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.

 

[Brodyw2521]

Would anyone be interested in additional parts to the story? This is my first time posting a story of mine and any feedback or suggestions would be welcome.

 

[Patdfan08]

Yes. Continue this story. So hot

 

[Torabraaten]

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.

I like the storyline. Keep up the great work! Thanks

 

[Brodyw2521]

The Problem With Travis
The Brody & Travis Series
Chapter 2: Clean Break

The sound stopped everything.

Not metaphorically. Physically. The click of a latch. The low groan of hinges. The sound of a door that had been closed now open, one floor directly above them, and from that open door the soft shuffle of someone awake and moving on the third floor.

Brody did not move.

He was still on his knees on the carpeted landing with Travis’s cock still in his hand, still in his mouth, still impossibly hard and running with heat and pulsing against his tongue with that same slow structural rhythm that had been rewriting things in his brain for the last several minutes. The pulse did not stop just because a door had opened. It kept going, steady and deep and indifferent, his palm registering every beat of it with a thoroughness his body had no idea what to do with.

Travis’s hand was still in his hair.

For one full second nothing happened. Then the hand tightened.

Not a push. Not a pull. A single involuntary contraction of those fingers, slow and sudden at the same time, gripping before the brain caught up with the grip, and then releasing. Withdrawing. Slow and careful, like he was taking something back that he had not meant to offer in the first place.

It was the first thing Brody had ever seen Travis do that had the texture of something unplanned.

He did not have time to think about it.

-----

Brody pulled back and got to his feet.

Travis was already moving and that was the thing his brain filed immediately and could not let go of. The easy unhurried quality that Travis brought to every other moment of his life was simply gone. In its place was something efficient and fast and practiced, a reflex that did not belong to a man who never seemed to need reflexes. He reached into the open jeans with both hands and Brody watched him work and understood within about three seconds that this was not a simple operation.

What Travis was attempting to fold back into those jeans was not built to fold. His cock was fully hard in the way that some men got fully hard, the kind of hard that was structural and complete and not interested in negotiating with denim. Brody had held it in his palm and felt the density of it, and what his eyes were now confirming was that there was simply too much of it, too much rigidity, for the geometry of the situation to be easy. Travis bent it once and exhaled through his nose and bent it again and Brody watched his jaw tighten and his hands work and thought about nothing except what those hands were touching and hated himself for it.

Four buttons. Done.

Travis’s hands were steady. His face gave Brody nothing.

That was the part his brain kept circling even with the footsteps getting closer above them. He was watching Travis close himself off in real time, watching a man reassemble himself from the outside in with the focused calm of someone who had done this before, or something like it, in circumstances he had no intention of discussing. Brody stood two steps below him and tried to find something readable in that face and found nothing. Not panic. Not embarrassment. Not the residue of what had just happened. Nothing except the concentration of a man solving a problem in a limited amount of time.

He also could not look away from the thin dark streak across the front of those jeans, just below the second button, catching the dim light of the wall sconce in a way that no amount of efficient tucking was going to fix.

The footsteps were on the second floor landing now.

His own problem announced itself with the specific and inconvenient insistence of something that had been building for six months and had not received the resolution it had been promised. His dick was pressing hard against the inside of his jeans in a way that the denim was not designed to accommodate discreetly and he had approximately three seconds to do something about that. He shifted. Adjusted. Pressed the back of his hand against the front of his jeans in a motion that was less than satisfying and more than nothing, then pulled his jacket closed and buttoned the bottom button with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be.

He took one step up to the landing and put his back against the wall and pulled out his phone.

The stairwell door opened.

-----

She was nobody he knew well. A woman from the building, one of the non-company residents, someone he had passed in the lobby twice without learning her name. She had a coat on and her keys in her hand and she looked at them the way you looked at people you did not know at 1am on a holiday, which was with a brief assessment and a rapid conclusion and then a small polite smile.

Her eyes moved across both of them without stopping.

He was acutely aware of the streak on Travis’s jeans. Of the one collar button on Travis’s shirt that had not made it. Of his own jacket and whether the bottom button was doing the work he needed it to do. He held his phone and kept his expression at the particular setting he had developed over six months of careful professional performance, pleasant and unremarkable and giving away nothing.

“Happy New Year,” she said.

“Happy New Year,” Brody said.

Travis said it too. And there it was, the voice arriving warm and easy and unhurried, the smile that came a half second before the rest of his face caught up, the effortless quality that had no business being available to him thirty seconds after wrestling his cock back into a button fly on a staircase landing. She smiled back at him the way people smiled back at Travis, reflexively, helplessly, like they had no say in the matter. She passed between them and continued down toward the lobby.

Brody did not look at Travis.

Travis did not look at Brody.

The lobby door opened below them and swung shut.

-----

Travis moved first.

He went up past Brody toward the second floor door and Brody tracked him in his peripheral vision without turning his head. The shirt hung open at the collar where one button had not made it. His shoulders were straight. His hands were in his pockets. He pushed through the second floor door and it swung shut behind him with a soft click that the carpet absorbed almost immediately.

Brody stood on the landing for a moment longer than was necessary, long enough for the quiet to settle back in around him. The sconce threw its dim light across the neutral carpet. The building was still. The landing was exactly the same as it had been before any of this, the same frosted window dark with January night, the same walls, the same utilitarian geography of a space that had not been designed for anything that had just happened in it.

He climbed the rest of the stairs to the third floor alone.

 

[Brodyw2521]

The apartment was quiet when he let himself in.

He stood in the small entry and listened. From behind one of the closed bedroom doors came the low unsteady sound of someone sleeping. From behind the other, nothing. He waited until he was sure, then moved through the kitchen without turning on the light, one hand trailing the counter, the layout familiar enough that he did not need to see it.

His room was at the end of the short hallway.

He eased the door shut behind him and stood in the dark and breathed.

Two double beds. One made, one used. Two nightstands side by side between them, a dresser against the far wall beside the narrow walk-in closet, the whole room exactly as corporate and impersonal as it had been when he moved in six months ago. The second bed had been made up by building management before he arrived, the pillow centered, the comforter smooth, waiting for a roommate who had never shown up. He had stopped noticing it after the first few weeks. It was just a fact of the room, like the dresser and the closet and the thin walls that let through the sound of the neighbor’s television at a volume that made the programming choices unavoidable.

He sat on the edge of his bed, set his phone on the nightstand, unlaced his shoes, set them side by side on the floor, and lay back on top of the covers.

The ceiling was the same ceiling it had always been.

He knew what was going to happen. There was no version of tonight where the want just resolved on its own and he went to sleep without addressing it. He turned off the lamp.

-----

In the dark he took stock of himself the way he took stock of most things, which was directly and without ceremony.

He was not a small man. He had never been a small man and had made his peace with that early. The body he had inherited was stocky and solid in a way that went bone-deep, the kind of build that came from generations of men who had used their bodies for things that required actual physical consequence. His chest was broad and covered in dark brown hair that ran down his sternum and spread across his pecs and tapered toward his stomach. His arms were heavy. His thighs were built for power rather than aesthetics, the kind that could generate force without much discussion about it. His calves were dense, his hands were large, his feet were a size eleven and a half, and all of it had always been simply what he was, unremarkable in the way that your own body became unremarkable when you had occupied it long enough.

He slid his hand down and wrapped it around his cock.

The loose skin shifted easily under his palm, the foreskin-adjacent looseness of his circumcision giving him something to work with that other men did not have, the skin moving over the head of him with a drag he had learned a long time ago how to use. He was not small. Six and a half inches, closer to seven when fully hard, and thick enough that his own hand felt proportional around him, fingers closing with room to spare.

He thought about what it had felt like when his fingers had not come close to meeting.

He was fully hard before he finished the thought.

The pulse of his cock against his palm arrived and his brain, without permission, cross-referenced it against something stored from forty minutes ago. A different pulse. Deeper. Slower. Moving through his whole hand like something with a lot of mass behind it. He curled his fingers around his own shaft and felt the girth of himself and then thought about the moment on the landing when girth had meant something categorically different and felt the specific low ache of a comparison he had not asked his brain to make.

He was what he was. Travis was what Travis was. Those were not the same thing, and holding what he had held tonight had recalibrated something in his understanding of certain measurements he had previously considered straightforward. He was not going to dress that up.

He pulled the loose skin slowly up over the flared head of his cock and let it drag back down.

He was going to take his time with this.

That was simply how he did it. Patient with himself in this particular regard the same way he was patient with most things that mattered. He edged the way he did everything else, with deliberate control, building and retreating and building again, his thumb working slow circles around the head of his dick until his toes curled against the bedspread and his thighs went tight and then he backed off and breathed and started again.

The thin walls were a fact he remained aware of. He kept his breathing deliberate and his sounds to himself and worked in the particular focused silence of a man who had learned to contain himself in shared spaces.

What his brain kept returning to was not a visual. It was sensory. The smell came back first, that specific warm private musk, Travis concentrated and close in a way that had done something to the back of his skull that he could not categorize as anything except want. Warm skin. Salt. Hours of a night out. And underneath all of that something that had nothing to do with whiskey or cold air, something that was just Travis at his most unguarded, private in a way that Brody had not been meant to access and had accessed anyway.

Then the sounds.

Travis had made sounds on that carpeted landing that had no relationship to ease. The sharp change in his breathing when Brody’s mouth first found him. The low involuntary quality of it, stripped-down and nothing like his usual voice, like something that existed underneath the performance and rarely got out.

He worked his thumb around the head of his cock and felt his toes curl and his thighs go rigid and pulled back.

He thought about the weight of Travis’s dick on his tongue. The heat of it. The way that deep pulse moved against the flat of his tongue. The way his jaw had ached with the effort and he had not cared.

He thought about the involuntary tightening of a hand.

His calves flexed against the covers. His stomach went tight. His free hand found the sheets and gripped.

He thought about nine and a half inches being bent back into a button fly by hands that were steady when they had no business being steady.

He did not pull back this time.

The first shot went over his head entirely. He felt it leave him before he processed what was happening, felt the force of it and then heard it hit the wall behind him in the dark. The second arrived across his face, the bridge of his nose, the corner of his mouth, salt and heat. The third caught his chin and his neck. The fourth and fifth hit his chest, the dark hair there catching and holding. The rest came in waves across his stomach, six, seven, eight, his whole body locked and shuddering, his thighs clamped, his toes completely off the mattress, and then nine, that last one rolling out of him with a slow insistence that wrung him out from somewhere deep.

He lay in the dark and breathed.

Nine and a half.

He did not think about that number for several seconds because he was not capable of thinking about anything at all. His body had finally let go of everything it had been holding and into that sudden empty space there was nothing. No calculation. No inventory. Just the dark and the slow return of his own heartbeat to something that resembled normal.

His chest rose and fell.

The sheets were warm.

He lay there in the particular quiet of a body that had stopped arguing with him and felt nothing except the warm loose weight of his own limbs and the faint throb of aftermath. His mind was, for once and briefly, simply still.

The phone lit up on the nightstand.

The glow reached him through the dark, the screen throwing a pale rectangle across the ceiling, and he turned his head and looked at it without moving anything else.

Travis.

He looked at the ceiling for a moment.

Then he picked up the phone.

hey

One word. Lowercase. Sent while he had been lying here in the dark with nine and a half shots drying on his chest and face and the wall behind him. No follow-up. No second message in the several minutes since it had been sent. Just that single word sitting in a thread that had never had a message in it before tonight, waiting with the same patience that Travis seemed to bring to everything.

He looked at it for longer than was useful.

The physical flood of what had just left his body was still drying on his skin. Into the space it had carved out, everything else came back in, rising the way water rose, filling every low place first and then the rest. The calculation. The company. The building. The career built from nothing in a city where he knew no one. The closet he had walked back into at graduation with full clarity about what he was trading and why.

All of it flooding back. A different kind of wave. The same relentless momentum.

He thought about Travis directly below him right now, one floor down, sitting on the other side of that one word with no idea whether it was going to land anywhere or just sit there in the dark unanswered. Travis who had reassembled himself on a staircase landing with three seconds on the clock and a face that gave away nothing, who had walked through his door and apparently picked up his phone almost immediately and typed the smallest possible version of something and sent it.

hey

He put the phone face-down on the nightstand.

He did not respond.

He stared at the ceiling in the dark and did not think about what it meant that a man who seemed to move through the world without effort or cost had apparently found four minutes alone in his apartment to be long enough.

He did not think about that.

He thought about it anyway.

-----

To be continued.

 

[tallmascaussie]

Great writing!

 

[Nolachap]

You’re a very good writer.

 

[Brodyw2521]

If you all have any feedback or suggestions, please let me know. I am excited to show everyone the direction of this story.

 

[Brodyw2521]

The Problem With Travis
The Brody & Travis Series
Chapter 3: The Same As Always

The ceiling was the same.

He opened his eyes and it was still there. Same popcorn texture. Same water stain in the far corner that had never looked like anything. Same cheap light fixture he had never once turned on because the lamp worked fine and the overhead made the room look like a waiting room.

He lay there for a moment.

His face felt tight. That landed before anything else, before the cold, before the gray light at the curtain, before the ache in the hinge of his jaw that was already making itself known. He knew what the tightness was. The bridge of his nose. One cheekbone. His chin and the skin of his neck just below it. Dried there while he slept.

He had not cleaned up before going to sleep. He had made that choice. He was not going to pretend otherwise.

The phone was face-down on the nightstand.

He picked it up.

One word. Lowercase. Sitting right where it had been when he put the phone down last night, nothing added since. The timestamp said 1:16am. Four minutes after Travis had walked through his own door. Brody had noticed that number in the dark and had not stopped noticing it. Four minutes was not a long time. It was also not nothing. It was a man alone in his apartment who had apparently lasted four minutes before picking up his phone and sending the shortest possible version of something.

He opened the reply field.

He typed: hey back

He looked at it. The word back was carrying something he had not decided to put there. He deleted it.

He typed: sorry, fell asleep

He stared at that one longer. The sorry might have been true or it might not have been. The fell asleep was a lie and he knew it was a lie and he was not going to send a lie he would have to remember. He deleted it.

He typed h.

He stopped.

He put the phone face-down and got up.

He went to the bathroom. The mirror showed him exactly what he expected and he did not take long with it. Dark beard, trimmed the way he kept it. Eyes that people always tried to describe as something other than blue-green, which they were. The dried marks on his face and neck that he washed off with a warm washcloth, working through it, rinsing, looking at what was left when he was done.

The jaw still ached. He knew what from.

His roommates were up. He could hear them in the kitchen from behind his door: the sound of mugs, voices kept low the way people kept them when their heads hurt. He had no interest in running into either of them, so he stayed in his room and let them have the rest of the apartment.

He ate at noon. Stood at the counter with a bowl of cereal while both roommates were back behind their own doors. The window over the sink looked out at the parking lot. His Ford Fusion was right where he had left it. He thought about going somewhere. He had nowhere to be, so he rinsed the bowl and went back to his room.

He tried the book that had been sitting on the second bed for three weeks. Read the first paragraph, did not take in a word of it, read it again, put it down.

He was aware of the building in a way he had not been before. Not in a general sense. He had always known the building: the floorboard in the hall that caught if you were not paying attention, the stairwell door that needed an actual pull to close right, the neighbor's TV that came through the wall loud enough that he had learned their programming schedule. He knew the building the way you knew any place you had lived in long enough.

This was different.

This was knowing that Travis was one floor below him. Right now. In whatever state he was in when nobody was around to see it. Brody had never thought about that before and he was not going to start now. He looked at the ceiling instead.

Mid-afternoon he heard footsteps on the staircase outside. He went still. They came up from below, paused at the third floor landing, kept going up toward the roof. Not Travis. He let out a breath he had not realized he was holding, which was embarrassing.

He checked his phone twice. Nothing new. He put it face-down and left it there until it was dark outside, and he had spent the entire first day of the year inside this room, which felt like an achievement even though it was not one.

* * *

He made it to the office in thirteen minutes.

He was good at first days back. Always had been. While everyone else came in moving at half speed with coffee in both hands, he came in with his stuff already pulled up, his face set to the expression that said he had not lost a single step. He did that today. It looked exactly the same as it always did.

He saw Travis forty seconds off the elevator.

He was at the coffee station by the east windows, back to the room, talking to someone from the corner office. Gray wool sweater. He was laughing at something she said, the laugh showing up just before the rest of his face did, the way it always did. The sound of it carried across the floor. Brody went to his desk, put his bag down, turned on his monitor, opened his email.

Twenty minutes later Travis pulled out the chair to Brody's left in the morning briefing like it was nothing.

There was no assigned seating. There had never been assigned seating. Travis had taken that chair on the first day of the first briefing and had taken it every time since, the same way he had decided somewhere along the line that Brody was the person worth texting at odd hours. No conversation about it. Just a decision made and held. The chair scraped back. Travis sat down, put his coffee on the table, silenced his phone, and said something about it being an unreasonable hour to care about deliverables. Two people laughed. The department head smiled like he did not want to.

Travis settled in the way he always settled, eyes on the notepad he had brought and never wrote in, like the staircase and the conference table were two completely separate things that had nothing to do with each other.

Brody wrote the date in the corner of his notepad and kept his eyes on the department head.

The briefing ran forty minutes. He tracked maybe sixty percent of it. His hands were on the table, his posture was where it needed to be, his face did its job. The rest of his attention was on Travis's forearm two inches away, the sweater pushed up to the elbow the way he did when he sat down for something long. A pen turning slowly across his knuckles. The smell of him, clean and straightforward in this context, soap and something faintly woody under it, nothing that was a problem.

His brain took all of that and lined it up next to what it had stored from two days ago. Same person. Same forearm. Whiskey and cold air and warm skin and something underneath all of it that Brody had been close enough to smell from his knees. He looked at his notepad.

He had written the date twice.

He drew a line through the second one.

The briefing ended. Travis stood, pushed his cuffs back down, picked up his coffee, and said something to the guy across the table about a timeline. He did not look at Brody on the way out.

* * *

He went to the men's room on the north side of the floor at half past eleven.

Small room. Beige tile, two urinals on the left wall, two stalls past them, a double sink, paper towels. The fluorescent light had no interest in being kind to anything it hit. There was a memo taped above the paper towel dispenser about food in the break room refrigerator that had been there since September, its corners peeling up from the tile.

He pushed the door open.

Travis was already there. Left urinal. Eyes on the tile in front of him the way you looked at tile in a men's room, which was to say nowhere.

He did not turn around.

Brody took the right urinal.

He looked at his own section of tile for about four seconds.

Then his eyes went left.

Travis's cock was soft.

His brain went straight to the comparison without asking him first. Two nights ago on the stair landing he had pulled that thing out of a pair of jeans and held it in both hands and his fingers had not come close to meeting. Now he was looking at six inches, maybe six and a half, soft and hanging heavy. He knew his own numbers well enough to know what six inches meant. Six inches soft was bigger than most guys got fully hard. He knew that the same way he knew anything factual about himself, plainly and without drama. What he was looking at right now looked almost reasonable compared to what he remembered. The girth was down, the thickness that had made his jaw work that hard noticeably reduced in this state. Almost normal. Then his brain put the two versions next to each other and the math did not add up to anything comfortable. Travis was a shower and a grower. Both, fully, at the same time. Brody had not known a person could be both that completely, and the evidence was standing two feet to his left.

He looked at the tile.

He counted grout lines.

He looked back. He knew Travis could see him looking if he turned his head. He looked anyway.

He was still looking when it happened.

Travis's cock moved. A short involuntary twitch, there and gone, the kind of thing a body does when it is standing next to something it remembers. No decision behind it. Just reflex.

Travis did not react. Eyes on the tile. Jaw loose. Nothing on his face.

But Brody had seen it.

He had known the staircase was real. Of course he had known. But something in him had apparently needed a second confirmation, something that was not a memory, something in front of him right now in a fluorescent bathroom on a Tuesday morning, and he had just gotten it.

Travis finished. Zipped up. Walked to the sink.

Brody stood there another moment and thought about what he had just watched.

When he got to the sink Travis was already drying his hands, and in the mirror Brody caught the side of his face. Jaw. Cheekbone. Nothing on it. The same expression it had when he walked out of the second floor stairwell door last night, the same one it wore in morning briefings, the same one it apparently brought to men's rooms. Gave nothing away. Never did.

Brody washed his hands.

He had spent six months thinking Travis was just easy. Easy in the way some people were built, like the world had been arranged to suit them and they had never questioned it. But a man who was actually easy did not need to be this still. Did not need to hold himself this flat. What Travis had was not ease. It was control. Real, practiced, deliberate control, and he had it available to him even here, with a man who had been on his knees with Travis's cock in his mouth two nights ago standing at the next sink over.

Those were two different things. And Brody had been wrong about which one he was looking at.

He dropped the paper towels and left.

Back at his desk he opened the document he had been working on before the briefing and sat with it for a full minute before he read a word. Travis came back two minutes later. Brody tracked it without looking up: the stride, the chair, the keyboard starting again. He kept his eyes on his screen.

He could not stop thinking about that twitch for the rest of the afternoon. It came back between emails, during a two o'clock call he handled fine while half his brain kept turning the same detail over. Not because it changed anything. It just confirmed something he had not realized he was still unsure about, and once he knew something he did not unknow it.

* * *

He drove home.

He went up the stairs without stopping at the landing. Let himself in, said something short to whoever was watching TV, went to his room and closed the door.

He lay down on top of the covers.

The ceiling was the same.

The arrangement was holding. They were both keeping it. That was how this was going to go and he could live with it.

He picked up his phone from the nightstand and held it screen up. He was done putting it face-down. That was a performance and he was the only one in the room.

He opened the thread out of habit and looked at it. One word, two days ago, 1:16am. Nothing below it. He set the phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling.

The phone buzzed.

He looked down.

Travis.

He opened it.

hey so we're doing boom cup at yours saturday before we go out. you don't have to play but someone needs to be the responsible adult and we both know it's you. also the guys want to do broad ripple again. you in or are you going to make me send a formal invitation

He read it twice.

On the surface it was exactly the kind of text Travis sent about any weekend plan. Casual, easy, not asking for anything. Except it was not in the group chat. It was in this thread. The same one that had one word in it from two days ago, sent four minutes after Travis walked through his door. Travis had opened this specific conversation on purpose and typed into it, which meant he had made a decision about where to put this.

The text had a question in it. That was new. One word at 1:16am did not need an answer. This did. There was a question mark. There was the clear expectation of a response, which meant Brody had to say something back, which meant the two days of saying nothing were over whether he had decided they were or not.

He set the phone on the nightstand screen up and looked at the ceiling.

The ceiling looked back.

He picked up the phone.

* * *

To be continued.

 

[Brodyw2521]

The Problem With Travis
The Brody & Travis Series
Chapter 4: On Purpose

He typed: yeah I'm in.

He looked at it for a second. Sent it.

He put the phone on the nightstand and looked at the ceiling and that was the end of that.

* * *

The thing about boom cup was that somebody had to be the one who remembered where the cups were.

That was Brody. That was always Brody. He had found the stack of red Solo cups on the shelf above the refrigerator in September and had put them back after the last time they were used and had found them again every time since, and that was essentially the whole of his relationship to boom cup: he knew where the cups were, he knew where the ping pong balls were, he knew the ratio of beer to water that made the far cup survivable, and he was going to be the one on his knees with paper towels at ten o'clock tomorrow morning while everyone else nursed their headaches behind closed doors.

That last part was not resentment. It was just math. He was the one who cleaned because he was the one who was always sober enough to notice that it needed doing, and he was always sober enough to notice because he was the one who did not drink past a certain point. He had one or two and then he stopped. He had done it that way since graduation and he intended to keep doing it that way, because alcohol had a specific effect on him that had nothing to do with coordination or volume and everything to do with the distance it put between him and his own judgment. He had spent two years in college watching that distance close in ways he could not afford to replicate here. Same company. Same building. Eleven people who knew him professionally and saw him daily and did not know one significant thing about him, and he intended to keep it exactly that way.

So he had one beer and he kept it in his hand and he set the cups up.

It was 7:15 on a Saturday and his kitchen table had been pushed against the wall. Eleven people total when everyone was accounted for, all of them from the building. His three roommates plus himself on the third floor. Travis and his five on the second floor below. The whole corporate housing situation condensed into one apartment for a Saturday pregame, which was not a number the third floor unit had been designed to accommodate comfortably, but it was also exactly the group it always was when they went out. The same people who had coalesced over six months into something that functioned like a social unit without anyone formally agreeing to it.

Travis arrived the way he arrived everywhere, which was not early and not late but at the exact moment that made his entrance the natural hinge point of the room. He had his jacket open and his hands in his pockets and he came through the door mid-sentence with someone behind him, finishing something, laughing before the sentence was done, and three people turned toward the sound of him before they had consciously decided to. Brody was at the table with a ping pong ball in his hand and did not turn around.

He tracked him anyway. The peripheral vision he had developed over six months of not looking directly at Travis was efficient by now.

Gray henley. Dark jeans. He noted that and moved on.

Travis crossed the kitchen, pulled a beer from the case on the counter, popped it open, and came to stand at the end of the table. He looked at the cup arrangement with the expression of a man assessing a technical challenge.

"You did twelve," he said.

"I always do twelve."

"Regulation is ten."

"You can play regulation at someone else's apartment."

Travis drank his beer and did not argue the point, which was the correct response. Brody bounced the ping pong ball once off the table and caught it.

Someone put music on. The apartment did what it did when enough people were in it: got louder, got warmer, started to feel less like a corporate housing unit and more like a place where people actually lived. By the time they had run through two rounds and someone had started a side bracket for the losers, the room had achieved the specific Saturday momentum Brody recognized. The kind that made staying home seem like an abstraction. The kind that made a man with two beers in him feel like the only reasonable next step was a third.

Brody's beer was still the same one.

He went to his room at quarter to nine to get his jacket, and on the way back out he grabbed the small paper bag from the shelf in his closet.

Travis was at the kitchen counter, back to the room, talking to one of his roommates. Brody came up beside him and set the bag on the counter without preamble.

Travis looked down at it.

"What's this."

"Saw them and bought them," Brody said. "Don't make it a thing."

Travis looked in the bag. He reached in and pulled out the boxer briefs, black, the Pair of Thieves waistband printed in white around the top. He held them up and the taco print covered every inch of the fabric, small and repeating and completely unambiguous. The laugh came, low and real, showing up a half second before the rest of his face caught up the way it always did.

"Because of the tattoo," he said.

"Because of the tattoo," Brody confirmed.

Travis turned them over in his hands. The tacos on the back matched the tacos on the front, which was going to make the taco tattoo on his ass either a very good joke or a very committed one. He was a large man across the shoulders and long through the legs and Brody had bought the size with full awareness that the fit was going to be its own situation. Pair of Thieves ran fitted. That was the point of them. On a man built the way Travis was built, below the waist, the spandex was going to be doing serious structural work and Brody had known that when he bought them and had bought them anyway, which was a decision he was not going to look at too directly right now.

Travis folded them and put them back in the bag. He looked at Brody with an expression that was not quite a smile and not performing anything.

"Thanks," he said.

"Don't mention it," Brody said.

He meant that part literally.

The group that pressed him into going out was the same group it always was, his own roommates plus the noise and the beer and the simple math of eleven people in a third floor apartment on a Saturday with nowhere else to be. By 9:30 they were down the stairs and into the cold and sorting themselves into Ubers, and Brody went with them because the alternative was standing in his own kitchen alone with twelve Solo cups and a paper bag, which was not an alternative.

He got in the car and did not think about who was in the one behind it.

* * *

Broad Ripple on a Saturday in January was the same as Broad Ripple on any other Saturday except colder. The bars were full. The sidewalks were full. The particular kind of person who went out in Indianapolis in January was the kind who had made their peace with the temperature and was not going to let it interfere with the plan, and there were apparently a lot of those people because the first bar they tried had a line and they went to the second one instead.

Brody got a beer at the bar and kept it. Same system as the apartment.

The group spread out the way groups did, clustering and reclustering, drifting between the bar and the back room and the high tops along the wall. He talked to people. He did the thing he was good at, which was being present enough to register as engaged without giving anything away. He had been doing it for six months and he could do it on autopilot now, which left the other half of his attention free to do what it was doing, which was tracking Travis across whatever room they were in without appearing to track Travis across whatever room they were in.

That was when he noticed the pants.

Travis was standing at the far end of the bar talking to two people from the second floor, and the pants were corduroy. Dark brown. Brody had not seen him change and could not have said exactly when it happened, sometime between the pregame winding down and the Ubers getting sorted, Travis slipping downstairs to his own apartment and back up without Brody clocking it. He understood now why it had not registered at the time. He had not known to look for it.

Corduroy was not denim. Denim had structure. Denim pushed back. Corduroy draped, and what it was draping over was Travis's dick, which had no interest in being minimized, and the fabric was doing nothing to help with that. The fit was not loose. The weight of him pulled the corduroy forward at the front in a way that was visible from across a bar in low light. Not subtle. Not ambiguous. And the fabric was soft enough, fitted enough, that the broad flared shape of his head was outlined clearly against the front of those pants, the ridge of it distinct through the corduroy, just sitting there as a plain fact about Travis that anyone paying attention could see.

Brody had apparently never been paying the right kind of attention before. His brain had needed a specific data point first. Now it had one and it was not going to stop using it.

He looked at his beer. He looked at the back wall. He talked to one of his roommates for ten minutes about something he did not retain.

He was at the bar getting his second drink of the night, the one he was going to nurse until they left, when Travis came up beside him and flagged down the bartender. He was warm the way he always was, that specific heat he threw off even in a crowded bar, and he smelled like cold air and underneath it something that Brody's memory had already catalogued and did not need to be reminded of.

Brody watched the bartender and not Travis.

Travis got his drink and stayed at the bar a beat longer than he needed to, and in that beat he shifted his weight and his jacket rode up at the back and Brody's eyes went there without asking him first.

The waistband. Black, the Pair of Thieves lettering in white, visible for exactly one second above the corduroy before the jacket dropped back down.

Brody felt his dick press against the inside of his jeans.

He looked at his drink. He took a slow breath through his nose. He thought about the sequence: Travis had gone downstairs at some point during the pregame, changed his pants, and put on the underwear Brody had handed him forty minutes earlier. That was what had happened. He could look at that from whatever angle he wanted and the sequence did not change.

Travis picked up his drink and went back to the group.

Brody stood at the bar and did not move for a moment. Then he finished his beer and went to find the rest of the group.

* * *

The night wound down the way nights did, gradually and then all at once. One round became last call and last call became coats and coats became the sidewalk, and somewhere in that sequence the group thinned without Brody tracking it closely enough. He had been at a high top with two of his roommates and when he turned around to find the rest of them the bar had rearranged itself and it was just Travis standing there with his jacket on and his hands in his pockets.

"They grabbed Ubers," Travis said.

Brody looked at the door. Then back at Travis.

"When."

"Ten, fifteen minutes ago." He did not seem concerned about this. "I told them we'd get the next one."

Brody looked at him for a moment. Travis had told them. That was the part he filed and did not comment on. He pulled out his phone and ordered the Uber.

Twenty minutes. That was the ride back. He had known that going in.

They waited outside on the sidewalk in the cold, not talking, not standing particularly close. The bar noise came through the door behind them in pulses every time someone went in or out. Brody put his hands in his jacket pockets and watched the street. Travis stood beside him and did the same. There was no version of this that was awkward because Travis did not do awkward, and Brody had enough control over himself to match that, so they just stood there in the January cold like two people waiting for a car.

The Uber was a Camry. They got in the back.

The driver had the heat on and music playing low, something with a lot of bass that filled the silence without requiring anything from it. The city moved past the windows. Brody had his elbow on the door and his eyes on the street and he was doing fine until they hit the highway and Travis shifted in his seat and his thigh settled against Brody's.

He did not move it.

Brody did not move his.

That was it. That was the whole thing. No words, no look, no acknowledgment of any kind. Just Travis's thigh against his for twenty minutes on a highway in January, warm even through two layers of denim, and neither of them doing anything about it in either direction.

Brody watched the highway lights go past and kept his breathing even and thought about nothing he was going to admit to thinking about.

The driver pulled up to the building. Travis paid before Brody could. He did not make anything of it and neither did Brody.

They got out into the cold.

* * *

The lobby was quiet. The overnight light threw its low yellowish wash across the carpet, the same as it always did. The door swung shut behind them and the cold stayed outside and Brody was already moving toward the stairs when Travis said his name.

Not a question. Just his name.

Brody stopped. He turned around.

Travis was standing in the middle of the lobby with his jacket still on and his hands out of his pockets now. He looked at Brody the way he had looked at him a week ago in this same lobby, in this same light, with that same unhurried steadiness that Brody had spent six months misreading as ease. He knew better now. What Travis had was not ease. It was control. And right now he was holding very still inside of it and looking at Brody and not saying anything else.

Brody looked back at him.

The building was quiet. The carpet absorbed everything. There was no one else in the lobby and no sound coming from the stairwell and the only light was the same yellowish overnight wash it had always been.

He walked back across the lobby.

* * *

The landing between the first and second floor was the same landing it had always been. One frosted window dark with January night. The carpet underfoot the same neutral tan. The wall sconce throwing the same dim light across the same geography that had not been designed for this and was being used for it anyway, same as before.

Brody had Travis's jacket open and his hands flat against his chest and Travis had him by the back of the neck and they were kissing the way they had kissed in the lobby a week ago, with the focused intensity of two people who had been not doing this in the intervening time and were now done not doing it. Travis was warm. He was always warm. The henley under Brody's palms was soft and underneath it the heat of him came through with the steady insistence of a body that ran above the ambient temperature of everything around it.

Travis walked him back against the wall and Brody let it happen.

The kiss did not have tenderness in it and did not need any. It had pressure and intent and Travis's hand solid at the back of his neck and Brody's fingers finding the hem of that henley and pulling it free. The skin underneath was warm and taut and Brody spread his hand flat against Travis's stomach and felt the distinct plane of his abs under his palm and Travis made a sound against his mouth that had no relationship to the easy version of him that the rest of the world got.

Brody pulled back enough to speak.

"Upstairs," he said.

Travis looked at him. The same steady look.

"Yeah," he said.

They went up.

 

[Brodyw2521]

Brody's room was dark when he pushed the door open. He left it that way. The lamp on the nightstand was right there and he did not turn it on, and Travis did not ask him to.

The door clicked shut behind them.

He had thought about this room in the context of Travis exactly once, lying on top of his covers in the dark a week ago with the phone lighting up on the nightstand. He had not let himself think about it since. Now Travis was standing in it and the room was the same room it had always been, the two double beds, the unused one with its centered pillow and smooth comforter, the dresser against the far wall, the thin walls that let through the neighbor's television at a volume that made the programming choices unavoidable. All of it exactly as corporate and impersonal as it had been in September.

Travis looked larger in it than he had any right to.

Brody reached out and got a hand in the front of his jacket and walked him back toward the bed and Travis went, unhurried, his hands finding Brody's jacket and pushing it off his shoulders. It hit the floor somewhere. Travis's jacket followed. Brody got both hands on the hem of the gray henley and pulled it up and Travis raised his arms and let him take it off and then they were at the edge of the bed and Brody put a hand on his chest and sat him down on it.

Travis looked up at him from the bed with that steady look. His chest was bare. The specific definition of him was visible even in the dark, the flat clean plane of his stomach, the obliques cutting their sharp line down toward his waist. The V-line disappearing into the corduroy.

Brody reached for his belt.

Travis sat still and let him work. The belt came open. The button. The zipper. Brody got both hands into the waist of the corduroy and pulled and Travis lifted his hips off the bed and the pants came down and off and hit the floor and there they were. The Pair of Thieves waistband in white against the black spandex, and the spandex itself doing exactly what Brody had known it was going to do when he bought them. The fabric was thin and stretched tight across the front, compressing and outlining at the same time, leaving nothing remotely ambiguous. The broad head of Travis's cock was pressed hard against the inside of the waistband, the shape of it distinct and detailed through the spandex, the thick shaft running heavy down and to the left, the full length of him straining the fabric with the particular insistence of a man who was most of the way to fully hard and still had somewhere left to go.

Brody looked at that for a moment.

Then he got his own shirt off, his own jeans, and sat down on the bed beside Travis and got a hand on the back of his neck and kissed him. Travis turned into it. His hand found Brody's chest and spread wide across it, palm warm against the dark hair there, and Brody felt the heat of that hand move through him and pressed his own palm flat against Travis's stomach in response. The skin was warm and tight. The muscle underneath was harder than it looked.

Travis broke the kiss and put his mouth against Brody's jaw, his neck, and Brody tipped his head back and let him and felt the scrape of stubble against his skin and thought about nothing except the weight of Travis's hand moving down his sternum, across his stomach, stopping at the waistband of his briefs.

He felt Travis's fingers curl into the fabric.

"Yeah," Brody said. He had not been asked. He said it anyway.

Travis pulled them down and off and Brody kicked them somewhere and then Travis went still for a moment.

His eyes moved down and back up.

"You've been holding out," he said.

"Didn't come up," Brody said.

Travis's hand wrapped around his cock, the warm certain grip of it closing around the full thickness of him, and Brody felt the weight of that grip move through him from his thighs to the back of his skull. Travis stroked him once, slowly, his thumb dragging across the loose skin at the head, the foreskin-adjacent give of Brody's circumcision, registering it, recalibrating, and then using it, working the skin slowly over the flared head of him in a way that made Brody's thighs go tight against the mattress.

He reached over and got his hand on the waistband of the Pair of Thieves and pulled them down.

Travis's cock came free and swung heavy and Brody wrapped his hand around the shaft and Travis said, low and unhurried, "bigger than at the urinal."

Brody looked up at him.

Travis held the look with that same steady expression that gave away exactly nothing.

He had known. He had been standing at that urinal with his eyes on the tile in front of him and he had known Brody was looking the entire time and had said nothing and filed it and apparently held onto it for four days, and he was only mentioning it now, like this, with Brody's hand around his cock in the dark. That was Travis. That was exactly Travis, and Brody did not know whether to be annoyed by it or not and did not spend time deciding.

"Yeah," Brody said. "It is."

He was not wrong. Hard, Travis was a different proposition entirely from what Brody had seen across two feet of beige tile on a Tuesday morning. The full structural hardness was back, the skin pulled smooth and tight, the broad head dark and flared, the prominent ridge thick where it met the shaft. The girth alone was its own separate reality, sitting heavy and dense in Brody's palm, the heat of him immediate and significant. His fingers did not come close to meeting around the shaft.

He stroked him once, base to tip, slow, and Travis's breath changed above him, sharp and real.

Brody got his mouth on Travis's chest, his stomach, felt the taut plane of his abs against his lips and the V-line under his tongue and heard Travis's breath go ragged, and then he kept going.

Up close the heat and the smell of him hit the same way they had on the landing a week ago. Warm skin and salt and that specific deep musk underneath all of it, private and concentrated and doing to the back of Brody's skull exactly what it had done on those carpeted stairs. He worked his jaw wide and went slow and got there, felt the stretch behind his ears and in the hinge of his jaw, the broad head filling his mouth completely, the tight smooth weight of Travis's cock on his tongue. He used his hand on what his mouth could not manage, working the thick shaft in a slow grip, and heard the sounds Travis made above him, low and involuntary and stripped of every bit of the control he carried everywhere else.

Travis's hand came up and settled on top of his head. Not pushing. Not guiding. Just resting there with the same quiet communication it had carried on the landing.

Brody worked him slowly and felt the pulse of him against his tongue and thought about nothing except the sounds Travis was making and the fact that none of them were performed.

He pulled off and came back up the bed.

He got his hand around his own cock, then reached over and wrapped the same hand around Travis's shaft alongside it, fitting as much of both of them into his grip as he could manage. His fingers stretched wide around the combined girth of them, his palm registering the different pulse of each of them at once, Travis deep and slow, himself faster and tighter. The heat of them together in his fist was its own specific thing and he did not have a category for it and did not try to make one.

He worked them together.

Travis's hand came down and covered his, not taking over, just adding pressure, and they found a rhythm that was not complicated and did not need to be.

Travis's whole body went tight first. Brody felt it through their joined hands before he heard it in Travis's breathing, the deep pulse against his palm accelerating, and then Travis was coming, the first shot reaching his own chest, the rest following across his stomach in waves, the heat of it against Brody's fist as he kept working them both through it.

The sounds Travis made tipped Brody over.

He followed him by seconds, his body locking up completely, toes off the mattress, thighs rigid, the force of it moving through him from somewhere low and deep. He came across his own chest and stomach, the shots landing hard, his whole body wrung out by the end of it, the last one rolling out of him slow and insistent while Travis's hand kept the pressure on and did not let up until Brody went still.

He lay there and breathed.

The neighbor's television came through the wall. Something with a laugh track.

* * *

Travis moved first.

He sat up and found his things in the dark, working through it efficiently, the corduroy, the henley, the jacket. Brody lay on top of his covers and watched him and said nothing. The dark made it difficult to track exactly what he was doing and Brody did not try too hard. He listened more than he watched. The soft sounds of a man getting dressed in someone else's room, unhurried, no fumbling.

Travis picked up his phone from wherever it had landed. He put it in his pocket.

He opened the door and pulled it shut behind him with a soft click that the carpet absorbed almost immediately. No word. No look back. Just the sound of his footsteps moving down the hall, the stairwell door opening and closing, and then the building was quiet.

Brody lay there in the dark and did not move for a moment.

Then he sat up and reached over to the nightstand to turn on the lamp and his hand came down on something on the edge of the mattress that was not the lamp. Fabric. He picked it up.

The Pair of Thieves waistband was unmistakable under his fingers.

He held them for a moment in the dark, turning that over. Travis had gotten dressed in the dark and left without them. That was either an oversight or it was not an oversight and in the dark with Travis one floor below him Brody did not have enough information to say which, and he was aware that the distinction mattered and aware that he was already thinking about it more than was useful.

He went to turn the lamp on and stopped.

The fabric in his hand was wet.

Not damp. Wet. He registered the specific warmth of it still caught in the spandex and understood within about two seconds what Travis had used them for before he got dressed, which meant Travis had left them here either because he did not think about it or because he had thought about it and left them anyway, and Brody was not going to resolve that question tonight.

He brought them to his nose.

The smell hit him before he had fully decided to do it. Travis concentrated and close, the deep private musk of him amplified by hours of wearing them through a night out and everything that had come after, warm skin and salt and something underneath all of that which had no name and did not need one. Both of them in it now, the smell layered and specific and doing to the back of Brody's skull exactly what it had done on the landing and in this room and every time before that. His cock was hard before he had processed what was happening to him.

He lay back on the bed.

He wrapped his hand around his cock and brought the underwear back to his face and breathed in slow and his whole body responded to it like a frequency he was built to receive. The smell of Travis wearing them all night. The warmth still caught in the fabric. The wet of both of them together in the spandex against his nose and his mouth, and he did not think about what that meant and he did not pull back from it either.

He worked himself the way he always worked himself, with patience and control, his thumb dragging slow circles around the head of his cock, the loose skin pulling over the flared head on each stroke. But the smell made patience difficult in a way his body was not interested in negotiating with tonight. He built faster than he meant to. His thighs went tight. His toes curled against the mattress. He backed off once and breathed and brought the underwear back to his face and that was the end of patience entirely.

He did not pull back a second time.

The first shot went over his head completely, catching the wall behind him in the dark. The second landed across his face, the bridge of his nose, his mouth, salt and heat. The third caught his chin and his neck. The fourth and fifth hit his chest, the dark hair there catching and holding. The rest came in waves across his stomach, his whole body locked and wrung out and not done until it was done.

He lay in the dark and breathed.

The underwear was still in his hand.

He set it on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling and let his heartbeat come back down to something that resembled normal. The mess on his face and chest and stomach was considerable and he was aware of that and did not move to address it. He was also aware that he had just used a man's discarded underwear to finish himself off for the second time in one night and that Travis was one floor below him right now, possibly asleep, possibly not, with no underwear on under the corduroy.

He thought about that.

He thought about whether Travis had left them on purpose.

He was still thinking about it when he fell asleep.

* * *

Monday morning the elevator doors opened and Travis was already at the coffee station by the east windows. Gray sweater, dark jeans, talking to someone from the corner office. He laughed at something she said, the laugh arriving before the rest of his face caught up the way it always did.

He looked up when Brody came off the elevator.

A nod. Brief and easy and carrying nothing.

Brody nodded back.

He went to his desk, put his bag down, turned on his monitor, and opened his email. Travis came to the morning briefing twelve minutes later and pulled out the chair to Brody's left like it was nothing, because for Travis it was nothing, or it looked like nothing, and Brody had spent enough time now understanding the difference between those two things to know he could not tell which one it was from the outside.

He wrote the date in the corner of his notepad.

Once, this time.

Travis settled in beside him, eyes on the notepad he never wrote in, and the briefing started, and the room went about its business, and the whole of what had happened on Saturday night sat between them and neither of them said a word about it.

That was how it was going to go.

Brody had known that. He had known it when Travis walked out of his room without a word and he had known it when he heard the stairwell door close and he had known it lying on his back in the dark with Travis's underwear in his hand. He had known it and he knew it now and the knowing of it did not make it easier or harder. It just made it true.

He looked at his notepad.

He drew a line under the date and got to work.

* * *

To be continued.