Page 1 of Muscle Cub

1

Over the years, whenever my friends talked about the local men’s campground, I’d always assumed the term clothing-optional referred to a simple binary choice—keep your clothes on or take them off.

Now that they’d finally convinced me to come meet them at Bear Mountain Lodge for the long Memorial Day weekend, I quickly discovered just how many clothing options there were.

It was intimidating in every way I’d dreaded and a few I could never have imagined.

A surprisingly high proportion of the men pitching their tents alongside mine this afternoon opted to do so while wearing nothing more than ball caps, flip-flops, and jockstraps.

With ball caps being the obvious exception, these choices seemed… impractical for manual labor.

Possibly dangerous.

I’d opted for a T-shirt, trail-running sneakers, and a pair of cargo shorts, which were an eternally useful and functional item of clothing that transcended all trends in perpetuity. Like many men of my generation, I was prepared to die on a hill of cargo shorts.

What else would you wear when camping out in warm weather?

For at least a few people, the answer to that question was a cock ring and motorcycle boots.

I kept my head down, eyes forward, and continued hauling my equipment back and forth from my truck to the perfectly idyllic campsite I’d chosen by the creek. It was about a three-hundred-yard trip in one direction, a path which led right through the pool area and a gauntlet of several dozen minimally attired or buck-ass-naked men who lounged in deck chairs, sipping from large drink tumblers and treating the pedestrian walkway as something of an undergarments and fetish-wear fashion show.

This seemed an awful lot like the kind of thing I might have had a bad dream about, but it was happening, right here, right now, at a campground swimming pool in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Who knew?

One thing I did know for sure, I was definitely not a model, and yet I found myself on a catwalk of concrete pavers and red Georgia clay, sweating like hell in the late May sunshine and dying to take my shirt off.

I stopped and dropped armloads of gear at my feet.

Stripping to the waist didn’t seem like that big a deal—the most justifiable of options really, given the environment and circumstances—as long as I ignored the fact that nothing accentuated a gut quite like the straps of a heavy backpack.

I doubted they were paying much attention to me anyway. Why would they? There was so much more to look at.

But apparently, the audience of leering, gawking sunbathers greatly approved of my modest offering of middle-aged torso, and they treated it as a kind of performance.

The catcalls elicited a complicated mixture of flattery and mortification I hadn’t experienced many times before, and the wolf-whistle was definitely a first for me.

Eric and Ben swore this would be the perfect place to hook up with age-appropriate men who’d appreciate me as I was—a forty-two-year-old man with a great upper body if you overlooked the yard-work tan and the little bit of a belly. I was definitely better than average looking. My gray eyes passed for blue sometimes, and I had a nice beard, even if there was a bit too much red in it. If I saw myself through another man’s eyes, and I didn’t know what I’d looked like before my hair had started thinning and I’d put on extra weight, I would’ve thought, he’s attractive.

But the applause…

Well.

Nothing could have prepared me for fucking applause.

I wished I’d worn mirrored sunglasses so I wouldn’t have had to make eye contact with anyone. I plastered on a grin and held up my hands in a gesture of acknowledgment and surrender.

Just some dad bod here, guys. Nothing much to see. Carry on.

I still had three or four more trips to make, and calls for me to take it all off weren’t dying away as quickly as I’d hoped. I wrestled a stack of folded tarps under one arm and reached for the bag with the inflatable air mattress with the other.

“We have wheelbarrows over there.”

The voice startled me.

I’d bowed my head to avoid the attention and scrutiny, so I hadn’t seen him standing so close.

Now this guy was handsome. He was over six feet tall, muscled and furry, with buzzed hair, beard scruff, and warm brown eyes gleaming above an easy smile. An avatar of masculine beauty, probably somewhere in his mid to late twenties.