Chapter 1

“Hell, never? You kidding me? Hell, boy, we gotta pop that cherry of yours!”

It’s not as bad as it sounds. Rufus T. Earle III isn’t actuallythreatening to relieve me of my virginity, therefore I don’t have to throw myself off the nearest skyscraper which, this being Hicksville, Alabama, isn’t actually all that near. And anyhow, I managed to lose my virginity some dozen years ago. I’m not thatbad looking. Well, I didn’t use to be, anyway. You know how some guys grow into their looks? I kind of grew out of mine, unfortunately. No, Rufus T. just wants to take me to a strip joint. One with girls, in case you were wondering if this is one of those progressive small towns that caters to guys like me.

I know what you’re thinking. I should just tell him I don’t swing that way. And if this was back home, and he was just some guy I’d met, that’s what I’d do. Probably. Okay, maybe I’d just tell him I had to get back home to feed the cat. But he’s a client, and a damn wealthy one at that. And if I keep quiet about liking guys, I don’t have to find out Rufus T. is a raving homophobe, and then I don’t have any qualms about doing business with him. Don’t ask, don’t tell: the office edition.

Plus, I don’t get the shit beat out of me. See? It’s a win-win situation.

“You’re gonna love these babes, boy. One hundred percent natural, home grown beauties. They don’t breed ‘em like that in the cities no more.” He leers at me. “And most of ‘em are amenable to providing a little personal service, if you get my drift.”

Oh, I get it all right. Dear old Rufus T. If there’s a prejudice he hasn’t got, it’s only because he’s never heard of it. Right now he’s busy buying into the popular belief that if you work in IT and wear glasses you never get laid, at least not without paying for it. The fact that he might be right in my case is neither here nor there.

See, part of the trouble’s my height. I’m six-four, which puts a lot of guys off to start with. I like a guy with a bit of muscle, someone who can take care of himself. Someone who’ll make me feel safe. But have you ever looked at the guys who hang around gyms? I’ve got one word for you: Sylvester Stallone. Okay, that’s two words, but you get my drift. He’s short. You can bet your bottom dollar he only started working out because he got picked on for being small. Sad to say, he’s not the exception. For every Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or LL Cool J, there’s a hundred Dolph Lundgrens. Don’t get me wrong, the films are cool, but you’ve gotta admit he’d look kinda dumb walking round with my skinny frame towering over him. Yeah, I’m skinny. I run. It’s a useful life skill to have.

So, the only guys who hit on me are the ones who look at my height and get the wrong impression, while the guys I like are all off romancing some cute blond twink. Did I mention I’m not blond, either?

Some days it sucks to be me.

So anyway, I let Rufus T. drive me to the strip joint. Back in the city, a place like this would be hidden in a back street, but they don’t have a whole lot of back streets around here, so instead it’s out of town a ways. You could almost mistake it for any other roadhouse, if it weren’t for the neon advertisements outside, presumably so no church-going types mistake it for the kind of place you can go into for a quiet beer. You wouldn’t want them to drive on by to some more obvious sleaze-pit.

Rufus T. leads me to a table by the stage—it figures he’s the kind of guy who likes to get up close and personal. The waitress introduces herself as Missy and takes our order. She’s decently clad, if by decent you mean not showing much more flesh than the average hooker, which come to think of it she probably is if all of Rufus T.’s talk of “extra services” isn’t just hot air. Does that sound sexist to you? People, by which I mean female people, often tell me I have kind of old-fashioned ideas about women. Listen, you sit through your grandma’s ranting over hussies who were “no better than they ought to be”, whatever the hell that means, every night at supper for close on a decade you tend to pick up an attitude or two. And no, you don’t get to say a word about my grandma. In other ways she was pretty damn forward-thinking, God rest her soul.