Adam lives on the third storey of a historic row-home in the city. I don’t. I live farther into the danger of the city in a non-historic row home with three other people. The houses are built like railroad cars, rooms connected one to the other in a straight line. Each room long but narrow and laid out like one long hallway. Main room to dining room to kitchen to summer kitchen.

Adam’s house is nicer. Each level of his row home is broad and roomy, the ceilings high, the windows too. His bedroom has a skylight and the front window faces the street.

I pass his house every night when I leave The Twisted Scarf, a tiny bar I work in that got its name from the way the original owner died. It had been McWilliams’s Tavern before then, but the original owner was killed – rumoured to be a mobtown hit – by strangulation. Did you guess a twisted scarf? You win a prize.

Gruesome name for a hole-in-the-wall dive bar. But I make good tips and once in a while a nice-looking college boy comes in and I end up going out for a night on the town. Usually followed by a night between the sheets.

But when I think of love and lust and need and all the weird and sometimes melancholy stuff that goes with it, it’s Adam who springs to mind. Adam who I met in the bar and Adam who’s worked out an arrangement with me.

He’s not into love. As he explains it, ‘I tried that once and she damn near killed me. I didn’t know a human heart could hurt that bad and still keep working. I’m never doing it again.’

And I get it. I get the pain he suffered and I get the way he feels and I get that he likes me and in another life it could have been something more. And hey, I agreed to the arrangeme...