Travis smirked. “Are you saying I should join the club?”
“It might expedite things.”
Travis whipped his shirt off, then stood up. “Hell, why not take it further.” He undid his fly and shoved his jeans down his legs. He stepped out of them on the way toward the bed, displaying his ass for Brandon as he walked by.
Travis’s body was sinewy and strong. He was tall and lean, with body hair that looked a bit like sand clinging to his skin after a day at the beach. There was a tattoo on his right pectoral muscle and another on his arm and probably more on other parts of him that Brandon couldn’t see because the object of his desire moved too fast. Travis disappeared behind the shelving unit, so Brandon followed, because he had to.
Brandon stood at the foot of the bed and looked at Travis, who lay there, still in his briefs, with his legs splayed. “What are you doing?”
Travis ran a hand down his own chest. “Expediting things.”
“Yeah?”
Travis shoved a hand into his briefs and grabbed what must have been a pretty substantial cock. “I’m having sex tonight. Whether it’s with you or not is up to you.”
Brandon’s heart pounded. Well, with an invitation like that….
Brandon pushed off his jeans and climbed onto the bed.
TRAVIS HAPPILY accepted the weight of Brandon’s body on top of his and ran his hands down Brandon’s back, feeling his soft, smooth skin. He opened his legs to let Brandon settle in the cradle of his hips, and he shifted his pelvis up so their dicks rubbed together. The zing of arousal that whipped through his body was warm and exciting.
Travis wanted to do this hard and fast. He didn’t want to waste time on romance or sweetness. He didn’t know Brandon well enough to judge how much foreplay or flowery language he needed, or if this could just be sexy fun.
So Travis decided to just go for it. He wrapped his legs around Brandon’s thighs and shifted his weight so that he was pinning Brandon onto the bed. Brandon laughed, which was a good sign that sexy fun was on the menu tonight. Travis kissed him hard, biting his lip, and Brandon groaned into Travis’s mouth, making his lips vibrate.
“So what’s your deal?” Travis asked.
“What do you mean?”
Travis ran a hand down Brandon’s chest. They both still had their underwear on, but Travis could feel that Brandon was hard as a rock. His eyes sparkled with a bit of daring. He was into this. Travis grinned. “You have things you like in bed? Top? Bottom? Whatever strikes you in the moment?”
Brandon kissed Travis, probably stalling for the best way to answer the question. Travis hadn’t intended for this to become an interview, but he wanted to know if there were boundaries he should respect. Brandon had been married to a woman until recently; maybe he hadn’t been with a man in a while. Or ever. Not wanting to dwell on that possibility, Travis deepened the kiss and shifted his hips against Brandon.
When Brandon dropped his head back onto the pillow without speaking, Travis said, “I’m game for pretty much anything. I can tell you what I’d like to do, which is to flip you over and worship that tight ass of yours, then fuck you into next Tuesday.”
Brandon groaned. “Yes.” The ecstasy in his voice told Travis that Brandon was definitely into that idea.
“Good.” Travis knelt and scooted back from Brandon a little. “Roll over.”
Brandon complied, smiling at Travis before he rolled onto his stomach with a bounce on the mattress.
Brandon’s body was something else. He was so flipping tall, with long limbs like a swimmer, and his broad shoulders and long back were unmarred by scars or tattoos. Brandon’s thighs were powerful, masculine, his arms well-muscled, his hips narrow, his ass nicely rounded. Everything about Brandon was TV ready. Travis was no slouch, but so much of his strength was due to throwing around sledgehammers and carrying around stone countertops; he wasn’t molded in a gym, and he had scars and tattoos, nothing like Brandon’s near perfect facade.
He pushed that thought aside and hooked his fingers into the waistband of Brandon’s briefs, then pulled them down. Brandon’s ass was similarly perfect, all firm, smooth skin.
“Do you have any physical flaws?” Travis asked, a bit in awe.
“If I do, I’m sure you’ll find them.”
Travis chuckled. Brandon did have his number. But he was done talking.
He pushed at Brandon’s ass and got him to raise it a bit. Then Travis ran his hands over Brandon’s skin, firm but soft to the touch, and slid his thumbs into the crack of Brandon’s ass. When he bent down to lick the seam, Brandon groaned and jerked.
“Okay?” Travis asked.
“Good Lord, do that again.”
Travis dove in.
Brandon smelled delightfully sweaty and musky. Travis had long been drawn to bodies like Brandon’s, strong, possibly gym-sculpted, men who smelled like sweat and hard work. Brandon had a bit of made-for-TV polish, but in the hidden parts of his body, he was raw, sexy, imperfect. Travis pressed his face in, licked the entrance to Brandon’s body, playing with his tongue and fingers to elicit all manner of grunts and groans. When Travis reached between Brandon’s legs, he found Brandon’s eager erection. Travis himself was hard and tingling everywhere, already beginning to lose himself in the sort of overwhelming arousal that made one forget his own name. And more than anything, he wanted to be inside Brandon.
He reached for his nightstand while Brandon, clearly lost in the same place Travis was headed, whined incomprehensible protest noises. Travis pulled a bottle of lube and a condom from the drawer, then resumed his place, this time lubing up his fingers and sliding them inside Brandon while he kissed and nibbled at Brandon’s lower back.
“Oh, that’s good,” Brandon said, shoving his body back onto Travis’s fingers.
Travis’s cock was practically crying out to be inside Brandon. Brandon was whimpering, his skin flushed now, his body begging Travis. So Travis pushed off his own briefs and rolled on a condom. But he wanted to see Brandon’s face.
He nudged Brandon onto his back. Brandon looked up with a question in his eyes. Brandon was pink from his face, across his chest, down toward his cock. Travis was hardly a size queen, but wow! He wrapped his hand around that cock and stroked it, sending Brandon’s hips hopping off the mattress. Then, because he had to, Travis swallowed that cock, savored the salty taste of it and gave it a long lick.
“I’m dying,” Brandon said. “This is what dying feels like.”
Travis laughed and rose on his knees. “But what a way to go, eh?”
Brandon grabbed the lube and poured some on his fingers. He wrapped them around Travis’s dick and slicked up the condom. “I need this inside me more than I need to breathe.”
“Jesus.”
It was Brandon who spread his legs and shifted his hips up, and Brandon who grabbed Travis’s cock and steered it toward him. Travis bowed down and kissed Brandon as he started to slide inside.
After that, instinct took over. Travis had done this hundreds of times, only it had never been quite like this. Brandon’s body was warm and tight, but Travis slid into it like he was meant to be there. Brandon put his arm around Travis as they continued to kiss and Travis started to buck his hips. There was nothing secretive about this, even though they wouldn’t be telling anyone about it in the morning. No, they had all night, and all the lights in Travis’s apartment were blaring, and they could see each other clearly. Travis lifted up, shifted his hips to get a deeper angle, and looked into Brandon’s eyes.
Brandon was falling apart, his lips parted. He closed his eyes tightly as if he were fighting to hold on. He threw his head and shoulders back, bowing off the bed, and his cock was red and hard and pointed toward his chin. Travis wrapped his hand around it as he got the best angle, and the rest of the world became a little fuzzy. He focused only on Brandon, on the size and hardness of his cock, on the way his body squeezed Travis’s, on the redness that spread across his chest.
Travis strok
ed Brandon harder. His singular goal was to get Brandon to come on his cock, to see Brandon fall apart beneath him before he himself succumbed to the pleasure their bodies were creating. Brandon’s facial expression was anguished, but in a way that Travis knew meant he was just barely holding it together.
Brandon grabbed fistfuls of the sheets near his head and pushed his hips against Travis. Then his whole body seemed to surrender to Travis; his eyes rolled back, his shoulders fell to the mattress, and he let out the moan of the deeply satisfied. Then he came against Travis’s hands, his body clamping down on Travis’s cock, and it was all too much. Travis surrendered himself as well, giving himself to this moment, and came inside Brandon.
When he was aware of his surroundings again, his forehead was pressed against Brandon’s sweaty chest. Travis slid out of Brandon and collapsed on top of him, his limbs limp.
Brandon laughed softly and put his arms around Travis. “That was awesome,” he said, sighing.
Travis rolled onto his back and dumped the condom in the trash can near the side of the bed. He remained on his back and looked over at Brandon, who looked happily out of it. “It was awesome,” Travis said.
Suddenly Travis felt a little overwhelmed. He’d just fucked a TV star. He’d fucked a guy he worked with, which he never did. He’d just fucked a guy he’d been arguing with in front of a camera. Had he really just done that?
He had, yeah. And he had no regrets. He rolled over to loop an arm around Brandon’s chest and pull him close. Brandon rested his head near Travis’s on the pillow. They gazed at each other for a moment. The way Brandon smiled indicated that hopefully, he had no regrets about this either.
Chapter Eight
TRAVIS COULD feel the gods of sleep luring him into unconsciousness, but Brandon flicked his earlobe and said, “I didn’t notice you had pierced ears before.”
Travis sighed and closed his eyes. “Something I did in my twenties. I still wear earrings when I go out, but I’m always worried about getting them caught on something at work sites, so I don’t wear them on the job. Which means I don’t wear them, because I pretty much only go to my job these days.”
Brandon laughed softly. “Okay. Tattoos. Piercings. A job you have to do with your hands. You’re a bit of a badass.”
Travis guffawed. “Hardly. Can we go to sleep now?” He settled into the pillows.
“I should tell you something.”
“Now?”
Brandon took a deep breath. “Well, given that we just had sex and we’ll be spending tomorrow with my ex-wife, yeah. I think you need to know this.”
Travis sighed and propped himself up on one elbow so he could look at Brandon. “Shoot.”
“I’m telling you this because I trust you, by the way. This doesn’t leave this room.”
Travis was touched that Brandon trusted him, so he said, “Okay. Lips are sealed.”
“Long before we were married, Kayla and I were best friends and business partners. We met at our real estate licensing class, actually. So basically, we founded B & K Homes, and we mostly handled real estate transactions at first, but then we started flipping houses in Dutchess County upstate.”
“Sure.”
“See, I’d always been interested in real estate because my father…. Do you know who my father is?”
“No. Should I?”
“John Chase.”
Travis sat up. “The John Chase? Chase Tower? The St. Joseph Hotel?”
“Yes. I grew up in a suite at the St. Joseph.”
“You… well, that’s amazing. Was it amazing?”
Brandon shrugged, as if he didn’t think so, but not in an arrogant way. He seemed nonplussed, in fact. “I don’t know if amazing is the right word. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the suite is gorgeous. The family doesn’t live there anymore, although my brother Robert uses it as an office sometimes. But… my father was a hard man to live with. You have to have a certain amount of ruthlessness to get ahead in the New York real estate market, and he used that same ruthlessness on his family. Failure was not tolerated.”
Travis was almost afraid to ask, but he did anyway. “What does that mean?”
“Well, like, my GPA dipped below 3.0 one semester in high school, and I wasn’t allowed to hang out with my friends until I pulled my grades up. My brother Luke got a DUI once when he was nineteen, and when the story showed up in the Post, my father was so furious, he refused to pay Luke’s rent that month. He never laid a hand on us, but he was stern and quick to dole out punishments. And if he disapproved of something we’d done, he’d freeze us out. He and Robert didn’t talk for almost a month once because Robert bought a building in Queens that Dad thought was a bad investment.”
Travis suspected Brandon was sugarcoating this story a little. He sounded almost apologetic about his father, which seemed like a sure sign of a lifetime of gaslighting and abuse. Travis also knew that John Chase had passed away about five years ago. Of course, most people were never quite free of a history like that.
“Anyway,” Brandon said. “I’m telling you this to explain the situation I was in. Robert took over the family business when Dad started having health problems. Luke helped out sometimes too, although Luke has… well, he’s got his own stuff to deal with. And I decided that I was interested in real estate, but I was the rebel, and I wanted to get by on my own. Kayla and I moved to Poughkeepsie and set up shop there just when there was a boom of people from the city moving upstate. We made enough money that I didn’t need Dad’s financing. I didn’t want it, frankly. Dad probably would have invested in my business if I’d asked, but his help would have come with strings, and he would have wanted more control than I was willing to give up. So Kayla and I made the business a success without his help.”
“That’s admirable,” said Travis, lying back down.
“I was proud of the work we were doing. And then we were watching some Restoration Channel show one evening when Kayla said, ‘We should do that.’”
Travis traced a line through Brandon’s chest hair with his finger. “Be on TV?”
“Yeah. Kayla had a friend who was an entertainment agent here in the city, and she managed to discover that the Restoration Channel was putting out feelers for a house-flipping show hosted by a married couple. Restoration’s whole thing at the time was that its viewers were getting really invested in each couple. Fans wanted to get to know the couple more than they wanted to see the end results of the home renovation. So Kayla decided we should get married.”
“Well, if you rushed into marriage to get your fifteen seconds of television fame, I suppose that could be a reason for divorce.”
“It worked, because we got the job.”
“And then lost it when your marriage fell apart.”
Brandon looked at the ceiling. “Here’s the thing I need you to understand. It was a marriage of convenience. In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m gay.”
Wait, what? Travis assumed Brandon and Kayla had been in love with each other—Brandon always talked about her fondly—and that Brandon was bisexual, especially since Brandon kept going on about how much he missed Kayla and wished she were with him on the site, but… no. He was gay.
“My father was conservative,” Brandon said. “He threatened to disown me when I came out, and my mother encouraged me to stay in the closet to keep him happy. So I did. Imagine how different my life would have been if I’d…. Well, it’s too late for that now. But at the time Kayla suggested we get married, it solved two problems. It made my family happy and it gave us the opportunity to do Dream Home. Dad was very excited about having a son carrying on the family tradition of real estate supremacy on television.”
“So, wait. You and Kayla had a fake marriage.”
“We had a legal marriage. There was a ceremony at City Hall and everything. We just never consummated it.”
This was blowing Travis’s mind. He didn’t know anyone in modern times who still did things like this. “So, wait. The tabloids al
l say she cheated on you.”
“We had an arrangement. We shared a house near Poughkeepsie to keep up the ruse, but we agreed that forcing each other into a sexless marriage was an awful thing to do, so we agreed we could see other people as long as we were discreet. And then about a year and a half ago, Kayla started dating this guy named Dave. They fell in love… and she got careless. They were out for dinner one night in Manhattan, and someone snapped a cell phone photo of them kissing. That person posted the photo on social media. Then the tabloids went crazy and ran with the story.”
Travis let that hang in the air while he tried to puzzle through what Brandon was telling him. “In other words, you and Kayla had a legal but fake marriage, and everything was going fine until the tabloids saw Kayla kiss another dude and assumed she was cheating. And that was enough to get your show canceled?”
“The Restoration Channel had another house-flipping show that was hosted by a married couple who got divorced in the sixth season, and the whole show fell apart. Viewership dropped off, the episodes weren’t as good because the couple was constantly fighting with each other, and the show itself became about their divorce drama instead of house flipping. Restoration wasn’t willing to make that mistake twice. And since the narrative was that we were getting divorced because Kayla was cheating on me—and not because Kayla wanted to marry the boyfriend she had my blessing to be with—Restoration pulled the plug. Plus, you know, we were hired because we were this cute, happy newlywed couple. It’s hard to sell that image when out here in the real world, everyone is talking about how our marriage fell apart.”
Travis remembered something Brandon had said earlier. “And you feel guilty because Kayla kind of got shafted here, but you look like the injured party.”
“Yes. I hate that this is how it played out. Kayla insists she’s okay and she and Dave are happily flipping houses out of the spotlight in California now, but… it’s all ruined.”
“To be fair, she’s the one who kissed a guy in public.”
Domestic Do-over Page 8
