“Right,” said Travis.
“I think Kayla will agree with me that most buyers want something that feels evocative of the era, but they also want modern kitchens and bathrooms,” Brandon added.
Kayla nodded. “Let’s do stainless everything. Appliances, sink. We can do an antique-looking vent hood over the oven. I saw these hammered copper ones a few weeks ago that would look great here.”
By the time they had finished with the last bathroom, Brandon couldn’t pay attention anymore. It was mostly Kayla and Travis conferring. Kayla wanted to move all kinds of plumbing around, but Travis was mindful of the budget and talked her out of it except in one bathroom, where it really did make sense to move the shower.
And finally they were in the family room. Travis and Kayla had a spirited argument about whether to get rid of the wall between the dining room and the family room and ultimately decided to just make the doorway bigger.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to this place I know in Dyker Heights,” said Kayla. “It’s like a tile clearinghouse. We should be able to get some good deals on quality product. That okay with you, Bran?”
“Yeah, that works.” He turned to Travis. “What do you think, Travis? Is Kayla’s design more in keeping with what you envisioned for the house?”
“You guys have the final say.”
Virginia made a “keep talking” motion from behind the camera.
“Tell me your opinion,” Brandon said.
“I like most of Kayla’s ideas. It all comes down to which materials you choose. I think you want to go for timeless over trendy here. But you can add a little color or something unique here or there.”
“Can you imagine something that really pops here?” Brandon asked, gesturing to the blank wall. “A wallpaper feature here. A Victorian pattern, something that could have been put in the house when it was built.”
“I salvaged some of the original wallpaper,” said Travis, “so maybe you can find something close to it.”
“That’s an amazing idea,” said Kayla. “Brandon, you and I will scare up some samples tomorrow too.”
“Sounds like we have a design,” said Brandon, grinning for the camera, even though his stomach was sinking.
TRAVIS WAS surprised by how much he liked Kayla. Oh, she was loud and pushy sometimes, but he liked her ideas, and she was upbeat without being insufferable.
They wrapped up filming for the day, leaving Travis with an interesting quandary. He’d been wanting to get Brandon back to his apartment since the morning, but Brandon seemed eager to spend time with Kayla. That was fine; Travis had no claim on Brandon’s time. Truth be told, he was still processing everything Brandon had told him the night before. It was plain that Brandon and Kayla were good friends; they had the easy rapport of people who had known and been fond of each other for a long time. Travis could see how that chemistry could be mistaken for romance; Travis himself had felt jealous a few times as the day had gone on. He told himself he was being ridiculous. Sleeping with a man one time did not mean they had any claim to each other.
He sighed and shook his head. It didn’t matter. They worked together. It was probably just as well that Brandon looked like he’d be hanging out with Kayla tonight. Travis should go home and talk himself out of ever being with Brandon again.
But then Brandon walked over to him. “We’re going to dinner. Kayla wants to check out some new restaurant on Cortelyou Road. You want to come with us?”
Dammit. Travis’s instinct was to say no. But that seemed rude. Plus, he did kind of want to spend more time with Brandon.
“I’m not asking you to solve a complicated math problem,” Brandon said. “It’s just dinner.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I’m not the best at navigating complex social situations. But sure, I’ll go to dinner.”
“It’s only, like, a fifteen-minute walk or a couple of stops on the subway, but Kayla’s getting a cab. Come on, pack up, let’s go.”
And that was how Travis found himself squashed into the back of a cab with Brandon and Kayla. It was thankfully a short ride, and then they were parked in front of what looked like a brand-new pub. The decor outside had the sort of artificial distressing that Travis kind of hated; blowtorches and hammers could make a piece of metal look old, but they also left telltale signs.
The restaurant turned out to be kind of a hipster joint, which Travis could have guessed from the outside. There were a lot of beards and flannel shirts among the clientele. A waitress with purple hair escorted them to a table in the corner, where she handed them menus that were pieces of paper stapled to slabs of wood.
“This is rustic,” said Kayla.
Travis laughed because he could hear the sarcasm in her voice.
She smiled at him in return. “So, the gimmick with this place is that they have a cheesemonger and a beer expert on staff. I don’t know what a beer expert is called. Like, you know how wine has sommeliers? What is a beer expert?”
Brandon got out his phone. “Google says a beer expert is called a cicerone.”
Kayla tilted her head as if she were considering that. “Interesting. Well, this place has a cheesemonger and a cicerone on staff. You can get a cheese plate as an appetizer with a flight of beer and they’ll explain which cheese to try with which beer. And then nearly everything on the menu integrates some unusual cheese and tells you which beer to drink with the dish. They have, like, a hundred and fifty beers on tap. Look behind the bar.”
Travis looked. The number of taps reminded him of a self-serve frozen yogurt café with dozens of handles. There were so many options, he didn’t know how he would even begin to choose. He liked beer—generally lighter, crisper beers over bitter IPAs—but he was game to try anything. He looked at the menu. Hipster prices too, a little high for this part of Brooklyn, but hell, he was making good money arguing with Brandon on camera, so he could eat an elaborate meal now and then.
Kayla ordered the cheese plate with the flight of beer; then they each chose entrees. Travis decided to order the beer recommended to pair with his chicken dish.
Brandon asked the waitress why beer instead of wine. She replied, “Cole, our beer expert, could tell you better than I could, but he thinks beer and cheese taste better together because of the similar ways they ferment, or something like that. I can send him over, if you like.”
“No, that’s okay. I was just curious.”
“This place is trying really hard,” said Travis when she left.
“I lived in this neighborhood years ago, before I met Brandon,” Kayla said. “It was almost entirely Afro-Caribbean. Now look at it!” She shook her head. “Hipsters everywhere.”
“Yeah, it gentrified pretty quickly,” Travis said. “The company I used to work for did a ton of projects in this neighborhood. Before I got hired for the show, I got steady work gutting and renovating kitchens and bathrooms in neighborhoods like this all over Brooklyn.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
“Well, some of these kitchens and bathrooms aren’t very big. But landlords have cottoned on to the fact that a certain type of renter is willing to pay a little more for a bathroom that doesn’t look like the standard black-and-white-tile one every New York apartment has. I mean, I rented a whole series of apartments that had identical layouts and finishes, as if the same architect had built every building.”
“I take it from your accent that you’re from New York originally.”
“Yeah, Queens.”
“What brought you to Brooklyn?”
Travis glanced at Brandon, who shrugged. Travis hadn’t expected to be interrogated, and he supposed it was an innocuous enough question, but he didn’t love talking about himself. He cleared his throat. “Uh, well, I grew up in Forest Hills, but my dad is from Brooklyn and my grandparents lived in Fort Greene. When I was in my midtwenties, a buddy of mine needed a roommate, so I moved over here.” He shrugged.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy.” Kayla smiled. “I’m just really
fascinated by why people move.”
“Speaking of that,” said Brandon, “how is Orange County treating you?”
“I love it! Dave and I are looking to buy a house near the beach now. I don’t love LA, but once you get a fair distance from the city, it’s sunny and warm and beautiful all the time. Well, the fact that it never rains is a problem, but we’ve been playing around with drought-tolerant landscaping at some of the houses we’ve flipped, and I like it.”
Brandon chuckled. “Always a positive spin.”
“We actually just bought a bungalow in Santa Ana that a few major film stars of the fifties once owned, but it has since fallen into disrepair. We got it for a song because it was in such sad shape when we bought it. But Dave’s letting me run with the design. I want to do a super retro midcentury modern design, but with a lot of pops of color, so it will be like living inside a Shag painting.”
“Shag?” asked Travis.
“He’s a SoCal painter who does these really cool, colorful retro paintings. Very mod era, early 1960s. I love them.” She looked at Brandon. “Brandon’s breaking out in hives. Whenever I wanted to do something like paint a wall purple, he used to freak out.”
“I suggested teal tiles for the backsplash in the kitchen,” Travis said, “and he nearly passed out.”
Kayla nodded. “That seems right.”
“Come on, guys. I need to sell this house for a lot of money if I have any hope of recouping my investment. If it’s too specific, I’ll never be able to find a buyer.”
“Look, if you do it right, it will look chic and custom.” Kayla picked up her phone. “The first house we flipped in Orange County was in this cute little up-and-coming neighborhood. Nobody there wanted the standard package. Let me show you what I did in the kitchen.”
Travis sipped his beer while he waited for his turn to look at the photos, and he felt a little smug. When Brandon handed him Kayla’s phone, he was treated to several photos of a very specific kitchen. Bright electric blue flat-panel cabinets, a backsplash with white and light gray subway tiles arranged in chevrons, dark wood floors. “Wow, I like this blue. Staging it with the pops of yellow was a good choice.”
“Right? And we sold the house like that.” Kayla snapped her fingers. “I mean, we got two offers right after the first open house. The house was only officially on the market for about eight hours.”
Brandon grimaced. “It’s just so bold.”
“All right, Mr. Expert,” Travis said, knowing that calling Brandon that would get his goat. “You asked me yesterday what I would do to the house if I could do anything. So let me turn that on you. If this was your house, not a flip but a place you’d actually live, what would your design choices be? Assume an unlimited budget.”
Brandon’s eyebrows knit together. “All right, fine. What I’d do?”
“Oh, here we go,” said Kayla, crossing her arms.
“Tile floors instead of wood,” Brandon said. “And none of this wood glaze bullshit. Ceramic tiles that look like ceramic tiles. But just in the kitchen and dining room, since they’re still separated from the living areas because we decided not to take the walls down. So, my thought is, warm gray floors, a warm wood for the cabinets, maybe walnut. Then polished concrete counters, chrome finishes.”
Kayla shook her head. “Your taste is so industrial and masculine. You had me until the concrete counters. I hate that look.”
“I know. You never let me put them in, but we’re not partners now and this is imaginary, so I can do what I want. I’d do white quartz in the bathrooms, though. The one with the sparkle like we picked out today. In the kitchen, I’d do a pop of color backsplash. Not electric blue, but a softer blue would work. You need some color to balance out the gray.” He sighed. “I’d paint the bedrooms different colors, or at least do a feature wall in each.”
“What would you do in the master?” asked Kayla.
“Feature wall with a wallpaper that has a geometric pattern behind the bed.”
“Not geometric,” said Travis, laughing. It seemed like such an odd thing for Mr. Neutral to choose.
Kayla put a hand over Travis’s. “He picked out this wallpaper for our house upstate that had a bit of gold metallic in it.”
“Metallic, eh? Is that not a bold choice?” Travis raised an eyebrow at Brandon.
“It was for my own house.” Brandon looked frazzled now. “I wasn’t trying to sell my old house when I designed it.”
“As I recall, we left the wallpaper when we sold it.”
“We could do some of those things in this kitchen,” Travis said. “I’m not opposed to polished concrete counters.”
“Really? I’m surprised you didn’t just tell me that something like that was all wrong for a house in this neighborhood.”
“I mean, it is. But I don’t hate your idea for the kitchen design.”
Brandon smiled, looking pleased. “Well, I don’t think that’s the right design for this kitchen. And actually, if it was my house, I wouldn’t do concrete counters. Concrete is really porous and you have to reseal it regularly, plus it still stains easily. It’s a bitch to maintain. It’s just a look I want to try at a flip now that I have free rein. Maybe in the next house.”
They talked shop as they ate, and Travis genuinely liked Kayla even more the longer they discussed house design. He could see why she and Brandon were friends.
Eventually they split the check and wandered outside. Kayla called another cab to take her back to her hotel. As it pulled up, she said, “Tile shopping tomorrow, big guy. You ready?”
Brandon smiled. “As I’ll ever be.”
She blew him a kiss and got in the car. As it pulled away, Travis said, “She seems fun.”
“I miss seeing her every day. We were great roommates. But such is life.”
Travis worried this would get maudlin, so he said, “So are you coming back to my place or….”
“Sure.” He patted his shoulder bag. “I brought a change of clothes this time.”
“Good thinking.”
Chapter Ten
AS BRANDON lay in bed, Travis took a phone call from Ismael. They discussed the work plan for the next day while Brandon felt like a fraud.
These guys were doing the actual work on the house. Sure, Brandon had thrown a sledgehammer a couple of times, and there’d be plenty of footage on the show of him laying tile or painting a wall, but he wasn’t the one actually working on the house. He wasn’t even responsible for most of the design now that he’d brought in Kayla. What the hell was he doing?
Travis got off the phone and glanced at Brandon. “You all right?”
“I should have said no to this show. It’s giving me an existential crisis.”
Travis laughed. “But darling,” he said, his voice teasing and sarcastic, “then you would have never met me.”
Travis’s tone made a shiver go up Brandon’s spine. “Don’t call me darling like that ever again.”
Travis laughed, crawled back into bed with Brandon, and lay beside him. He grinned. “Big project for tomorrow is to start putting up drywall. Are we doing anything with the basement?”
“Let’s put up insulation and drywall but otherwise just leave it as an open space. What’s the floor like down there?”
“Just concrete. But it looks decent because it’s new. Maybe we should stage it with some rugs and good lighting so it doesn’t look too barren. You can claim it’s a great room or something. Plus, the laundry is still in the basement, so you don’t want it to look too scary.”
“Okay.”
“The house I grew up in had a dark, terrifying basement. It scared the crap out of me as a kid. My mom used to put stuff she didn’t want me touching in the basement because she knew I was too afraid to go down there.”
Brandon liked the mental image of Travis as a little boy afraid of monsters in the basement. He put an arm around Travis and stroked his back. Then he let out a sigh. “Are we making a mistake?”
Travis w
as silent for a long time. Finally he said, “What do you mean?”
“I guess it’s my turn to have the freakout about us potentially getting caught together.”
Travis frowned. “Are you freaking out? About what we just did or….”
“No, not about you. About the show. About how we act on the show. Or… about everything.”
“So it’s like an overarching crisis you’re having.”
Brandon took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling. “Here’s where I’m at right now. I’m a man who has been putting up this front of heterosexuality for years, and everyone who watches or produces the show thinks I was part of this nice, happy marriage until it fell apart, and now I’m this wounded bird who just needs the right woman to come along to fix me. I actually read that in a tabloid article, by the way.”
“Gross.”
“I know. But I’ve cultivated this image that is intended to help attract the sorts of viewers who watch the Restoration Channel. I felt like I needed to act a certain way in order to be successful.”
“Like a house you make generic to appeal to as many buyers as possible.”
It bothered Brandon how astute that was. “I feel like I’ve painted myself into a corner. And I’m enjoying spending time with you. Dinner tonight was fun, the sex after was even better, and I even enjoy arguing with you when the cameras are around. But I’m worried now that we’ll get caught and then… then it’ll be all over. That my reputation will be blown to bits.”
Travis pulled away and sat up. “Okay, first of all, there’s nothing bad about being gay.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it. That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it? That everyone will find out you’re gay and this perfect piece of fiction you’ve created will fall to pieces? As if being gay was a character flaw?”
“Some might view it that way.” Brandon put a hand over his eyes, hating how well Travis had him pegged.
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