Tipping the Balance

by Koehler, Christopher

  “No,” Brad said, suddenly surprised.

  “Oh yeah,” Drew said, rolling his eyes. He took a swig of his water. “Every time a development opens, they invite any and every real estate agent from miles around to come see it, and so when I saw that Sundstrom Homes—and I had no idea you were that Sundstrom, by the way—had something out there, I went to look. I only found it because I got lost. When I got back to my office, I got online to locate the nearest grocery store to see just how bad it was. It’d take someone almost half an hour just to get there.”

  “Shit,” Brad breathed. “I knew there was nothing around there for lunch, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”

  “Look, Brad, these kinds of developments are meant as commuter communities, so I guess people could buy food on the way home from work, but what the fuck? Twenty-seven minutes to get from the Suburban Symphony to the parking lot of a back-country Safeway? Why did you guys saddle yourself with that place?”

  “I don’t think it was ever our idea. My dad acquired it along with the company that originally developed it,” Brad said glumly. “Now you know why the original developer got into trouble and made himself vulnerable.”

  “Only now it’ll take Sundstrom Homes down?” Drew suggested.

  “I doubt it, but it’s not helping my career any,” Brad said. He picked at his pasta.

  “I wish I had better news for you, but I’m not really sure how to help you with that place,” Drew said. He smiled at Brad, who seemed calmer now that he’d gotten what he wanted out of Drew. “You’ve only been out of school for a few months. Still learning the ropes, are you?”

  “Not really. I’ve worked for the family business every summer since I started high school,” Brad said.

  When he didn’t elaborate further, Drew didn’t push it. “So tell me what else you’re up to.”

  “Now why would you be interested in that?” Brad said, smiling a real smile for the first time since they sat down. He started eating.

  “I might have my reasons,” Drew said with an arched eyebrow.

  Brad laughed, and it warmed Drew right down to his toes. It was a loud laugh, almost a guffaw from a man Drew was learning didn’t do things quietly. A few people turned their heads to glare, but he didn’t care. Drew was just glad that Brad had shaken off the glum demeanor that that horrendous subdivision inspired.

  Afterward, conversation flowed like water, sometimes like a gentle stream, sometimes charging ahead like the varsity eight at the PCRCs. Drew still thought of that magnificent sight, the CalPac V-8 surging ahead of the other crews like eight thoroughbred stallions (and one tiny jockey) moving in perfect synch, backs bending, chests heaving, oars blades knifing into the water.

  Drew had never witnessed the human body pushed to the brink like that before. That he’d been there for Nick, his best friend, was special. That he’d gotten to see Brad in his native element—that’d been something else.

  For all that Brad set off his gaydar, Drew didn’t know for sure that Brad was… questioning, and straight men could get pretty freaked out by the obvious signs of gay interest.

  “Brad, look… I’ll bring clients by Suburban Symphony. At the very least, it’ll leave records of increased traffic,” Drew said impulsively. He couldn’t help himself. There was just something about Brad that made him want to keep him smiling. “It’ll at least show your father that you’re earning your keep.”

  But Brad shook his head. “No way, you were right. It’s a dump, a tacky little subdivision that’s too far from anything. Suburban Graveyard is doomed. How I’m supposed to bring it back is anyone’s guess.”

  “It can’t be that bad. If someone wants something in that price point, I’ll keep it mind,” Drew said. Brad quirked a smile, and Drew felt all goofy.

  The waiter left the check, and they both grabbed for it. “My treat,” Drew said, pulling it close to him. Brad had long arms. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  Outside the restaurant, Brad shook Drew’s hand. “Here,” he said, handing Drew a card. “My contact info.”

  “I’ve already got it,” Drew said with a smile.

  Chapter Four

  Brad spent the drive home flying on an adrenaline high. Drew rocked. That man was awesome, no two ways about it.

  He laughed out loud. He hadn’t made too big a fool of himself, not since he’d picked up the phone and called Drew in the first place. At first, he’d been so nervous he could barely speak. But he’d planned ahead, and he’d stuck to his script, pages arrayed before him on the desk. It was probably a little stilted, but it helped put his mind at ease.

  And then Drew had asked him a question he hadn’t planned on, and Brad panicked. He’d never been one of those people who thought fast on his feet, and as nervous as he’d been, Brad froze.

  Then he’d frantically rifled through his papers, trying to find something he could modify on the fly.

  “Are you reading from a script?” Drew had chuckled.

  “No,” Brad had said, letting his pages of scribbled conversation scatter as he dropped them on his desk. “No, what gives you that idea? Just busy… with paperwork.”

  At the time, he’d been petrified, but there in the car, Brad thought it was pretty damned funny. Making a script to call someone, then getting caught at it and playing it off. He still wasn’t sure if he’d gotten away with it, only that Drew had let it go.

  Drew was a class act, Brad could tell, a man more sophisticated and suave, if that was the word, than he’d ever be. He was a big lug, and he knew it. You could put him in a fancy suit and teach him to tie a Windsor knot and curl his pinky while drinking tea, and he’d still be a big lug yanking on his collar because it felt like it was strangling him.

  Just the thought of himself all dressed up like that made him snicker. Brad, with his neck like a tree trunk and thighs to match. In a suit. Drinking tea.

  But Drew…. Brad stopped laughing. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Drew the entire lunch. Every time he felt uncomfortable or even scared and started glancing around, the sight of Drew pulled him back.

  “Fuck, he’s handsome,” Brad whispered. Drew was just average height, but Brad liked that better. He’d been around tall and rangy rowers for five years, and not one of them had ever caught his eye.

  Drew’s brown hair sparkled in the sunlight when they stood in the parking lot to say goodbye. That was the word, sparkled. Maybe it was some gay super hair product or good genes or something. Brad had brown hair, at least what was left of it from where it was noticeably thinning on top. He just clipped it super short every other week and left it at that. But even when he’d had enough hair to style, it had never looked like Drew’s.

  Blue eyes that danced when he smiled. That was just weird. Blue eyes usually bugged him. There was something off about them, the way they were different colors from ice blue to flat-out gray, but all still blue. His dad had blue eyes, and they’d never held a hint of warmth. But Drew’s… they looked so friendly, so inviting.

  Muscles that showed, even through his business-casual clothes. Brad wasn’t cultured or sophisticated, which he imagined meant things like knowing about art or fancy food or… something. He didn’t know. That was him. But he knew muscles. He knew what time in the gym felt like, and what it looked like later, after you’d recovered and built the muscle. Drew had muscles.

  Drew had earned his muscles the hard way too. Brad had never juiced. He knew people who had, people who’d done Deca and then Clomid to keep their balls from shrinking. He could always tell. The thought made him curl his lip in contempt. Juicing was cheating. That was for pussies, pussies and….

  Fags?

  Brad had forgotten that Drew was a homo, that it was another man whose appearances he was so hung up on. But damn, those pecs alone, hidden behind Drew’s dress shirt, they’d taken a lot of time to sculpt like that. A lot of guys just did the bench press for their pecs and left it that, but it took a lot more than that. It took time with the incline pres
s, the dumbbell flies, pull-ups…. No, those muscles made Drew look like a man, not just someone who was male. Maybe that was it. There was something manly about Drew.

  Was it gay to appreciate another man’s masculinity? Brad shook his head. It couldn’t be. It was just acknowledging all Drew’s hard work in the gym, that was all.

  But even if that was the case, that he just appreciated Drew’s efforts in the one area he happened to know something about, Brad was forced to admit that there was more to it than that.

  Brad shifted uncomfortably as he drove. He’d boned right up as soon as Drew got out of his car. He was just glad Drew had gone into the restaurant ahead of him so he couldn’t see the wood Brad had been pushing. But he’d been hard for the entire lunch, balls so tight they ached.

  That was totally gay, and Brad knew it. That pissed him off. It scared him. That wasn’t who he was.

  Was it?

  That wasn’t who he wanted to be.

  But what if he secretly did?

  “Damn it!” Brad yelled, bellowed, as he pounded the steering wheel in frustration. “I’m not gay!”

  Then he noticed the dashboard clock.

  “Shit!” he screamed, well and truly pissed.

  It was 4:00 p.m. Lunch had lasted hours, and he’d never noticed. He’d been gone from the office all afternoon. If his dad had dropped by….

  Brad gunned the engine. He had to get back to work.

  Brad pulled up outside his house—his dad’s house, really, even though both Sundstrom boys still lived at home—with a feeling of dread curdling in his guts. It wasn’t that Randall Sundstrom was physically abusive, but he sure yelled a lot. Brad was sick of the yelling.

  His shoulders slumped, and he got out of the car. He swung the disreputable backpack he still carried over one shoulder and looked at his house, wishing he were anywhere but there. He might as well face the music, but coming hard on the heels of his afternoon, he was so not in the mood for this.

  Brad had barely shut the door behind him when he looked up to see Randall standing there waiting for him. “Hi, Randall.”

  Randall acknowledged the greeting. “Where were you this afternoon?”

  “I’m sorry, I just lost track of time. It won’t happen—”

  “I’m tired of your excuses, Bradley,” Randall said calmly.

  “Look, I said I was sorry—”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it in the grown-up world, Bradley. You’ve always been feckless. You treat life like a joke. When’re you going to grow up?”

  Maybe when you treat me like a grown-up? Brad thought. “What—”

  “The sales office was closed all afternoon. That’s simply inexcusable,” Randall said. “Where were you?”

  “Meeting with a real estate agent to find out what I could do to make Suburban Graveyard more appealing to his clients,” Brad snapped, voice dripping sarcasm. That was it. He’d had enough. Pushed by his fears and insecurities, he’d hit the limit of what he was willing to swallow. “That not what you were expecting to hear, Dad? Figured I took the afternoon off to go joyriding or something? Sorry to disappoint you, Dad, but I’m trying to do the job you dumped on me. Besides which, there weren’t any cards stuck in the door when I got back, and no messages on the voice mail.”

  Randall stared at him for a moment. “We don’t want Realtors bringing people in, Bradley. You have to share the commission,” he said, emphasizing the you.

  But Brad was having none of it. “Right now, there’s no one coming in. So all of nothing is… nothing. You told me I had to do this. If you’re not going to tell me how, then back off.”

  “No cards just means no real estate agents, Bradley,” Randall said with exaggerated patience, “it doesn’t mean that no one came by. The people we want don’t leave their business cards in the door. They’re just ordinary people who want to buy a house.”

  “Yeah, they’re beating a path to our door, that’s for sure,” Brad said, laughing. “Whole busloads of ’em, all panting to buy one of those horrible houses. Whoever designed those must have a lot of hostility to work out.”

  Brad didn’t wait for an answer. He stomped off to his room, ignoring his dad’s demands that he come back. He threw his backpack into a corner of his room and slammed the door behind him. If Randall was true to form, he’d leave Brad alone in his room.

  Brad relaxed fractionally now that the door was shut and locked. Whatever else he could say about living at home as a college graduate, at least he had a spacious room to call his own, including an attached bath. If it had had a kitchen beyond the small dorm-style fridge he stored beer in, it’d have been like living on his own. His dad was an asshole, but he was still a home-builder and developer, and the Sundstrom house showed it through details, finishes, and touches large and small.

  Part of him wondered if it was his dad’s way of keeping his sons dependent, but mostly he just liked hiding back in his room, kicking back in a battered recliner and cracking open a beer or four. But if this job Randall had dumped on him ever started paying, he was off like a prom dress, out of there, and into his own place.

  He didn’t figure the shit job was his dad’s way of keeping him down, as his brother Philip made bank with his job at Sundstrom Homes. Why Philsie didn’t leave was anyone’s guess, but he was the oldest and clear favorite. Brad had a shit job because he was Brad.

  He sighed and opened a beer.

  Brad was pissed but unsure why beyond the catch-22 his dad had put him in, although that was enough. It angered him that he was playing by a set of rules he didn’t know and, for all he did know, changed on him at his dad’s whim. Brad felt like he’d had a good idea and taken positive steps to do his job, a job he didn’t want, and then got crapped on.

  No, he brooded as the booze worked its liquid magic, there was something else going on. He and his emotions and motivations weren’t really on a first-name basis. He’d always been content to go with the flow, riding the wave of whatever he felt without bothering with the whys and the how-comes. Life was simpler that way, and Brad liked simple.

  But lately, his emotions were turning on him. Starting this summer, he’d been buffeted by an unaccustomed melancholy. He’d looked the word up once, and it seemed to describe his mood. He missed his old life, plain and simple. The parties. The gym.

  Crew.

  He missed that most of all. He’d proven himself there. Even if Morgan had finally beaten him on the ergs, proving once and for all that he was faster, Brad had enjoyed the process.

  But the thought of crew led him directly to Drew. Crew and Drew. On his third beer, the rhyme made him snicker. But the direction his mind—liberated by alcohol and an empty stomach—headed when he thought of Drew, that scared him.

  He thought about how hard he’d been during lunch. That scared him too. He’d sported a monster boner for another man.

  Brad leveraged himself out of the chair and headed for the bathroom to tap a kidney. He finished up and glanced at his underwear as he was putting his cock back in. The gray of the boxer-briefs was damp with darker spots of pre-cum.

  Standing before the toilet, junk still out, Brad could only stare at the physical evidence of his attraction for another man.

  That is it, that is just it. I’m not gay, I’m not attracted to Drew. He helped me out with a work problem, but that is it. Over and done with.

  Whatever this… thing of his where Drew was concerned, was a thing of the past. It was over and done with.

  Drew left the restaurant thoroughly charmed by Brad. He didn’t know what Nick’s problem with the guy was, because lunch just confirmed Drew’s hunch that Brad was worth getting to know. A few hours of face time across a table from him, and Drew knew he couldn’t get enough of that double handful of big lug. He was just so appealingly gauche, but once he warmed up and started smiling… that was even better. Drew wanted some more of that.

  Drew wanted all kinds of things from Brad, starting with a little help for his hard-on. But he also knew
the chances of that were slim. As he puttered back to his office to prepare for taking his clients to that freak-show of a house in a few hours, he realized he also wanted to be Brad’s friend.

  Based on what he’d seen of the crew and Brad’s place in it in previous years, and what Brad had let slip, he had the sense Brad might not have had too many friends, real friends, not just people he made trouble with.

  It was probably just wishful thinking, Drew cautioned himself as he pulled into his parking space at the realty office, but it had really seemed like Brad had opened up over the course of lunch, from the closed, even hostile person who’d greeted him in the parking lot, to the laughing and joking guy he said goodbye to.