"You're the next Hispanic Markus Schenkenberg. You're the, um, Hispanic Tyson." I reach over and push his hand away again. "You're a star, man. Any day of the week."

"I just don't want this to be like an afterthought-"

"Hey man, spare me." I grin. "`Afterthought' isn't in this guy's vocabulary," I say, pointing at myself.

"Okay, man," Juan says, letting go of the Door Open button and offering a shaky thumbs-up. "I, like, trust you."

The elevator zips up to the top floor, where it opens into Alison's penthouse. I peer down the front hallway, don't see or hear the dogs, then quietly wheel the Vespa inside and lean it against a wall in the foyer next to a Vivienne Tam sofa bed.

I tiptoe silently toward the kitchen but stop when I hear the hoarse breathing of the two chows, who have been intently watching me from the other end of the hallway, quietly growling, audible only now. I turn around and offer them a weak smile.

I can barely say "Oh shit" before they both break out into major scampering and rush at their target: me.

The two chows-one chocolate, one cinnamon-leap up, baring their teeth, nipping at my knees, pawing at my calves, barking furiously.

"Alison! Alison!" I call out, trying desperately to bat them away.

Hearing her name, they both stop barking. Then they glance down the hallway to see if she's coming. After a pause, when they hear no sign of her-we're frozen in position, red chow standing on back legs, its paws in my groin, black chow down on its front paws with Gucci boot in mouth-they immediately go to work on me again, growling and basically freaking out like they always do.

"Alison!" I scream. "Jesus Christ!"

Gauging the distance from where I'm at to the kitchen door, I decide to make a run for it, and when I bolt, the chows scamper after me, yelping, biting at my ankles.

I finally make it into the kitchen and slam the door, hear both of them skidding across the marble floor into the door with two large thumps, hear them fall over, then scamper up and attack the door. Shaken, I open a Snapple, down half of it, then light a cigarette, check for bites. I hear Alison clapping her hands, and then she walks into the kitchen, naked beneath an open Aerosmith tour robe, a cell phone cradled in her neck, an unlit joint in her mouth. "Mr. Chow, Mrs. Chow, down, down, goddamnit, down."

She hurls the dogs into the pantry, pulls a handful of colored biscuits from the robe and throws them at the dogs before slamming the pantry door shut, the sounds of the dogs fighting over the biscuits cut mercifully short.

"Okay, uh-huh, right, Malcolm McLaren... Yeah, no, Frederic Fekkai. Yeah. Everybody's hung over, babe." She scrunches up her face. "Andrew Shue and Leonardo DiCaprio?... What?... Oh baby, no-o-o way." Alison winks at me. "You're not at a window table at Mortimer's right now. Wake up! Oh boy... Ciao, ciao." She clicks off the cellular and carefully places the joint on the counter and says, "That was a three-way with Dr. Dre, Yasmine Bleeth and Jared Leto."

"Alison, those two little shits tried to kill me," I point out as she jumps up and wraps her legs around my waist.

"Mr. and Mrs. Chow aren't little shits, baby." She clamps her mouth onto mine as I stumble with her toward the bedroom. Once there she falls to her knees, rips open my jeans and proceeds to expertly give me head, deep-throating in an unfortunately practiced way, grabbing my ass so hard I have to pry one of her hands loose. I take a last drag off the cigarette that I'm still holding, look around for a place to stub it out, find a half-empty Snapple bottle, drop in what's left of the Marlboro, hear it hiss.

"Slow down, Alison, you're moving too fast," I'm mumbling.

She pulls my dick out of her mouth and, looking up at me, says in a low, "sexy" voice, "Urgency is my specialty, baby."

She suddenly gets up, drops the robe and lies back on the bed, spreading her legs, pushing me down onto a floor littered with random issues of WWDs, my right knee crumpling a back-page photo of Alison and Damien and Chloe and me at Naomi Campbell's birthday party, sitting in a cramped booth at Doppelganger's, and then I'm nibbling at a small tattoo on the inside of a muscular thigh and the moment my tongue touches her she starts coming-once, twice, three times. Knowing where this will not end up, I jerk off a little until I'm almost coming and then I think, Oh screw it, I don't really have time for this, so I just fake it, moaning loudly, my head between her legs, movement from my right arm giving the impression from where she lies that I'm actually doing something. The music in the background is mid-period Duran Duran. Our rendezvous spots have included the atrium at Remi, room 101 at the Paramount, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.