“What’s on your mind, bro?” TJ’s best friend Bradley Wheeler prompted him as TJ remained silent, lost in thought.

“I don’t know, Brad,” TJ responded slowly.  “I’m not sure that we all are giving this the seriousness and effort it deserves.”

“Why do you think that, TJ?” Brad’s fraternal twin sister Haley asked disappointedly, as she brushed back hair that had fallen across her face.  She contemplated her brother’s best friend, licking her lips while trying to avoid looking at him for longer than it was polite to do so.  She masked her appraising look nervously when he flitted a glance her way.  This wasn’t the first time he’d almost caught her staring at him in this way either: man alive, this guy is just a stone-cold fox.  What makes him even more delicious is he doesn’t know it.  Or doesn’t walk around like he knows it.  Always so serious and talking about various causes like the water shortage someplace he and Angie had visited over the winter break with their parents, or about artists he’d met during the last Whitney Biennial when he and Angie had tagged along with his mom’s friend Jenna Bonham, a well-respected art adviser, during some of the pre-Biennial activities.

Haley reflected that about the only time TJ was focused on something less serious was when he played sports, the arena he and Brad had formed their strong personal bonds around from the time that they were little boys playing in various sandboxes around Central Park.

As he looked her way, and she casually glanced over she continued thinking that TJ’s looks were beginning to overshadow everything else about him.  He’d always been a draw, or so she’d been told, from the time he’d been a toddler, strolling around town in the arms of either of his beautiful moms.  But, hot damn, he’s become a bonafide “chick magnet,” particularly over this unseasonably warm spring.

Especially when he peels off his shirt for “shirts-and-skins” pick-up games in the neighborhood basketball court: heaven forgive me, but there are things I want to do to that lightly bronzed well-muscled torso that sisters of a boy’s best friend aren’t supposed to have.

Because there are guys, and there are Guys.  These were the Greek or Roman gods who effortlessly parted the sea of mere mortals as they walked in the midst of them.  And amongst the boys of upper Manhattan, TJ was the undisputed Apollo.

So when that shirt began coming off this spring whenever he played (thank goodness he was always in the “skins” team!), like a zeitgeist pinging through Manhattan’s Upper Eastside girldom, the message that TJ and his friends were about to play a “shirts and skins” game passed quickly from one to the next. Girls began to descend with such regularity on the courts TJ and Brad were playing in that NYPD patrols assigned to their neighborhood started giving the crowd of girls its own informal call sign.