“Doesn’t look like a gay bar,” Shaw said.

“Like you’d know. Anyway, Matty told us it wasn’t a gay bar.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you have never been in a gay bar, so how would you know what one looks like?” North studied the crowd through the big windows. This was the after-work rush on a Thursday. They looked exactly like the kind of people that populated the Central West End, like somebody had shaken up a mix of money and gym time and tanning booths, and then baked these people in about three different molds. Expensive clothes, expensive jewelry, expensive drinks. “Matty’s paying expenses, right?”

He caught the flicker of worry on Shaw’s face—which meant Shaw had not told Matty he was covering their expenses—but all Shaw said was, “I have too been in a gay bar. I went for Peter and Paul’s birthday party. I went to Rivets. I had a Long Island iced tea.”

“You had like four Shirley Temples and then you had one sip of that damn Long Island iced tea and gave it to Rufus because you said it was too sweet. And anyway, Rivets isn’t a gay bar. It’s a bar that’s barely, barely gay.”

“It’s a bar where gay guys go. That’s a gay bar. And that was the week I was trying that new Pure15 diet and I forgot that Long Island iced tea would put me over my carbs for the day.”

“You forgot that a five-year-old Girl Scout could handle her booze better than you. And Rivets had like four TVs playing Sunday night football, no dance floor, and not a single, sweaty gay boy tried to grind you into the bathroom with him. And nobody did any coke. Not even a smoke machine. Oh, and no drag. So it was not a gay bar.”

North didn’t wait for Shaw to answer and stepped into Allure. It even smelled like the Central West End: a melange of high-end perfumes, the occasional whiff of flavored steam from a vape—some sort of noxious, imitation citrus—and overheated bodies. North eyed the room for a moment, weighing his options. Two bars. And a lot of tables and booths. But Matty had told them that the mystery man had approached him at the bar. So which one?

Well, one had a pretty boy with dark hair slinging bottles. And one had a middle-aged woman with a red streak above her temples and arms like she’d spent the first half of the day driving fence posts. If North were a very closeted gay boy on his first public foray, he knew which one he’d choose—and while Allure doubtless had many bartenders who worked different nights, North at least knew where he was going to start.

They navigated the press, moving toward the closest of the two bars. If this was the crowd on a Thursday night, what would a weekend be like? How would anybody remember two guys from Saturday night—even if one of them was as spectacularly good-looking as Matty Fennmore? Music pounded at a steady, dull roar, flooding into any available silence, but not so loud that people couldn’t talk. That would make North’s job harder too; the chances that anyone had overheard Matty and his hookup, or the hookup’s name, dropped significantly.