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over coffee?
    What the fuck?
    Jack thought that was all settled. Mark said nothing. Steve was on edge, as if he were a ticking time bomb, and Jack had never seen the four of them so uneasy.
    Even their four-way sex on the weekends had become strained. Mark lay there. Lay there and allowed them to fuck him, stick their cocks in his ass and mouth, but when they tried to make him come? Mark nudged them away with the same excuses. Too tired ; p reoccupied.
    The four of them using Mark as a pincushion wasn’t that unusual, actually. More the norm. But after they had been satisfied, the y descended on Mark and the three of them were able to make him come.
    Since this ‘coffee with Randy’, Mark was resisting them.
    Jack had seen Mark at his worst. One suicide attempt while they were in college together, living in an apartment off campus , and the second one, when Alexander and Steve’s behavior made Mark feel as if he was going to lose his husband to his son.
    Again, Mark was in the ER getting his stomach pumped of pills . These were no vain attempts. Mark Antonious hated himself ; h ated the aging process, becoming undesirable because he thought all he had going for him was his beauty. Mark was so wrong. The man was generous, kind, loving, and modest to a fault. There was nothing ugly inside Mark to make anything that happened to him as he moved through the decades any less desirable.
    But try telling him that.
    Milt Richfield had done a good job. Mark was filled with self-loathing and lacked confidence. The Nation’s Top Male Model was one of the most insecure men Jack had ever met. Maybe that was why he worshiped the ground Mark walked on. Jack’s life’s work was defending the weak, in law.
    How Mark could be so filled with self-doubt, when the world adored Mark , lov ed him for his cologne and car ads, Jack did not know. But he saw it coming. Steve was right. Something had happened that day when Mark was forced to straighten out th e mess Steve and Billy had made; Alex almost losing his contract for his first big blockbuster movie.
    Stupid fucking LAPD cops . Jack shook his head. Well earned reputations for assholes.
    Steve and Adam nudged Mark to the buffet table where several of the men were eating while standing up, plates full…
    Ewan and Jason were the perfect hosts, smiling, laughing, pouring drinks, listening to Danny and Donny tell of how they met their significant others … double trouble, those two identical twins .
    There i t was , Mark’s refusal of food.
    How predictable.
    Richfield shaking his head, no, pushing a plate of nothing but salad leaves away as Steve tried to make him eat.
    Unable to witness the self destruction, Jack finished his drink and left the room. He did a walkthrough of the entire home. He knew it as well as Mark did. Every inch.
    The game room where Milt had his vintage pool table, one that Mark had made sure he had sex on, was gone. In its place was a modern man-cave, filled with electronic video games, old fashioned pinball machines, a juke box, posters of movies on the walls: ‘ Murphy’s Hero’ , of course, and all the Star Wars films and even a few British films that Jack had seen over the years, ‘ Sunday, Bloody, Sunday’ … ‘ Trainspotting ’… ‘ My Beautiful Launderette ’.
    Jack ran his hand down the slender trim on a corner of a wall. The heavy dark wood that stunk of cigars was gone. He continued walking down the hall. The home movie theater was still there, but the seats had been swapped out for recliners, with vibrating massaging and heat, a popcorn machine was near the screen, and more film paraphernalia hung on the walls. No. This did not even resemble the Richfield manor.
    Stainless steel gleamed, the wallpaper had been replaced with paint, and the heavy trim had been redone with narrow modern wood.
    Noise behind him made him look. A group of the men were laughing as they made their way in.
    “Jack!” Pete appeared surprised to see him. “Ewan has some