Upside Down
Every action has a consequence. Sometimes those consequences turn out to be something you didn’t expect and didn’t really want.
Brian watched Justin walk out of Babylon with his boyfriend. Fucking Ian!
Brian had known that taking Rage to the back room might not be a good idea. But it had seemed like the best thing to do at the time. He knew Justin hadn’t been happy with him for a while. So this was his way of bringing it all to a head. Justin would have to decide what he wanted, who he wanted. And he had chosen the Fiddler.
Brian locked eyes with Justin one last time before he disappeared out of the club. There was pain in both their eyes, although neither chose to acknowledge it. Justin turned, took the Fiddler’s hand and they were gone.
Then came the commiseration and the criticism and the pity from his so-called friends. He hated all of it. He ignored whatever he could, and as soon as possible he left Babylon.
He didn’t really want to go home, but there didn’t seem to be any other place to go. At least no place that he could think of. He headed his Jeep toward the loft.
When he slid back the door the reverberation of the metal on its track seemed louder and more hollow than usual. The click of his boots on the hardwood was louder too. The loft was empty. It was all his space now.
That was what he had expected. But it was not nearly as pleasant as he had hoped it would be. There was an overall emptiness in his loft, in his heart, in his life. The blond artist would no longer be there when he came home. There wouldn’t be sketches all over the place. None of Justin’s shit would clutter up the bedroom or the bathroom. Brian’s loft could now have the pristine neatness that his loft was meant to have.
Brian walked up the steps to the bedroom and looked at the bed he would no longer share with … him. He knew he wouldn’t share it with anybody else either, certainly not in the way he had shared it with … Justin Taylor.
His life had been turned upside down that night he had met Justin under the streetlamp, and for the most part he didn’t regret any of it. But like so many things in Brian’s life, he had managed to screw it up. He had his rules that he lived by and he had broken most of them to let Justin Taylor into his life. He thought he had found the one – although he would have been hard pressed to define what the “one” was. And he certainly hadn’t been looking for the one.
But somehow courtesy of Justin’s persistence and caring and incredible sexual energy, Brian had come to accept him in his life. He had learned to like having him around. Brian had even begun to expect them to be together. And then along came the fiddler and everything went south.
Brian couldn’t help but wonder what the fiddler had to offer. He was okay to look at. Brian supposed he had some talent. But he didn’t have two pennies to rub together and he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack. Brian supposed the fiddler offered Justin romance, like that fucking picnic on the floor that Justin had wanted him to take part in. That had to come from somewhere, and when Brian wouldn’t play along, that had been the beginning of the end.
He supposed they both had managed to screw up. But what difference did it make who was at fault. It was over.
The man who had turned his life upside down had managed to do it all over again. Here he was in his quiet, immaculate loft with no one to talk to and no one to make lo…have sex with. This life that was now his was wrong and he knew it deep inside. The problem was that he didn’t know if he had the ability or the strength to allow his life to be upset like that again. He had done it for Justin Taylor … once. He didn’t think he could ever do it for anyone else again.
So the future stretched out ahead of him with nothing much to look forward to, not even the prospect of having it turned upside down.
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