Colin O’Neill hung up the phone, dizzy with excitement and fear. He’d done it. He’d called the number, talked to the agency, and booked a “date” with Hamilton Dillon.

He’d looked at Hamilton’s Rentmen.com ad a hundred times, at least, over the last three months. He’d looked forward to new profile photos the way a kid keeps an ear cocked for the ice cream truck. Even though all the profile pictures had been beheaded for discretion, it didn’t matter. Hamilton Dillon had a way of posing that expressed more personality with his body than most other guys ever did with their faces.

The way he sat on a park bench in nothing but a pair of running shorts and Nikes, shirtless, manspread, his arms thrown over the back of the bench, his strong graceful neck taut, telling you that the face just out of frame was tilted up towards the Central Park sunshine, that the man was reveling in his easy beauty, the unique joy that comes from being young and hot and free in New York City…

Then the way he floated in the air in those same shorts and Nikes, leaping for a football, the camera capturing him from behind in the moment the ball touched his fingers, the imminence of his success apparent, ordained, the muscles in his back bunched, the mass of his shoulders gathered together, sweat flying off his brown hair, in the seconds before you knew he landed on the lawn, arms curled around the ball, surely to rise in triumph and be slapped on the back by all his equally hot and shirtless buddies…

The way he sat at a café table, in a slim fit navy blue polo shirt, one of his sculpted vascular arms holding open a well-worn copy of The Fortress of Solitude and the other just toying with a cup of espresso as if it was the back of another man’s hand…

Colin often did something that very few men did anymore, which was to masturbate furiously and successfully to a series of still photos. And with no penises in sight, to boot. He’d done it so often over the last three months that he’d stopped donating his old t-shirts, because he needed them for cleanup duty, at least until they became hopelessly stained.

He had been amicably divorced for six months now, from a wife who’d pretty much always known he was gay but had decided to let him figure it out for himself. Elizabeth was a career woman whose need for a husband was seasonal, from the company picnic in July to the company Christmas party in December, with various client dinners in between.

Colin was twenty seven years old, and had engaged in sexual intercourse with one woman and two men. Intercourse was pretty much the word for it, he thought. It sounded less like passion and more like, well, cars merging on the freeway, and all three partners had been just about that exciting. Actually, less so, since on the freeway there was always the thrilling risk of death at the hands of someone who’d rather kill you than let you merge.

Then one night, half drunk and inhibitions lowered, he’d thought, Fuck it, let’s hire a professional and see how it feels when it’s done right.

He’d paged through the escort ads on Rentmen, hundreds of them in Manhattan alone. It was mind numbing, the diversity, and it was overwhelming, the number of choices. He knew he didn’t want to visit Master Bob in his safe and private play space, and he knew he didn’t want to party with Anaconda Joe. The ones who caught his eye were, well yeah, the ones who looked… classy. The one thing he knew he didn’t want was to get ripped off.

And he didn’t want it to feel... He didn’t want to feel like he’d got a burger in a fast food drive through. He wanted it to be special, if that was really possible with a paid companion and not just something that happened to teenage boys in Hollywood movies.

But even the upscale-looking ones, well, there was something about them that… He knew it was good business, to offer yourself up as “versatile,” and available for “mild to wild,” but… Well, the more he saw what he didn’t want, the more a picture began to form in his mind of what he did want. He didn’t want someone who looked like an investment banker but whose profile also said, “Hey I look classy but I can drop it if you just want a dirty pig fest and you’ve got the money for it.”

No. He wanted someone who was one thing. Who wasn’t whoever you wanted him to be. But who was what he said he was. Classy, for real. Not “up for anything.”

And then he found Hamilton Dillon.

Sure, for months, lots of things had kept him from picking up the phone and calling that number in the Rentmen ad. And sure, sometimes he’d picked up the phone and dialed the number but never pressed send, so nervous and excited at the thought of it all being this close.

But of all the reasons or excuses or whatever he had for not calling, for not reaching out to touch the object of his desires, one stood out above all others.

“My fee is $2,000 for our time together.” There was no need for Hamilton Dillon to say more, to say it was non-negotiable, to say how much time you got. He was a gentleman and so were you and these things need not be discussed. There was no mention of sex, at all, in the ad, it sounded so legal and legit. All the other escort ads had rates for Hourly and Overnight, but not Hamilton Dillon. He wasn’t available for quickies.

Two thousand dollars! Colin had a generous divorce settlement from Elizabeth, which had included a down payment on this apartment, but it wasn’t the kind of money that allowed for extravagances like that.

He contemplated opening a credit card just to get a cash advance. He was a voiceover actor, and he thought about auditioning for video game work for a few extra bucks. But given the absurdly low pay scale, and the havoc wreaked on an actor’s voice over seventy-seven takes of an orc screaming its death throes for a Ritalin-addled director who just didn’t think you’d captured the character yet… No.

And to be honest with himself, now that he’d accepted his gayness, he was glad he couldn’t afford it. As long as “Hamilton” was a set of fantastic photos, faceless, voiceless, an ad accompanied by a blurb so smoothly crafted that Colin took professional pleasure in reading it aloud, a blurb that avoided every cliché of the business (“equally comfortable in tux or jeans,” for instance)…

Yeah. As long as “Hamilton” was over there, and he was over here, it was perfect, wasn’t it? And that… Well, that wouldn’t last. It would be ruined if he tried to make it real. It would be just as awful as the two dates he’d gone on so far. With guys who sounded… well, as good as Hamilton Dillon, on paper, anyway. Only free.

But just the other day, something had changed in Colin’s life, something that had forced his hand at last.

Colin was reasonably successful as a voiceover artist. He’d narrated commercials for local politicians (in a stentorian Limbaugh-esque voice whose rich rolling intonations implied intelligence to the ignorant), lead-ins for the evening news (calmly authoritative, you could absolutely trust Rick Ruppert’s AccuWeather Forecast for tomorrow), and while he didn’t do video game voices, he did a lot of video game commercials (guaranteeing couch potatoes that Greatness Awaited Them Without Ever Having To Journey Farther Than The Fridge).

But the Big One had finally come in, the Big Score, every creative worker’s dream. His normally laid-back agent Clarice (if you wanted to stay on her good side, you greeted her with Hi and not Hello, for obvious reasons) had called him, nearly hysterical.

“Calm down, you sound like you’re about to shit a brick,” he remembered saying.

“I am. A big fucking junk food turd right in your lap. Guess what job you just landed.”

There was only one job he’d auditioned for that could make her this excited. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Welcome to the big leagues, kid. No more fucking ScootAmerica commercials for you.”

Colin had converted the walk-in closet in his one bedroom apartment into a recording studio. The Upper West Side building was pre-war, its hefty walls and floors sound-absorbent, but he needed iso-tank levels of quiet for voice work.

On the door outside the studio, Colin had installed a full length mirror. Before he went inside, he worked in this mirror, preparing. He was an actor, after all, even if nobody ever saw his face. This was when he became the person who’d be speaking into the microphone. Not poor Colin, lonely and horny, but… Today, he would be this guy. Taco Bell guy.

He looked in the mirror, expressionless. “Taco Bell,” he said neutrally, as if repeating a request for directions, monotonous, apathetic.

Then he nodded, an affirmation. “Taco Bell.” His eyes narrowed, his lip curled. No, he thought, too Billy Idol. A smirk, that was better. A glitter in the eyes, a hunger.

“Because you smoke too much fucking weed,” he told the mirror. “Yeah,” he agreed mischievously. “Fuck yeah I smoke a lotta weed. Need all my money for weed, so food’s gotta be cheap. Lots of cheap stoner food.”

Now he had the look on his face he needed, complicit in the listener’s desire to get baked and shovel a bucket of junk food. “Taco Bell.”

His voice got younger, collegiate, gritty. His name was Nathan, but his friends… his buddies, they called him Nate. He spoke to them now from the dirty couch in their man cave, that they’d found on the street and hauled home one drunken night.

“Let’s get high and… Let’s get fucking wasted and… Let’s spark a doob and get fucking… fuckin’ loaded. Let’s spark a big ole doob and get fuckin’ loaded and go get some fuckin’ Taco Bell.”

“Nate” nodded, satisfied. “Fuck yeah, Taco fuckin’ Bell.”

Colin did three takes, but he’d nailed it the first time, he knew. The other two were for insurance purposes, in case the files got screwed up.

It wasn’t recording the commercial that would ensure his financial stability for a while; the recording itself would only net him $500. It was the sweet, sweet residual income. Every time this commercial aired on a broadcast network, Colin would get another $80. He was pretty much fucked on cable airings, but, Taco Bell had placed 11,000 commercials on the air in the last 30 days. So yeah. Taco fuckin’ Bell.

And success breeds success. This meant all kinds of things were open to him now. Banks, nationwide retailers, computer manufacturers…

But he didn’t think of HSBC or Home Depot or HP. He thought of only one brand, one name.

Hamilton.