Tipping the Balance

by Koehler, Christopher

  And then before he knew it, before he could ask, Brad untied his hands. Drew pulled Brad up. “That was….”

  Brad kissed him, and he tasted himself on Brad’s lips. “I know,” Brad said.

  “But I didn’t do anything to make you feel good.” He felt a little empty, thinking he’d been alone at his climax.

  “Yeah, you did,” Brad said. He kissed Drew. “That was so hot for me. Seeing you spread out and helpless like that? I could do that to you for hours. Wanna know why?”

  He nodded slowly. Hearing Brad say that made him burn all over again.

  “Because at the end of it, I know you’re mine, and sooner or later I’ll get to tap that fine, fine ass again.”

  Drew could only nod again, blushing. He was Brad’s too. Unsure of just when it had happened, he knew in that instant that he belonged to Brad, and that was that.

  It scared him a little. He’d always thought that when he gave his heart to someone, he’d be aware of it, that it would be a conscious decision, that he’d have had some control over it, but where Brad was concerned, he was learning quickly he wasn’t in the driver’s seat.

  “Besides,” Brad continued, “I came right after you did.”

  Drew licked his lips, wondering if Brad somehow knew exactly what he was doing or if he were rushing headlong into this too. “You’re sure taking to this like a natural.”

  “Have you looked in a mirror? You would, too, if you had you teaching you,” Brad said. He leaned toward Drew. “You… I don’t know. You make me crazy, sometimes.”

  But Drew did know. As passion dimmed and lust cooled, he wondered if that would be enough.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  October flew by in a blur of crumbling plaster and sawdust, there and gone as the renovation of the Bayard House kicked into high gear. Like both men knew it would, the renovation consumed their lives.

  Brad’s days consisted of early mornings on the river helping Nick coach the CalPac rowers, followed by his part-time work for his father at Suburban Graveyard, and more often than not, he spent that fielding calls from his crews at the renovation, since most people who ventured out there seldom bought. Finally, he dashed to the job site, inhaling lunch as he drove and working until the crews quit for the day. Sometimes—the nights he didn’t have classes—he stayed late working by himself until the private security Drew had hired told him to go home since he was in the way.

  He yawned, swilling down some more energy drink. It wouldn’t help, and after five late nights in a row, first studying for exams and then taking them, on top of everything else, he was fried. Still, the mansion wouldn’t renovate itself.

  Drew’d tried to tell him to take it easy, to pace himself, that they’d built plenty of time into the bid. Brad failed to understand that logic. They had both staked their futures on this high-visibility project, and Brad in particular felt like this was his make-or-break moment. He wasn’t even out of college a year and had majored in physical education. If he had it to do over….

  He swore and put the energy drink down. He was too young for regrets. Wasn’t he? Maybe Drew, at twenty-nine and with a successful real estate career, could afford to go home when he was tired, but Brad knew it was slacking, not that he’d said so. He wasn’t a complete idiot. Still, Drew was stressing hard, so shouldn’t he work just as long and hard?

  He rested his head on the desk they’d set up in the rented trailer inside the fence at the jobsite. Just a few minutes of rest.

  Initially, he’d worried about working with Drew. They already spent many evenings together, and with Drew’s leave from selling houses… well, that promised a lot of togetherness, but the past month had flown by, the days spent in satisfying work and the nights spent making each other feel good. They usually handled their disagreements calmly, and both of them worked to keep the disagreements minor, usually a matter of what Drew envisioned clashing with the realities of engineering and a building almost as old as the state of California itself. At such times, Brad usually found himself serving as the interpreter of the structurally possible to his boyfriend.

  It was weird, Brad thought. When they fucked… made love, he guessed, because it had turned into far more than getting his rocks off. Making love. He still struggled claiming the “gay” label, but he definitely had feelings for Drew far beyond what he’d felt for anyone else, and he sure as hell loved plowing him. If that wasn’t gay, he didn’t know what was. But still, the word.

  He felt funny thinking that, but he also felt like they’d passed some threshold or reached some new level. Like they’d established who was boss and who liked what and that was that. Drew liked to be dominated, and Brad liked to dominate him. Drew clearly got off on submission, at least submission to Brad. But he himself just as clearly got off on that submission.

  Brad hadn’t known that about himself. He wondered if Drew did. From the first time they made out, Drew had responded on a deep, instinctive level to Brad’s larger physical size and brash, even forceful personality. Brad could be tender with Drew, but they both knew what Drew liked, and as Brad was learning, his own pleasure lay in giving it to him.

  In fact, that time after the football game when he’d gone down on Drew, he’d been firmly in control. He’d held the man down and given him what he craved. Brad had been the one with the dick in his mouth and the cum down his throat, but he’d definitely been on top, like he had all the other times. But that got him to thinking.

  He’d always thought the one who went down was “the girl.” That was all his sexual experience had taught him, but when he thought about it, he’d eaten women out before, and he was still all man. He didn’t think Drew would’ve been so into him if he weren’t. So maybe oral was oral. Maybe sex was just sex, and what you stuck it in or who stuck what in you didn’t really matter.

  But then he thought about submitting to Drew, taking Drew inside him. It wasn’t like he’d seen a lot of guys’ dicks to compare Drew to, but the thought of riding that cock kind of scared him. It meant a lot more than sex. It meant a fundamental change in who Brad thought he was, and he wasn’t ready for that.

  Still, he’d never been happier, and not even running around like a crazy man between his two jobs, school, and coaching changed that. Not even the daily tedium of Suburban Graveyard brought him down, not when he had this, and not with Drew in his life. When he thought about it, he might be young and stressed about making it, but he had what he wanted—he was being taken seriously and treated with respect.

  He jolted up. Damn, he was about to fall asleep. He glanced down at the blueprints and decided to get going on what he saw. The last thing he wanted was a noise complaint from the neighbors, but a reciprocating saw used deep inside the mansion should be fine. He’d cut the hole for that interior door he’d seen literally right under his nose and then call it a night before security ran him off.

  It wouldn’t take long, but a few minutes saved here, a few saved there, added up fast, and time was money, right?

  “Hey, boss, you need to see this.”

  Drew looked up from the blueprints for the third-floor private residence. Now that the crews had removed those parts of the rotting floors, walls, and ceiling that posed the greatest hazard and temporarily reinforced the rest, the structural engineers were ready to begin the delicate operation of buttressing all load-bearing members, both to hold the building up and keep it standing in the event of an earthquake.

  “Bring those with you,” Octavio continued.

  “I’ll be right back,” Drew said to the lead engineer. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m hoping you can tell me. There’s a hole for a door where there wasn’t one yesterday. Where there shouldn’t be today.”

  “Where?” Drew groaned. He so didn’t need this. Too tired and busy for his usual stress releases, he could only push himself to the edge for so long before falling over it. The acid shooting into his stomach right then told him that much.

  “Second-floor ballroom,” Oct
avio said.

  “Crap,” Drew said, following Octavio out of the trailer and up the once-grand main staircase and into the ballroom that would again sparkle in a new gilded age once Emily finished with it.

  For now, lath gaped from where the masons had scraped away what couldn’t be salvaged. Drew was surprised at just how much of the original walls they’d been able to preserve, both in the ballroom and the rest of the mansion. That meant after addressing load issues to take the stress off original structural materials, repairing and filling cracks, rekeying de-laminating plaster, and finally after replacing damaged lath, the entire thing could receive a fresh coat of plaster with marble dust to create a hard, smooth coat that would then be polished with a metal trowel.

  Octavio led him to the back of the ballroom, but Drew saw the damage as soon as they walked through the open double doors. The gaping hole where none should be stuck out like a Planned Parenthood clinic in Sun City. “Jesus God,” he muttered, dumbfounded by the sight.

  “Basically, yes,” Octavio replied.

  They peered into the wall, although there wasn’t much to see. A door-sized hole had been neatly cut through into what was supposed to be a library next door, and the dust had even been cleaned up. A few loose pieces of lath wiggled when Drew poked at them. The cleanness of the cuts surprised Drew, for all this constituted mutilation.

  “So what do we do?” Octavio said.

  Drew ground his teeth. What he really wanted to do was hurl his hardhat across the room and then jump up and down on his protective eyewear until it made a nice, satisfying crunching noise. “Why don’t you check the Dumpsters to see if we can salvage any of the pieces? I’m going to check the workflow log to see who gets a new asshole today and then go grovel to the carpenters and masons to see if they can fix it.”

  “Don’t forget telling the city’s historical preservation department. And you wonder why I refuse to be a foreman,” Octavio said as they left the ballroom.

  “No, I really don’t,” Drew said.

  As he hurried downstairs, Drew knew exactly why Octavio refused any more responsibility than Drew had already forced upon him. But really, what kind of fool clattered around with a saw and no clue where to use it? It had to have been one of his people, if only because vandals weren’t so tidy. It was a carefully cut doorway, the result of planning and absolutely stupid blueprint reading.

  Fortunately, Drew had a solution. He’d come up with the idea of a workflow log to track the progress of each crew and to know who had done what in his absence. It was looking more and more like he’d be going back to real estate soon, since, as predicted, the city had proved slow to pay, and he had yet to hear back on two pending grants, including a large one from the state redevelopment agency. Given the state’s perpetually blinkered finances and with spending freezes looking likely, Drew knew he’d need to raise the cash to keep going temporarily. And now the thought of leaving the renovation in someone else’s hands made him long to vomit.

  One good thing, he thought, was that door hadn’t been there when he left yesterday, so the work wouldn’t be too far back. Then he realized something, and it felt like a kick in the gut.

  Brad.

  Brad had worked late the previous night.

  He’d told Brad to go home and sleep, to rest, that he was tired, too tired to keep pushing himself like that.

  Brad hadn’t listened and, like the jackass he could be, charged on ahead, probably fueled by coffee or energy drinks. Drew spun around in his desk chair to check the green recycling bin by the door, and yep, it was full of Rockstar and Red Bull.

  He was old enough to realize that you could only go on that kind of amplification for so long. Brad hadn’t figured it out yet, but he was about to, just as soon as he arrived at work.

  Drew sat at his desk and opened the log to see Brad’s handwriting detailing what he’d worked on the day before, including that damned doorway.

  A note fluttered out of the log, obviously meant for him.

  Hey babe,

  Just a quick note to let you know I got a jump on the next phase and cut the door for the new bathroom in the library wall.

  This schedule sux. We never see each other. : (

  xoxo Brad

  “Yeah, buddy, good luck with that.” Drew bit each word off and spat it out. He was tired and beyond stressed, and the note should’ve charmed him. It might even charm him later, if he restrained himself from wadding it up and chucking it in the recycling bin. “Trust me, Brad, right now, you don’t want to see me. And will someone please spare me from men too stupid to know their own limitations?”

  What he really wanted to do was hit the pathway along the river to pound his stress and anxiety and furor out. Instead, what he would do was mutter rude and unflattering things about his boyfriend under his breath while he wrote a report to the city about the damage to the historic house and then start the cost projections for the repairs. He knew they’d bite into his already-tight budget, and they were starting to be strapped for cash as it was.

  He remembered thinking this summer that he liked a challenge where both Brad and the mansion were concerned, but there in the trailer-cum-office, he reflected that he’d been full of shit. If a closeted boyfriend who blundered through walls in an historic building that was already devouring his budget constituted a “challenge,” the universe lacked all sense of proportion.

  A half-hour later, Octavio came in. “Good call on the Dumpster. I got some of my guys to help, and we found three big pieces. We pulled them out very carefully, so it can probably be repaired.”

  “Okay, can you oversee this personally?” Drew asked.

  “Brad’s crew—”

  Drew shook his head. “Brad’s the one who did this. I want someone on it I know won’t fuck it up again.”

  Octavio’s eyes widened. He knew the score between Drew and Brad. “You got it, boss,” he said, putting particular emphasis on the last word as if to remind him just where the buck stopped. “But in my opinion? This is going to need a restoration specialist. I mean, I can ask the carpenters and masons, but we need this to be perfect so you can assure the city that they’ll need radar to find the fix.”

  Drew regarded Octavio for a moment. “Okay, this conversation never happened, but this will pretty much push the budget into the red.”

  “But the funding—” Octavio started.

  “Between the city and the pending grants, it’s tight. I’ll have to go over the budget with Emily and see how much I can loan the project, but the reality is I’ll probably have to go sell some houses,” Drew said.

  Octavio nodded slowly. “Wow. Good to know. So you want me

  to—”

  “Keep an eye on Brad. He’ll be nominally in control in my absence.”

  Octavio nodded again. “Good luck with that.”

  “No kidding.”

  Octavio checked his watch. “I need to get back to work.”

  “Right. You know how to reach me,” Drew said.

  As Octavio turned to open the trailer door, it opened, and Brad walked in, along with Drew’s renewed anger at the whole situation.

  With a last look over his shoulder, Octavio left to get back to work and get out of the line of fire.

  “That’s odd. What’s his deal?” Brad said. “Anyway, did you see the note I left? I hope it helped.”

  “Helped, you say,” Drew said flatly.

  “Yeah, what’s the problem?” Brad said, looking at him strangely. “What’s yours?”

  “The problem, and it’s our problem, not just mine, is that you cut a door where it didn’t belong,” Drew said.

  “What?” Brad said stupidly.

  “You stayed late when you were dead tired and, I’m guessing, misread the blueprints somehow. You were a room off, Brad. You destroyed a wall that was in pretty good shape,” Drew grated out. “Now we have to try to patch it back together and then pray the masons can repair the plaster. You should’ve gone home and gotten some sleep.”<
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  “Shit,” Brad breathed. He half-turned away.

  Drew unclenched his jaw. “Yes, that’s one word for it. I might also choose colossally stupid or maybe completely fucked, but sure, we can go with shit. Like shit for brains! How could you do that?”

  “At least I was in here doing something!” Brad snapped.

  “When you had no business being here!” Drew fired back. “I tried to tell you it was time to go, that you were too tired, but you wouldn’t listen to me. You had to be a hero. Now on top of fixing it, I get to explain to the city how this happened.”

  Brad just glared at him belligerently, but Drew’s anger still burned incandescently. “Even you have your limits, Superman. You’re not a college jock anymore, Brad! You can’t push yourself to the edge and expect to sleep it off by skipping class.”