2: The Making of the Perfect Porn Trailer

Out-of-work data scientist Clayton Lewis finds a hidden pattern in his algorithm, can it change the course of his life?

He had been out of work for nineteen days, including the bank holiday, which this year had fallen on a Wednesday which meant most of his friends had had to fit three days work in on the Monday and Tuesday, but then they also had felt the need to catch up on lost time on the Thursday and Friday meaning they were unavailable for lunch or long, ambling conversational phone calls in the middle of the day which only served to further enhance the mind-crunching loneliness that comes from feeling like everyone else has a purpose to their life and a sense of identity ascribed by their job, him being gut-wrenchingly aware of his own joblessness which was always further exacerbated when he went out and no longer had an easy byline for going up and introducing himself to guys, given that so, what do you do? was the second question that gets asked here in London where the class system is alive and well and the sorting starts immediately to determine whether you are worth continued conversation. Except in summer, when the class system reverts to a gay circuit version of caste where men are all sorted by body fat percentage, giving a totally different meaning to the top 1%. Since it was May, a time of year straddling the traditional class social-sorting system and at the same time increasingly valuing the summer caste body fat system, Clayton Lewis was now finding it even more elusive to meet someone for a night of hot, mindless, go nowhere, mutually satisfying, spring season sex because he had neither a job nor less than around 13% body fat, which was a combination of two factors: firstly because he lacked a job being as he was a data scientist without any actual data to work on since the abrupt closure of Hedmonix, a startup that aimed to democratize the way AI is used in the fight against the male patterned early onset baldness health crisis faced by two-thirds of all men by the time they turn thirty five, by better identifying the risks of MPEOB and to use machine learning to calculate the best treatment for it based on individual head shape and genetic predisposition but which had mostly failed because the majority of the recommendations that came back from the algorithm were to just start shaving your head completely and go with it, thus upsetting the seed funders of Hedmonix, which had come predominantly from the platelet-rich plasma, minoxidil and finasetride industries, and secondly, because he no longer did crossfit.

He had been testing out different ways of explaining his lack of employment by saying he was looking around at the moment in order to be open to some potential networking with the guys he was cruising in case they worked in startups or for those few large enterprises that were apparently all experimenting with GenAI at the moment according to the tech media and LinkedIn but which he hadn’t actually seen translate into new jobs yet, but he also had a quick backup comment ready to vaguely suggest that he was fielding offers, just in case a hint of unemployed status wafted too fast into the mind of his cruising target and he saw them start stepping backwards, and scanning the room for an income-earning piece of trade. Clayton did not resent them for it, he himself now remembered the teeth-clenched, face-pulling wince he would instinctively do when anyone he spoke to would say they were a student, “between jobs”, a waiter, worked in a call center, or who were apparently working on their own projects at the moment and seeing where it would take them which, while Clayton was not completely sure he understood what they meant when they said that, knew where it was taking him, which was out of that conversation and moving on posthaste.

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It was through chatting at a bar that Clayton did get an offer of some temporary work to tide him over, but not any chatting that he was doing, instead it was a conversation that his friend Eric Wiltshire had had, the friend he had once played around with when they first met in their early twenties until they both realized they were looking for a similar hairy, masculine-yet-comfortable-with-his-homosexuality, athletic type that both Eric and Clayton, as young twinks yet to fill out their bodies or know themselves well enough to like themselves yet, had realized that they were not, and in fact, once naked and back at Eric’s place with some bedside lighting and out of the G.A.Y. nightclub darkness where they had met, now saw that they were fairly identical to each other, which was nice for a bit of camaraderie sex when first meeting but even when they were in the middle of a sixty-nine, both sensed that this was more like a friendship forming and they were currently simply helping each other out rather than anything more sexually chemically intense. They did in fact help each other out a few more times, until both independently of each other, had had the weird sensation when having a wank on their own that this was what sex with the other had felt like and immediately that seemed pointless to each of them so wordlessly they moved into a non-sexual friendship from that point forward except one time when Eric had gotten really drunk and needed to give someone a blow job and since it was Eric’s birthday and since Clayton was his good mate, he - Clayton - obliged but suggested they use a glory hole so that Eric wouldn’t feel so much like he - Eric - was going down on himself but not in that bendy, hot, self-fellatio way but more like, say, sucking off a blowup doll of yourself which would be not so hot.

Eric had been speaking with a guy who did the marketing for the Chavs and Scallies in Public video-on-demand website, which had grown into a fairly moderate production studio over the past year by showing mid-twenties guys on the tube or in public parks or walking around Hampstead Heath pretending to look for their dogs that had run off but which they did not actually have, and then meeting another mid-twenties guy usually in a tracksuit and a baseball cap and maybe a thick chain on and finding an empty tube carriage or a discreet bush to suck each other off in while a third guy videoed the whole thing. Actually, there were usually two videos and a production guy who would help keep a lookout on the tube, for example, but the idea was to make them look like amateur vids shot by young guys who know how to video edit on an android phone, since — Eric told Clayton that the marketing guy had explained — this wasn’t porn aimed at an iPhone gay demographic. What the marketing guy had explained to Eric, who later relayed all of this to Clayton when giving him the marketing guy’s phone number, was that the latest thing in the porn industry was from this well known producer in San Francisco who was apparently a whiz at making money and who had been using algorithms to know exactly which two minutes or so, of previews to use in a porn trailer that would cause a cock-frenzy response amongst viewers who absolutely had to see how the scene would play out and would therefore sign up immediately for a free 7-day trial, after which they would be moved to a monthly subscription, and, as it clearly explained in a small text section at the bottom of the payment approval form webpage, they could only actually cancel by phoning an office number, standard phone charges apply, rather than by sending an email or using the online chat, a model that had been copied from both The Wall Street Times and The Economist subscription centers and which slowed down the cancellation rate by at least two or three months in most cases. The marketing guy at Chavs and Scallies in Public was wanting to try and figure out if they could improve the trailers they were making for their video series by choosing the best clips of material that would not be sufficient to allow preview viewers to get themselves off successfully just from watching the preview, but who would be excited enough by the potential of what they saw to decide to sign up and give the site a try, monthly credit card fee now well worth it if they could see what happens next when the chav or scally gets the other chav or scally to give up his arse on the midnight tube somewhere after Canada Water which was the last platform stop you could see in the background just before the trailer cut out.

Eric had stumbled into this conversation probably because he had been asked so what do you do, and Eric had shared he was a lighting guy, as back when Clayton and Eric first met, Eric later contemplated how different people could look depending on not just the level of lighting overall, but which colored lighting they were standing under, which when Clayton first realized this was what sparked Eric’s professional curiosity was somewhat pleased that he had played a small part in helping Eric come to that realization but over the years as he thought about it more, it had made him somewhat miffed when he realized that Eric’s lighting curiosity had been sparked by him trying to figure out what had gone so wrong that he had thought Clayton had looked like someone quite different under the G.A.Y. nightclub lighting than the skinny, almost hairless, pale white twink that had been lit up at Eric’s shared apartment by the bedside lighting. When Eric said lighting, the marketing guy had gotten excited and said he worked in a related industry and then talked about lighting of the Chav series, which was apparently quite difficult given the lighting required and the need to keep any professional lighting out of camera view in order to maintain the amateur aesthetic, but, of course, the marketing guy conceded, there were slip ups, before then moving on to the discussion about the best seconds to use in a marketing trailer, if only there was some algorithm for calculating that to which Eric, who did not really ever understand what Clayton did but knew that the word algorithm was central to it all, then got the guy’s number and, in turn, gave it to Clayton.

It turned out it was to be just a few days' work, apparently. Clayton was given the entire backlog of full videos of Chavs and Scallies in Public, plus all of the trailers, plus the website data on what people had been watching just prior to them signing up for a trial subscription, what those who went straight to a paid subscription had been watching, and the data on which trailers were stopped prematurely and the website visitor left, returning another day to watch the same video and leaving again, suggesting they were able to get off to the trailer without having to subscribe or purchase any full download, according to the marketing guy’s assumptions, to which Clayton concurred. They haggled a little over price for the work, Clayton arguing this was high level data science that should be compensated for, since he would have to create a number of models and test which was the most accurate, while the marketing guy thought granting Clayton the full catalog of the Chavs and Scallies in Public videos was of value in itself and should therefore discount Clayton’s hourly rate.

So that is how in late May, Clayton found himself preparing to work in his home office aka lounge-room, after waking up on a Monday morning, grinding beans from a fair trade plantation in Guatemala, preparing a pot of coffee using a stovetop Italian espresso since he had taken his aeropress on holidays to Cornwall with him a few months back and then left it there and had then come home to find out that Hedmonix was winding up to the point that he felt guilty about spending money on a replacement aeropress for now and instead returned to using the stovetop and promising to himself he would buy an aeropress when he got a new job, notwithstanding this current arrangement which he didn’t really see as a job but more of a way to earn a little cash that would help pay the rent until all the offers for a lucrative data scientist position come in as it is apparently a very hot job right now according to the tech media and LinkedIn and a great set of skills to have although the lack of replies to any of his job applications would suggest otherwise.

After just one day of reviewing the analytics reports and associated timestamps, Clayton knew he had to find a new methodology in order for the data to come alive to him, a requisite for any successful data science task in his mind, as he had once remarked, he had thought quite cleverly, to a guy he met at the Duke of Wellington one Thursday afternoon back when he was employed and was even experimenting with crossfit and so had a position in the caste system whether it be winter or summer, of which it was winter at the time, when he - Clayton - had remarked that it was not just data science but data art, as the data scientist must get to know the variables intimately and get a feel for the patterns inherent in line after line of single cases until an aggregate flow could be sensed and explored underneath, like hearing birds chirping in the trees and needing to just look up and soak in all the tree branches and leaves and listen to the chirping without directly trying to identify the source of the sound until the leaves above shimmered and dematerialized, exposing the birds which had not moved but would only just now become visible. Clayton remembered he had had quite good sex that night, excited as he was by his own cleverness as well as by the trade’s remarks about his at-the-time crossfit-influenced reduced body fat, along the lines of “you’ve got an amazing body for a data scientist.”

Clayton decided to take a break and actually match up some of the videos with the analytics report entries, choosing one volume of Chavs and Scallies in Public at random, the one called simply Derek and Troy, and playing it from the start on his TV, with the analytics report at first lying open on his laptop in front of him, but then needing to be moved to the side so that he could get a paper towel and have a quick wank at the part when Derek eats out Troy’s hole on the Tube for almost a whole station stop, the ubiquitous “mind the gap please” voiceover and dinging of tube doors sounding, all the while Derek very much minding Troy’s gap.

It was while Derek was munching on Troy’s hole that the cameraman came into view and for a brief few minutes, the cameraman lowered his own cock into Troy’s mouth, causing Clayton to come while watching this cameraman, a guy who appeared to be around Clayton’s own age, but with a poke of dusty blonde hair under a reversed baseball cap, and thick biceps as opposed to Clayton’s mop of red hair and slim but toned physique, which he still had, thanks to crossfit, even though he had stopped going after Hedmonix shut down, again because of the need to budget but also, if Clayton was being completely honest, because it was exhausting. The cameraman, who was wearing a possibly ironic World’s Greatest Dad t-shirt, his whole appearance in the video only occurring for one minute and thirty five seconds, had left Clayton with a powerful urge to figure out who he was and to try to arrange to meet him.

So the rest of that day and well into that night, Clayton barely looked at the analytics reports, uninterested in comparing timestamped website visitor data entries against subscription rates data, uninterested in cross-validating which trailers garnered the most subscriptions, uninterested in which of the trailers was viewed the most often but led to the least subscriptions (thus indicative that viewers could get off to the video preview alone without having to subscribe), uninterested in seeing if there were any outliers in terms of which trailers were not viewed all the way through but still triggered the most subscribers, which Clayton knew should be his starting point for further investigation, but instead he checked the name of the cameraman in the credits, where it was listed as Craig Daly, making Clayton wonder if porn cameramen also used aliases as well as the onscreen talent, although on reflection realizing that since Craig had been onscreen talent anyway, he figured yes, they do use porn names as well, which then made him think of that massive data collation conspiracy that occurred when there was a meme for sharing your pornstar name on Facebook, but which, in reality, was a darkweb ploy to collect data points on individuals (their pet’s name and street where they first lived) that could later be used to try to figure out people’s passwords. So instead of any of those data-as-art-as-much-as-science tasks, Clayton instead sped forward through each video until he reached the credits, sorting them into piles of which ones Craig had been cameraman for and which ones his name did not appear in, and then planning to work through the pile of all the Craig Daly filmed vids to see if there was any more of a glimpse of this guy. He was getting quite adept at using keystrokes to fast forward, slow down, or play at half-rate the videos, and in the end, was able to categorize the 28 videos, coincidentally one for each year of his life, into two piles, one with 9 videos which was the Craig Daly filmed pile, and one with 19 which was all the others, and then out of curiosity he looked at which videos had trailers which led to the most subscription rates, which he was proud on behalf of Craig to discover came from the Craig-videoed camera pile, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, also had the videos with the trailers that matched the most-watched, least-subscribed data points. Clayton spent the rest of the day watching porn videos at double-speed, doodling a plan for how he would identify the elements of a successful trailer based on the data, while waiting to see if Craig appeared in any more videos.

His hand shot out as if by instinct and he paused another tube scene, this one with a Paul and Declan making out in a carriage, but in the tube door windows, you could see Craig videoing the two, Craig wearing a tank top and again a reverse baseball cap with a little bit of blond hair poking out, his left arm held up as he cradled the camera in his hand, which flexed his biceps a little more making them look even chunkier in the soft window reflection, a handheld light raised in his right hand and pointing it at Paul and Declan, Clayton’s breath all the while speeding up as he hoped to see if Craig would enter the video in his entirety, and in case not, recording the timestamp where Craig’s reflection could be seen by writing the numbers 14:23 on the corner of the mindmap he had been doodling which was meant to be his notes to explain how he could use the data to create the perfect video trailer that would lead to more subscriptions, and at the same time remembering that classified ads trend where people would sell stainless steel kitchen appliances like stovetop kettles but take the photo of the kettle while naked so that when they posted the sale item in the classified ad then you could sort-of half make out the nude owner in the kettle reflection, offering up their second hand appliance and, surreptitiously, their naked selves, to a willing buyer.

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While Craig did not appear again in the Paul and Declan video, he did have a longer extended scene in the next video, which was meant to be of a Scallies sunday afternoon TV football watching session in Derek’s flat, with Troy, Paul, and another guy called Gary, all eating chips and drinking beers before then descending into everyone gangbanging Troy when at one point, as Derek goes to town on pounding Troy while slapping his ass cheeks, Craig swivels the camera around so that he can spit roast Troy, panning the camera from looking down at his cock in Troy’s mouth, to panning up to Derek grabbing hold of Troy’s waist and piston fucking him, to swinging the camera around to give the viewer a break-through-the-fourth-wall, if such a thing exists in amateur-looking professional porn, to show Craig, his tank top pulled up and over his head so that his shirt is bunched behind his neck and, Clayton is happy to see, his hairy chest is exposed, and Craig poking his tongue out in a KISS-type look of ecstasy and sharing a moment of can-you-believe-this-is-happening with the viewer, before swiveling the camera back around so that you can see him continuing to face fuck Troy with gusto.

At almost midnight, Clayton stood up, his lower back sore from having crunched over for the past six hours while he was scanning every video until he had completely tracked Craig’s on-screen oeuvre which amounted to just three scenes in the nine videos, now feeling guilty that he didn’t cook dinner or make any progress on the data analytics side of things and unsure whether his level of integrity would go so far as claiming all of these hours as work, maybe just half of them since it was background research and he had done a fair bit of mindmap doodling while watching videos at doublespeed, amazed at his own reflexes in which when he thought he was barely paying attention, his hand suddenly able to shoot out and pause and turn the video to a normal playback speed at the first glimpse that Craig was re-entering the picture. He wondered if he could ask the marketing guy at Chavs and Scallies in Public if it was possible to do an introduction for him so he could meet Craig, as now, more than at the start of the day, when the desire to bring Craig off the screen and meet him in person had felt so strong and so urgent, he now felt that this was his destiny that he must meet this guy and introduce himself to him, without really knowing why and his brain not really envisioning what would happen after that, only that his life could not move forward until that moment had arrived.

The pain of this torment kept Clayton up for most of the night, every forty minutes or so him clambering out of his bed and back into his work studio, which was what he called his couch and the coffee table, where he would peel off another couple of kitchen paper towels from the roll and work his way through another of Craig’s scenes and after he had come, he would zombie walk back to bed, hoping that this time he would be able to sleep, and then forty minutes later, as if this was some Netflix binge, deciding just one more, and heading back and repeating the process until somewhere around the 4 am, 4.30 am mark he finally did fall asleep to wake around 8 am the next morning, intent on avoiding watching Craig until he had made at least a little progress with his data science project and would be comfortable with invoicing for whatever hours all of this in total was taking him.

By the end of that third day, Clayton had come up with a fairly rudimentary formula based on the data of previous website visits and sign-up subscriptions for what segments of a porn video should be included in a trailer and that would need to be validated. The formula basically went something like: 15-19 second scene of rampant fucking from midway through the porn movie, backtrack to a 10-16 second scene showing how the two guys first hookup, then a cut from a blowjob or ass eating scene from somewhere in the middle of the video of around 46 seconds, and finish with an 11-14 second fucking scene where you can hear one of the two guys moaning as if they are just about to cum, and then cut the trailer off mid-moan. According to Clayton’s analysis of the data, that formula most closely resembled all the data points where people signed up for a subscription when they either watched a porn trailer or, evenmoreso, when they watched just part of a trailer, and had been site visitors (according to their IP addresses), who had watched no more than 3-5 porn video trailers on average instead of the site visitors with IP addresses who seemed to visit the site regularly and who watched a ton of trailers but never subscribed.

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Clayton was now ready to hand in his findings and suggest another few days work in the not-too-distant future after Chavs and Scallies in Public had had time to create the new porn video trailers based off his formula and he could again recheck the latest data points to see how accurate his model was and if it could be refined to drive up subscription rates even further. He imagined presenting the findings to the marketing guy and to the Chavs and Scallies in Public production team in total, Craig Daly standing cross-armed, uninterested at the back of the room, biceps tight, thick, hairy legs in his usual football shorts, maybe staring out a window and thinking this had nothing to do with him, when Clayton would put on an example trailer, roughly edited to demonstrate the formula, and the trailer would feature some of Clayton’s favorite Craig Daly scenes as examples, and then Craig would turn, absorbed in the video, a smile creeping across his face, his arms dropping and his hand going instinctively to his own cock to cup it over his football shorts in a masculine, yeah-this-is-me, gesture, before then seeking out Clayton and the two of them sharing eye contact and a meaningful look that said to each other, I know who you are, again Clayton not imagining much past this but knowing that their connection had now been established and that a joint future lay ahead of them.

It was a longshot, but it excited Clayton to think of the possibility of it and on a whim, he grabbed the Sunday afternoon football video and started to take notes on which scenes to cut into an example trailer using his formula and the added idea of making sure that that scene with Craig doing the KISS tongue out was in it, which he could count as the blowjob scene. He was pretty shit at using a video editing app, even though they were meant to be fairly straightforward these days and he wished he could call Eric over to help him, as that was more in his wheelhouse, but Clayton was feeling protective of Craig and didn’t want Eric to ask Who is that guy? as he knew they both had similar tastes in men and Eric was still doing crossfit while Clayton was not, so while he didn’t think Eric would meet Craig, in his mind, they were potentially in competition and Eric could have a slight edge given it was almost June and Eric had both a job and less body fat, no doubt.

As his hand fluttered across his laptop keys, cutting and splicing and editing together, he accidentally hit the halfspeed playback button and, not realizing, had his bluetooth speakers connected so it startled him a little to suddenly hear a robotic voice omnisciently seem to slur the words “Pocock and Sawyer” at the 1:52 point of the roughly-made trailer, filling the previously silent room with this foreboding, nonsensical message. Except it wasn’t that nonsensical. Clayton lived on Webber street, which was parallel to Pocock Street, in Waterloo, and Pocock Street ended at Sawyer Street. So Pocock and Sawyer was about two blocks from his place. He replayed the trailer from the start, this time at normal speed and while some of the edit cuts caused the bluetooth speakers to emit a low murmur from the scallies chatting as they watched the football game or grunting in enjoyment at taking turns at Troy, there was nothing that sounded like the street corner address, but then when he played it at half-speed and again, the slurred words of Pocock and Sawyer emphatically called out from the speakers at one minute fifty-two seconds into the trailer. His mind went blank as he felt himself trying to grasp internally at potential reasons why this was happening, his eyes staring at the now paused frozen scene, the time stamp stuck at 1:52 and just beside that the laptop clock indicating it was 1:43. Pocock and Sawyer, Pocock and Sawyer, 1:52. Later he would not really be able to understand what made him think of this, and he would one day dismiss it as a data scientist trait of just following the data, but for now, he grabbed his jacket, synchronized his watch, which now said 1:44 so by his estimation, he had 8 minutes to get to the corner of Pocock and Sawyer, which was only about 5 minutes walk away. His heart felt jittery and his whole body buzzed in an excitement and anxiety he could not name nor explain, so it took him another two minutes to remember where he had left his keys, which were in the inside lock of the front door, by which time he was too worried about arriving late to be bothered trying to find his wallet, so checking his watch again which warned 1:46, he pulled the keys from the door handle, swung the apartment door shut behind him, and leapt down the stairs two at a time, thinking it would be quicker to run down the four floors than wait anxiously for the lift, but more so intuiting that this chase was something that he had to do himself, not pass off responsibility, even for descending him to street level, on someone or something else.

As he left the building, he glanced at his watch again and saw the digital time display tick over from 1:47 to 1:48. He started running down Webber street to the corner of Rushworth, then up Rushworth which took him longer than expected so he was on Pocock at 1:50 and still had two blocks to run to get to the corner of Sawyer. He started sprinting, every ten seconds checking his watch, as if trying to outrun the inevitable tally of seconds, out of breath and finally slowing down with the end of Pocock in sight now, the tan and grey fire station in front of him, with a little electrical generator type building jutting out, the street sign labeled Sawyer Street beside the electric generator firehouse door.

As he panted and slowed down to a walk, obsessively scanning between his watch and the street sign, 1:52, at the corner of Pocock and Sawyer, Clayton could see through the opened doors of Lino’s Cafe on the corner, and there, paying his bill at the counter, was Craig Daly.

Clayton felt a surge of vomit wave through him as though he was going to throw up from pushing himself from running, but he knew it was more from the incredulity of life coming together in this perfect interconnection that he sometimes saw when he was examining data and the patterns were revealing themselves, and he felt like getting on his knees and acknowledging a higher power, then feeling himself arrogantly to actually be that god able to read the world, and simultaneously feeling humbly like a speck of dust, a whim in the cosmos that can do nothing but observe how the universe is laid out rather than be able to make things occur himself, no matter how much he wants them to happen. He took a deep breath. He didn’t feel particularly sexy or well-dressed or fit at the moment, but he was led there and he would make the most of it. He could see Craig through the doors of the cafe, and watched him tip his head back and laugh with the waitress as he took his change, her shaking her head at him as if he had just said something naughty, and now the moment was here: Craig was turning to the street and would be walking directly towards Clayton.

To his left, Clayton heard an enormous thud and a metallic crumpling sound, and then a huge crash of glass. A delivery truck had smashed into the electrical generator building and spewed half its contents of beer bottles onto the street, the first pallet of bottles smashing and glugging their contents out as a second pallet fell on top of it. Firemen from the corner came rushing out and the street was filled with the sirens from the firehouse. The cafe customers in Lino’s Cafe had all jumped back and were now huddled furthest from the Sawyer Street corner, while a fireman, cliched ax in his hand, motioned for everyone to keep stepping back, worried there could be further danger from the truck’s engine or the electrical generator or both. Neighbours had started coming out from their houses along Pocock Street and more firemen blocked the corner, urging everyone to get back while they investigated and assessed the potential danger. Clayton scanned the growing crowd, but couldn’t see any sign of Craig now. He looked back down Pocock, no sign of him, he tried to go through Lino’s Cafe to the exit on Sawyer, but a fireman blocked his way and told him he would have to now go around the long way, back down Pocock and into Great Suffolk Street. Clayton implored, saying his friend had just left and he had to catch up with him. The fireman was insistent, confused as to why Clayton seemed so desperate when there was a simple solution and besides, he could just text his friend and say meet you on the next corner once I walk around.

Shoulders slumped, the feeling of universal connection and excitement at being in the flow seeped out of him like the beer emptied onto the street from the delivery truck, with the promotional poster of a football player concertinaed on the side of the crumpled truck so it only showed a disembodied boot kicking at a ball, and so Clayton dejectedly walked back down Pocock, his chance to meet Craig gone.

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As he walked home, it all felt like a weird dream that he was waking from. Such a strange pattern of events that seemed to unfold and that he instinctively knew to enter into. How had that all happened? Clayton played through his whole morning and, in particular, the few hours, when he had started making the example video trailer. By the time he got home, none of it felt real, so he replayed the video trailer at halfspeed, bluetooth speakers turned up. At 1:52 there were just the voices of the gangbangers, watching football, drinking beer, and fucking Troy. Could he hear one say “Your cock”? Could he hear another say “Aww yeah”? Is that what he heard instead of Pocock and Sawyer? He began to dismiss it all, sometimes when doing data science, you go down a rabbit hole and think it will lead somewhere but in the end, it is just a jumble of data that you are trying to prescribe meaning to, imposing a pattern where none really existed, unsure what to do with all the outlying data that inconveniently didn’t match the nice simple model you were trying to build.

Clayton sorted through his notes and prepared a one-page summary on the video trailer formula, explained the key data trends he saw, and suggested the next stage of work to validate the data. He prepared his invoice and on a whim decided to give them the video trailer example he had made as well, now dismissing the idea of presenting it to the production team, Craig included, of Chavs and Scallies in Public. He would email it all to the marketing guy tomorrow, wanting to claim the rest of the day as part of his invoicing so therefore not able to submit his work until the morning.

By 10pm he felt strangely tired and still melancholy from what he felt was a loss today, almost having his future in his reach and then not even seeing it disappear, instead him looking in another direction as it was snatched from him, him tirelessly repeating the scenario trying to figure out where he could have done something differently so that he had met Craig. It was so close, it was so frustrating. As he went to bed to try and forget about it, it suddenly hit him, like a truck barreling into an electrical generator: Craig had actually been there. So whatever was happening with making the trailer, the address details, the timestamp, all of that had actually worked, there had been a pattern that he had been able to read. Then a bunch of random shit happened, sure, but Craig had been there. The pattern held.

A new energy surged through him and Clayton jumped out of bed and loaded another video into his editing software, this time choosing the one where Shane and Gareth are fucking in a park at night and after Gareth cums over Shane’s hole, he takes the camera from Craig and Craig uses Gareth’s cum as lube on his cock and then slides into Shane and fucks him until he pulls out and cums over Shane’s arse while Shane pushes out the cum inside him, arse lips pursed out and pearly white beads of cum now exposed around his puckered hole as Craig’s cum slides down the arse cheeks and joins it all in one cummy mass. In the video, Craig suddenly grabs the camera back as Shane and Gareth whisper urgently to each other and Craig points the camera towards a torchlight heading in their direction, a police helmet clearly visible as Gareth hisses “Run!” and the film ends. Clayton double checked his formula and started splicing the trailer together. When Gareth initially came over Shane, he had let out a moan which was perfect for the end of the video, but Clayton had wanted to use a scene from Craig as well somewhere in the trailer, for some reason, he felt that was an essential component for what he was trying to do, so he spliced the bit where Craig lubes his cock with Gareth’s cum and added that in as the middle scene where he would normally do a blowjob or ass-eating scene, and, in the end, for the sake of the formula, he also chose 5 seconds of Shane swallowing Gareth’s cock so the trailer was a bit longer, and because he was so nervous about trying to put this together, as if measuring explosive liquids in test tubes while someone over your shoulder annoyingly says “Easy! Easy!”, it was almost 1 am by the time Clayton had finished creating the new trailer. He took a deep breath, prayed to he-doesn’t-really-know-what that this would work, and then played the trailer from the beginning at halfspeed. His clumsiness and trembling hands had meant the editing was not as crisp as the first time, so the video had extra seconds buffering each scene, so it was not until 2:02 that he hears it: “Dickens Fields.” He played it back again to double check. “Dickens Fields.”

He had heard of this before, but needed to look it up on a map. It was a 15 minute walk from his place, but more towards Elephant and Castle which was a direction he didn’t tend to head in that often. Was it a beat? It seemed a weird place to go cottaging. A wave of despondency overcame him, he was sure he had it wrong, he was planning to chase nonexistent ghosts at 2 am in a London suburban park. It was 1:27, he had plenty of time, so he dejectedly got dressed, pulled on jeans and grabbed a bomber jacket from his wardrobe. As he prepared to leave his apartment, he felt a wave of resignation and accepted that this was some crazy, desperate mission that would come to nought but that he knew he was strangely compelled to see through.

He left his apartment at 1:35, again taking the stairs, knowing this was something he had to do under his own energy and will, to turn up, no matter how ridiculous this seemed and how embarrassed he was for his future self that he was so desperate for a guy he had never met that he was willing to read signs into porn video trailers that he himself had created.

He got to Dickens Fields earlier than he expected, he must have walked briskly, as it was 1:52 when he arrived, and for a second, his heart leapt as he remembered 1:52 that afternoon: Craig had been there! Now suddenly, it didn’t seem so crazy, and after all, if Craig had been there just twelve hours earlier, maybe he lived in this neighbourhood so it wasn’t so unlikely to run into him again. The park at Dickens Field had a wall around it, so he wondered whether he should jump it and wander through but instead decided to walk the perimeter and see if there was an entrance, and he found, at the corner of Dickens Square, a wide grass entry point behind a closed toilet block that led into the park area without a fence.

Clayton glanced at his watch. 2:02. He scanned the parkland in front of him. Nothing. He jogged back to the street corner and looked up the road in the direction of the park corner. Nothing. Behind him was a mosque, he dismissed that direction as a possibility and decided to rush back to the park. He felt more urgent, 2:02 was the window, he didn’t know how long he had and he glanced at his watch again, it had not ticked over to 2:03 yet. As Clayton again reached the end of Dickens Square, he could see someone ahead of him in the dark, walking quickly down through the park, as if returning from somewhere and not so much cruising the bushes, it was a muscley looking guy with a backwards cap on. He was the size of Craig. Clayton’s heart did a flutter, it was really happening. Again, he was seized by that joy and fear that he was in the middle of the universe, that everything had meaning and yet he was powerless over it and that, forever, the best that he could hope for would be to ride the flow, enjoy the unfolding, to be content to be in the middle of his own journey as it happened, instead of smashing up against the sides of his own life as he hit closed doors and misdirections that told him sternly that he was off-kilter. Craig stopped a few meters ahead of him, pulled out his phone to check something or read a message, or so it looked like to Clayton, when he - Clayton - felt a firm hand rest on his shoulder. He spun around and found himself facing a policeman who was looking at him with tight, squinted eyes, trying to assess him.

“What are you doing sonnyboy?” The policeman asked in a sing songy voice that to Clayton’s ear mimicked a “hello hello hello, what do we have here then”, which, in turn, caused Clayton to involuntarily eye roll at the cliched-ness of it and then to regret that instantly when he saw the policeman’s surprise and immediate anger as his cynicism was clocked and interpreted as a sign of delinquency and antagonism. Clayton could see all of that in the policeman’s face as he - the policeman - reached for his notebook, now moulding his features into a stern, businesslike demeanour that looked resolute at getting to the bottom of this. “Are you aware that we have had some skinheads threatening the mosque right here in recent days?” The policeman asked, eyes flicking up and down over Clayton’s bomber jacket. Clayton flinched instinctively, and dribbled out a hurried answer, trying to calm the policeman and explain himself, which he couldn’t really do without sounding like a crazy stalker he had to admit to himself, so he settled on saying he hadn’t been able to sleep and had gone for a walk around the block, now showing the address on his ID card to confirm he lived nearby, glad that this time he had brought his wallet, and after the policeman phoned in his date of birth and full name and confirmed there were no outstanding warrants or criminal history, gave Clayton a long stare which Clayton guessed was meant to be interpreted symbolically as meaning I am keeping my eye on you, but actually since it was a long stare, was literally the meaning and not just a symbol of that message, until Clayton gave a nod to confirm he understood.

As the policeman walked off, Clayton spun around, scanning the park and the streets in either direction, but Craig was nowhere to be seen. “Fuuuucccckkkkkk,” Clayton whispered to himself, sending hateful dagger eyes to the back of the policeman’s head and trying to decide which direction to start running in, to begin his search of all the streets around here, before realising this was a futile plan, the moment had slipped away again and he had not managed to meet Craig.

Despondently, for the second time that day, he returned home, completely body weary from the excitement, sense of connection, and then rejection, awash with a feeling of being denied something that had been rightfully his, with no umpire or adjudicator to appeal to and argue his case to win it back. At home, he fell into bed, was immediately wrapped in a deep sleep, and woke shortly after 11 am the next morning when, after grinding more beans and drinking a stovetop coffee, he decided to send off that email with his report and sample trailer and wrap up this project for now, with his recommendation to do a second round of analysis in a month or so once some trailers using his suggested formula were posted to the site and tested, Clayton recommending a minimum set of trailer views that would be necessary to collect in order to validate the model he had been using thus far.

                 ###

Sometime shortly after Clayton sent off his project email and invoice, the stovetop coffee kicked in and he realised, with a rush, that he had one more shot. There was another video scene with Craig that he could turn into a trailer and see what happened. His hands shook as he clicked on the Derek and Troy video, which had been the first he had watched with Craig in it, granted Craig was only in it for a minute and a half, but it was a perfect blowjob scene to put in the middle of the trailer when he needed a blowjob or ass eating scene, according to his formula. His video editing skills were off, he constantly felt like he was going to be sick, as if he was rehearsing to accept a major award on a stage and needed to prepare his speech, while also having to be ready to clap graciously if the camera filmed him when a fellow nominee’s name was read out instead of his. Clayton was aware that he was not only holding his breath but literally sitting on the edge of his couch as he hovered the cursor over the half-speed payback button and clicked down.

At the 1:12 timestamp indicated in his homemade trailer, he again heard the slurred voice that sounded like a cutup of conversations now edited together to create a new word entirely: “The Crabtree”. Clayton surfed to Google Maps and with one finger carefully typed the words into the search button. A pub in Hammersmith was the only result. He looked up the directions, it required an estimated 46 minutes to get there. It was 11:52 now. A wave of chills ran through him: 11:52 again. Was that part of the pattern as well? He could hear at the back of his data science brain, his inner data scientist was furiously scribbling notes on the cycle he was observing and storing a side-comment in the margin of his hippocampus for him to maybe investigate later if this didn’t work, and with that he realised he had a sense of optimism and hope, and forthright dedication to making sure that he would arrange somehow to meet Craig, reminding him of that sense of urgency he had felt from the very first time he saw Craig on film and the compulsion to somehow make them meet. He decided to quickly do some pushups and burpees on his lounge floor, desperately regretting not having continued crossfit and he hoped he could make up for it in the next ten minutes before he would have to leave and catch the Jubilee tube to Green Park and change to the Piccadilly line and get off at Hammersmith and then walk about 16 minutes according to Google Maps, to be sure to arrive at The Crabtree by 1:12. After five minutes, Clayton again remembered how tiring crossfit and in particular jumping exercises made him, so he decided to just wear his favourite shirt instead which was dark green that he thought went well with his ginger hair.

Clayton walked to Southwark Station and got the tube as Google Maps suggested, all in a slight haze, him replaying not just today’s trailer but each of the last two events, pressing the halfspeed playback button on his own memories to walk through each occurrence slowly as if to try to see something he had missed in his original experiences, some reason why the universe would taunt him with these opportunities to meet Craig and then snatch them away from him as if he was each time failing a test.

The Crabtree was quite busy for a Wednesday, Clayton thought, with a large lunch event happening in the main restaurant space overlooking the river, so Clayton was able to be left unattended, standing against the far wall of the restaurant as a man gave a speech at the front of the floor-to-ceiling riverview windows, everyone turned away from him and with all the waiters too busy attending tables to be bothered asking him what he was doing at what, Clayton realised, was some sort of private function. He stared down at his watch: 1:11 and he waited for the digital display to tick over to 1:12, and as it did so, he flicked his head back up so hard he felt a slight soreness in his neck, which also may have been from trying to do a frantic set of burpees with no warm up an hour ago. The speaker at the mike had now called someone up and as the tables halfheartedly clapped towards the speaker, a man Clayton’s own age got up from the front, muscled back immediately identifiable to Clayton even before the man turned around to, sure enough, reveal himself to be Craig Daly. Only Clayton thought he had heard the man introduce him as Craig Dyern, thus immediately giving Clayton the confirmation that cameramen did use pseudonyms in porn. Craig took the microphone and whispered something to the man who had introduced him, who laughed and pointed at Craig as if he had just told him a dirty joke, and now Craig smiled at the audience silently for a second before his face took on a more sombre tone. “We all know why we are here today, but I want to share a fairly personal story first,” Craig spoke into the microphone confidently, eyeing each table around him with a steady intimacy. By the way he spoke, Clayton knew Craig must have known most of the people he was speaking with. After sharing an anecdote of watching his father receive a series of visits from struggling employees with various health or social complaints — a sick daughter who needed surgery, an uncle with dementia that needed round-the-clock care, a stolen car that meant someone could not get to work — and how his father had not turned away a single request for help, Craig shared his own story of how he had teamed up with some high school dropouts and was starting to steal and be involved in petty crimes himself before his father bought him a video camera and inspired him to take up lessons and pursue what he was now seeing as a successful career as a filmmaker (at this Clayton saw Craig give a half smile as his eyes swept the room, imagining Craig thinking to himself that his audience did not know what kind of films he helped make). Craig now continued with his speech, his voice crescendoing as he listed a series of complimentary adjectives - thoughtful, kind, generous, supportive - and then introduced “the man I am lucky to call Dad”, Raymond Dyner. Clapping filled the room, alongside the sound of chairs scraping and cutlery chinking as everyone stood at once, several whistled, and a small, almost embarrassed looking man came to the mike and gave Craig a long hug.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Clayton whispered angrily and exasperatedly to himself, just as a waiter who had been approaching him gave a startled jump back, surveyed the room, and chin nodded to another waiter standing at the side doors near the kitchen, who then also started to walk over to where Clayton was standing. “Excuse me sir, are you an invited guest?” The waiter now asked and Clayton could start to see the guests at the tables nearest him turn towards him and the waiter, while the swiftly-striding second waiter weaved around a table to get to him. Not wanting for Craig to first see him like this, Clayton motioned to the waiter that had heard him and to follow him outside so they could talk without disturbing the guests and headed out of the restaurant so he could make up a story about wanting to come and check out the menu here and, lo, the day he had decided it turned out to be a private event, thus explaining his are you fucking kidding me? comment, which he had actually meant in terms of how was he going to now introduce himself to Craig while Craig was obviously in the middle of some intimate and personal event and probably not really in the mood or atmosphere to be flirting with some random stranger like himself.

“All the same,” the waiter shrugged when Clayton explained, and, trailing off the rest of that sentence, the waiter instead let his - the waiter’s - eyes complete the thought by now motioning towards The Crabtree’s main exit door. Clayton nodded, knowing that, again, this moment had been ruined and that any attempt to meet with Craig right now would come across as creepy and stalkerish.

On the tube on the way home, Clayton angrily muttered to himself at the stupidity of the data pattern and how it had revealed the address to him. What did the pattern think he could do with that when it was obviously some private event to celebrate a guy that was obviously the world’s number one dad? How could that even be a good time to meet Craig? Clayton wasn’t sure who he was angry at, imagining some guiding hand behind the revealing patterns that he could be frustrated at for giving him useless, non-actionable information.

The phrase world’s number one dad echoed around in his head the rest of the way home on the tube and he continued to think it like a mantra as he walked from Southwark Station to Webber Street and he was still thinking it when he turned the corner onto his street when it suddenly occurred to him: he knew that phrase from somewhere. The videos.

Clayton sprinted the rest of the way to his apartment block and, as if stepping through each action in reverse, he climbed his stairs two at a time to the fourth floor, let himself into his apartment, put the keys in the inside door lock and threw his jacket on the chair so he could slide into his “office space” on the floor between the couch and his laptop and review the latest trailer again. He played it at halfspeed, and even though the slurred voice saying “The Crabtree” had disappeared, just like the slurred sounds of “Pocock and Sawyer” and “Dickens Fields” seemed to disappear on the trailer after the previous events, that was not what he was seeking out now, instead waiting to see when Craig appeared in the trailer and when he did, noticing that t-shirt again that he thought was worn ironically which was emblazoned with the words World’s Greatest Dad on it, and was pulled up to reveal his - Craig’s - hairy chest, and thus allowing a clearer view of Craig’s cock being consumed by Troy’s mouth.

Clayton now searched his files for the previous trailer and, again played at halfspeed, waited for the scene with Craig standing over Shane’s arse and now, in the background, Clayton could see a distant policeman’s helmet bobbing up and down in the far bushes, as if walking towards them, that, in a few seconds time, in the part of the original video that he had edited out of the trailer, was when Craig took back the camera from Gareth as the policeman had approached them, but now it was clear from the trailer edit that the policeman had been starting to approach them even earlier.

Clayton tried to remember if the policeman that had stopped him at Dickens Field had been wearing a helmet as he searched out his first homemade trailer, the one spliced together with the football scenes. He played this one at normal speed, noticing that the brand of beer that the scallies and chavs had all been drinking was the same brand that had fallen from the truck on Sawyer Street the other day. In the trailer scene with Craig doing the KISS tongue out, just before it swapped over to the next edited scene, in the TV behind Craig, there was a shot of a disembodied leg and boot, kicking a ball. Clayton froze the trailer to stare at the background TV. It was the exact same image that had ended up on the side of the truck when the crash had crumpled the advertising enough to hide the footballer and just show the final one-fifth of the poster: the leg and boot kicking a ball.

It wasn’t just the timestamp, the address and Craig that was part of the pattern, everything in the background was a variable as well, Clayton’s data science brain told him now, as he registered that he had been ignoring the other aspects of the data in order to come up with his own model of what was happening. The beer bottles, the image on the TV, the policeman, the world’s greatest dad: they were elements in play as well.

Clayton shook his head at himself, annoyed by his own ignorance that he hadn’t investigated or questioned what was happening further and instead thinking he understood the pattern well enough from the start that he could chase it around town like some sort of water diviner. So much of data science was always the other way around from what you think, like, Clayton now thought, how when you complete authentication on a form to prove you are not a robot, you have to indicate all of the traffic conditions in a series of photos which Clayton knew was a way for tech companies to make humans act like robots in order to teach self driving robots how to act like humans.

But it would do him no good. He had used up the three videos of Craig on the other trailers, he had truly figured out the pattern finally but now there was no more source data to use to make another. Clayton slumped into the couch and closed his eyes, exhausted by how he now perceived life to be arranged, as if he had partly figured out some intrinsic truth to the universe right when the universe had imploded and no longer had a need for being understood. He opened his eyes, hating himself and this project, wanting to just wipe it away from himself so he didn’t need to be reminded of his own uselessness: the out-of-work data scientist that doesn’t even do crossfit.

                ###

As he picked up his notepad with his doodles and mindmaps, ready to collect them all together and file them away, by which he meant put them in the bottom drawer of his wardrobe, he read his own scribble: 14:23. For a second it confused him. The timestamps he had chased were 1:52, 2:02 and 1:12. Besides, his clocks were all in 12-hour times, so 14:23 never came up as an option. Instinctively, he scanned the rest of the notes to try and figure out when and how he had written 14:23. He had doodled a lightglobe, and now he remembered, that had been the video where Craig had appeared in the reflection, holding up a camera and a portable light. He looked over his notes while also trying to remember from memory which video that had been in.

With a silent calmness which he himself barely understood where it came from, he opened the Paul and Declan video file and started taking notes on how to make another video trailer. He felt his chest flutter, but he willed himself to take long deep breaths and he noted down various possible cuts for 13 seconds of rampant fucking (Declan holding on to a branch in the middle of a park while Paul, with one leg propped behind him on a small shrub to give him more pushing strength, fucked him - Declan - from behind), an 11-second introduction showing Paul and Declan making out in the tube earlier which is where they had met, then just over half a minute of Declan on his knees pulling down Paul’s tracksuit pants and opening his mouth wide to swallow Paul’s thick veiny cock, and a 12 second scene of Paul pulling his cock out of Declan’s hole and gasping on an intake breath, as if just about to shoot his load, cut to black. It was the perfect video trailer according to Clayton’s formula. And he used the make out scene on the tube where Craig was visible in the window reflection.

He stared at the TV screen, hand hovered above the video edit controls, and after adjusting his posture to sit up straight, he pressed down on the half-speed playback button and clicked the base of his retractable pen so that he was ready to take notes.

At 1:11 he heard the slurred voice: “1 Frith Street”. That was Soho. He checked it again, but felt a calm certainty, he had not misheard, but now came the trickier task of looking through the video mashup, particularly during Craig’s scene, to look for anything else that might count as a variable but at first all he saw was just the otherwise empty train carriage with the two guys making out. His eyes were drawn to the brightness in the reflection of the window. It was the handheld light that Craig was holding.

Clayton checked the time. 11:52. His skin buzzed in recognition of the synchronicity and all it had come to remind him of in the past few days. The tube to get to Soho would take about half an hour, but now he knew he had to go see Eric first and borrow a light like the one in the video trailer. Eric owned a bunch of lighting equipment so Clayton was sure that he could get something from his friend. He had to dispel the risk of the pattern bringing the variable into the scene. If he brought that variable, it would be present, so there wouldn’t need to be any other lighting brought in at the last moment. Clayton imagined seeing Craig at 1:11 and then someone shining a bright light in his eyes until he was blinded for a second and then by 1:12 as his vision cleared, he would find that Craig was not in the vicinity again. If he brought the lighting then it wouldn’t need to be “supplied”, at least, that was Clayton’s new theory.

Clayton texted his friend, anxiety started to build as he worried that he was yet again on a countdown as Eric could be anywhere in the city, but luckily, Eric answered Clayton’s text almost immediately, as he - Eric - was at work in a lighting store in Fulham and was bored and as such eager for any texting distraction and, once Clayton had made the request, to meet with his friend and supply him - Clayton - with a Lowel Blender 240 volt LED light head with a extended handle that screwed into the pistol tail of the lightbox to allow for a better grip, although technically that was not necessary, but which Eric had found was much more comfortable to use and hence why he had hacked one together of his own design.

Clayton grabbed his jacket, checked that his wallet was in the pocket, pulled the keys from the inside front door, locked the apartment, jumped down the stairs two at a time, all four floors, and made his way to the station so he could first catch the Jubilee Line to Westminster, swap for the District line and get off at Fulham, walk to the Ryness lighting store where Eric worked, give some half-hearted explanation as to why he needed the Lowel Blender 240 volt LED light head, which he had decided he would say was because he was making a sample trailer for his data formula but wanted to add a scene of his own in order to demonstrate what was needed to the Chavs and Scallies in Public production crew, then catch the District line back to Notting Hill Gate, swap to the Central line and catch it to Tottenham Court Road and then walk through Soho Square Gardens to the other side and wait at the start of Frith Street by 1:11.

He got there at 12:59 with so much energy he had to jog on the spot for a few minutes to calm down. It was a cloudy, but humid day. Since first seeing Craig, he had sensed this urgent desire to meet him, but had never really been able to fantasise or give any thought to what could happen after they met. Was he even Craig’s type? He hadn’t prepared anything funny or clever to say, and now that he thought about it, he was reluctant to explain how he had come to be in a position of tracking him down all over London in order to accidentally bump into him. Absentmindedly, he flicked the Lowel Blender 240 volt LED light head on and off, holding it in front of him and playing with the dimmer switch, which was how he happened to have turned it up to three-quarter strength when he looked at his watch and noticed that it was now 1:11. Clayton looked up, a group of people had all come out of the health building on the corner of Frith Street, mumbling to each other and most with cigarettes at the ready to light as soon as they had walked down the three steps at the building’s entrance.

Clayton dropped the light to his side, still mostly powered on, as he almost forgot he was carrying it and instead scanned the cluster of people to see if Craig was amongst them. He walked towards the group, and when there was no Craig, he weaved his way through to enter the building of 1 Frith Street, which he now saw was a community health centre. No sign of Craig, but in the centre of the lobby was a display box, inside a model railway with a train on a loop, circling through what were meant to be miniature areas of London, amateur-looking papier mache buildings clumped around various parts of the track with little cardboard labels on paddle-pop sticks indicating other health centre sites apparently, a coloured card in the display corner explaining the display was made by the Frith Community Center After-School Homework Club. Clayton’s hopes sank: it was the tube itself. He hadn’t factored that in and he worried that this was the variable he hadn’t included, not the light, which meant something would happen to divert Craig from meeting him, if he even showed up. Clayton watched the model train spin through its circuit, the endless circles becoming mesmerising as Clayton tried to consider what to do next.

“Hey, I’ve used a light like that, they are great for videos,” Clayton heard a voice say from behind him and he turned to see Craig, looking as fit as his images from the porn, now here in front of him. Clayton started to open his mouth to reply, unsure of what to say, when he saw a startled look in Craig’s eyes, as though Craig was doing a double-take, admiring him. Craig took off his baseball cap, and Clayton could see that the blonde wisps of hair that usually poked out were now gone. “You’ve shaved your head,” Clayton narrated, and was immediately embarrassed that it would reveal that he knew what Craig looked like, but Craig seemed not to notice, replying with a slight self-consciousness while running his hand over his scalp: “Yeah, I read this website a few months back that gives recommendations on what to do if your hair is thinning and it said I should just shave it all off. What do you think?”

Clayton broke into a grin, took a breath and started to reply.

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