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trying to find something he could modify on the fly.
     
    “Are you reading from a script?” Drew had chuckled.
     
    “No,” Brad had said, letting his pages of scribbled conversation scatter as he dropped them on his desk. “No, what gives you that idea? Just busy… with paperwork.”
     
    At the time, he’d been petrified, but there in the car, Brad thought it was pretty damned funny. Making a script to call someone, then getting caught at it and playing it off. He still wasn’t sure if he’d gotten away with it, only that Drew had let it go.
     
    Drew was a class act, Brad could tell, a man more sophisticated and suave, if that was the word, than he’d ever be. He was a big lug, and he knew it. You could put him in a fancy suit and teach him to tie a Windsor knot and curl his pinky while drinking tea, and he’d still be a big lug yanking on his collar because it felt like it was strangling him.
     
    Just the thought of himself all dressed up like that made him snicker. Brad, with his neck like a tree trunk and thighs to match. In a suit. Drinking tea.
     
    But Drew…. Brad stopped laughing. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Drew the entire lunch. Every time he felt uncomfortable or even scared and started glancing around, the sight of Drew pulled him back.
     
    “Fuck, he’s handsome,” Brad whispered. Drew was just average height, but Brad liked that better. He’d been around tall and rangy rowers for five years, and not one of them had ever caught his eye.
     
    Drew’s brown hair sparkled in the sunlight when they stood in the parking lot to say goodbye. That was the word, sparkled. Maybe it was some gay super hair product or good genes or something. Brad had brown hair, at least what was left of it from where it was noticeably thinning on top. He just clipped it super short every other week and left it at that. But even when he’d had enough hair to style, it had never looked like Drew’s.
     
    Blue eyes that danced when he smiled. That was just weird. Blue eyes usually bugged him. There was something off about them, the way they were different colors from ice blue to flat-out gray, but all still blue. His dad had blue eyes, and they’d never held a hint of warmth. But Drew’s… they looked so friendly, so inviting.
     
    Muscles that showed, even through his business-casual clothes. Brad wasn’t cultured or sophisticated, which he imagined meant things like knowing about art or fancy food or… something. He didn’t know. That was him. But he knew muscles. He knew what time in the gym felt like, and what it looked like later, after you’d recovered and built the muscle. Drew had muscles.
     
    Drew had earned his muscles the hard way too. Brad had never juiced. He knew people who had, people who’d done Deca and then Clomid to keep their balls from shrinking. He could always tell. The thought made him curl his lip in contempt. Juicing was cheating. That was for pussies, pussies and….
     
    Fags?
     
    Brad had forgotten that Drew was a homo, that it was another man whose appearances he was so hung up on. But damn, those pecs alone, hidden behind Drew’s dress shirt, they’d taken a lot of time to sculpt like that. A lot of guys just did the bench press for their pecs and left it that, but it took a lot more than that. It took time with the incline press, the dumbbell flies, pull-ups…. No, those muscles made Drew look like a man, not just someone who was male. Maybe that was it. There was something manly about Drew.
     
    Was it gay to appreciate another man’s masculinity? Brad shook his head. It couldn’t be. It was just acknowledging all Drew’s hard work in the gym, that was all.
     
    But even if that was the case, that he just appreciated Drew’s efforts in the one area he happened to know something about, Brad was forced to admit that there was more to it than that.
     
    Brad shifted uncomfortably as he drove. He’d boned right up as soon as Drew got out of his car. He was