If Kenn Blake had known that Shaun thought of him as, ‘Old Man Blake’ he would have smiled ruefully to himself. At almost Forty-one, he was still in good condition, partly maintained by his work as a carpenter, building and repairing houses for the great and good of Dutchess County, and partly, (when he wasn’t out in the mountains running, climbing and kayaking) working out in his home gym... if he felt the need.
The gym had been his gift to himself after Judith had died. They had been childhood sweethearts, so marriage had seemed inevitable, no surprise to them, or to anyone else. The inability to have children, however, had been. They’d tried pretty much everything but were eventually advised that kids just weren’t an option for them, ‘...unless they’d like to adopt?’ Jude had shot this down, and so they concentrated instead on creating and building the business and enjoying their weekends up in the hills.
Then as if from nowhere had come the breast cancer, sudden and shocking, from diagnosis, to death, in only six months. That had been nearly five years ago. To cover his grief, Kenn had concentrated on his work-life. And on the weekends when he wasn’t working, he’d high tail it to the wilderness to lose himself in the wildness and beauty. Over the years since Jude’s death, there had been a few tentative approaches from well-meaning wives of friends, trying to hook him up with single girlfriends, or coy attempts to get to know him better by other single women in the town, but as he’d stayed remote they’d drifted off leaving him to his widowhood, work and wilderness.
Kat Monkton was a friend of Judith’s who’d tried to set him up with one of her colleagues at the hospital and while he was friendly and appreciative, he didn’t encourage the contact and she, like the others, had lost interest after a while. It was partly out of guilt that he’d agreed to help Kat out by employing her son, ‘Chip’. He seemed like a good kid, dropped out of college or something, chisel-jawed like his father, but with none of the attitude. He’d given him a few delivery and collection jobs to do which had worked out ok; the kid even remembered the receipts and so, that morning, Kenn had finally trusted him to wash his pride and joy, the Toyota Tundra. The result of a long held dream, and his accountant’s advice, which he’d followed to offset his taxes. The old transit was still good enough for his work, and folk in the district knew him well enough that he had nothing to prove, so the Tundra was saved for the mountains and four-wheel drive. Come the weekend, he was over the bridge and off to the hills.
Kenn pulled the Ford into the parking bay in front of the Hardware store on East Market Street to pick up some more bolts and hack-blades before heading off to the Thornton place in Tivoli. Old man Thornton’s porch had finally succumbed to the trials of time, and while it wasn’t a difficult job, it was time consuming and required a sensitive approach, as a lot of these old buildings were listed. Kenn prided himself on doing a good job and never cut-corners or slacked-off, kinda old-school he guessed, but that was how he liked to do things.
He came out of the store a half hour later with the blades and bolts and some lengths of nylon rope, to replace those he’d forgotten to bring from the house. As he thought about the rope, he suddenly remembered something else he’d forgotten, ‘Dammit!’ he cursed quietly, as he pictured the keys to the Thornton place swinging on a hook by the pass door into the garage. Because he’d brought the pick-up out for the kid to wash, he’d forgotten the keys in his haste. There was a whole heap of traffic on South Broadway; they were digging up sections of the road for cable. It had taken him almost twenty minutes to get into town. It’ll be quicker if I run he thought. He dumped the rope and hardware into the old Ford, and started the half mile trek back to the house.
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Shaun, still engaging his abs, slowly lowered the bar with one final exhalation. He sat up, wiped his brow with his forearm and looked at himself in the mirror. A light sheen of sweat glistened on his skin, and his pecs stood slightly proud with the nipples well defined. He checked out his arms in the reflection, he was satisfied to see a thick strong vein like a cord, running down the sharp curve of his biceps, even un-flexed and enjoyed the light heat of strain in his triceps. The weights had initially been set at a little heavier than he was used to, so he’d removed a few rings until it was a more comfortable load. He lay back on the still damp towel with his legs spread to either side of the bench, preparing to do another set of reps with the weight-set he was using; as he did so he smiled to himself thinking, ‘Mr B. must lie back just like this, on this same towel’ and grinned as he felt a stirring in his cock at the image, and a tightening in his nuts as he sighed and stiffened...
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