A battered black pick-up rattled into the car park over the road from the Bylow Reporter offices, trailing smoke in ominous clouds. The engine died before the driver could turn it off, earning the vehicle a severe cussing. Rust prevented the man from opening the door in the dramatic way he clearly wanted to do, and then swung the metal half-way shut on his ankle as he jumped out. More swearing followed as a dark-haired young man, casually dressed in jeans, black shirt and an old jacket, picked himself off the ground and wiped dust off his clothes. He tugged a bag out of the truck through an open window. The car door slammed shut. Angry muttering followed footsteps across the road, into the newspaper building, boots scuffing the ground.

The receptionist looked up for only a few seconds, and then smiled. "Morning, Jack! Car troubles again?"

"Yeah. Damn thing's really fucked up now." Jack leant against her desk and gave her one of his best smiles. "Any mail for me, doll?"

"If there was it's been sent up to your desk by now."

Jack rolled his eyes and glanced at the clock. It was well past ten, and he should have been here at nine. Oops…

"Better run. See ya!" He swiftly ran up the spiral staircase, darted in between various boxes in the corridor and skidded to a halt in the reporters' office, trying to act as nonchalant as possible.

He sauntered across the huge room, pausing to talk to several people who were already hard at work at their own tables. On reflection it shouldn't take ten minutes to cross a 15 metre wide room, but Jack was a sociable soul and he needed to catch up on the morning's gossip.

Jack's own desk was shoved tight to the wall, right beside a window. Half of it was covered it scraps of paper and other assorted bits of rubbish. The messy half of the table was his; the other half was the territory of Bylow's most notorious playboy, Christian Lachlan. Until Jack could find a man prepared for a serious relationship, the smooth talking Bostonian was filling the role of his best friend.

Christian was already in his chair, gnawing at his thumb as he read something on his laptop. Jack threw his bag and coat down onto his chair and tossed his car keys to the desk, attempting to create as much noise as possible. A few frown lines appeared on Christian's forehead.

"Fuckin' car nearly stopped on the damn freeway! Taken it to the mechanic's so many fuckin' times I could quote the damn magazines in the waitin' room!" He narrowed his eyes as Christian continued to pointedly ignore him.

The coat was evicted to the vague vicinity of a peg and the bag slammed on top of the car keys. Across the table a battered mug, bearing the legend "The World's Greatest Dad", jumped and clattered to the ground.

Jack ignored the pained sigh from his friend and rummaged through his bag, pulling out his note books and a sheaf of pages he had printed off his home computer the night before. A pencil was located from under what Jack supposed was either a biodegradable pencil case or, more likely, the remains of a sandwich from last week.

"Well, that's lovely." Christian finally broke his silence, getting up to retrieve his mug. "How long has that been there?"

"Dunno." The needed notebook was found and opened at a clean sheet. Jack shuffled through the printed pages and spread them out on the table, chewing his pencil thoughtfully. "Cheese sandwich by the taste of it. When was the last time you cleaned?"

"Yesterday, but I only managed to remove the top thirty centimetres of junk before it went six. There's a reason the cleaning lady doesn't come near this table you know."

"She knows her boundaries, obviously."

"Hah!" The sprawled coat was placed on the peg it had previously missed by a metre. The possible cheese sandwich was scooped up with a piece of card and dumped in the bin. "Ick. That's disgusting."

"You could have left it, Christian!" Jack glared at the man as he sat down again.

"And wait for it to grow legs so it can throw itself into the trash?" A stapler was brandished with excessive force on an unsuspecting mouse pad – Christian's odd little habit that was aired whenever he got irritated.

The two men glared at each other, but there was no ill feeling there at all. They had bickered like that since they had first met, and now it was practically traditional. It seemed rather fitting, therefore, that they had first spoke to one another in a Texas law firm's waiting room. Jack had been waiting for a meeting about his pre-nup agreement with Lureen – something her father had insisted on to prevent the screw-up who dared to wed his daughter from getting too much money when the marriage finally hit the rocks. Christian had been visiting his lawyer about his pre-nup agreement – the only thing keeping him from losing huge amounts of money to a disgruntled soon-to-be ex-wife. Five months later, Jack was moving to Arizona, unemployed and broke, and completely dependant on his friend's guarantee of a job in a town newspaper. Sometimes Jack did wonder how he got from being a rodeo cowboy to a columnist, but more often than not passed it off as sheer good luck and left it at that.

"Aguirre still wants you to help Malone with the new season coming up. I told him you wouldn't, but…" Christian indicated that their editor was a complete and utter ass with a single shrug. "I'm afraid you might be stuck with it."

"Fuck."

"Well, if you came in earlier then maybe you could refuse him to his face. That might work."

"It isn't my fault my fuckin' car's a piece of shit, is it?"

"No, but it might be your mechanic's. How many times have you gone to that place?"

"For this problem? About ten."

The other man actually twitched. Christian had a thing for his cars, and often despaired of Jack, whose knowledge of vehicular mechanics extended as about as far as 'The engine makes the wheels turn.'

"Ten times? And he hasn't fixed it? Get yourself a new mechanic, kid. Yours obviously doesn't know how to do his job properly." A glint appeared in one dark eye. "Or maybe he's not doing his job right so you'll come back."

"What?" Jack set down his cheesy pencil and leant forward.

"Maybe you ain't as unappreciated by Bylow's gay community as you think."

"Now, that's just wrong!" The columnist pushed himself away from the table, chair wheels squeaking. He pictured his mechanic – a large fat man by the name of Edward, who clearly didn't know what either soap or deodorant was. Now there was something make his nightmares a little bit more varied.

A card with a name, address and telephone number scribbled on it landed on his notebook.

"Try him. He fixed my Merc last month."

"What makes you think I can afford to go to your mechanic?"

"'Cause I'm paying." One hand went up to stay Jack's protests. "Just let me explain. This is now your birthday present. Ok? It's not charity."

"My birthday isn't for six months," muttered Jack.

"Christmas present, Easter egg, whatever. " Christian looked back at his laptop and scowled. His new column was clearly giving him difficulties.

The Bylow Reporter was the town paper of a population straining to be called a city, and therefore liked to pretend it could afford seven columnists, but none of them had much to talk about. Christian's way past this problem was to relate stories of his own childhood in Boston. He had the advantage that he was from an extremely wealthy family, and this meant he was rarely actually in Boston at all – spending most summers in Italy and winters at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. Jack's childhood mainly seemed to consist of cattle, sheep, horses and being beaten by his father. Nothing 

the cowboy really wanted to talk about. So he just picked something mildly interesting that had happened in the news and gave Bylow his opinion on it. It looked like it worked rather well; he nearly had as big a following as the Bostonian did.

His other five co-workers had done basically the same thing, doing things on science, literature, art, sport and what had happened in Bylow that week. All in all in resulted in three pages of almost complete nonsense every Sunday, but apparently it was popular. The Reporter seriously kicked ass in the Bylow paper races, even if the only competition was really from the Advertiser, who liked to focus on the scandals of the town's big names, and whose editor spent most of his time in court on libel charges.

Jack attempted to banish all the pointless thoughts from his head and tried to focus. Half an hour later he was still trying and becoming very aware of how easily sidetracked he was.

"Damn." He dropped his pencil and stretched, wincing as vertebrae popped into a more suitable position.

"No luck?" Christian had been industriously clicking about his laptop, making Jack feel a bit more useless than he normally did.

"Nope. You?"

"Haven't written a new word since last night."

"What're you clickin' then?"

"I'm playing Solitaire."

Jack rolled his eyes. Figured. He sighed, found his pencil and set about covering the notebook pages in untidy scribbles. Maybe by the end of the day he'd come up with something useful.

On the other side of Bylow, Ennis Del Mar was bleeding the air from the engine of Mrs. Bowyer's diesel BMW for the second time that month. The old woman herself was twittering away about something pointless on the other side of the garage.

Ennis straightened up and sighed. If only the stupid biddy would remember her car did not run on petrol he would… well, be slightly poorer for a start. Mrs. Bowyer was about 40 of his custom, and probably the cause of 20 more of it, considering her rather erratic driving style. Those lines down the middle of the road were only a suggestion as far as she was concerned.

"There you go, ma'am. Good as new."

Five minutes later Ennis was alone again, watching as Mrs. Bowyer drove off, narrowly missing a school bus. He groaned in despair, and wandered to his little office.

Normally he would have had an apprentice or two in here, or maybe a few kids who just needed some cash, but no one appeared to need a job right now and his one apprentice was off on a family trip to Disneyland. And his colleague, Stoutamire, who used Ennis's business as an easy way of running a bike repair shop, was taking the day off to celebrate becoming a father for the second time. So Ennis was alone.

He didn't mind being by himself for a while, it gave him time to think, but these days he was beginning to feel a bit removed from everything. It was the divorce that had done it - an unpleasant four months of arguing and court dates which resulted in a 50-50 split of their accumulated possessions and an order that father and daughters would be reunited at least every other weekend.

So he lived out his rather isolated life in what was basically a trailer concreted to the ground in the eastern suburbs, spent his evenings either in Craft's Bar or at home watching TV and his weekends without his daughters carefully mowing his lawn, trying to find something to fix in his house or washing his car. Ennis was really having trouble trying to figure out how his life could get worse.

There was a paper lying on his desk, the Sunday Edition of the Bylow Reporter. He never read through the whole damn thing on the day it was published and always left a bit he could turn to in times of severe boredom. Recently he'd taken to leaving out the Columns section, mainly because it was the most interesting bit.

It was a sign of how much the Reporter was into looking like a proper big important newspaper that could spare sheets for pointless things that the Columns section was fronted by a huge full page photo of their seven columnists all managing to look like they enjoyed each other's company. Ennis was beginning to love that photo, just because of that one man whose gaze, albeit unseeing, made Ennis's stomach do strange acrobatics. He'd spent many a half hour sitting in silence, wondering what he'd do if he ever met him.

So this was how his life could get worse... Not only was he falling for an unattainable target, the target was a guy. Great...

Not that that stopped him from regularly drooling over... What was his name again? A fumble through a couple pages. Ah, yes, Jack Twist.