“A friend of mine has a girlfriend and a boyfriend,” Erick adds with his eyes still closed. “I wouldn’t mind that arrangement – except the girlfriend would have to be a boyfriend.”

Chris chuckles. “So you want two boyfriends?”

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind three.”

“Three?” Chris asks.

Erick sits up. “Yes, three — one to meet the physical needs, one to meet the social needs and one to meet the emotional needs,” he explains before returning to his stretched out position with his head in Chris lap and his eyes closed.

Erick and Chris are watching the first season of Friday Night Lights on DVD. The last episode on the second disc finishes playing. Erick gets up to take the second disc out of his DVD player and loads up the third disc.

“How’s Eugene doing?” Chris asks. This comes across as somewhat out of the blue to Erick but Eugene has been lingering in the back of Chris’s mind since Erick finally met him in person several weeks ago after talking for four years. He has yet to figure out if this is cause for concern or if it amounts to just a harmless little crush.

Erick freezes for a moment before continuing. “Um…I’m not sure. I haven’t heard from him in a couple of weeks. I’m sure he’s fine though.”

“Let’s schedule another date with him, but I’d like to go this time.”

“Well this looks like trouble,” Tato says from behind the bar as Erick and his managing editor John enter for their weekly Friday happy hour at Larrabee’s in West Hollywood.

“If you play your cards right,” Erick responds as he and John slide into the stools on the other side of the bar.

“Let me wear those glasses for a while and we’ll talk,” Tato replies.

“That play gets better every time I see it,” Cole comments as he walks into the lobby of the Hudson Guild Theatre in Hollywood. His boyfriend Mitch had invited Erick and Chris to see his first stage performance since returning to Los Angeles last year.

“How many times have you seen it?” Chris asks, walking alongside Cole.

“This was number six.”

Erick panics over what he hopes is a one-time situation involving his boyfriend Chris.

“Isn’t that Ryan Martin?” Erick asks Chris as the two of them are having Saturday brunch at Basix Café in West Hollywood.

Chris turns around. “Where?”

“He’s leaning against a tree with his arms crossed.”

Chris leans back in his chair and then turns back around. “Great. Who is he?”

Erick and Chris had been invited by April and Grayson to a Fourth of July party at her friend Ashley’s apartment in the Palms section of West LA. Since Erick had just returned from a weeklong trip to New York and Boston, it was fully expected that their fashionably late appearance at this party would only last a couple of hours — enough time to exchange pleasantries with the hostess, eat and mingle with the other guests before the weekend took its toll.

Two weeks ago, Erick put together a very well-received sponsorship package for the Fresh Air Fund to be underwritten by the Fresh Fruits Initiative. Since the FFI had been approached to essentially foot the bill for a campaign that Lefty Magazine would still making a commission on, they issued a challenge for them make a sacrificial contribution of their own to the Fresh Air Fund.

It was decided that Erick and Abram, who closed the deal with the FFI, would fly to New York for the week to help drive inner-city kids to the homes of their host families in more rural and suburban areas in the northeast and mid-Atlantic.

Chris laughs. “What have you told him about me?”

“He knows you exist, but we don’t talk much about the gay thing.”

“Does he have a problem with it?”

“It’s not so much that he has a problem with it. He just not thrilled with it. He loves his son more than he dislikes the fact that said son is gay.”

“Are you okay with that?” Chris asks as he places the potatoes in a pot, fills it with water, places it on the stove and turns on the burner.

Lefty Magazine was recently approached by the Fresh Air Fund to put together a sponsorship package for their summer campaign. This presented an interesting challenge to Erick, who was accustomed to working with some semblance of a budget. Given that the Fresh Air Fund was a non-profit, Steve the Promotions Director suggested that he and Abram scour their list of former, current and prospective sponsors to establish a co-operative deal that would offset the Fresh Air Fund’s marketing costs.