He’d always been sociable and good-looking, academically successful, a standout athlete. He’d tried football and ice hockey and water polo, but his best sport was soccer. His high school team had made it all the way to the state finals; Sebastian had been named to the all-state team. Soccer wasn’t a sport in which you could go pro and earn fame and fortune in the United States. It was, however, a sport where your skills were of interest to college recruiters. Sebastian had been accepted early decision at Wesleyan, his first choice, and the only school to which he’d applied—just one more example of the way the Universe showed its favor to him.
On the first day of college, he’d walked into his dorm room in a brick building called the Butterfields, dressed in the nylon shorts, tee shirt, and baseball cap he’d pulled on that morning. He’d found Lincoln, standing in front of an ironing board, dressed in khakis and a blue-and-white-checked short-sleeved button-down, pressing his shirts. Sebastian had stared, wondering, Gay or just affected? Lincoln had stared back at him, probably thinking, Dumb jock.
Sebastian had given Lincoln his most disarming smile. “Hey,” he said, “I’m Sebastian.” The closet’s folding doors were open, and Sebastian could see ranks of neatly pressed pants and shirts on wooden hangers, arranged from lightest to darkest.
“Hello,” said Lincoln. He introduced himself and told Sebastian that he played the violin, that he’d be auditioning for the orchestra, that he was not planning on bringing romantic partners back to the room and hoped that Sebastian would extend him the same courtesy.
Still smiling, Sebastian told him that was fine, even as he was thinking, This is not going to work… But ten minutes later, Lincoln was shaking his head over the piles of wrinkled clothes Sebastian had pulled out of his duffel, and five minutes after that he’d been ironing Sebastian’s shirts, and then Sebastian had taken Lincoln out to the quad to teach him the basics of Ultimate Frisbee.
Proper, starchy, crisply creased Lincoln became Sebastian’s best friend. They’d roomed together all four years of college. When they were sophomores, they’d launched a website called Scoop, which collected pieces of campus gossip, gave roundups of the Week in Wesleyan, and published a few in-depth, reported pieces on topics like the food services workers’ efforts to unionize, or the controversy after a popular professor failed to get tenure. The website had been started as a lark but had gained readers every month. After graduation, Sebastian and Lincoln had moved to New York, where they ran Scoop as a weekly newsletter, a grown-up version of the college site, a mixture of gossip and news stories, delivered in an offhand, conversational style. “We’ll see if we can make a go of it,” Lincoln had said, after Sebastian had talked him out of going directly to business school. “We’ll give it a year.”
Sebastian and Lincoln had started off sharing an apartment, a tiny one-bedroom in Queens, which was also Scoop’s headquarters, although they did most of their work at nearby coffee shops… and Scoop had thrived. When Lincoln had gotten engaged to Lana, a fellow orchestra member from Wesleyan, his parents had given them the down payment on a brownstone in Williamsburg as a wedding gift. The place was beautiful, three stories of high ceilings and crown moldings, plus a separate garden-level apartment with its own entrance. The plan was for Lincoln and his bride to live on the upper floors while renting the apartment, using the income to offset the mortgage, but Lincoln had convinced his parents to let Sebastian have the unit for less- than-market value.
So there he was, thirty-three years old, in the best city in the world, with a job he loved, with excellent, affordable living arrangements, his best friend right upstairs, and, thanks to the dating apps, a never-ending parade of available ladies. Sebastian could—and often did—meet one woman Friday night for drinks (translation: sex) and another woman Saturday afternoon for coffee, which, if he liked her, became drinks, or dinner, or both (followed by sex). If he wasn’t feeling his afternoon date, he’d bid her a polite farewell, then jump on the apps and find someone else for drinks. Sometimes he’d meet yet another woman on Sunday for brunch (and more sex)… and if he wasn’t tired, or busy, or if he was in the thick of reporting and needed a distraction, sometimes he’d even arrange for a Sunday-night hookup (which was no drinks or coffee; just sex).
Big girls and small girls, short girls and tall girls; Black, white, brown, Asian; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, every nationality and ethnicity and religion… Sebastian did not discriminate. His love life was a bottomless buffet, and Sebastian saw no reason to toss a napkin on his plate and say, “Thanks, but I’m stuffed.”
True, Lincoln sometimes called him a man-whore with commitment issues, while Lana just looked sad. And yes, his sister muttered darkly about how this was compulsive behavior, that Sebastian was compensating for his dysfunctional childhood or something; that he’d never, quote-unquote, “faced his demons,” or “dealt with his trauma,” how he might even be a sex addict. Sebastian had just laughed.
“Sex isn’t a substance,” he’d told her. “And, if I’m an addict, I hope they never cut me off.”
He wasn’t lonely. He wasn’t compensating. He absolutely wasn’t traumatized. He just wasn’t ready for anything more than the most casual of relationships. He’d had a front-row seat to the terrifyingly wholesome life Lincoln and Lana built together: their dinner parties and trips to the farmers market, the Christmas cookie swap they hosted where guests would gather around the piano to sing carols.
Sebastian did not throw parties. He preferred to entertain individual guests, as Lincoln put it, between the hours of Closing Time and Walk of Shame O’clock. But even though he wasn’t looking for anything permanent, Sebastian did not treat women badly. He didn’t objectify women. Indeed, if anything, women objectified him. He never hooked up with a woman who hadn’t explicitly said that was what she wanted. He always asked and never did anything without his partner’s full and enthusiastic consent. He’d never broken anyone’s heart. At least not on purpose.
He wasn’t some callous jerk with only one thing on his mind. But he liked sex, and variety, and situations that didn’t allow for misunderstandings or confusion. With a few exceptions, the women he met on the apps were in perfect agreement. And thus had the first decade of Sebastian’s postcollege life zipped by in a happy, horny blur.
There had been one girl, once: one girl he actually had wanted to see again. She hadn’t come from the apps, which would have made it easier for him to find her again. He’d picked her up at a bar just before closing time. They’d had a memorable night together, and, when he’d woken up, she’d been gone. She hadn’t left a note, and he’d never even gotten her last name. It had felt like a message from the Universe, that there was no such thing as love… or, at least, that Sebastian’s time to find it had not yet arrived.
Except now, here was the girl, standing right in front of him! And they’d be together for the next two weeks. Sebastian beamed, pleased at yet another example of the world raining its blessings down on him; another instance of how things usually worked out the way he’d hoped they would.
“Nice to see you again,” he said to Abby, in what he’d been told was his Barry White voice. Instead of looking pleased, Abby just looked… irritated? Frazzled? Scared?