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look at how you’ve been hitting the gym lately!”
    “I’m getting myself into better shape for you, Paul, not for people to look at me.”
    He shook his head. “Chanse, you shouldn’t be doing all of this for me.” He tapped me in the center of my chest. “You should be doing it for you.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that. “Are you going to do it? Pose, I mean?”
    “Are you asking me not to?” Paul replied.
    It sounded like a test question, one where I could pass or fail. Fuck it. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
    “Then, I guess I need to think about this.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to get running.”
    “Where?” I couldn’t believe what I’d said , or the whiny way it came out.
    He frowned at me. “I told you I have some things to do, Chanse.” He shook his head. “You want to meet for dinner at seven? Juan’s Flying Burrito?”
    Juan’s wasn’t on our diet. “Yeah. Sure.”
    He winked at me. “Well, you knew I’ve posed before. And I’ve posed nude, Chanse—but this isn’t going to be, so just relax, okay?” He started to walk away, then stopped. “Let me ask you this, Chanse. Does other people looking at me bother you because you don’t want them to look at me, or does it bother you because you would rather they looked at you?”
    I just stared at him. After a moment, he shrugged and walked away.
    I watched him until he rounded the corner at Dauphine. I didn’t know what to think. Maybe he was right--maybe I was jealous when people looked at him. But if the situation was reversed, I didn’t believe he could honestly tell me he wouldn’t feel the exact same way. I loved him and thought he was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen, but couldn’t he understand how tiring it was always to be made to feel inadequate? To see guys checking out your boyfriend and knowing they’re thinking, Why is he with THAT guy? And it would only get worse if he posed for that magazine cover. And what was this “I’ve posed nude” shit? Why was I just now finding out?
    What else hadn’t he told me?
    The gate hadn’t shut, so I walked through it and up the stairs. I knocked on the door. I heard footsteps, then a slender young man opened the door. He had large green eyes, short black hair parted in the middle and gelled stiff, and a rather large nose the rest of his face dropped back from. He was slender— maybe 140 pounds, and wore baggy jeans and an orange T-shirt with an iron-on patch of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman on it. In a very soft voice he said, “May I help you?” Behind him I heard a male voice say something I couldn’t make out, followed by a high-pitched girlish peal of laugher.
    “I’m looking for Mark Williams. My name is Chanse MacLeod—“ I reached into my back pocket for my badge. “—and I’m working for Dominique DuPre.”
    He nodded, without giving the badge the courtesy of a glance. “She called to let us know you’d be coming.” He held the door open, and I walked into a large room. A chandelier hung from a 16-foot ceiling. The desks were slapdash things made out of particle board. Several of them were scattered about the room, with computers on top of them.. Equally cheap-looking chairs, garbage cans, and lamps accompanied them. A man and a woman were seated in chairs on the opposite sides of two desks that had been pushed together. Loose papers and file folders covered their shared work space.
    The man was in his early 40’s, with bangs brushed forward over a receding hairline.  He had brown plastic glasses that dangled halfway down a wide, almost squashed-looking nose. The lenses were large and thick. The glasses had been glued together several times at the bridge. The  man  was laughing, his eyes were narrow slits, his mouth gaped open and his head shook. He was wearing a gray T-shirt with attitude written across the chest.
    The woman facing him had blonde hair in dreadlocks. She wore a baggy, faded blue men’s shirt over cut-off men’s brown