Matt Motors, which you probably don’t even know about since you’re not from around here, but it’s the best place not to get ripped off if you’ve got a junk heap over ten years old and want to keep it going for another ten or twenty years. Matt, this here’s Clayton, though he likes to be called Clay, which I find weird since he don’t look like anybody could make a pot outta him. Ha! Notice that artistic reference? I’m working on that up-scaling.”

  He slapped the smiling young man firmly on his bare, broad shoulder.

  “I’m gonna leave you two at it. Got a 3-par meet-up with an old buddy this afternoon over at the 9-holer at the brook.” Leo splashed some aftershave on himself. “Might as well let him know I’m still in the barbering business. You’ll lock up when you two finish, right, Clayton?”

  “Yes, sir,” the tall young man answered.

  Leo patted Matt on the shoulder as he passed him on the way to the front door. “The boy can give you his two cents too, Matt. ‘Bout givin’ the town ladies a shot.” He flipped the sign on the glass-paned panel to “Closed,” and shut the door behind him, a hand raised in farewell as he disappeared down the street.

  Matt and Clayton stood looking at each other, smiling tentatively.

  “The room isn’t ready,” the muscular young masseur-to-be eagerly explained, “but if you’ll give me a couple of minutes to shove things around, the table’s in there and that’s really all we need.” He turned to hurry into the freshly painted space.

  Matt stared at the retreating figure. Damn, he was built like…

  “Did Leo say you were undecided about getting a massage?” Moving to unfold a portable padded massage table into the center of the room, the young man quickly slid a small beat-up bedside table next to it. “I can give you a really good price since the place isn’t quite finished.” He laughed, somewhat nervously, “If you promise to mention me to your buddies, I’ll even give you a freebie. Did Leo say you worked at a car shop? Sorry, I had my earbuds in. And, mostly, I get around on my bike.”

  Matt walked into the freshly painted space. Eye-blinding yellow. Bright, no-place-to-hide, fucking-scare-the-shit-out-of-a-guy-who-might-be-a-little-nervous-about-letting-another-guy-put-his-hands-on-him possible customer. And
what the hell was that scent? Patchouli?

  Patchouli.

  “Uh, yeah. I work at a car shop. How’s…what’s all this about? Is this Leo’s version of a spa? For guys? Is he gonna set up a hot tub in the corner?”

  “Oh. I never thought of that.” The surprised young man considered the suggestion eagerly. “Yeah…that might work.” Then just as quickly downcast. “But, man, that would really set me back. Probably have to have the place rewired and new plumbing.” He gave a broad-shouldered resigned shrug and grinned. “I guess I’ll just have to depend on these for a while.” He held up his hands and flexed and released ten strong fingers.

  Matt felt his body pull back as the thick forearms swelled and the young man’s biceps bulged. Would not want to mess with that dude, he thought, warily.

  “What do you think?” The kid arced his astonishingly muscled arm around, twisting to take in the small room. His chest expanded, his abs compacted, and his ass thickened inside the paint-spattered cargo cut-offs that hung from his slim hips. Not a hair on him. He was like a piece of sculpture, Matt noted, again somewhat warily.

  Or a porn dude. Not that he would know much about…

  “It’s…nice,” Matt said firmly. No use bashing the kids’ hopes right at the beginning of the game and, besides, who knew? Maybe bright and perky is what guys would want after a hard day of battling Wall Street. “I’ll bet this place hasn’t been as clean since Leo first moved in sometime in the first century,” he chuckled, trying not to totally scope out the incredibly constructed young man. “You talked him in to letting you do this? You came up with the idea?”

  “Yeah.” He seemed inordinately pleased to have his business acumen recognized. His grin of satisfaction was almost as magnetic as his stunningly sexy body.

  Sexy body? A guy? Watch it, Matt, old man…

  “I worked in the city—you know, downstate…New York City—as a personal trainer in a really fancy spa, but I’m really not a city guy and I’ve always wanted, like, a place of my own in a place like this.” Clayton easily pushed packed boxes and discarded furniture out of the way.