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?
“Wear your pinny, please,” she said, and hurried away, leaving his friend staring at him.
“I take it you two know each other?” Lincoln’s voice was extremely dry.
Sebastian knew that if he confirmed it, he’d be spending the entire trip listening to Lincoln complaining about Sebastian’s wanton ways, and how there were fewer women in the world he hadn’t slept with than women he had. Sebastian didn’t need the hassle.
“Is there a reason she didn’t seem entirely pleased to see you?” Lincoln inquired.
“No worries,” said Sebastian. “It’s all good.” He smiled to himself, thinking that this trip, which he was already looking forward to, had just gotten exponentially more interesting.
Abby
The introductions had wrapped up with the Landons, Richard and Carol, an affluent-looking married, middle-aged white couple from Connecticut. Abby greeted them while she did her best to calm her racing heart and to not stare at Sebastian, or even look in his direction.
“Okay,” she said. “Was everyone able to download the route, or grab a printed cue sheet?”
The moms and dads consulted their phones. The teenagers consulted their parents. The men of the Spoke’n Four fiddled with their cycling computers, while the woman who was either Lou or Sue （Abby had already forgotten which couple was tall and which was short） unfolded one of the cue sheets that Abby had printed. Morgan Mackenzie stood behind her mom, an icy oasis of teenage silence. Ezra Presser was being lectured by his mother—“No, you can’t just follow me. You need to learn to read a map. It’s an important life skill!” Abby heard Kayla say. Andy Presser, meanwhile, had sidled even closer to Morgan.
Abby walked to her own bike, the Trek touring bike that she’d bought secondhand for three hundred dollars of babysitting money and bat mitzvah gift cash when she was sixteen. She’d purchased it in advance of the first trip she’d ever taken, a five-day ride on Cape Cod with Lizzie. They’d packed tents and sleeping bags and ground cloths, and they’d spent two nights in Nickerson State Park in Brewster, one night in a hostel by the ocean in a town called Truro. For their final night, they’d slept on Race Point Beach in Provincetown. The sunset had been spectacular, and when they’d woken up in the morning they’d seen minke whales, mothers and calves, frolicking close to the shore.