– A Horny Short –

I thought Ellis was hot the first time I saw him. He had taken up residence in the house next door—quite unceremoniously and completely unobserved by me. It’s one of the great ironies of the typical suburban plastic community. All of the houses are slightly varying shades of putty and sit on postage stamps of highly-treated sod, yet no one sees anyone come and go in spite of the fact that one could flick a clove of garlic from their kitchen windowsill and easily have it land in the pot of boiling water in the house adjacent.  I had barely even noticed 302 was up for sale before the sign had come down and the dining room window lights shone through different drapes from the ones the Southlands had had up. Southlands? Sutherlands. Sundermans?

At any rate, it was of particular interest one evening as I pulled into my short stub of a driveway that I saw the mysterious owner of the new window treatments doing calf stretches off his front step. Even through the greenish hue of the laminated car glass and from across the HOA regulation shape boxwoods that defined the corners of each of our yards, I could see the impressive definition of those calf muscles. Seemed it was time to be neighborly. 

I slammed the car door loudly as a prelude to my introduction.  “Hi, there!  I guess we’re neighbors.”  Nice, captain obvious. 

He looked over his dry-fit clad shoulder and smiled, straightening up. “Guess we are,” he said with a crooked smile. Oh, yeah—he was hot. But in an unassuming way.  The Clark Kent way. The best way. He wasn’t particularly tall and not overly rugged. But he was lean and solid, and the chunky glasses that rested on his strong cheekbones gave him a sexy bookishness. As he approached, I could see behind the lenses and framed in thick lashes were eyes like pools of black coffee. I’ve got a thing for brown eyes, just like I have a thing for coffee. 

“You have a beautiful home,” he said, offering me his hand over the boxwoods. I took it, chuckling. Our houses were mirrored plastic clones. 

We went through the obligatory awkward introduction stuff. I don’t remember a lot of it because my attention was split. Half of my focus was on not sounding like a nimrod to this guy. The other was hung up on his body, which I could tell was ripped under his fitted  running attire. Of course, I caught his name. I remember him mentioning that he was a food safety consultant.  And even though he said it was often boring data analysis, I couldn’t help but enjoy a brief mental image of him moving across a polished concrete factory floor wearing bright yellow rubber boots and a white lab coat. 

The conversation was a lot blurrier after he absently put a foot up on the short brick platform out of rose our twin mailboxes, just as they uniformly appeared beneath every pair of our neighborhood’s regulation mailboxes.  Suddenly all of my faculties were honed on the hot pink Adidas arching over the corner of the masonry, the jet black ankle sock, and the Achilles tendon that practically jumped out of this man’s sinewy leg, a dark recess forming where the sock stretched taut between it and the ankle bone. Ellis’ words may as well have been the muted trombone from Peanuts until he bent to tighten his laces and his head moved into frame, bringing his words along with it. 

“Yeah—the house is in decent shape but I can already tell it’s going to need some work.”  He tugged on the laces and the soft upper eagerly tightened its embrace on his foot.  I shook myself loose from my trance. 

“Well, these houses are—what?—18 years old? They all look great, but I’m sure things are reaching the ends of their lifespans.”

Ellis straightened and glanced at the houses behind us. “Like roofs,” he practically moaned.  

“And air conditioning,” I offered in commiseration. 

He turned back to look at me, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “Fortunately, I’m pretty handy. Hopefully I can figure out whatever this place throws at me.”  

Somehow, this didn’t surprise me. “Perfect. Maybe I can hit you up for those skills sometime?  I can offer homemade sourdough bread.”  I said this dryly as though it were a standard barter, which elicited a laugh from Ellis. It was fucking musical. 

“Fair enough!  I’m going to hit the pavement before it gets too late. I’ll see you around!”

“Surely,” I called after him, watching the pink and black soles of his shoes slap off the street as he jogged off.  I’ll definitely be seeing more of you, I silently vowed. 

---

I turned out to be quite the attentive neighbor.  For example, I waited until I saw him outside one afternoon to return the piece of junk mail.  That I had furtively removed this piece from his mailbox when I was checking mine was utterly irrelevant. He was edging around the bottom of his regulation weeping cherry when I approached, his back to me. I watched, mesmerized, as again and again he his brought loose, worn Timberland boot down onto the back of the spade, driving the blade cleanly into the tufts of grass encroaching on the mulch circle. I hated to interrupt the show.

“Hey, Ellis. Looking good,” I offered.  “You don’t have the lawn service do that?”

Ellis turned to look at me, his boot still poised on the spade in mid thrust. He brought his wrist across his sweaty brow. “Don’t use a lawn service.”  I felt my eyebrows jump in shock. 

“Really?  The HOA is pretty fanatical about our yards.”

A sheepish grin crossed his face. “I’ve been made pretty aware of that. Apparently I have too many dandelions.”  

I scanned the turf. “I don’t see a single one,” I observed with a measure of confusion. 

“Right?  Nevertheless, I was reported.”  He bent to pull at a ribbon of sod cut from the edge of the bed. He glanced back up at me with narrowed eyes, as if in afterthought. “Wasn’t you, was it?”

I dramatically put my hand to my chest as if scandalized at the suggestion. “And risk pissing off the one person I know who can fix a toilet?”  Ellis chuckled and resumed shaking the soil from a clump of grass. I stepped closer, extending the junk mail in my hand. “This piece of mail is yours.”  As I drew up to him, I couldn’t help but notice the navy sock beneath the hem of his faded jeans. 

Ellis sat back on his heels and reached for the postcard.  His nylon tips of his gardening gloves brushed my fingers, and I could feel the weave of their knit pattern and the warmth of his hand radiating through it. He peered at it, then raised it above his head. “Thank god! I don’t know what I would have done without my flyer for Zip’s Water Park!” He smiled and winked before tossing it into the bucket with the yard waste. He crouched forward again, sifting his hand through the mulch under the tree.  As he did, the gap between his leg and boot widened, his blue sock disappearing into the yawning, moist darkness of the Timberland. I wished him a good evening and retreated to my bathroom. 

---

In another instance, I proved neighborly when I arrived home from work early one afternoon, the menacing clouds of a summer storm at my heels.  Looming like a stampede of black sheep, they hung just over the cul de sac up the street.  Looking out my window toward Ellis’ house—something I had found myself doing with increasing habitual frequency—I saw that he had left a pair of shoes by his back door. In minutes, they would certainly be drenched by the impending deluge. There was nothing for it. 

Martyr that I am, I braved the imminent elements and slipped out the back slider, squeezing through the gap between the regulation aluminum slat fence and the neatly pruned cherry laurels, and dashed across his backyard as the first icy drops began to pelt down on Ellis’ back steps. I thrust my hand in the tops of the shoes and—pinching them together—conveyed the pair to the safety of my family room.  When the door had been slid shut behind me, the leaves of the backyard trees beyond were suddenly turned inside out by the insistent wind, as if their skirts had been blown up, revealing their silvery gray undergarments. An angry spray of rain hit the door like shrapnel.  Only then did I look down and to the rescued footwear in my hand. 

They were rugged Chelsea boots, worn soft from being put through their paces. But more fascinatingly, the bottom inch of each of them was encrusted with dried yellow mud. My heart pounded and my cock began to throb as I ran my fingers along the seasoned leather uppers.  I tugged on the elastic side panels, feeling their resistance and knowing that they hugged Ellis’ sexy ankles when he wore them. But wore them where?  Where had he gotten them so deliciously filthy?

My endocrine system told my brain that Ellis had been hiking a picturesque nature trail, wearing skinny jeans and the same navy blue socks I had seen him wear that day in the yard. He had come to a dip in the trail where rainwater collects, and the countless bikes and feet that traverse the trail had kneaded the ground into a pasty slurry. He scanned either side of the path for a safer, drier route, but to no avail.  He paused, looking from the tops of his beloved Chelseas to the mud, before he smiled to himself and shrugged.  He stepped directly into the center of the slime and watched in satisfaction as it gathered wetly around the bottoms of his boots. He lifted one, staring down at it in amusement, and as the gluey ground pulled back, his fluted navy sock slid up past the stretchy side panels…

With a grunt I came in my pants, the crumbly soil from the bottom of Ellis’ boot having smudged my crotch as I had ground against it. I noted with satisfaction the thin, glassy rope that spanned between my damp pants as the toe of the Chelsea when I pulled it away. It broke, leaving the slightest trace of myself on the leather, where I wanted it to stay. 

As I cleaned myself up, I debated on the state in which I should return the shoes. It felt odd to have saved them from ruin only to hand them back over in their soiled state. I had already knocked a significant amount of dirt off of one—it wouldn’t be unreasonable to at least clap the rest off on the garage floor.  Then again, I could fully clean and polish them—get out the leather care kit and go to town. I shivered in delight at the thought of slipping the boots over my hand to work on them, my palms resting on the insoles where Ellis’ feet had been.  But in the end, I decided it would be pretty weird to have both rescued my neighbor’s shoes from the rain and given them a complete spa treatment while he was at work.  I had to consider just what I would have said: “I grabbed your shoes before they got rained on decided to detail them for you?”  Awkward. 

Later, when I crossed to Ellis’ driveway, the rain was already rising off the street in steamy wisps, the late afternoon sun glistening like jewels on the grass. He stepped out of his car, a butter yellow sock peeking from between the cuff of his gray trousers and the rim of his chocolate suede oxford. The same foot, the same ankle I had just fantasized about. I presented him with his dusty-but-no-longer-encrusted boots as he looked quizzically at me. 

“Hey.  Saw these out back just before the storm hit. Didn’t want them to get rained on.”

Ellis took the Chelseas and smiled. “Aw, thanks. Totally forgot they were out there. Have a good one!” He turned and headed toward his front door. I confess I was a little disappointed, but what did I really expect? For him to look me in the eye and say “yeah, I totally got them slathered in mud the other day—it was hot as fuck?”  Hardly.