Page 1 of The Mayor and the Mystery Man

1

LEO

As mayor of Sourwood, I’d spent the past eight years dedicating my life to serving our community, making this town I’ve called home my entire life a wonderful place to live. But none of that will matter because any minute, my constituents were going to see my dick.

“How bad is it?” I asked Vernita Wallace, my chief of staff and campaign manager, who’d been with me since I first had the crazy idea to run for mayor. My favorite quality of hers was that she didn’t sugarcoat.

“You tell me. They’re your pictures.”

Although maybe a dash of sugar on this horrific shitstorm wouldn’t be so bad.

I whipped out my phone and tapped on the Milkman app icon, a sketch of a hunky guy in a way-too-tight 1950s milkman uniform. Boxes of naked and half-naked men with names like CumDumpster4u filled my screen.

For those living under a heterosexual rock, Milkman was a gay “dating” app. Allegedly, it was named after gay rights icon Harvey Milk and not because it was a conduit for men to meet and, uh, milk each other. Men got very revealing with the pictures they posted on their profiles. We were a visual species, after all.

“MisterWood?” Vernita read my profile handle aloud, and here was where I remembered that she was a mother and avid churchgoer.

“Y’know, because of Sourwood.”

“Sure.”

“Wood can have many different meanings.”

“The beauty of the English language,” she deadpanned.

“Just keep scrolling.”

I bit into my piece of red velvet cake. After she broke the news to me, Vernita took me to For Goodness Cakes, the bakery in Sourwood. I tried to stay away from the sweets, but now was the ideal time to stress-eat.

I looked over her shoulder. It was quite a feeling getting an objective reaction to your profile pictures. I prided myself on staying in shape through daily runs. I was six-two and trim. My black hair was starting to gray at the edges, more so than I realized thanks to these pictures. At first, I breathed a sigh of relief. The pictures were tame. I was clothed and smiling.

“See, I’m not stupid enough to put naked pictures of myself on the internet.”

“Some of these are pretty close.” She scrolled to a pic of me shirtless on the beach (with my kids cropped out), and then one with me shirtless in my bathroom doing the classic mirror selfie.

“No dick pics.”

“Gold star for you.”

“And hey, I look pretty good for a forty-two-year-old father of teens.” I managed a weak smile. “This might win me more voters.”

She handed back my phone. “It’s not about the pictures. We don’t know what Damian’s article is going to say.”

Apparently, Damian, one of my former hookups, was penning a firsthand account of our time together for an LGBTQ-focused website that “sought to shine a light on important issues in the queer community,” per their masthead. I wasn’t sure howthisadvanced the cause. They reached out to Vernita to get a quote from me earlier today, mere hours before publishing. Woodward and Bernstein, they were not.

I preferred hookups with men around my age. Damian was my rare foray into fucking twentysomethings. It was slim pickings that night, and he had a good body and a background in gymnastics. I should’ve known that he would turn this around into a public story to spooge onto the internet. Fucking Gen Z.

“Is there anything I should be really worried about?” Vernita asked.

“Yeah. You’re missing all the cake.” I took another bite into red velvet goodness.

“Leo.”

“And then, of course, I used my favorite sex toy on Damian: anal beads shaped like little swastikas.”

“Thank you for putting that image in my head.” Vernita blew out an exasperated breath, Grand Canyon-level creases carved into her forehead.

Probably not the best time for sarcasm.

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