9781618857569GettingitAllStorm (3 page)

“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 glass 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.