Page 3 of Muscle Cub

The dining hall was a large space with more windows and rows of long wooden tables that could seat dozens of men. With all their unmentionables tucked away, the crowd looked like the kind you might find at a sports bar. Eric and Ben hadn’t prepared me for the pool complex, but this scene certainly fit with what I’d imagined when they’d sold me on joining them.

I relaxed a little.

After filling my plate at the buffet, I tried to slip onto the end of a table without drawing too much attention to myself. The handful of men sitting closest introduced themselves with a friendly, although mostly useless, blur of first names.

“Paul,” I said, summoning my best smile.

“Where’re you from, Paul?” asked the guy to my right—Grant, I believed he’d said.

“Edgewood.”

“Lucky you,” said the man sitting on his other side. “So close. You can come all the time.”

I didn’t volunteer that this was my first time here. Over the years, plenty of local men had made too big a deal about my being a Bear Camp virgin. I was here now, so there was no point in defending my reasons for not coming sooner or broadcasting my relatively nonexistent social life.

The conversation remained superficial and cheery—when everyone had arrived, where on the property they were staying. Some of them seemed to know each other, others not at all, but it didn’t seem to matter.

I listened while enjoying the food in pleasant quasi-anonymity.

Until Wheelbarrow Boy appeared with iced tea and water pitchers. As he worked his way down the table offering refills, several of the guests made suggestive comments to him and found excuses to touch him.

Nothing vulgar, really, just small squeezes on the arm or pats on the back. He responded with an unflappable smirk and flirty comebacks like an old-school waitress in a diner full of hard-up truckers. He was probably used to it.

He arrived at my side, seeming to loom over me with the bulge of his crotch right at my eye level. When he reached over my shoulder to fill my glass, I caught a whiff of his citrus body wash.

I glanced up and murmured, “Thanks.”

His eyes flashed. “My pleasure, sir.”

He retreated, but the heat of his body lingered on my flushed cheeks.

“Oh my,” Grant purred. “I think you’ve caught the attention of the most popular boy in school.”

God, if he only knew what an awful metaphor that was to use with me. I tossed my napkin onto my empty plate. “I’m sure he’s just doing his job.”

As if on cue, Wheelbarrow Boy appeared at my side again, one hand on the back of my chair for the briefest moment before he whisked away my plate. He looked back over his shoulder and grinned.

Grant made a skeptical noise, but it was teasing, not unkind. “The guys who work here don’t even attempt to offer full service at meals. A tea refill here or there, sure. But just so you know, I’ve never not carried my own dirty dishes to the bus tub.” He quirked an eyebrow. “And I’ve been coming here for twenty years.”

After I’d failed to find a stable Wi-Fi connection, I went looking for Eric and Ben.

I finally located Ben’s truck up a distant hill parked at a dark and silent cabin next door to what I presumed to be the campground bar. The sign above the door proclaimed it the Cubby Hole, which was unfortunate since cubbyhole was one word. If I’d thought to bring pen and paper, I could have left a note on Ben’s windshield, but the plan had always been to meet up later this evening.

I went for a shower at the bathhouse near the pool—an eye-opening voyeuristic experience—and puttered around my tent organizing my clothes and snacks until it was time to head back to the bar.

The geodesic building reminded me of a wooden igloo elevated on a pedestal with a steep staircase and wraparound decking. It must have been adapted from some kind of eighties prefab round cabin kit.

I pressed through the crowd of men in religious-themed costumes and stepped through the door.

What gay hell is this?

Inside was a circular dance floor beneath a domed ceiling with various alcoves and additions built off its perimeter—a DJ station, a bathroom, a bar, and a billiards room.

Dressed in head-to-toe latex, the DJ operated a laptop keyboard with one hand while holding a tall plastic pitchfork in the other. With puffs from a smoke machine and lighting changes, the dance floor alternated between the third ring of the seventh circle of Dante’s inferno and disco Xanadu. Baby doll cherubs with glitter wings pasted on their backs hovered in a ring around a mirror ball suspended over the heads of the dancers.

I skirted the dance floor and headed toward the bar, which would’ve made a damned good theater set for a pearly gates scene. The bar area was bathed in blue light, flanked by false classical columns and draped in silk with white puffy clouds hung from fishing line.

I definitely needed a drink for this.