A Regular Bud

Noah's entire adult life had been a narration of discarding other men, casting them off for impractical reasons, pushing them aside for the next promising relationship. Monogamy tended to make him yawn after the first three months...usually when the sex became routine and the romance disappeared.
When his last boyfriend, Mike, started to hang a few clothes in the closet after only two weeks of dating, Noah started to lose sleep. How could he ignore such a bold move? Clearly, Noah knew it wouldn't be easy to get rid of him if this continued. He could always end it all on the telephone and mail the clothes in a plain brown box. But he decided to tell Mike in person that things weren't working out and that it was probably for the best if Mike removed all his personal things from the closet. Though Mike didn't take this well and he lashed out because Noah couldn't give him a solid excuse for ending the relationship, Noah was relieved when he finally heard Mike's car back out of the driveway for good.
Everything else in Noah's life remained stable though. Noah was an only child, and his mother and father had been killed in an automobile accident just outside of Baltimore two weeks before his college graduation. He lived in his dead mother and father's house, the big stone colonial next door to the free library, in the same small town where he'd grown up, about thirty miles south of Baltimore. He had the same job as an international marketing representative for a chemical company since college, with a new company car every two years and free trips around the world. Even his nerdy college roommate, Preston, was still with him.
When Preston haplessly mentioned he was looking for a place to live back then within thirty miles of his new teaching job in Baltimore, Noah suggested he rent a room from him, in the house in Martha Falls. And he'd been there ever since. Though the balding Preston was an emaciated man with big ears and thin lips shaped like the letter M, who had been engaged to the same thick-ankled schoolteacher for seven years and Noah was a handsome, openly gay man with an athletic body and many boyfriends, this peculiar match worked. Preston was that polite, perpetual boarder who only used the bottom shelf of the refrigerator and spent all of his time tiptoeing around his own bedroom when Noah was home.
Noah didn't travel all the time. He worked at home in a small office on the second floor next to his bedroom. All his work was done with phone calls, computers, and fax machines. He went to the corporate offices several times a year for significant sales meetings. The only time he left the house when he wasn't traveling was to go to the market, the gym, or to hook up with guys he'd met on craigslist...he thought of them as his buds.
The old house was immense, and he didn't have to run into Preston if he didn't want to. You could set your watch by that man's routine: up at six, off to school by seven, and home again at five thirty. Except for Tuesdays when he wore his red plaid button down and met his fiancé at the movies. And Preston didn't seem to mind when Noah had the occasional overnight guest, so to speak. Actually, when he did run into one of Noah's buds in the upstairs hall, he'd fold his arms and smile as if he knew a naughty little secret. He'd been living in the same house with Noah for almost nine years, and he knew these guys wouldn't last more than a few weeks at the most.
But what Preston didn't know about Noah would have made the few thin strands of hair he had left stand up straight. He never would have suspected that his good-looking, dark-haired landlord, whom he'd known since freshmen year in college, had a fetish so unusual and so kinky, there wasn't even a porn site devoted to it. None of Noah's ex-boyfriends or buds new about his secret either. This was something Noah kept private, and he didn't want to be caught.