Men of All Seasons Box Set
By R.W. Clinger
Published by JMS Books LLC
Visit jms-books.com for more information.
Copyright 2017 R.W. Clinger
ISBN 9781634864701
Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com
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All rights reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
* * * *
Men of All Seasons Box Set
By R.W. Clinger
The Fine Art of Reading Riley
Mr. Hideaway
Autumn Cliché
20 Days of Tuck
Chapter 1: And Then I Fell
Chapter 2: You’re Adorable, Micah Berk
Chapter 3: Miss Kitty
Chapter 4: Stairway to Heaven
Chapter 5: Tall and Sexy
Chapter 6: Heated Daydream
Chapter 7: Invitation
Chapter 8: That Truck
Chapter 9: Magic
Chapter 10: Lumberman Carl
Chapter 11: I Wasn’t Alone
Chapter 12: Fossil
Chapter 13: Betner’s Cliff
Chapter 14: Too Many Martinis
Chapter 15: Gentle Bites
Chapter 16: Miss Kitty’s Ladies’ Canasta Night
Chapter 17: He Told Me…
Chapter 18: Carl’s Garage
Chapter 19: While Miss Kitty is Away
Chapter 20: A Boyfriend’s History
Chapter 21: A Moment of Truth
Chapter 22: Carl’s Family
Chapter 23: Literature and Music
Chapter 24: Carl’s Boyfriends
Chapter 25: More Truth and What Matters
Chapter 26: Bathed in the October Sun
Chapter 27: Blur of Minutes
Chapter 28: Stepping
Chapter 29: Two Visits
Chapter 30: Moon Dance
Chapter 31: Our Pairing
Chapter 32: Big Foot and the Little Creatures
Chapter 33: I’m Not Who You Think I Am
Chapter 34: Showtime
Chapter 35: Crashing Down
Chapter 36: Halloween
Chapter 37: The Great Planner
Chapter 38: Fireside
Chapter 39: But You Already Know That
Chapter 40: Dreaming That Night
Chapter 41: Gone
Chapter 42: The Gray and Tumultuous Lake
Chapter 43: Cincinnati, Ohio
Chapter 44: Get Closer to Me
Chapter 45: The Darkest Day
Chapter 46: Thanksgiving
Chapter 47: Return Trip and Healing
Chapter 48: That Night and Carl’s Great Plan
Epilogue: For Keeps
The Fine Art of Reading Riley
To Kenito Padilla.
The book club invitations Stone Daye sent to his guests included the following information:
Date: January 11, 20—
Time: 7:00 P.M.
Address: 2378 Messgrove Avenue
Plimpton, Pennsylvania
Chosen Book: A Winter Affair
Author: Robert Riley
RSVP by email: stonedaye@…
* * * *
Stone placed the invitations in the mail on January 1. As of January 10, he had heard from a few guests who wanted to attend. Now it was January 11, the day of the event and…
Stone looked at his watch and realized he had eight hours until book club members started arriving at his two- to three-hour party. The scheduled time for the event was 7:00 P.M., but Lance, his irresponsible and sex-swooned nephew, never failed to be late, and his bestie, Conner Worthington, had to work late, probably tied up at least until eight. No matter what, the book club started on time each month, with or without all nine members, all of which Stone knew would eventually show.
Feeling overwhelmed, having a lot to do today and suffering from a clusterfuck of thoughts inside his head, Stone wanted everything to be perfect since the last book club event at Marigold Lofty’s cottage in Harrison Hills turned out be an epic failure. Stone wanted tonight to be enchanting, almost whimsical, and rather uppity, without coming across as being pretentious and arrogant, which all of the club members thought of him.
He had a list of chores to accomplish by seven that evening. The Tudor needed cleaned from top to bottom. Sadie Harrison, a Baptist Congolian with bright-white eyes and a beer belly, had planned to come around at noon and scrub the place clean, concentrating on every nook and cranny. Stone had hired the grandmother of six to do menial tasks throughout the year. He wanted to impress his book club members the way Marigold tried to impress them with a male stripper named Ralph X, which ended up being far too shocking. Stone had groceries to buy at The Basket Grocery Store and a stack of Robert Riley paperback books to pick up at Turn the Page Books, which were door prizes he wanted to share with his guests. There were also flowers to pick up, chocolates, both gifts for Lance, since it was almost his twentieth birthday. Lance loved flowers, a botanist at heart, always captivated by red roses or pink carnations.
At some point in his day, he had to eat. Honey mustard drizzled over a cranberry-almond salad with sweet- and salt-buttered rolls had been the plan for lunch. Granted, it wasn’t the healthiest, low-calorie meal he could chow down in a hurry, but it seemed better than two cheeseburgers, a large fry, and a milkshake at a fast food restaurant.
Weight had always been one of Stone’s problems. Love handles were a nuisance in his life, and he tried to work out at least three times a week at Muscles & Men, a gay gym on Plimpton’s Main Street. He really needed to cut back on his carbohydrates, though, having a sick weakness for a slew of breads, particularly rye and pumpernickel with slices of Dutch cheese. If he could just lay off the pasta, too, things in the weight division of his life would look better for him. For now, it wasn’t going to happen, particularly today.
Besides lifting a few weights, jogging, and rowing at his local gym, he liked to speed walk. Studies in a variety of fitness magazines stated that speed walking could be unhealthy, and other magazines said it was the way to go. Stone really didn’t care what nonfiction writers thought of his workouts, wanting all of them to mind their own love handles, of course. So shame on them.
The reason he enjoyed speed walking so much was because he could listen to one of Robert Riley’s megahit e-books. Truth and Eco’s Desire was Stone’s last pick, and he wasn’t unsatisfied in the least. Something about Riley’s writing came across as soothing, meticulous, and challenging all at the same time. He really couldn’t explain why he liked Riley so much, but he did. No one was about to tell him otherwise.
Truth and Eco were lovers during a nuclear and apocalyptical war set in 2093, somewhere in,
or near, Kansas; Riley didn’t make such a place official for his readers. The author purposely created the characters as hermaphrodites, confusing most readers and critics, which Stone loved about the four-hundred and fifty-page tome. Most of the other club members found it tedious and a blur. Another attribute about the book entailed its short chapters, a total of over two hundred, and all being less than two pages long. Yet another fascinating fact about the best-selling novel was that Truth and Eco were brother and sister, but not by blood, only by reconstructed tissue after spending the first five years of their lives in a German hospital that had mastered cloning.
Honestly, Stone thought Riley an impervious genius on paper and one of the great thinkers of today’s unexceptional world of fluff and beach reads. All twenty-seven novels the author published and shared with the world left Stone feeling bewildered, enlightened, depressed, and happy. And Stone couldn’t wait for number twenty-eight, Misfortune of Myth, which just happened to be out in April of the following year, a six-hundred and fifty-nine-page hardback by Smithington Company, and costing a steep thirty-two bucks per copy.
“Get a move on it, pokey,” Stone said to himself, admiring his salt-and-peppered hair in the mudroom’s mirror positioned above a Crate & Barrel bench where guests could sit and slip their shoes on and off or take a slight breather. How he had obtained a sprinkle of gray hair at such the young age of thirty-two was beyond his comprehension. His twin, Samuel, still had a full head of black hair, without the tiniest streak, dapple, or blade of gray. Samuel had always tried to up him on everything, though, ever since Stone could remember: career, bank accounts, property values, BMWs, and vacations. No wonder the brothers didn’t talk anymore, living on two different sides of the country, ignoring each other to the best of their abilities.
Stone still looked rather young for a man who had just exited his twenties, even if he had some gray. His friends, who inevitably included the book club members, thought he acted older, not that he could help it, of course. He was clean-shaven, with sparkling blue eyes, a slender, sharp Greek nose, and straight teeth thanks to braces at the age of fifteen. Stone looked almost like a cartoon character: somewhat clumsy, thin-lipped, pink-cheeked, and not at all his age. If he could only lose some fat around his neck, he might be involved with a man. But his discreet and private love life was another topic for another time since he had to leave and carry out his chores.
Truth told, he didn’t want to think about the extra meat around his middle. Samuel had always called it blubber and bullied Stone through grade school, middle school, and high school. Some things were best not to think about, right? This is what he processed while leaving his Tudor unlocked for Sadie Harrison to enter and start cleaning. He headed outside and into the cold driveway where his snow-covered BMW was parked.
* * * *
Fresh snow fell down from the heavens: bulky snowflakes mixed with a tempestuous wind, which added a ferocious cold layer to the day. The chill felt almost unbearable, in the low twenties, biting. Five inches of snow had already covered Plimpton. By the end of the day, at least three more inches could be expected, according to the early morning news. Later, a torrential snowstorm could hit his little town, coming down from Canada, if it veered ever so slightly to the west, catching Pennsylvania’s northwestern lakeside coast.
The Basket Grocery Store sat at the far end of Elberstein Way in downtown Plimpton, next to Dixie’s Cardshop Land. A parking lot that snugly fit seven cars could be located behind the brick building. The square footage of the place was ten thousand feet, consisting of a bakery area, dairy, meats, vegetables, and a miscellaneous aisle jam-packed with foreign foods. Hours of operation were from six in the morning until ten at night, every day of the week. Plimpton was a small town next to Lake Erie, bumped up against Templeton and the city of Erie. All three cities were closed on holidays throughout the year, which included Martin Luther King’s birthday, Columbus Day, Presidents’ Day, and Flag Day.
Today wasn’t a holiday, though, and Basket Grocery flashed a bright orange sign saying Open. Stone thought the Chinese-American owners of the grocery store a delight. Xi Cho, (pronounced Zee Chew), was funny, with his unibrow, wide smile, and bright brown eyes. Pai, (pronounced Pie), his wife of ten years, was just as amazing, kind-hearted, polite, and quite the little buzzing bee around their grocery store. The imported couple from Nanjing, China had been only a few years younger than him. Xi’s family became known for making shoes (xie), and Pai’s family made straw hats (caomao). They didn’t feel embarrassed about their past lives in China and called the eighteen-year-old period something in Chinese Stone couldn’t understand. He recently translated it as: our struggle for a better life.
There were two particular stock boys, Dave and John, who worked for Xi and Pai. They were nephews to the owners. Xi and Pai made a goal to have American and Chinese cultures blend, hence the water-downed names. Dave, Stone guessed, probably had the name Ding, and John translated from Ji, not that Stone knew for sure. Frankly, he didn’t care what the teenagers’ names were. He glanced at the cousins for a brief amount of time, stopped, and then headed to the restroom area at the back of the store to drain his bladder, which felt as if it were going to burst.
The bathroom sat on the second floor of the grocery store. It looked simple, unisex. Two American Standard toilets were divided in stalls. Green tile covered the floor. Two mirrors hung on the wall above two sinks. One of the sinks kept dripping with water. The small room smelled like Pine-Sol, freshly cleaned by maybe John or Dave.
Stone took a long piss, emptying his bladder. A smile formed on his face as he remembered being twenty years old, having loads of safe and unsafe sex in various roadside restrooms throughout western Pennsylvania. Those were ridiculous days in his life when he acted careless, willy nilly about things, and not at all mature. Twelve years could change a person, though, turning a boy into a man. It happened to him, like most men his age. They went from having rough bathroom sex with random roadies to throwing book club parties with their closest friends.
He zipped up, washed his hands, and returned to the main floor of the grocery store. Boxes of all-natural granola caught his eye and so did Jack Panda, his ex-lover.
Jack Panda, more or less, came across as Jack-off in Stone’s heart. Nothing seemed all-natural about the idiot. Coincidentally, the two met in a restroom three years ago along Interstate 79, jacked each other off outside a small city named Butler, exchanged cell numbers, and tried to make a go of a relationship for two years. Jack liked his restrooms a little too much and played the field while involved with Stone, screwing every Tom, Dick, and Harry he could find. The relationship ended a year ago, and Stone hadn’t seen him since, a wish come true.
Jack still looked good, with his blond hair and blue eyes, astute and model-like. He had the stance and jawline of a cowboy. The scruff on his chin and cheeks told Stone the guy still liked to be a player. Sex in restrooms continued to be the man’s gig. Jack looked like one of those steamy and sexy guys on the front cover a drugstore paperback romance. Chiseled, as well as degrading, filthy, and many other undignified labels. They made eye contact but didn’t speak to each other.
Good thing, Stone thought, because I just might slam one of my fists in the guy’s face.
Jack really buggered their business over, leaving Stone high and dry when the romance in their relationship had died. The business they started together three years ago was called The Cat Breed. They were hired to provide cat owners with exclusive and personal information about their client’s cats. Details pertained to cat standards for showing purposes. Withers, coats, necks, croups, hocks, tails, paw pads, stifles, stops, and whiskers were listed in a portfolio for each client about their beloved pussy. The information then qualified, or unqualified, the owner’s cat for showing purposes.
Jack and Stone made a killing from the business. Then Jack sued the Jesus out of him for half of the business, won, and started a new business called The Perfect Pussy, which, Stone un
derstood, had become popular and did quite well, according to rumors, even with its offensive name.
In the end, the attorneys Bradley, Rawe, and Crow legally forced Stone to ditch The Cat Breed trademark. Stone then started his own company, Catfabulous, which cloned everything The Cat Breed had become, except with a different name. The first six months of business were grueling, unproductive, and filled with much heartache for Stone. But the last six months had taken a turn-around for the better and proved he could make a living at providing cat owners advice for possible showings. No, he could never be a millionaire, but he had found a sense of happiness, especially now that Jack had exited the stage of his life and Stone’s heart had healed. Amen.
Screw Jack Panda, Stone thought, turning his view away from the man who had temporarily ruined him. Stone had bigger and better things to accomplish, like prepare for the book club and his guests that evening.
During the next twenty minutes, he gathered an arrangement of food for his fellowship. Blueberry cheesecake, maple-bacon-filled turnovers, a variety of frozen appetizers, and freshly made pot-stickers were tossed into a green plastic basket he carried around the store like Little Red Riding Hood. Thereafter, he made his way to the front of the store and the register area.
There were two Robert Riley paperbacks next to an assortment of magazines at the checkout. Tender Down and The Wicked Will Prey. Both were national best-sellers at the turn of the century, and Stone enjoyed them, staying up late into the night to finish. Tender Down was a mystery set in Erie. A young man had been found along Lake Erie, and his neck sported a slice from ear to ear. Short but potent, the solid whodunit had already been discussed, and thoroughly enjoyed, among Stone’s book club members.
The Wicked Will Prey comprised of two hundred pages that most of the members thought challenging; a romance/drama of sorts between an Amish boy from Foxburg, Pennsylvania, and a local high school drama teacher almost twice his age. Although Stone enjoyed the story, others in his book club found it an atrocity, sinful, and taboo, but still had claimed they had liked the tale.
Men of All Seasons Box Set Page 1
