Michael is the spoilt son of a very rich family. 25 years old, he has no purpose in life if not be drunk and go out with his friends. Every time his father tries to talk to him and convince him to find a job, Michael only sees the plastic doll stepmother he has and thinks that, if she can spend the day doing nothing, also he can do that. Michael is not a nice person, he is self-centered and vain: he spends most of the time in front of some mirror asking to his image who is the best and the most beautiful and answering himself that he is the one...
Jarrod is a nice guy. 22 years old from a too poor family to allow him to go to college, he has left home to arrive in Los Angeles with the hope of a better future. But even if he is a very handsome man, he is like many others and in the end he is nothing special. So now Jarrod is at the end of the rope, without money and starving. And he is alone: he looks around his empty apartment and knows that he has no one in the world who cares for him. He has only two chance: hustling, a thing he can't consider, or suicide, what he chooses to do. So he shoplifts a little gun from a pawnshop and turns his steps towards home... and he is almost run over from a drunken Michael.
Obviously Michael is not the type of man to excuse himself or to ask if Jarrod is all right, instead he yells to Jarrod, and Jarrod snaps out of his suicidal stupor and aims the gun towards Michael: he brings a drunken Michael in his two room apartment and ties him up to the kitchen's chair. Now Jarrod is no more alone, now he has Michael.
Among naive attempts to ask a ransom for Michael, Jarrod begins to see him in a different way than an hostage: he begins to see him like a friend, something he needs so much, and like a lover. And Michael begins to understand that he has no one around him who cares really for him and in the claustrophobic apartment he begins to feel that the only one who cares for him is Jarrod. But it's not so simple: in a situation that is almost a push psychological therapy, Michael continues to run in his mind all the reasons why he is alone, but he never admits that he has some guilty in it, everyone is to blame but him. And every time Jarrod reaches a hand to "pet" him or to feed him (not only food but also love), he finishes with a bitten hand...
I'm addicted. I always know, even before starting a book, that I will like Hauser's book and I will love her faulty characters...