“Not my favorite.” I climbed back on the bed and composed myself. Adam leaned against me and muttered something about “old geezer music,” but as Ella sang on, his silence became intent, his breathing deeper, and when I glanced over his eyes were closed. By the time she sang Skylark, he was squeezing my hand. For a moment, when the album ended, neither of us said anything but strained to hear the fading notes of When A Woman Loves A Man.

“Wow,” he said. “Play that again.”

I started the record over and when I turned back to him, he’d kicked off his shoes, pulled off his T-shirt and was unbuttoning his pants.

“This is great make-out music,” he said. “Let’s not waste it.”

I stripped to my briefs and joined him.

You see things in another guy’s eyes when you’re having sex with him that he ordinarily veils, a submissiveness men are not supposed to expose to anyone, much less another man. Not the forced submission of the weak to the strong, but a relaxation into the care of another, a letting go. The little boy curling into his daddy’s arms, blissfully unaware that soon the arms of other men would be forbidden. I thought I saw that in Adam’s eyes when I entered him, slowly. His lips parted and his eyelids fluttered and then he looked steadily at me as I began to fuck him; his eyes filled not simply with pleasure but trust. He drew his fingertips across my lips. I kissed them. It’s just sex, I thought, just sex.

When I called Larry the next morning, I could still smell Adam on my sheets, on my skin. Larry and I talked about Thanksgiving, which I was spending at his house in L.A., about work and my fourth step inventory and we again sparred over whether the belief in the existence of God was necessary for recovery. I said nothing about Adam.

Between visits to him in Los Angeles, I’d forget Larry was rich, but then I’d make my way up narrow roads into the hills and canyons above Franklin Boulevard where he lived in a neighborhood of grand old mansions that had been the original movie star colony in the 1920s and ’30s. Larry’s house was modest by the standards of the surrounding French chateaux, Mexican haciendas and Tudor manors but the views from his deck were equally stunning.. He overlooked a steep, wooded canyon that was home to deer and coyotes, a stucco and copper Lloyd Wright fabrication— “the son, not the father,” Larry had informed me—built for a silent movie star, and, at the horizon, the tinselly towers of downtown L.A