Charles Hunker was not generally considered to be a likeable man. He knew this. He didn't care if most people found him disagreeable. He'd discovered that respect was more valuable than a large circle of friends.

He'd just hung up the phone rather dramatically and, he believed, effectively on another advertising client who was over 90 days past due when he looked up and saw a blast from the past that made him frown even more than he'd already been frowning.

"Annabelle."

"Hi, Charles. Have I come at a bad time?"

"It amazes me that people think they can walk away from their advertising bills. It's unbelievable, really, how people cannot grasp the concept that they've received a service and have to pay for it."

Annabelle nodded as though she was intimately aware of the frustration and took a seat at the far side of his desk. He glanced down at the messy piles of paperwork between them and began gathering them up into one larger pile that he moved to one side.

"I mean, it's like walking out on a restaurant tab just because you don't feel full, or refusing to pay your car insurance because you haven't been in an accident yet. It's not my fault that a one-time ad didn't generate thousands of new customers. You can't expect miracles off a single placement, especially when your bar isn't very clean and has a bad word-of-mouth reputation. But you're not dropping by to hear about the reasons I can barely keep my business alive."

"Actually, I'd like to hear more about it," said Annabelle. "We'd all like to hear more about your life in the past few years."

"'We,' huh? So the whole gang's gone to therapy except me?"

"Not really. I mean, yeah, we went once or twice, but now we just get together on our own. Didn't you get our emails?"

For a second, Charles thought about pretending he hadn't, but he wasn't in the mood to play games. Instead, he gave Annabelle a look he was certain would make her feel uncomfortable. She wasn't going to be baited so easily, however, and returned his look with a friendly and curious expression.

"I've moved on, Annabelle. It's in the past."

"If you've moved on, why are you still so angry that you can't even be polite about it?"

He had no response to that, so he didn't try. "I'm sorry, this is a bad time, after all. I've got to make some more phone calls if I'm going to pay my writers' this month."

Annabelle looked around the one room office, as if the writers were hiding behind a filing cabinet or something. "I always imagined that you had a huge office and a big staff. Your paper is so well done, I always thought the place you worked out of must look like the big newsrooms they show in movies. You know, like Lois Lane and Clark Kent."

"As a matter of fact, I'm doing well enough that I'm planning to hire an office assistant to help out. But for the last 8 years, it's been a one man operation. My writers are freelance and the sales guys work on their own schedules, but I do the layout, production, graphic design, editorial assignments and accounting by myself."

"Must make it hard to take time off." Annabelle replied and he began to wonder why she was dragging this out. Why wouldn't she just leave?

"I haven't had a vacation in years. The perils of owning your own business. I'm always busy."

The door opened again and a tall, dark-haired young man walked in holding a red backpack in his arms. From his look, Charles guessed he was another manwhore looking to place a classified ad to promote his "body rub" services.

"And it looks like a client just walked in, so you'll have to excuse me," he said to Annabelle. Sensing that she just might hang around until he was done, he added with a certain venom, "Tell everyone I politely said hello and maybe I'll bump into you again in a decade or so."

Annabelle sighed and stood up. "It really would be nice to see you again, if you change your mind. We miss you, Charles."

Charles looked down at his desk until Annabelle had left the room. When he heard the door shut behind her, he looked up at the young man standing awkwardly just inside the office.

"Sorry about the wait, can I help you?"

"Is this the Gay Vegas Observer?" The young man looked out of it. He's dancing with Tina, thought Charles with a silent sigh. Just what he needed to make his day complete.

"That's what it says on the door," Charles said, barely keeping the frustration out of his voice. "Are you here to place an ad?"

"Right, oh, sorry..." stammered the boy. He reached into the backpack he hugged to his chest and pulled out a pair of much-used spiral notebooks. Sitting in the seat just vacated by Annabelle, he thrust the notebooks across the desk and demanded, "I need to know if these are any good."

Charles took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was willing to put up with these drugged-out kids for a $20 classified ad placement, but he really didn't want to deal with this now. He wanted to call up another past due advertiser and threaten to take them to court if they didn't make a payment.

"So you're a writer?" He asked in his frustration.

"Maybe, I dunno. Sometimes I get these ideas and I write them down, but I need to know if they're any good. Mostly I'm a dancer and I do other things, you know, but I want to be a writer if I'm any good at it. I dance over at Snick's Place and I think I saw you there once, only it wasn't 'til after you left that someone told me what you do. That's when I got the idea that maybe you could tell me if these are any good or not. Be honest, I don't mind if they're bad, I just want to know."

Charles did remember this kid now. His name was Prince or something like that. He had quite the rep among a certain crowd as a cheap hooker, but he'd been one of the best exotic dancers Charles had ever seen - and he'd seen a lot in his years. In fact, it had been word of mouth from one of his few friendly acquaintances that had drawn him down to the dive bar in the first place.

"Look, Prince..."

"It's Price."

"Right, Price, I've got a lot to do today, but if you want to leave these here, I'll take a look at them when I get a chance and..."

"Could you look at them now, please."

Something about the desperation in the boy's voice reached Charles. Well, he thought, maybe I can at least flatter the kid and get him into bed or something. On a day like today, Charles wasn't above meaningless sex. And Price was certainly attractive. The floor show he'd seen from Price had been the closest thing to a sexual encounter he'd had in several months at least. In fact, Charles was startled to realize exactly how long it had been since he'd had sex at all.

And so it was with a sigh and an ulterior motive that Charles flipped the top notebook open and began to scan the page. He wasn't really trying to read it, he'd begun imagining what Price would be like in bed. How he'd danced and how that might translate in the bedroom...

He was scanning the third page (imagining what it would be like to undress the boy) when a line suddenly struck him as being very, very clever. He actually looked at what he was reading. The boy was telling the story of a young runaway who becomes a hooker in order to survive, but it was told with a mix of poignancy and humor that really engaged the reader.

He began reading through in earnest now--flipping back and forth to different sections in both notebooks. Much of the material was clearly fictionalized autobiography, but some of it seemed unlike anything the boy could have experienced himself. In fact, there was one story that reminded Charles very much of his old friend Harry, from L.A. It was almost as if the boy had known him.

After a few minutes of reading, Charles looked back at the boy, really taking him. Price had sunken eyes and appeared to be dirty from having spent a few days, at least, on the streets. He looked like he was getting ready to crash. Charles wished that he could see into the boy's head and know exactly how bad a place he was in. He was also younger than Charles had first taken assumed. If he was a full twenty year old, Charles would eat his desk, computer and all. What was a kid with so much potential doing dancing in the clubs and hooking? Well, the red veins in Price's eyes explained that story.

"You want me to be completely honest, right?"

The boy looked on the verge of tears at this response, but nodded his head.

"Okay, fine, I'll be honest with you if you're honest with me first. Answer a few questions and I'll answer yours. First, where are you staying?"

The boy was too strung out to be defensive. "Every couple of days, I save up enough money to rent a motel for a night - you know the one downtown that rents by the hour?"

Charles nodded. "Are you using when you write this stuff?"

"Not really. It's kinda like my head clears out all of a sudden and I've got to write this stuff down. It's really weird. I know that Tina makes you see weird things like bugs under your skin and stuff, but something's been different lately. It's like, the world becomes more real when I'm using, and when I'm straight, the world is wrong somehow. But I can't write until I come down. That's why..."

"'That's why,' what?"

"That's why I have to know if it's good. If I can be a writer instead... I can stop... And I don't to use anymore... I just want to stop..." Price was crying now, choking out his words, "Please...Tell me that I'm a writer... Tell me I'm not just this... Please..."

Charles realized what was going on. This young man was hitting rock bottom. He had nothing and no one else. Although he'd never had a problem himself, he'd been involved in the gay community far too long not to know all about addiction and recovery. He especially knew about Crystal Meth, had run several stories about its increasing stranglehold on the queer community.

"Price, you asked me to honest, and here it is. You need to work on the mechanics, things like grammar and punctuation. But a good editor can help you with that. Otherwise, this is some of the best writing I've ever seen."

"Really?" Price looked up at him, not quite believing it to be true.

"In fact, I'd be willing to offer you a full-time job and pay you to write for me and help out around the office. On two conditions."

Charles opened up the current edition of the paper and flipped to the back section, looking at the service directory in the classifieds. He rarely ever looked at this section unless someone called in to make corrections or changes, but he knew the Meth Anonymous group was listed.

"One. You're coming with me to a meeting in two hours and you're going to every meeting, every night as long as you work for me. Two. Until we can work something else out, you're going to stay with me."

Price struggled with his soul and his addiction in that moment. Charles sat patiently and watched the young man try to make his decision. Finally, he reached forward and took a hold of the notebooks and hugged them to his chest. With tears in his eyes, he whispered, "okay."

Charles may not have been a man who made a lot of friends, but no one could accuse him of being less than honorable. Okay, well, they could accuse him, and probably would, but it wasn't true.

Charles had walked Price to the door of the meeting, but let him go in alone. While Price began the journey of recovery, Charles sat in the lobby reading pamphlets about how to help people with drug addictions. If things got bad, he didn't have the money to put Price into a full-time rehab facility, but he hoped it wouldn't be that bad.

After the meeting, Price emerged alongside one of Charles' casual acquaintances, a guy who worked at a queer coffee shop nearby. Charles didn't know the guy well, but he'd noticed him around over the years.

"Charles, this is Jerry, he wanted to talk with you." Price muttered, then excused himself to talk to some other group members.

Of course, Jerry recognized him in an instant. You didn't run the city's queer paper for almost a decade without being something of a public figure and subject to all the gossip that came along with it. From the look on Jerry's face, Charles knew that by this time tomorrow, half of Vegas would know that he'd picked up a strung-out, underage prostitute.

Jerry was one of those guys Charles envied for their charming and outgoing personalities. The handful of times they'd been in the same place at the same time, Charles had always seen him surrounded by a group of friends. It's not that Jerry was especially good-looking. He obviously spent time at the gym, but his black hair was thinning on top and his skin was leathery and dark, like someone who spent too many years sunbathing without UV protection. Whether he was in a shirt an tie or a tank-top and short, Jerry always gave the impression that it was the height of popular fashion at that moment.

They'd always managed to avoid each other at social events. They'd never been introduced and, after a while, it was just kind of assumed that they didn't care to be. Until this moment, Charles hadn't known that Jerry was involved in the recovery group.

"So Price is staying with you?" Jerry asked, pitching his voice in the neutral and so-obviously-non-judgmental tones of a counselor, when he was really fishing for juicy tidbits to add to his story.

"Yeah, kid needs a break. He's a writer, and a good one. I took a professional interest." Charles couldn't help it, he felt the color rising in his face. He had thought about seducing the boy and getting rid of him, but he was less and less interested in the boy that way with each passing minute spent in his presence. "What should I be expecting?"

"Well, he should try and sleep, although I don't know if he'll be able to. Try to talk him out of leaving for any reason, but it's got to be his decision to stay. Be firm, but don't let him think you're going to make his decisions for him." Jerry glanced over at Price with a look that told Charles he wasn't the only one infatuated with the boy. "Do you know why so many gay men are addicted to Meth?"

"I assumed it was mostly an escape - like drinking or other drugs - a way to deal with the social pressures." Charles thought of all the lives he'd seen destroyed because people couldn't accept who they were.

"Well, I'm sure that's a part of it, but you're thinking like an activist. No, most of us get hooked on the stuff because it makes sex really intense. You can't begin to imagine. Most gay meth addicts are also sex addicts." Now he looked at Charles with a severity that made him feel uncomfortable. "It could take months, maybe years, before he's really able to have a healthy sex life again. He'll either feel like he can't have sex without using, or he'll feel like he needs to have lots of sex with lots of men to try and reproduce the sensations. Meth addicts in the early stages of recovery make shitty boyfriends. Just thought you should know."

Charles had enough of the attitude. "He's not my boyfriend, and I have no intentions of trying to get him in bed." Charles took a breath and reined in his anger. "Look, I'm telling you the truth, Price is a natural writer - one of the best I've run across. If you're ready to run out and tell your buddies about this, tell them that I've found the person I'm going to groom to take over the paper when I retire, okay."

"Easy, easy. We get a lot of creeps dragging in kids they found on the streets. I guess it's reflex around here to assume the worst. I'm sorry." Jerry extended his hand. Charles thought he was offering to shake on the apology, but when he looked down, he saw a small white card between Jerry's index and middle fingers. "It's probably going to be a rough night. If you need anything, call me. He's got my number, too."

Charles took the card and shoved it in his back pocket. It was time to go. He turned toward Price. "Hey, Charlie," Jerry stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, "whether you call or not, why don't you both stop by the cafe tomorrow for lunch. It's on me. You're an okay guy, Charles Hunker."