Domestic Do-over Read online

  A display of four-inch-square ceramic tiles caught his eye. Most of them were solid colored, but one display had a variety of ones with different patterns. And there in the middle was a teal tile with a brown overlay painted on. It wasn’t exactly the style of tile Travis had shown him, but it was close and quite eye-catching.

  Suddenly Brandon could picture the whole kitchen. He could see the floors going in, the way they complimented the dark cabinets, and then this pop of teal. It was the dream kitchen Travis had described, in this house, this crazy house they were fixing together. This money pit of a house that Brandon nonetheless thought was beautiful and charming and heartbreaking and, well, kind of perfect. And it should have the perfect kitchen.

  “This is a little out-there,” Brandon said, “but what do you think?”

  “These are gorgeous. This brown is very close to the cabinets, so it will match well. But it’s such a busy pattern that I wouldn’t use it for more than the backsplash, maybe this high.” She held her hands about eighteen inches apart. “These are pricey, though.”

  Brandon hadn’t looked at the price. He just knew these were the tiles Travis had wanted in his dream design.

  Fuck the price. “Worth it. I want these tiles.”

  Kayla nodded. “They are pretty. Sometimes design is like that. It just snags your eye.”

  Brandon looked at the measurements Travis had given him and worked out the price because he needed to for the cameras, but he knew these were the tiles he had to have. And it was such a dumb thing, to be feeling this way about kitchen tiles, but suddenly he could picture exactly what this kitchen would look like. And it would be perfect.

  After an hour in the store, Brandon felt satisfied with the choices they made. It would take a few days for everything to be delivered, but Brandon was suddenly eager for Travis to see all the purchases he’d made.

  Erik directed the cameras to shut down and told Brandon they had some good footage of the shopping expedition. Presumably the viewers liked this design stuff. Brandon wondered idly how many hours of footage they already had for a forty-two-minute episode.

  “Are you filming the great countertop decision?” Kayla asked Erik.

  “Yeah, meet you there?”

  “Sure,” said Brandon.

  A few minutes later, he and Kayla climbed into the car and Brandon punched the address for the stone shop into his GPS.

  “We’re alone now, right?” Kayla asked.

  “Yeah. The car’s not bugged or anything. No cameras here. Is something up?”

  “I happened to notice back there that you picked out teal tiles. Didn’t Travis say something at dinner last night about teal tiles?”

  Leave it to Kayla to notice that. Brandon put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot before answering. “I picked them because they matched the kind of tiles he told me he’d like to put in the kitchen. His design instincts have been pretty good so far, despite his continual reminders that he’s not a designer, so I decided to defer to his opinion there. And they are beautiful tiles. Even you thought they’d work well in the kitchen.”

  “You like him, don’t you? And not just as a contractor. You like him, like him.”

  “What are we, in ninth grade?”

  “You have a crush on him. Buying the tiles he described is your way of showing it. You forget that I was your best friend for a long time, Brandon Chase. I know how you operate.”

  “In three hundred feet, turn left,” said the GPS.

  “Fine, I like him, but that’s not why I spent four hundred extra dollars on tile. I believe in the design.”

  “Aha! Do you need me to play matchmaker? Pass a note to him in study hall?”

  Brandon laughed. “No. We… we’ve figured out enough on our own.”

  “You’re sleeping with him already, aren’t you?”

  The starkness of the statement hit Brandon so hard, he almost missed the turn. “Jesus, Kayla. I mean, yes, but no one knows. And don’t tell him I told you, because he will freak out.”

  “Oh-ho! Is this a real thing?”

  “No, it’s…. We’ve hooked up a couple of times, that’s it. It’s not really anything yet. Which is why you won’t say anything.”

  “Lips are sealed.” She mimed zipping her lips. “And I do really like him. I hope this does become a thing, because I think he’d be good for you.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’s straightforward in a way you’re not. And he’s practical and organized and understands little details. You’ve always been more of a big-picture guy. You can dream things up, and he can make those dreams happen.”

  Brandon fought against rolling his eyes as they moved through an intersection. “Please. This is not as big as all that. It’s… sex. I mean, I like hanging out with him, but if anyone at Restoration found out about us, it would be all over. And we work together, so if something went wrong, it could really complicate the show. Getting involved with him was a tremendously stupid idea.”

  “Or a brilliant one!”

  “Your destination is ahead on the right,” said the GPS.

  “Tamp it down,” Brandon said. “Don’t let on that you know anything. It probably won’t last past my selling this house, so don’t go planning my wedding yet, all right?”

  “You should so marry him.”

  Brandon pulled into the parking lot and found a spot near the entrance. Then he did roll his eyes. “We’re back on camera now. We discuss only slabs of stone. Got it?”

  “You can trust me, Brandon.”

  He wasn’t so sure about that. Although he blamed himself for how things had gone down, there was still the fundamental truth that Kayla had kissed Dave in public and managed to get photographed doing it. She was either cocky about their privacy or lazy about adhering to their plan for behaving in public. Or both. And that had been her fault, even if Brandon took responsibility for the rest of it.

  They both got out of the car and let a store manager escort them out back, to an empty lot full of rows of stone slabs. Kayla beelined for the stone in the color she wanted, and Brandon was content to let her pick out one she liked, provided it didn’t have too much sparkle. He watched her like a hawk the whole time, worried now that she’d forget the cameras were around, but she kept her ongoing stream of dialogue limited to stone countertops. They found a slab they both agreed they liked that was, happily enough, on clearance. As they rang up the purchase, Erik called, “Cut!” and herded all the cameras out of the store.

  “I saw you watching me,” Kayla said as she got into the car. “I behaved.”

  “We good? Anything else you want to pick out?”

  “Not today. Shall we go back to the house and check on your boyfriend?”

  Brandon sighed and put the car into gear. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “He should be.”

  “Let it go, Kay.”

  “You’ll see.”

  TRAVIS TRIED to see the kitchen the way the kitchen and bath guys did. Travis’s old boss, Mike McPhee, owned a renovation business that mostly made over the kitchens and bathrooms of the rich and famous in Manhattan, and he’d already explained that he didn’t know the Brooklyn real estate market as well, but his business partner, Sandy Sullivan, had just made over his own house in Crown Heights and had lots of opinions.

  “Here are the plans,” Travis said, holding up his sketches. “It looks like a blank canvas now, but we made a lot of the design decisions yesterday.”

  The assistant director, Glen, was in charge of shooting while everyone else was out shopping, so Travis made a big show of displaying his plans on the table he’d made with a sawhorse, about where the new kitchen island would be.

  “I haven’t done a gut job like this in a while,” said Mike. “Our last few kitchen gigs were mostly cosmetic. Painting cabinets, adding backsplashes, that kind of thing.”

  “Have you guys dealt with the plumbing yet?” Sandy asked.

  “Some of it. We moved the pipes
to that corner over there, but we still have to deal with gas lines and water lines here. We’re keeping the footprints in all but one of the bathrooms, so we only need to move plumbing around in that one. The plumber’s coming tomorrow to deal with the remainder of the pipes. My crew and I can do the rest.”

  Mike and Sandy glanced at each other, then Mike nodded. It wasn’t the most glamorous of gigs, truth be told. Travis had talked Mike into it by saying he and Sandy could wear shirts advertising their business and would get a good plug from being on the show.

  They talked about the plans for a few minutes before Glen cut and told everyone to take five.

  “Some cushy job you’ve got here,” said Mike when Glen was gone.

  “It’s not bad. I mean, this house was a complete disaster. You can’t tell that now that we’re starting to get drywall up, but every possible thing you can think of was wrong. Asbestos, bugs, structural problems, water damage, the whole shebang.”

  “It still looks pretty rough outside,” Sandy said.

  “The siding is actually in pretty good shape—it just needs a power wash and a new coat of paint. That’s on the agenda for next week.”

  “So you’re flying through this renovation.”

  Travis nodded. “We’ve got day and night crews, so we get through everything faster. The reno is costing Brandon a pretty penny, though.”

  Sandy leaned against the sawhorse. “This Brandon fellow. My husband likes his old show because I guess he has a thing for foxy contractors.” He gestured at himself. “So I’ve seen a few episodes. Is Brandon as handsome in person as he is on TV?”

  “Better.”

  The front door banged open then, and Brandon hollered out, “Travis?”

  “Speak of the devil.” Toward the front of the house, Travis shouted, “Kitchen.”

  Brandon and Kayla appeared a few seconds later. Brandon grinned at Travis, and something inside of him melted.

  Mike cleared his throat.

  “Oh, Brandon. Let me introduce you to Mike and Sandy.” Travis gestured to each man as he said his name. “They’re the kitchen and bath guys.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Brandon Chase.”

  Sandy grinned as he took Brandon’s hand. “Very nice to meet you in person. And Kayla too!”

  Brandon looked wary, but Kayla was all over the situation, grasping Sandy’s hand in both of hers. “It’s great to meet a fan.”

  “Well, we got everything ordered,” said Brandon. “We should have almost all the materials by the end of the week. The kitchen backsplash tile might be running behind.”

  “That goes in last anyway,” said Travis. “If we can start installing cabinets by early next week, we’ll be on schedule.”

  “Good.”

  Mike stepped forward. “Travis showed us his plans, but why don’t you talk a little about what you’ve got in mind. Layout, materials, the whole thing.”

  Brandon nodded and launched into his description.

  Travis stood to the side and enjoyed watching Brandon talk. Erik walked in and signaled to the camera crew that they should be filming this, so Travis kept his mouth shut and tried to subtly manipulate Sandy so that his back of his shirt—with the name of the company and the office phone number, as well as a little rainbow flag near the bottom—was showing to the camera. Travis wondered if anyone would notice. He’d had a ton of fun working for Mike and Sandy when he was breaking into the business, in part because they were great bosses, but also it was nice to have some LGBT friends in the industry.

  They looked at each bathroom in turn, with Mike and Sandy offering suggestions here or there, but most of the decisions were locked in now that materials had been ordered. Travis was a little curious about what Brandon had picked, but he figured he’d see it soon enough. Hopefully Kayla hadn’t let Brandon buy anything generic or beige.

  As if Travis had said that aloud, Kayla elbowed him. “I think you’ll like the materials we chose. This house will have character when all is said and done. All new, totally safe, modern amenities, but it will feel like an old house.”

  “Cool,” said Travis, not sure how to react to that.

  “I know you were worried. I’m trying to reassure you.”

  “I appreciate that. But at the end of the day, it’s still Brandon’s house. Putting in a cookie-cutter white kitchen would be a shame, but it’s still his decision.”

  “No worries on that front. I’ve saved him from himself.”

  Chapter Twelve

  THE NEXT night Travis followed Brandon home, and was somewhat intimidated by his apartment. Brandon was renting out the second floor of a brownstone on a charming block of Brooklyn Heights, in a house that was likely around 150 years old. It was a long, narrow apartment, not a great deal of square footage, but with french doors at the back that led out onto a little deck. The apartment itself was white and a little stark. When they came up the stairs, they were in Brandon’s living room. A narrow hall took them to the bedroom and the kitchen in the rear. The kitchen was the stuff of Travis’s nightmares: white cabinets, white marble counters, no color, no character.

  “I didn’t do this work,” Brandon said. “It’s a rental.”

  “Good. Because yikes.”

  “This is the dream kitchen of a good number of clients I’ve worked with, though. Lots of people like white kitchens.”

  “They can have them.”

  “Why does it mean so much to you?”

  “It doesn’t.” Travis shrugged, but it nagged at him.

  Brandon could likely tell he was lying. “Come on. It obviously means something to you.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah.”

  Travis rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna need some booze or something first.”

  “I’ve got beer in the fridge. Have a seat at the island.”

  Because of course the model generic kitchen had a huge island. The stools beside it were the only pops of color in the room, dark wood with blue upholstery. Travis slid onto one as Brandon grabbed two beers from the fridge.

  When they were seated beside each other, Brandon lifted his beer and said, “Cheers.”

  Travis clinked his bottle.

  “So talk to me about why you are so passionately opposed to white kitchens. Have I finally unearthed one of your secrets?”

  “It’s not white kitchens that I abhor, exactly. It’s this trend toward making everything so bland and homogenous.” Travis sighed. “Fine. So, I know intellectually that owning property in New York City is in some ways a good investment, and in other ways it’s just pissing money away. But my parents own their house in Forest Hills, and I guess I always assumed I’d own a house someday. I worked for Mike McPhee for a few years before striking out on my own, and I was making a good enough living that I was able to sock away some money. And a little over a year ago, I found this house. It was perfect.” Travis knew he was going to get emotional, although he didn’t want to. “Well, the house was my grandfather’s.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. My parents sold the house after my grandfather died, but it came back on the market, and I jumped at it. I could afford it because calling it a fixer-upper was kind of an insult to fixer-uppers, but I figured I could do a lot of the work myself over a few months before I moved in.”

  “Where was it?”

  Travis sipped his beer while he collected his thoughts. It seemed like such a small thing in retrospect, but it still bothered him. “Fort Greene, on a residential block that was a real hodgepodge of architectural styles. And this house, man…. Two stories, ancient wood siding, tiny lot, but still a detached house. The people who bought it from my parents divided it into apartments, but it should really be a nice single-family home. Three bedrooms, compartmentalized main floor that could be opened up, and a finished basement, albeit one that was finished around 1972. I loved that house. A lot of my favorite childhood memories took place there. The interim owners did some weird things, but I could have r
estored it to be exactly what I wanted, a beautiful home for me and my hypothetical future husband and maybe a dog.”

  Brandon smiled. “So what happened?”

  “I got outbid. I had enough money under my mattress to put down a solid down payment and could have secured a loan that would have allowed me to offer over list price. I had all my ducks in a row. And then a fucking house flipper outbid me and bought it.” And that still stung. All that work, all those savings, all the plans he’d made, but it was New York City, and there was always someone waiting in the wings with more money to spend.

  “I’m so sorry,” Brandon said. “How do you know it was a flipper?”

  “The house went on the market again three months ago—at one point three million! Can you believe that? That’s more than half a million more than the asking price the year before. I was curious, so I went to the open house. And you know what they did? They converted it to a single-family home, but the inside was just a sea of beige. All the character of the house had been completely stripped away.” Seeing the house after renovation had broken Travis’s heart. He knew a flipper going in and modernizing the house would be contrary to his vision for it, but for this guy to have modernized everything, to have torn down walls and tiles and stripped all the personality from the house, was like an insult.

  “I’m sorry,” said Brandon, looking somewhat chastened.

  “I know I was kind of aggressive about it, but after losing that house, I couldn’t stand the idea of someone going into an old Victorian house and making it just another cookie-cutter place. Those houses are historic and beautiful and interesting. The interior design should reflect that.”

  “It will. I’m excited to show you the materials we picked out.”

  Travis leaned an elbow on the counter—the marble was cool against his skin—and he rubbed his forehead. It still stung, losing that house, and he wasn’t sure if he could explain how it had felt to have his dreams dashed the way they had been. How he’d almost left New York after the house sold because he was so fed up with the city, tired of renting, tired of putting white kitchens in other people’s houses.