The Problem With Travis

[Brodyw2521]

The Problem With Travis

Broad Ripple After Midnight

Chapter 1

The thing about New Year's Eve is that it promises something it almost
never delivers. A clean break. A fresh start. The idea that when the
clock flips, something shifts and the version of yourself you've been
carrying around all year gets to be set down, at least for a night.


Brody had given up on that particular fantasy somewhere around his
second year of college. So when his coworkers had made their plans to
hit Broad Ripple and ring in 2017 with overpriced drinks and bad
decisions, he had volunteered to drive. It was easier that way. Keep
your hands on the wheel, keep your eyes on the road, keep yourself
useful. It was a role he had carved out for himself since starting at
the company six months ago, the steady one, the reliable one, the guy
who had everything together.


It was a good cover.


The night had been quiet. He made three runs between the bars and the
apartments, ferrying laughing, stumbling coworkers back to their beds,
collecting thanks he didn't need and promises to Venmo him that he
knew would never come. By 12:45am he was parked outside the last bar
on his list, engine idling, watching a group of strangers count down
the last seconds of the year on the sidewalk. He had his phone in his
hand, checking to see if anyone else needed a ride.


The phone buzzed and Brody already knew before he flipped it over.


Travis.


He stared at the name on the screen for a beat longer than was
reasonable. Long enough that the call almost went to voicemail, which
would have been the smarter choice. The self-preserving choice. The
choice that the version of Brody who had everything under control
would have made without hesitating.


He answered.


"Hey." Travis's voice came through thick and loose, the unmistakable
texture of someone four drinks past their limit. "Hey, Brody, man. I
need a ride."


"Yeah, I figured. Where are you?"


A pause. Shuffling sounds. The distant noise of a crowd somewhere behind him.


"I'm... okay so there's a... there's a sign. It's got a... it's red."


Brody closed his eyes briefly. "Travis. What street are you on?"


"The one with the..." More shuffling. "Okay there's a gas station. A
Marathon. And across the street there's a place that does gyros, I
think. Or maybe it's a taco place."


It took Brody four minutes to figure out which Marathon it was. Four
minutes of pulling up the Broad Ripple grid in his head, running
through the intersections, eliminating options while Travis breathed
into the phone and offered occasional unhelpful details. A parking
lot. A tree. What he believed might be a mural but could not confirm.


Four minutes of telling himself that the low, loose quality of
Travis's voice was not doing anything to him.


It was doing something to him.


That was the thing about Travis that Brody had spent six months
refusing to examine directly. It wasn't any single quality. It was the
accumulation. The way he existed in the world without apparent effort,
like the world had been arranged to accommodate him and he had simply
never questioned it. Six feet four inches of easy confidence and long
limbs and a face that belonged on something you'd see in a magazine,
and the infuriating part was that Travis didn't seem to know it, or if
he did he had never found it worth mentioning. He laughed too loud and
took up too much space and people loved him for it, reflexively,
helplessly, like they had no say in the matter.


Brody had a say in the matter.


He had been exercising that say since day one at orientation when
Travis had turned and extended his hand and smiled at him with that
particular smile, the one that arrived a half second before the rest
of his face caught up, and Brody had shaken it and felt the dry warm
grip of it travel all the way up his arm and had thought, very clearly
and without flinching: absolutely not.


He pulled up to the Marathon and found Travis sitting on the curb outside.


Even drunk and rumpled and half-frozen he looked like that. Elbows on
his knees, head hanging forward, shirt mostly open and blowing back in
the cold January air like winter was something that happened to other
people. The headlights caught him and he looked up and broke into a
grin that had no business being that disarming on someone who could
barely stand up. His shirt was a pale blue button-down and it was
doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to contain the width of his
shoulders or the long flat line of his stomach below them. His jeans
were dark and sat low on his hips, the top button open already,
because of course it was, because that was the kind of thing that just
happened around Travis without anyone deciding it should.


"You came," Travis said, like this was in question.


"Get in the car," Brody said.


Travis unfolded himself from the curb. That was the only word for it.
He was so much leg, so much arm, all of it loose and unhurried, and he
pulled the passenger door open and folded himself into the seat and
the car shrank immediately. It always did when Travis got in it. The
air changed. Something shifted in the barometric pressure of the
space.


He smelled like whiskey and cold air and underneath that something
else that Brody kept firmly in the category of things he was not going
to think about.


Brody put the Ford Fusion in drive and kept his eyes on the road.


He made it six blocks.


Travis leaned over and put his head on Brody's shoulder.


Brody's hands tightened on the wheel. His jaw set. He kept his eyes
forward and his speed even and his breathing deliberate because he was
a person who was in control of himself and his circumstances and he
was going to keep it that way.


"Travis."


"Mm."


"What are you doing."


"Tired," Travis said, like it was self-explanatory, like this was a
perfectly normal thing to do to someone. His voice was low and a
little rough and the word landed warm against Brody's neck, and Brody
felt it in his collarbone, in his sternum, lower than that if he was
being honest, which he was not going to be.


Travis's head was heavy. That was the thing he hadn't anticipated. The
actual physical weight of him, the warmth radiating through two layers
of fabric, the way he had settled against Brody's shoulder like he had
been doing it for years. Like it was a place he was familiar with.
Like his body had decided this was where it was supposed to be and had
simply gone there.


Brody stared at the road and catalogued, very clinically, what was
happening in his body.


His shoulder and upper arm where Travis's weight was resting: warm. Too warm.


His right hand on the wheel: too tight. He consciously loosened it.


His pulse: a problem.


The rest of him: also a problem, and getting worse.


Travis shifted. Just slightly, just enough, his head sliding
incrementally downward from Brody's shoulder, tilting forward, and
Brody tracked the movement in his peripheral vision with the focused
attention of someone watching a car slide slowly toward the edge of an
icy road. He knew where this was going. He told himself to say
something, to redirect, to perform the basic function of speech.


He did not perform the basic function of speech.


Travis's head came to rest in his lap.


Brody exhaled through his nose, slow and controlled, a breath he had
been holding for approximately six months. The weight of Travis's head
against his thigh was warm and solid and real in a way that no amount
of careful management had prepared him for. He could feel the shape of
his jaw, the slight rasp of a day's worth of stubble through the
denim. Travis shifted again, getting comfortable, one hand coming up
loosely to rest against Brody's knee with a casual intimacy that
absolutely did not belong to them.


Brody drove.


Under his breath, in the privacy of his own skull, he said some things
to himself that were not particularly kind. He catalogued the ways
this was a bad idea with the efficiency of someone who had prepared
the list in advance. Same company. Same building. Same floor,
practically. The career he had spent six months building carefully
from scratch in a city where he knew no one. The closet he had climbed
back into at graduation with full awareness of what he was trading and
why. All of it stacked up against the weight of Travis's head in his
lap and the sound of his breathing going slow and even and the
maddening animal warmth of him filling the passenger seat of Brody's
sensible, responsible, completely controlled Ford Fusion.


The thing Brody could not stand about Travis, the thing that lived
underneath the want and made it worse, was the ease of him. Even
drunk. Even like this. He was still effortless. His body took up space
without apology, his presence rewrote the physics of whatever room he
was in, and he had laid his head in Brody's lap like it cost him
nothing because for Travis nothing ever seemed to cost anything.


Brody worked for every single inch of the life he had built. He worked
for the steady reputation. He worked for the carefully maintained
distance between who he was privately and who he was professionally.
He worked for the control that kept all of it from sliding into each
other.


Travis existed.


That was genuinely all he seemed to have to do.


Brody turned into the apartment complex and parked the car and sat for
a moment in the dark with Travis's head in his lap and his hands still
on the wheel and told himself, for what felt like the hundredth time
since orientation, that this was not going to happen.


He was almost convinced.

 

[Brodyw2521]

The apartment building was quiet when they got back. That particular
brand of 1am quiet that felt thick, like the whole building was
holding its breath. The kind of quiet that made every small sound
matter more than it should. The soft thud of the lobby door. The
muffled fall of their footsteps on the carpet. The sound of Travis
breathing, steadier now than he had been at the Marathon, the cold air
having done some of the work that time hadn't yet.


Brody got him through the front door with one hand at his back, just
below the shoulder blades, feeling the shift and play of muscle
through the thin fabric of that open shirt. Travis was warm even here,
even after the walk from the car in January air that had no business
being kind to anyone. His skin threw heat the way some people did,
like his body ran a few degrees above the rest of the world and had
never thought to question it.


The door swung shut behind them with a soft thud that the carpet
swallowed almost immediately.


Brody's hand was still at Travis's back.


Neither of them moved toward the stairs.


It wasn't a decision so much as a mutual failure to keep moving, like
two people who had been walking toward the edge of something and had
arrived there simultaneously and were now standing at the lip of it,
close enough that Brody could feel the heat coming off him in the dim
lobby air.


The overhead light was on its overnight setting, casting everything in
a low yellowish wash, and Travis turned to look at him and the light
caught the open front of his shirt and Brody's eyes moved there before
he could stop them.


Travis's stomach was bare where the shirt had fallen open. Not built
the way Brody was built, no mass, no density, but toned in a way that
looked almost unreasonable, the kind of definition that belonged in an
advertisement for something aspirational. His abs were flat and clean,
each one distinct without being exaggerated, the kind of stomach that
came from genetics as much as effort, and Brody hated that, hated that
Travis probably didn't even have to work particularly hard for it. His
obliques cut a sharp line down toward his hips and below that,
disappearing into the low waist of his dark jeans, was the V. That
infuriating, perfect, deeply unnecessary V-line, two clean diagonal
cuts of muscle framing the trail of hair below his navel and pointing
downward with a kind of architectural precision that seemed almost
intentional, like his body had been designed specifically to make
people stop thinking clearly.


Brody's jaw tightened.


Travis's collarbones were sharp above it all, his shirt hanging off
one shoulder now, and his dark eyes were steady on Brody's face with
that same unhurried quality he brought to everything. Reading
something there. Patient about it.


Brody felt the want move through him like a current, low and specific,
and underneath it the familiar edge of something that lived right next
to resentment. Because Travis looked like that without trying. Because
he was standing in a dim lobby at 1am looking like a problem Brody had
not signed up for, and he wasn't doing anything except existing, which
had always been the core issue with Travis. He simply existed and the
room reorganized itself accordingly and everyone in it, including
Brody, had to decide what to do about that.


Travis's hand came up and settled against the side of Brody's jaw.
Warm and dry. His thumb traced the line of Brody's beard with a
deliberateness that was worse than if he had simply moved fast. Brody
stood very still and felt the drag of that thumb against the grain of
his beard and thought with absolute clarity: this is a mistake I am
going to make anyway.


"This okay?" Travis said. Quiet. Not performing anything.


"Yeah," Brody said. Equally quiet. Equally honest.


Travis kissed him.


Or Brody kissed Travis. Honestly the sequence was unclear and within
about four seconds it stopped mattering because they were both kissing
each other with the specific focused intensity of two people who had
been not doing this for six months. Brody's back hit the wall and he
barely registered the impact. Travis was taller by several inches and
the hands that found Brody's jacket and gripped it were large and
sure, no hesitation in them, and Brody got a fistful of that open
shirt and pulled Travis closer and felt the full length of him press
in and Travis made a sound against his mouth that landed somewhere
below Brody's sternum and radiated outward.


Travis kissed like he did everything else. Like it cost him nothing.
Like he had all the time in the world and had decided to spend some of
it here. His mouth was warm and unhurried and thorough and Brody, who
had kissed people before, who was not new to this, found himself
working to keep up in a way that he resented deeply and did not stop.


He felt the solid press of Travis against him. The breadth of those
shoulders blocking out the room. The bare warmth of that stomach where
the open shirt had fallen away completely and skin met the fabric of
Brody's coat. And lower than that, unmistakably, undeniably, the thick
weight of him beginning to shift against Brody's hip as the kiss went
on, heavy and slow and already significant in a way that Brody's brain
registered and stored and did not yet know what to do with.


Brody shoved back into the kiss. Travis's shoulders hit the opposite
wall and something clattered somewhere down the carpeted hallway and
Travis laughed into his mouth, low and rough, a sound that vibrated
against Brody's lips, and then kissed him again harder. His hands had
moved, one at Brody's hip now, gripping with a quiet certainty that
communicated clearly that it was not going anywhere until Brody said
otherwise.


Brody was the one who pulled back.


He needed six inches of air between their mouths before he could
construct a sentence. His hands were still in Travis's shirt.


"Hey." His voice came out rougher than he intended. He cleared his
throat. "Hey. We should... it's late. You're drunk. We should go to
bed."


Travis looked at him. His mouth was slightly swollen. His shirt was
half off his shoulders now, the open front showing that perfect
stomach and that devastating V-line, and Brody made himself look at
Travis's face instead. Those dark eyes moved across Brody's face with
that same unhurried steadiness, reading something there that Brody
hoped was not as legible as it felt.


"Yeah," Travis said after a moment. His voice had dropped an octave. "Okay."


Neither of them moved for three full seconds.


Then Travis pushed off the wall and they started for the stairs.


* * *


They made it to the landing between the first and second floor before
Brody's eyes dropped without his permission.


He noticed it the way you notice something that has been there the
whole time and suddenly can no longer be ignored. Travis was ahead of
him by half a step on the carpeted stairs, shirt hanging completely
open now, and his jeans, dark denim with a button fly, were doing
something they had not been doing in the lobby. The fabric was pulling
tight across the front in a way that stopped Brody's feet mid-step and
stopped most of his higher cognitive functions along with them.


Travis stopped too.


The landing was small. One frosted window, dark with January night.
The carpet underfoot a neutral tan that the building management had
probably chosen specifically because it showed nothing. A single wall
sconce throwing just enough light to see by. Intimate in the way that
unplanned spaces sometimes were, not designed for this, simply the
nearest available geography.


Brody's eyes were on the front of Travis's jeans and he was not
pretending otherwise.


What was happening there was not subtle. The denim was straining in a
way that suggested what was beneath it had been building for a while,
pulling the fabric taut from the inside with a heaviness that the
button fly was doing its level best to contain. The shape of it was
visible. The length of it tracking down and to the left along his
thigh, thick and insistent and fundamentally impossible to misread.


Brody stood on the carpeted landing of their apartment building at 1am
on New Year's Day and looked at that and felt his mouth go dry.


His hand moved before he made a conscious decision to move it.


He pressed his palm flat against the front of those jeans and what he
found there stopped the breath in his chest completely. The weight of
it against his hand was extraordinary. Dense and heavy and radiating
heat through the denim, and the shape of it filled his palm and then
kept going, thick enough that even through the fabric Brody could feel
he was not going to be able to close his hand around it. It pulsed
once against his palm, slow and powerful, like a second heartbeat.


"Jesus," Brody said. It came out almost reverent.


Travis looked down at him. His dark eyes were steady, no performance
in them, no smugness. He reached down and popped the button fly open
in one practiced motion, four quick snaps in succession, and the jeans
fell open.


"Still good?" he said quietly.


"Yeah," Brody said. His voice was not entirely steady. "Yeah, I'm good."


The boxers underneath were thin gray cotton and they were not doing
anything except making the situation more explicit. The outline
pressed against the fabric was detailed and unambiguous, the shape
distinct through the cotton, the shaft running thick and straight and
heavy along his hip. Brody's brain attempted to estimate and revised
upward twice before he stopped trying.


He reached up and pulled the waistband down.


The sound Brody made was involuntary. A short sharp exhale that he
could not have stopped if he had wanted to.


The smell hit him first.


That was the honest truth of it. Before his eyes had fully processed
what was in front of him, before his hands had caught up with what
they were holding, it was the smell that landed. Warm skin and hours
of a night out and underneath that something else entirely, something
that had nothing to do with whiskey or cold air, something that was
just Travis, concentrated and close in a way Brody had never been
positioned to notice before. The faint salt of sweat on warm skin. The
particular heat that came off a body that had been moving and drinking
and existing at full intensity for hours. Something deeper underneath
all of that, musky and private and specific to him, the kind of scent
that did not ask permission before it did what it did to you.


Brody's brain tried to file it under information. His body filed it
somewhere else entirely.


What was in his hand was something his prior experience had not
prepared him for and he was self-aware enough to admit that. Travis
was hard in a way that seemed structural. Fully and completely hard,
the skin pulled so smooth and tight it had an almost polished quality,
the head broad and dark and flared wide at the crown with a prominent
ridge where it met the shaft. He was straight, which somehow made the
reality of the length more confronting, no curve to negotiate, just
the full uninterrupted fact of him. Brody wrapped his fingers around
the shaft and his fingertips did not come close to meeting. The girth
alone was its own separate revelation, thick enough that Brody's hand
felt proportionally wrong around it. He ran his thumb slowly up the
underside and felt the thick ridge of the vein there and heard
Travis's breath change above him, sharp and sudden.


He stroked him once. Slowly. Base to tip.


The weight of him moved in Brody's hand with a dense rolling momentum,
the pulse steady and deep against Brody's palm, and the heat of him
was extraordinary, the skin smooth and tight and running hot in a way
that made Brody's grip tighten involuntarily.


Travis's hand came up slowly and settled on top of his head. Not
pushing. Not guiding. Just resting there with a quiet certainty that
said: I want this. Your call.


Brody sank to his knees on the carpeted stair landing.


He looked up at Travis once from down there. Travis looked back at
him, chest rising and falling, shirt hanging open, that perfect
stomach taut above him, the V-line pointing down to exactly where
Brody's hands were. Waiting. Patient. A faint shine of sweat at his
collarbone catching the dim light of the wall sconce.


Brody turned his attention to the task.


Up close the heat of him was its own atmosphere. The scent was
stronger here, warmer, that same deep musk amplified by proximity,
wrapping around Brody's senses with a thoroughness that left no room
for careful thought. It was not cologne. It was not soap. It was
something that existed underneath all of that, something that Travis
had not put there deliberately and could not have removed if he had
tried. Raw and specific and private, the scent of a person in their
most unguarded state, and it hit the back of Brody's brain like a
frequency he had not known he was tuned to.


He did not get it on the first try. That was the plain truth and he
was not going to dress it up. He worked his jaw wide and went slow and
felt the broad smooth head press against his lips and push past them
and the stretch was immediate and significant, something he felt
behind his ears and in the hinge of his jaw. He breathed through it.
Adjusted. Tried again.


He got there.


And once he did, once he had the tight smooth weight of him on his
tongue, once he felt that taut skin against his lips and tasted the
salt heat of him and heard the way Travis's breath changed above him,
sharp and real and stripped of all that easy composure, something in
Brody's chest went very quiet. Not soft. Not tender. Something more
like satisfaction. The specific satisfaction of watching the most
effortless person he had ever met become suddenly, helplessly
affected.


Travis's hand tightened in his hair.


Brody worked him slowly, taking what he could, using his hand on the
rest, finding a rhythm that drew another sound out of Travis, low and
involuntary and nothing like his usual voice. The scent of him was
everywhere now, filling every breath, warm and dark and relentless,
and Brody felt the pulse of him against his tongue and the heat of him
against his lips and thought about nothing except this. This specific
landing. These carpeted stairs. The way Travis sounded when he stopped
performing effortlessness and just felt something instead.


Travis's fingers curled tighter in his hair.


Somewhere above them, a door opened on the third floor.


The sound cut through everything. The soft mechanical click of a
latch. The quiet groan of hinges. The sudden presence of someone awake
and moving on the floor directly above them.


Brody went completely still.


Travis's hand stopped moving in his hair.


Neither of them breathed.

* * *

To be continued.