This story actually happened to me. It's not fiction, as unbelievable as it will sound when you hear it. I've changed the names, but the details are all true.
I met Matt and his wife Allie when they first pulled into their driveway as new owners of the home next door to my wife and me.
The house, a rundown split level, had been owed by an old guy when we first moved into our place. Tom was in his late 70s then. A widower, he lived with his 50-something son, who had many health problems exacerbated by alcoholism and drug addiction. I helped Tom out a bit, responding to calls when he found his son drunk or drugged on the front lawn or, in the last years, unable to pick himself up after a fall in his bedroom on the lower level of the house. Eventually, the son died of an overdose, and Tom moved off to live closer to his other son and his family.
The real estate agent told us that the house had been sold sight-unseen to a couple in their late 20s who were moving to our area from California so that the husband could attend the physician's assistant training program at the state university and medical system nearby. They had loaded all their belongings into a rental truck, and they were driving cross country to get here.
I was sitting in the front room of my house reading on the May evening when they arrived, so I saw the lights of the truck as they pulled into the driveway. Alone in the house that night (my wife was on a business trip), I went out on the front porch, just to say hello as my new neighbors got out of the cab.
Allie came out onto the driveway from the passenger side first. She was beautiful: thin and athletic, with a pretty face and long blond hair. She had an easy smile, and she thanked me for the offer I made to help them in any way I could.
Matt spend a minute in the cab, gathering things up that they would need in the house immediately, so I saw him second. He stepped out of the cab onto the truck's running board.
The easy, casual way he paused there, half in and half outside the cab, mobile phone and earphones in one hand, holding onto the door frame of the truck with the other; the way the sinewy muscles in his arm and shoulder flexed as he held himself at an angle away from the side of the truck; the lean muscular lower thighs and calves showing below his athletic shorts -- they all took my breath away. He jumped off the truck, bounded over the low bushes that separated his driveway from my side yard, and shook my hand.
"Jesus," I thought, "he's BEAUTIFUL." I think I stammered a bit as I offered my help once again.
He thought about it a second and then said, "Well, we're not going to try to move any furniture in at this hour, but I would like to get our mattress into the house. Could you help?"
"Sure!" I said, and I bought myself the opportunity to spend a few more minutes admiring his easy physical grace.
In the first three months they were there, Matt and Allie tried to get the house in shape before Matt's program began in late August. They closed off a back door near the kitchen to create a half bath (They planned later to open the wall at the back of the dining area to add French doors out to a future deck.), they ripped out wall to open the kitchen to the living area, and Matt did a lot to clean up the landscaping.
He was obviously comfortable in his own skin. Whenever I knocked on the front door, he'd answer it shirtless. And even if he was wearing a shirt, when he went outside to do something in the yard, he'd at least strip to the waist, and he'd sometimes go further: In the height of the North Carolina summer, for instance, he cut the lawn in running shorts and flip-flops.
He was incredibly fit -- tall and lean, with light brown hair on his chest and stomach that emphasized his pectoral and abdominal muscles -- more skateboarder or parkour enthusiast than weightlifter.
He was also really casual about his looks, as good-looking guys can be. His medium-brown hair was naturally curly, and the curls would bleach out to blond in the summer months, so he would get a buzz cut, and be all brown and military until the hair would grow in and the sun would change him to blond Greek god. He did the same thing with his beard, keeping things scruffy. I used to think that he shaved about once a week, until I realized that he had a trimmer that maintained his beard at about a three-day length and kept it off his neck and cheeks.
I spent a lot of time at the windows watching Matt work in his yard. When the opportunity arose, I offered my help or asked for his. When I saw him in his driveway (stripped to the waist, of course) sharpening the blade of his lawn mower, for instance, I ran out to ask him to do mine. And when he decided to pull all the old materials out of the lower floor of the house to get ready for a renovation, I spent a few hours helping him and his friends haul the materials to a roll-off refuse container at the curb. I'm generally a good neighbor, but believe me when I tell you that these contacts were all about getting as close as possible to Matt's body.
Almost a year and a half after they moved in, Allie and Matt announced they were expecting a baby, and Matt decided that he wanted to do something with the back yard. On our side of the street, all of our yards sloped down to woods and eventually to a fairly sizable stream. Matt wanted to put in a railroad-tie retaining wall and then fill in behind it to create a level play space immediately off the back of the house. His father, who was in construction, came in to help with the wall, but when it was done and that Matt's family had returned home, he still had to do the filling in.
I offered to help, and so we found ourselves on Matt's driveway on a Monday morning in early August, staring at 10 cubic yards of top soil. The plan was to use our two wheelbarrows to move the load, all in one day, and get grass seed and straw down before rain that was predicted for Wednesday.
I don't know how this happened -- I certainly didn't plan it, and I probably wouldn't have had the nerve to execute the plan even if I HAD planned it -- but we guys were alone. My wife was gone on another business trip, and Allie had flown home to see her family before she would be unable to fly in the latter stages of the pregnancy. So there were we, me in old jeans, a tee shirt and work boots, and Matt in shorts and work boots (no shirt, naturally).
I was in heaven. By 9 a.m., Matt was covered in sweat, and his muscles were pumped. Without having to stare, I got the best view of his body I'd ever hoped for. We drank water all day, of course, but at the end of the day, Matt asked me if I wanted a beer. I told him I was more of a wine drinker, so I'd stick with water, but as we sat together looking over our work -- all the soil moved and leveled, seed distributed and raked in, and straw spread -- he chugged a beer.
Suddenly, there was enormous tension in the air.
When he'd come back out from getting his beer, he'd sat down very close to me on a low wall that separated the back yard from the carport. As a single guy, if another guy had done this to me, I would have "accidentally" brushed my thigh against his and then, if he didn't move his leg away, I would have pressed further. But here, faced with the same situation with my incredibly good-looking -- but also much younger, and also MARRIED -- next-door neighbor, I was screaming at myself inside my head: "This is crazy. He's more than 20 years younger than you are. You know his wife. HIS wife knows YOUR wife! You can't DO this!"
I slapped him on the thigh, said "Well, I guess I'll go clean up," and got up to go into my house.
"Hey," he said. I looked back. "How about I order a pizza?"
"Great," I said, smiling. "I'll bring over a bottle of wine. I know: you're a beer guy, but I'm ready for a drink, myself." I was about to turn again, when he stood and took a step closer to me. I wanted to step in even closer to him; I wanted to reach out and touch his chest. But, with the voices still screaming inside my head, I stood still, hands at my sides.
"Can I ask you a question?" he said. He had a good five inches on me in terms of height, so he was looking down at me.
"Sure," I said.
"Are you ashamed of your body?" he asked.
"What?" I chuckled. "Why would you ask that?"
"Well, I don't think I've ever seen you with your shirt off," he said. "You do all your own yard work, and you exercise and run, and yet in all the time we've lived here, I don't think I've ever seen you without a shirt. From what I can see, you're in pretty good shape. I can't imagine why you wouldn't take off your shirt once in a while."
I thought my head was going to explode. Instead, I laughed.
"No," I said. "It's just that I have a history of melanoma in my family -- my father died from it -- and I try to keep myself covered up against the sun."
He glanced up and to his right, where the sun had now ducked behind the tops of the trees in the back yard.
"Not much sun now."
"What? You want me to take off my shirt?" I asked.
"Yeah."
The tension was unbearable. I smiled. "Stay casual," I thought. "Be cool."
I crossed my arms in front of my torso, grabbed the hem of my damp tee shirt in both hands, and peeled it off over my head.
"Wow," he said, looking at my chest and stomach. "I thought you were in pretty good shape, but you have a great body."
"Oh, stop," I said. I had always exercised regularly -- a combination of free weights and aerobics. In my 40s, though, I had started to feel real pain from a rotator cuff injury I'd sustained in my 30s and basically ignored. To avoid surgery, I'd tried physical therapy, and the therapist did wonders for me, helping me to see that I was not building strength in the muscles in my back, which was throwing my posture completely out of whack. I changed up my exercise routine, and added yoga to my regimen, and I was now in truly the best shape of my life. Even so, I couldn't hold a candle to Matt.
"No, really," he said, looking directly into my eyes for a second. "You're in GREAT shape." Then he shifted his gaze down to my chest again, and said "Your nipples are amazing."
Matt's nipples were standard issue. The areolas were a shade darker than the tanned skin of his chest, but the ovals were completely flat, and the actual nipples -- the nibs at the center of the colored area -- were almost nonexistent. That, combined with the fact that they were hidden in a chest full of medium brown hair, made them almost unnoticeable.
Mine, on the other hand, were attention-getting. When relaxed, my areolas were only slightly darker than the pale skin of my chest, which I'd inherited from my Irish ancestors. Rather than sitting flat, in line with the plane of my chest, thought, like Matt's, my areolas stuck out a bit: soft, rounded domes of flesh, each topped with a soft nipple the diameter of a pencil eraser.
I said "when relaxed," because they were transformed when stimulated -- by sexual activity, of course, but also exercise, and even by casual touch, such as removing my shirt, which I'd just done. When they were stimulated, my areolas became covered with goose flesh. Their diameter actually shrunk, the skin tightened, and the areolas AND the nipples firmed up and stood farther out from my chest.
Oh, and there was no hair to camouflage them, either. From my teens, I'd always had more hair on my stomach than I'd had on my chest, a sorry state of affairs. In college, one of my roommates with pointed out that the hair on my stomach was totally connected to my pubic hair. "Dude," he'd said, "you should shave your stomach!" and introduced me to what would eventually be called "manscaping." To this day, I kept my chest and stomach shaved, and my pubic hair trimmed.
So, there were my areolas and nipples, calling out "Wanna play?"
"They do call attention to themselves," I said.
"Are they sensitive?" he asked.
I was about to give the standard answer I'd used in my teens and 20s when guys asked about this ("Yes, and they're hard-wired to my cock, too."), but I didn't get the chance, because as soon as he asked the question, Matt reached out and touched my nipples.
I gasped, and then, as he started running his fingertips ever so gently in circles around my nipples, I moaned and closed my eyes.
"Well, I guess that answers my question," he joked. I reached up, and put my hands on his upper arms, just below the shoulder heads. Already aroused by his touch, I was turned on even more as I felt his biceps and triceps working.
He kept playing with my right nipple with his left hand, but he started running the fingertips of his right hand off my chest, down my abdomen and into the waistband of my jeans. Then, he bent forward, putting his face closer to my chest, and licked my left nipple.
"Oh, fuck," I whispered.
He chuckled, his lips brushing my chest, and whispered back "That can be arranged."
He moved his right hand along the waistband of my pants, expertly thumbed open the top button -- I was wearing 501s -- and then pulled the fly to the right to pop all the remaining buttons open in one quick action. I grabbed his hand with one of my hands, and my jeans waist with the other.
"Not here," I said. "We can't do this here."
Our back yards were all pretty private in this older neighborhood, with narrow woods and underbrush running down the property lines from the street to the deeper woods in the back. The neighbors on the other side of Matt's house had a pool, for instance, and although we could hear the kids horsing around in the water most summer days, we could never actually see them.
He smiled at me. "Well, it's dumb for us to dirty two showers. Why don't you take a shower here ... with me?"
"I'd like that," I said, and he immediately moved over to the sliding door that led to the downstairs room, opened it and started unlacing his work boots.