So, Nick was deciding that the guy he’d met at the Monaco Principality youth hostel had been right—that the steps of the Cathedral of Our Lady on the edge of the Jardins Sant-Martin park was as good a place as any to pick up men good for the day’s expenses. And Nick’s resources were down to the point of selling his body, which he was willing to do and had done before during his European adventure. Such a guy was standing in front of him now, looking rough at the base but candy coated. He was expensively dressed in tailored clothes covering a muscular, hard-as-steel body. He maybe was in his early forties and looked thuggish, but thuggish in a handsome, arousing way—and he looked like money. Nick gauged him to be Slavic. He was probably organized crime, Nick thought, which would be an addition to Nick’s European adventure. The man was standing there, in front of Nick, all-American sunny blond, with a friendly smile on a handsome face and sculpted body, looking years younger than his nineteen.

Nick had taken a year off after high school and before entering Penn State, where all his people went and where he was promised an athletic scholarship when he was ready for it to play tennis. Before he settled down to that he was bumming around Europe for a year. They had a name for it—the gap year. His expenses had outrun the money his family was regularly wiring to him in France and he was sitting it out in Monaco, waiting for the money drafts to catch up with him. He needed cash, though, and he’d let men use his body before in Europe on this gap year adventure—and not always because he needed money at the time—so here he was, lounging and posing on the steps of the Cathedral of Our Lady. Being free to be casually gay was part of the adventure.

The man, swarthy under the elegant clothes, although not uncomfortably so, black, curly hair, with hairy forearms and tufts of curls at his neckline, and what was probably a perpetual five o’clock shadow at his jaw line and on his cheeks, was giving Nick a piercing stare. Nick was dressed as if he was biking and had stopped at the cathedral for a short rest—neon-blue skin-tight Lycra biker thigh-compression shorts and a peel-off Lycra jersey. He’d dressed to be noticed. There was no bike in sight, though. He couldn’t see bringing one to this audition and worrying about what to do with it if he went to a hotel room with a man. He did bring his tennis racket to give some credibility to being in athletic gear.