Chapter 9It was New Year’s Eve, and the next day, New Year’s Day, was my twenty-eighth birthday. During the time I’d been a rent boy, we hadn’t really celebrated birthdays. Oh, maybe an over- the-hill gag gift. Age wasn’t something that was on our side, and the older we got, the closer we came to being less in demand until finally we were s**t out of work. I’d been lucky in that I looked a number of years younger than I actually was. When Wills and I had first met, he’d thought I was seventeen.
But now it didn’t matter, and I knew Wills had something special planned. He had made reservations more than a month in advance for dinner at Raphael’s, and there were boxes in his office. I’d sneaked in and—not given them a shake, I was too adult for that—but I’d turned them over and over in an at
