Brandon sat at Anthony’s old desk, a battered but solid oak affair with an untold history.  He was in the small office area that was tucked away on the opposite side of the dining table from the kitchen. It had been the last space to receive his attention in the downstairs improvements, the last to be swept clear of Anthony’s old bent toward clutter and chaos. To make matters exponentially worse, it had become the place to consolidate everything that had been orphaned from all of the previous projects.  By the time Brandon and Anthony had turned to attacking the office, boxes were piled high against the dark pine paneled wall, and crates of canned goods and bottled drinks—which Anthony loved to buy in bulk—obscured the front of the overburdened desk.  

“It’s time,” Brandon had announced ominously one day.  They had just finished constructing cubbies on the back porch where all of Anthony’s boots now stood, each with its own apartment—they had joked that it was like the opening credits of the Brady Bunch, but with boots. Anthony had just taken a bite from an enormous ham sandwich and paused his chewing, waiting for elaboration. Brandon dramatically leaned over the kitchen table, the overhead light glowing off his hair like a halo and casting shadows in the hollows under his brows. “It’s time to start in on the office.”

Anthony resumed chewing but with a pained expression, as if the sandwich was suddenly rancid in his mouth. “No.”  The childish protestation came after a heavy swallow. 

Brandon leaned back. “Anthony—it’s gotten out of control. And it looks ten times worse now that everything else is coming together.”

Anthony held a beer bottle poised to his lips.  “Why do you think I always sit on this side of the table?” He always sat facing the kitchen. 

After significant cajoling, Brandon had persuaded Anthony that installing floor-to-ceiling cabinets along the wall that backed the living room was the way forward.  Once there had been a place to shove everything that wouldn’t be purged from the house, the office space could breathe.  That hurdle finally cleared, the knotty pine walls became the new elephant in the room and a source of much debate. Brandon wanted to gloss them over in a soft sage green that played off of the tartan walls in the hallway. Anthony wanted to leave them as they were. In the end, the compromise was to sand them down and gently pickle them, exchanging the deep, dated amber tone for a fresher blonde one. 

Since the office was directly underneath what was now Brandon’s bedroom, it had the same two windows—a west exposure and a north, though the north window looked out on the screened in porch. In spite of the two openings, the back corner of the house had now become gloomy in the imminent storm.  Brandon’s face was lit up a blue-white by the computer monitor as he studied the real estate listing for the Prescott Building. 

“Hello?” Kyle’s voice drifted through the screen door. 

Brandon jumped to his feet. “Door’s open!” He came to the kitchen doorway as Kyle stepped in. Large raindrops had just started dotting the flagstones on the patio, evaporating almost immediately as the day’s heat continued to radiate from the dark stone slabs. Kyle lifted his cap and pushed the tuft of hair back in place before repositioning it, glancing through the door behind him as he did. 

“It’s just about to get interesting out there.”  A puff of ozone had followed him into the house.

“Maybe it’s better that you’re in here and not driving through it. Summer storms are usually pretty short-lived.”  

Kyle took in the rows of boots in their built-ins. Anthony had only taken one pair of Hunters with him, so nearly every compartment was filled. “That sure is a lot of boots.” Brandon wasn’t sure if he was impressed or concerned. 

“Anthony was…a bit of an aficionado,” he volunteered carefully, grinning. 

“Huh. Who knew?” His tone was light and trivial, as if he was reading the ingredients off the side panel of a cereal box. Which was good. No need for Kyle to suspect just how deep it went…literally. “Should I take my shoes off?” he asked, hesitating before stepping up onto the kitchen white tile. Brandon’s stomach flipped at being unwittingly given such power. 

Steeped in sex hormones, his brain calculated the possible scenarios almost instantly. If he said “yes,” he would have the thrill of watching him remove them. This, however, could prove a disappointment as the shoes would remain behind on the porch for the rest of Kyle’s visit. Then again, if he played his cards right, he could possibly hand him his shoes to put back on as he left, letting his fingers sneak inside of them as he picked them up.  If he simply said “no,” he would have the joy of seeing them animated by Kyle’s feet over the length of his stay, however brief it was.

“Oh my gosh, don’t be ridiculous,” Brandon flippantly waved him off. “Please—this is a farmhouse. Come on in. I’ll show you what we’ve been doing.”

Brandon ushered Kyle through the kitchen, the front hall, and the living room, describing the work that had been required of the transformations and feeling gratified at the sense of awe that Kyle displayed as he took in the details of the design. And of course, as Kyle ran his hand over the finish on the kitchen cabinets or bent to admire the new baseboard that ran under the tartan wallpaper in the foyer, Brandon took each opportunity to stare hypnotically at the black Jags on his feet. He loved the way they looked against the stark white tile floor. The spot lights in the kitchen raked across the neoprene uppers, showing how they had formed soft bulging ripples across his feet from repeatedly crouching all day. 

By the time Brandon had led him upstairs to the bedroom, he was semi-wooden, a hot prickle like a tiny flame dancing in his center.  “The second floor kind of shows you what state the house was in when we started,” he chuckled as they passed the tattered peony wallpaper in Anthony’s room.  They ducked into his own room where the furring strips stretched across the stained and buckling ceiling, a cage failing to hold back the ugliness. 

Kyle whistled low as he took in the room and nodded, as though both appreciative of the significance of what had already been accomplished and the scale of what still needed to be done. “I see what you mean.  Looks like a lot of blown plaster.”  He spotted the folding step ladder propped against the wall and helped himself, placing it in the center of the room.   He mounted it and reached up, pressing his hands against the cracked surface, probing it for fragility.  Brandon gaped at Kyle’s stretchy boots, now at his waist height on the step ladder.  He fleetingly fantasized at leaning in, letting his crotch probe at the gray K logo that held its arms up under Kyle’s pant leg. “It’s definitely loose,” he was saying as he rapped his knuckles over the plaster. White flecks rained down, dusting the tops of the black shoes. Without even thinking, Brandon reached over and brushed off the Jags.  The neoprene was soft and flexed easily under his touch. His fingers caught the edge of Kyle’s pants as he flicked the tiny flakes away and he saw the glimpse of a black sock.  Kyle looked down at him, clearly puzzled. 

“Sorry,” Brandon said sheepishly. “Plaster dust.”  As though this explained everything, Kyle climbed down, but Brandon was vibrating with excitement.  If that hadn’t been enough, the back of Kyle’s pant leg had flipped up over the back pull loop of his right Jag as he dismounted, and a white Under Armour logo could be seen peering out from behind the sloped, stitched rim of the boot. 

“I see two options.” Kyle glanced back up and clapped the dust from his hands. “The first is to rip it all down. You could re-lathe and plaster it again, or you could Sheetrock it, which is what I would probably do.  It would be a hellish mess, but with way you’d have a clean surface.”

“And the second?”

“Cover it back up,” Kyle shrugged. “I don’t think there’s a risk of it falling on its own. And the furring strips are probably securing most of it.”

Brandon wrinkled his nose. “Cover it with what? More tile?”

Kyle frowned thoughtfully, his lower lip protruding. “What about bead-board like you did in the kitchen?”  That was a possibility. And a cheap solution. Brandon silently declared this visit a triumph—for various reasons. 

By the time they had moved back downstairs, the heavens had opened outside, so Brandon invited Kyle to the back porch for a cold beer while they waited for the worst to pass. Kyle sat on the wicker settee like a sports spectator, observing the rain as it drove sideways from the west, pinning bits of leaves to the tall screens and filtering a refreshing spray over their seats. Every square in the screens grids filled with water, like tiny magnifying glasses. Brandon, on the other hand, kept his eyes on the left Jag, which Kyle had crossed over his right knee.  The same gray sole that had buried itself in the mud the week before now stared him down as if daring him to get an erection.

---

That night in bed, when the moment had arrived for Brandon to relieve the pressure that had built so beautifully over the events of the day, he found himself scrolling through Anthony’s YouTube channel.  He could just about always count on a more than satisfactory outcome by reviewing some of his greatest hits—many of which he had witnessed in person, so it was really more like reliving than rewatching them. With his cock hard and expectant, but patient, he sailed past familiar thumbnails until he came across Anthony’s muddy pasture encounter in the black Xtratuf deck boots.  

He paused, finger poised over the video.  He remembered the day they had shot the footage—it had been an impromptu session that arose from carpooling after work.  But the hottest moments of that shoot weren’t on YouTube. Brandon felt a sudden resolve down below—as if the smoldering had suddenly turned into an insistent conflagration. He left the app and opened his own video archives, scanning the screen hungrily as the tiles appeared until he found the one he had been looking for.  Brandon’s own recording from that day had captured the exceptionally messy end when Anthony had wandered into mud way out of his short boots’ depth.  It was shot at a crazy angle as his phone had itself been anchored in the mud at the time…because Brandon had feigned dropping it there in order to lure Anthony into the deepest place in the mire.

As he watched the events unfold on the screen in high-definition, he could see the tiny diagonal ridges in the weave of Anthony’s twill pant leg fill with sloppy clay.  Brandon had been right that day—texture was everything in these videos. He quickly arrived at his critical point, like a child who had climbed the ladder and was about to push off down the slide.  But it wasn’t just Anthony with his camel colored pants plunging deeper into the tan cream that gave him the extra momentum this evening—though this in itself would have been plenty. It was the sudden burst of an idea, like the pop of a flash bulb in an old-timey camera that truly lent him wings as he sailed into pleasure. In the mental clarity that sometimes accompanies climax, he realized that he was going to set a trap for Kyle, just as he had for Anthony that day. 

And what’s more, he already knew just how he was going to do it.