Commander Ted Taylor stripped off his soaking-wet, body-clinging tennis whites just inside the porch door to his Overlook Drive cottage. His house was a boathouse converted into a cozy cottage jutting out over the water in a cove of the Severn River in the Mariner's Cove section of Annapolis, Maryland. The old residential neighborhood was conveniently located between the Route 301 bridge over the river and the Naval Academy. The main house had burned down before he acquired the property and the front of the lot was now overgrown with foliage.
He took a look at the thermometer on the porch, grunting at seeing it was 94 degrees in the shade, as he'd entered the cottage and, with a grateful sigh, stripped down to the altogether.
He'd only kept the Academy tennis team he coached as a phys ed instructor at the Naval Academy on the courts for an hour, as it was just too damn hot out there today. They squared off against Princeton next weekend and he didn't want any of his guys to go down with heat stroke. The sports programs were important at the Academy to keeping the midshipmen in hard-bodied fighting trim. Conditioning and using the body to its max was a priority to Commander Taylor as well--his body was well as the students' bodies. He had a personal fitness program that kept them coming back for more.
He walked nude through the living and dining room combination area with the galley kitchen tucked in at the left and up the stairs to where a hall with a bath and bedroom to the right and a laundry room and bedroom to the left led back to a screened porch spanning the width of the building. The bedroom section jutted out over the water, with two boat slips underneath. This was where he kept his vintage 1960 Chris-Craft 24 sportsman motor launch.
At a very fit thirty-two, Taylor walked proud, not only because he liked going nude in his house but also because his life pursuit was getting the most out of one's body. He was a strapping six-foot-two Greek-heritage Adonis. His whole life had been devoted to honing the bodies of his young men and his own in every way and to every classic Greek purpose. He was built, cut, hung, and hanging. His relations with his students were patterned on the ancient Greek mentoring system, and the students signing on to this liked it just fine.
As he came out of the shower and was rubbing himself off, he heard the phone ring. He decided to let it go to voice mail or just die in a scammer's inability to get him to answer. The voice mail clicked on, though, and announced that it was the Emergency Operations Center calling.
"This is an emergency alert to watch out for a disoriented, eighty-year-old man, Glen Gaugh, who left his Riverview Avenue house in the Mariner's Cove section between noon and 1:00 pm. He is thought to be in the nude..."
Riverview Avenue was the main road going through the neighborhood.
The announcement went on, but Ted had laughed at the thought of an eighty-year-old man roaming around the neighborhood in he nude, and he missed the rest of what was said. He cut off the laugh, though, realizing it was no laughing matter for a man that old to be out in nearly 100-degree heat, whether or not he was clothed.
Whatever. He hadn't seen such a man when he was driving back from the academy and there was little chance he see him on Overlook Drive, which was a short dead-end street nosing into a cove off the Severn River. His cottage, the former boathouse of a bigger house on the street, which had burned down, was pretty isolated for being close in to the Naval Academy. Ted liked it that way. He had young men in frequently--he was highly sexed and mentored his Academy students in the Greek tradition--and it suited him to have his privacy here.
Remaining in the nude, he went padded across the hall and into the guest bedroom, where he had fucked one of the Academy midshipmen, Randy, the previous night. Randy was a gymnast and they'd been swinging from the chandelier as Ted put the student through demanding positions. The bed looked like a battle had been fought there, and in terms of Ted pounding Randy into submission that wasn't far off the mark. He'd been rough but Randy had begged to come back for more, so Ted was content with their relations.
He stripped the bedding and took it into the laundry room. Realizing then that he was thirsty, he went down the stairs into the great room and pulled a beer out of the refrigerator.
It was then that he glanced through one of the front windows to see that someone was sitting in one of the rattan rockers on his front porch. It was a white-haired old man and Ted could see from here that the man was naked.
"Well, shit," he exclaimed and headed for the porch.
He didn't give a thought to being naked himself when he opened the front door and spoke to the man, "Hey, old fellah. You lost or something?"
The old man looked up at him and smiled. He didn't seem a bit surprise to find the man at the door naked.
"Gene? Is that you? I don't know where I am. I left lunch to go take a nap, but this isn't my room." But then he paused and said, "But you're not Gene. You're big and hung. Gene's but a slip of a young man."
"No, I'm not, Gene," Ted said. "But how about you come inside where it's cooler? It's too hot out here. Who is Gene? Shall we call him to come pick you up? Here, let me help you inside."
The man didn't resist. Ted settled him in the living room and went over behind the island in the galley kitchen, poured the man a glass of ice water, and brought it back.
"Sorry for not having anything on," he said, suddenly self-conscious about having gone to the porch in the nude. Still, he was amused. The old man and tall, but gaunt and wrinkly, but not badly built for an eighty-year-old, was naked too. A perfectionist in body sculpting and use, Ted's first thoughts in meeting someone new was to assess their bodies and preferences.
"Oh, it's all right. Gene and I go naked in the house too."
So, that explained that. The old man, three sheets to dementia, had made a wrong turn on his way to take a nap in the house and had wound up in unknown territory several streets over. "Gene? Is he your son?"
"No. My grandson. He works at the marina."
Ted didn't think the man could be prompted to identify which marina or any further information on what put the old codger on the street nude. He realized, though, that the Emergency Operations Center message would still be on his voice mail. So, he checked out the message and went back to the old man.
"So, Mr. Gaugh. Glen, is it? How about I call and get you back with your grandson."
"That would be nice. I called for him in the house a few times, but he didn't answer. Must be at work. He's a good boy, although I think he gets a bit too free with himself."
"Gets in trouble with the women? He's a real looker, is he?" Ted asked as he was dialing the contact number given in the phone message.
"Not exactly, and he looks just fine," Glen Gaugh answered. He did so with a yawn, and by the time Ted finished with the phone call, he saw that the old man was asleep in the lounge chair.
