Tipping the Balance (52 page)

Brad reached back and returned the favor, setting up a long, slow stroke over the thick fabric of the captain’s protective clothing. Maybe it was just the thickness of that gear, but good goddamn. The captain felt huge under there.

“Jeez,” the captain breathed. “You’d better be prepared to follow up on that. I’m taking a huge risk, but I’ve been hard since you got here.”

“Me too,” Brad said, a little nervous but also incredibly hot. “And yeah, I think you’d better… uh, show me the situation upstairs.” He coughed. “I… uh, it wouldn’t be right bringing crews back in without… uh, assessing the damage in person.”

With a look that smoldered in a way that had nothing to do with the fire his brigade had just quenched, Captain Douglas led Brad upstairs, dragging him into the first room that wasn’t open to the stairs.

Before Brad knew it, the man shoved him up against a wall. “You like this?”

“Yeah,” Brad breathed, and he did. “So what’s your name, hot fireman?”

“It’s Owen,” he said, sucking Brad’s lip into his mouth. “I’ve wanted to do this since you walked in.”

“I think I noticed,” Brad breathed. He hesitantly reached into Owen’s pants and pulled at his shirt. “Is… is this okay?”

“More than,” Owen said, shoving Brad’s hand further down over his hard-on. “Yeah, like that.”

Brad kissed Owen back, biting his way down Owen’s neck as he worked his hands into his pants. It had always revved Drew up, and it worked on Owen, too, judging by his jagged breath.

Then Owen tugged at his own jeans. “Let that out. Fire needs air before it can burn.”

“Do you always talk about fires during sex?” Brad asked.

“Only when the guys are as hot as you,” Owen replied. Then he looked at Brad, and they both laughed. “Sorry, that was really bad. Let me make it up to you.”

“How?” Brad said, squeezing Owen’s prick and playing with the fluid leaking from its tip.

“Like this,” Owen said. He sucked at Brad’s neck briefly before he fell to his knees before Brad’s open jeans. Owen reached into his underwear like it was a box of buried treasure and tenderly pulled Brad out, stroking his cock gently with one hand while he used the other on himself.

“That’s feels good,” Brad breathed, leaning back against the wall.

“That’s nothing,” Owen said before taking Brad in all the way.

“Oh God,” Brad moaned as the soft tissue at the back of Owen’s throat muscles fluttered around the head of his cock as Owen took him all the way in.

Owen pulled off, looking smug. “Told you.”

“Don’t stop,” Brad urged, and smiling, Owen bent back to his task.

Brad was on his way to heaven when his mind took a detour. He’d tried to deep-throat Drew but couldn’t. They’d both enjoyed the attempt, however. It was them. He still missed Drew.

“Stay with me, Brad,” Owen murmured around his cock, looking up at him. Then he started humming, a low throaty rumble that notched everything up a hundred times.

And Brad could only think about what Owen was doing to him. He concentrated on the sensations. It was impossible not to, but it was likewise impossible not to think of his boyfriend… ex-boyfriend.

His hips thrust of their own volition, and he suddenly knew just how close he was. “Almost there, buddy.”

Owen backed off, stroking them both hard and fast.

“Oooh!” Brad gasped as he shot in two hard blasts, splattering the front of Owen’s chest. Moments later, Owen grunted out his own climax, narrowly missing Brad’s shoes.

Brad leaned back, catching his breath. As intense as the blowjob had been, he recovered fast. Then he noticed what he’d done. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Owen said with a smirk, rubbing his hand through Brad’s load. He held it up and smelled it before wiping his hand on his pants and zipping up his coat. “The memory of this? I’ll be jacking off for months to this.”

“Yeah,” Brad said, barely over a whisper.

“Who is he?” Owen said softly.

“What?” Brad said. He blinked, unprepared to hear soft words on the lips of a stranger who’d just blown him in public.

“The man you thought about.”

“He… he’s my boyfriend, my first. I guess now he’s my first ex,” Brad said, sniffling. He told himself the sniffles were because of the smoke. Same with the tears in his eyes. All that smoke.

Owen stood and took Brad in his arms and held him gently. “You want to tell me about it?”

And strangely enough, Brad did want to tell this not-quite-total stranger with his cum on his chest. It felt good to be held, even like this.

“So there it is,” Brad said, wiping his eyes, “the whole sorry story.”

Owen released Brad enough to look in his eyes. “You need to call this man. If he’s still jonesing for you the way you so obviously are for him, this will all be a bad memory in the rearview mirror before you know it. But you won’t know if you don’t reach out.”

“I have called him,” Brad mumbled. “He didn’t call back.”

“Then call him again, at least one more time. You owe it to both of you to give this another shot.”

“I guess so,” Brad said.

“I know so, and—”

“Hey, Captain!” someone called form downstairs.

“Up here! Be right down,” Owen—Captain Douglas again—called. “I’m just showing the project foreman the damage.”

“Yeah, all over the inside of your jacket,” Brad whispered.

“Bad!” Owen hissed playfully. He pulled Brad in for a quick kiss. “One more thing. If this guy really doesn’t want you, trust me, when you’re ready, you won’t be single for long.”

Brad didn’t say anything as he followed the fire captain downstairs, instead trying to school his expression out of freshly blown into something more serious, since he’d just been shown the smoke and fire damage to the second floor. Allegedly.

He left quickly after that, something they both seemed to want. Captain Douglas had a job to do, and Brad suddenly had a lot to think about on the drive back to his apartment, so close to Drew’s house and yet so far away from the comfort it once held.

Owen was right. Brad owed it to himself and Drew to try again.

But jeez, did he have “bitch boy” written on his forehead? How’d Owen known he was gay? And if he and Drew weren’t together, why did it feel like cheating?

The
entire next week, the first week in March, Brad felt like his skin didn’t fit. No matter what he did, how hard he pulled in the boats or pumped in the gym, nothing worked.

With the fire at the Bayard House, Sundstrom Homes and Suburban Graveyard held him fast like the La Brea Tar Pits. He decided to take advantage of the perks and keep going to the gym. One of the few, to his way of thinking. Not that it worked. Nothing set him at ease. Perhaps nothing could.

Where his life had been looking up and he felt like he was regaining his mojo, suddenly it was the suck again. Life, work, Drew, all of it.

The very next day after the fire, he called Drew on his landline, since calling him on him on his mobile line had yet to accomplish anything besides eating up Brad’s own minutes.

Psyching himself up, he promised he would be perfectly calm when what he wanted more than anything was to beg and whine and plead like an Irish setter for Drew to take him back.

“Hi, Drew. It’s me. I’m still really sorry I couldn’t give you what you wanted. But… can we at least talk about this? I miss you. Please call me.”

Drew had to be call screening. No one in business for himself could afford to be this hard to reach. Or maybe Drew was showing houses. Brad was too afraid to call the real estate office, although at this point, he’d long ago parted company with his pride. He heard the echoes of his father’s words. He really was chickenshit.

Feeling worse when he hung up the phone, Brad just stared out the window. Spring made its presence known in fits and spurts, and that day was a pleasant one, although with his luck, it’d rain for tomorrow’s practice.

Brad hated not knowing about the fate of the Bayard House, but until Captain Douglas completed the arson investigation, the entire thing was up in the air. He’d spoken unofficially to the city’s preservation office and to the mayor’s office, but until the report came back, both agencies were noncommittal, and since he wasn’t a principal on the project, they couldn’t tell him much that was official.

Captain Douglas. Owen. Brad still couldn’t believe he’d done something like that, but it left no question in his mind. He was gay. No doubt about it.

Even though the memory still quickened his pulse, and yeah, he’d jacked off a couple of times thinking about it and thinking about Owen getting off remembering what they’d done, lingering regret permeated the memory. He didn’t want built firemen. He wanted Drew, but Drew didn’t seem to want him back anymore.

Fuck. What was he going to do? How was he going to get over Drew? Getting under someone else hadn’t worked. He’d thought of Drew so much Owen had called him on it.

The
ping!
of his corporate e-mail pulled his mind back to the present. Just what he wanted, an e-mail from his father.

Against his better judgment, Brad opened it and regretted it almost instantly. Randall had written to him to gloat about the fire at the Bayard House.

On the
Thursday the week after the fire, during another interminable afternoon in the sales office, Brad’s cell phone rang, but he didn’t recognize the number.

“Brad Sundstrom.”

“Hi, Brad. It’s Owen Douglas.”

Brad’s stomach turned a little summersault. “Hey, Owen. What’s going on?”

“Like I told you, I fast-tracked the investigation, and I just wanted to let you know that I’m done. It’s safe to resume work,” Owen said.

“Now if only the city would let us,” Brad said.

“I’ve recommended as much in my report. As long as the mansion’s empty and incompletely renovated, it’ll be a target, either for vandals or for squatters from the homeless population. That might well mean more fires, too, since they light them to stay warm. It wouldn’t take much for one to get out of control,” Owen told him.

“You said you thought it was arson. Was it?” Brad asked.

“Oh, definitely. I don’t have many leads, but that’s a job for the police, and I’ve turned everything related to that over to them. There’s not a whole lot to go on, however, so we may never catch the arsonists,” Owen said. He paused. “Are you doing all right?”