"I'm just plain old Cooper Boon," the ranger said. "I work as a park ranger and I've been on plenty of horses, but never a white one."
Treston extended his right hand and said, "I'm Treston Fair Leigh. It's nice to meet you, Cooper Boon." His name had a historic sound, as if he'd been named after some wild cowboy from the old Wild West. He probably looked great in a cowboy hat with his rugged jaw.
Cooper shook his hand and said, "It's nice to meet you, too, Treston Fair Leigh."
Treston glanced at his watch and said, "I really have to go now. I'll be late for work. I work nights and I have a very strict boss." He didn't mention what he did for a living. He knew how people often judged male strippers and he didn't feel like being judged anymore that day.
"I have to get back to the station," Cooper said. "I'm on duty until nine tonight."
"I'm sorry again you had to go through all this trouble," Treston said. "I can't thank you enough for helping me out this way. I thought that asshole had taken all my sunshine away. It's nice to see there are still some good people left in the world."
"Your sunshine?"
Treston laughed. "It's just this thing I say sometimes. I like to listen to the old song, You Are My Sunshine. And today I thought Harlan had finally taken it all away for good, until you came along."
"You're doing it again," Cooper said.
"What am I doing?"
Cooper smiled at him and said, "You're trusting me too soon. For all you know, I'm a mass murderer. I could be even worse than Harlan. You have to stop trusting people so fast."
Treston shrugged. He couldn't argue with him. He should have learned his lesson and here he was, trusting a total stranger all over again. And this time he wasn't even interested in having sex with him. "I guess I'm just a hopeless fool."
"No. Not a fool and definitely not hopeless," Cooper said. "You're just a little too nice and there's nothing wrong with that."
This was the kind of compliment that made Treston feel awkward. He didn't mind when men told him he gave great blow jobs, or that he had a tight ass. He didn't mind when men felt him up and raved about his body. Where most people would have been creeped out, he found it complimentary when he saw a man sitting below the stage where he stripped, stroking his dick while he watched Treston dance. But the moment a man started to compliment something deeper than what they saw on the outside, Treston didn't know where to run first. So he reached for the door handle and said, "I have to go, Cooper. Thanks again. I'll get the sweatsuit back to you soon."
"There's no rush, man," Cooper said. "You know where to find me."
Treston sent him one last smile and climbed out of the truck. When most of the men he knew dropped him off at his door, they pulled away before he even had a chance to get his key out of his pocket. But he didn't have his keys. They'd been in the pocket of the jeans Harlan had stolen from him. He had to reach up to where he kept an extra key hidden above the door frame. Cooper sat there waiting the entire time. He didn't pull away until he saw Treston's door was open and Treston turned back to wave.
* * * *
The first thing Treston did when inside his apartment was check out Harlan's side of the small closet they shared. The few things he'd had when Treston had met him were still hanging there. But Treston knew this didn't mean he was coming back and this had all been a huge misunderstanding. The things Harlan had left in the closet were not worth much and could be replaced easily. He didn't own socks or underwear; he'd been borrowing Treston's since he'd move in. The one thing Harlan owned he'd cared the most about, the leather jacket, he'd taken with him. Now Treston knew why he'd been wearing the heavy jacket on such a warm day. It was evident Harlan must have been planning this for a while. Treston remembered him mentioning he'd researched Lake Mead on the Internet on the way to Hoover Dam that morning. He said he'd been searching for quiet, out-of-the-way places to have sex outdoors, when he'd really been searching for a place to dump Treston and take all his money. And Treston hadn't noticed anything different about him and he hadn't seen it coming. He'd dropped his pants and removed his shirt without thinking. He felt so colossally dumb that he punched the bedroom wall and hurt his knuckles.
After he searched the apartment, the only comfort he found was when he saw his cell phone on his nightstand. He'd forgotten to bring it with him that morning to the bank. If he had taken the phone, it would have been in his pants and would be lost now.He went to work that night, as usual, and danced in a string thong in a cage above the bar. He smiled at the men below him, wiggled his hips, and bucked his pelvis for tips. He even let one guy with gray hair reach up and feel his ass for a second or two, and he wound up getting a twenty-dollar-bill for this one simple gesture.
At three in the morning, he climbed out of the cage and went back to the dressing room so he could get dressed and go home. He felt as if he were moving in slow motion and he knew he wouldn't realize he was still in shock until much later. But when he walked into the dressing room he found his boss and the gray-haired guy who'd given him the twenty-dollar tip. They were standing next to the door, speaking in low voices and talking with their hands.
When Treston's boss saw him, he winked and said, "You up for a private encore tonight?" Chickey handled situations like this with care and discretion. Although these situations were legal in some cases in Nevada, in places that were licensed for that sort of thing, they weren't in most others.
Treston stopped and glanced between the two men. He knew what his boss meant by "encore." In this club the guys who stripped were not expected to perform any extra duties-not unless they wanted to perform them. Treston's boss was an older gay man with long silver hair and too much chunky gold jewelry. He wore thick gold chains around his neck with his shirts open to his waist, gold nugget rings that seemed to weigh his bony fingers down, and shiny double-breasted suits with exaggerated lapels. All the younger guys joked he'd been caught in a time warp and his sense of style had stopped moving forward around 1976. He still drove the same white Lincoln Town Car he'd had for the past thirty-six years. When he talked about the car he laughed and told people he'd been smart enough to think ahead in 1976. He always said, "I saw the writing on the wall back then when they started coming out with these little foreign cars and all those funny foreign names, so I bought up two big white Lincolns." He drove one and kept the other in the garage for parts.
The guy with the gray hair seemed nice enough, so Treston shrugged at his boss and said, "Sure. I'm up for it, Chickey." He could use the extra money, now that he'd emptied his saving account. His boss's name was Chickey Levine. If he had a real first name Treston had never heard it. He'd only known him as Chickey. And he didn't pronounce his last name Lah-veen like most people. He pronounced it Lah-Vyne, with the emphasis on the first syllable.
Chickey smiled at the man with the gray hair and he nodded at Treston. "See me before you leave," he said.
Treston smiled. "Okay, Chickey." He knew this meant Chickey would pay him extra for giving the gray-haired guy a private show that night. They didn't have to speak about these things aloud, especially in front of a customer. Discretion was the most important word in Treston's line of work.
A private show with a client could range from anything to dancing around to licking his toes. Treston always made it clear he only practiced safe sex and didn't get into anything kinky. If they wanted kink, they had to go somewhere else. There were many things Treston wanted to experience in life, but being tied up and peed on was not one of them. In this case, all the gray-haired guy wanted Treston to do was sit on his lap and give him a hand job. When it was over, he gave Treston a fifty-dollar bill for being such a good sport and left the room without a backward glance. This didn't always happen; the men usually paid Chickey up front and Chickey would give Treston his cut after the private session. And Chickey was decent about this; he never asked the guys for a cut of the tips the clients gave them in private. Chickey treated the guys with respect because he'd once been a male stripper himself-back when male strip clubs were not easy to find.
After he showered and dressed, Treston met Chickey up front near the bar and Chickey slipped three one-hundred-dollar bills into his back pocket. Though some of the other male strippers frowned on this, and they refused to do private shows for men, they never said a word aloud about it. Treston had said no to plenty of private shows himself when he didn't feel like doing them. He liked to think of himself more as a dancer and a male model than a hooker. But once in a while he needed the extra cash, and he'd needed it more than ever. He was so thankful and so happy to get it, he hugged Chickey before he left and said, "Thanks, man. You're the best."
He felt so good he took a taxi home. He deserved it after all he'd been through that day. As he glanced out the back window at tourists and passersby on the strip, in their ill-fitted wrinkled clothes and their plastic flip-flops, and thought about his options. For now he was doing the only thing he knew how to do. He'd grown up with a mother who'd basically made a living doing the same things. After he'd dropped out of high school at seventeen to work at Chickey's club, she moved to Texas with a trucker she'd met at work. She'd kissed him goodbye and said, "I love you and I know you can take care of yourself now. I'm getting too old to dance and I need to make a life. I'll keep in touch." At the time, she was forty years old. They kept in touch once or twice a year. He didn't have any other living relatives and he couldn't look for his father because his mother didn't have a clue. The one thing that frightened him the most was he knew he would be too old to dance one day and he wasn't sure what he would do when the time came. He'd always been realistic about his options and knew he would never be a nurse, a teacher, or a dental assistant. Real-estate agent might be an option, but even this seemed so far out of his reach. His only viable option was to find the right man and marry him while he was still young enough to do it. That's what guys like him did, and they usually did it with older men who had more money than they did.