“Well, I wasn’t ready to process it. We’d been talking about getting engaged for so long, but he wanted to open things up and I felt uncomfortable about it, so we decided to take a break. And then…” He shoots another glance at Kevin.
“We actually have some news for you,” Kevin says. He takes Jon’s hand over the table. “We’re together. Like … together together.”
I put down my beer midsip.
“You guys! What? How long has this been going on?”
“Since New Year’s Eve,” Kevin says. “We didn’t want to tell you if it wasn’t going to be anything serious.”
“So it’s serious?”
“We’re moving in together at the end of the month,” Jon says with a shy smile. “As soon as my lease is up.”
“Oh my God, you guys. Wow. I’m so happy for you.” I raise my glass. “To love! And to happiness!”
Maybe it’s just my second beer hitting me on an empty stomach, but I feel much happier now. Like the news of my two best friends finding love together has made me more joyous than planning to propose to my own girlfriend.
“You know who called this?” I say. “Molly Marks.”
“What?” Kevin laughs.
“Yeah. At the reunion. She said she thought you two had a spark.”
“I guess she noticed it before we did,” Jon says.
“Oh please,” Kevin says. “I had a huge crush on you already. You know that.”
Jon smiles at him. “What I meant is, I’ve had a huge crush on you for my entire adult life. I just didn’t know it was reciprocated.”
“It’s much reciprocated.”
They lean over and kiss.
They look right together. Natural. Relaxed.
I wonder if I look that way with Sarah.
But I don’t want to think about Sarah, because the person in my head right now is Molly. And how I’m losing the bet, one to two.
And how she’ll make fun of me relentlessly if she finds out.
And how much I want her to.
CHAPTER 19 Molly
His name is Sebastian Stone, née Tom Lovell, and he is the hottest man I’ve ever spoken to, let alone slept with.
We met at the premiere for my friend’s movie. He walked up to me and asked if anyone had ever told me I look like Demi Moore, whereupon I immediately decided to sleep with him.
He’s twenty-six. An actor. Not the aspiring kind—he’s on a network show about teenage girls who solve crimes. He wants to pivot to action movies. He’s never seen my films. I don’t watch his show.
He works out for two to four hours a day and eats ungodly quantities of chicken breast. He gets spray tans and highlights and facials. He laughs about how I hide from the sun and don’t dye my hair. He likes to play with my grays in bed, wrapping them around his manicured fingers and calling me his hot-ass crone.
He has a French bulldog named Milo he is sometimes photographed walking. The photos end up in the “stars, just like us” section of supermarket checkout line tabloids. He doesn’t set up these photo ops, but he also doesn’t avoid the celebrity-friendly coffee shops the paparazzi hang out in front of. Once, we were pictured together in a magazine holding hands while walking up Sunset and drinking twelve-dollar cold brews. The headline was SEBASTIAN STONE’S OLDER WOMAN. I framed it.
He lives in West Hollywood, on a high floor of an expensive condo tower. He doesn’t own a car. It’s a forty-five-minute drive, minimum, to get to his neighborhood. He’s been to my house three times and questions why I would want to live in a place with no gym or private pool. He wants me to move to Beverly Hills. He laughs when I tell him I’d rather jump out of his high-rise.
We are an opposites-attract cliché, I’m aware, but you see: there’s the sex.
I’m a professional writer and I’m not sure there are words to describe what he’s capable of. I think it’s something to do with his core strength and his young man’s vigor. He loves to be between my legs. He loves to be inside me. He loves the taste of my skin. He loves to hold me up in front of mirrors and pin me against headboards and hitch me against trees. I’ve had more orgasms in the last three months than I have in the last three years.
He’s the best antianxiety sex I’ve ever had. My life is a shambles, but I haven’t popped a benzo since we met.
Currently, Sebastian is getting a massage at our hotel in Cabo San Lucas, where we’ve gone for a long weekend. Sebastian is treating, so he picked the hotel, and while it’s luxurious, it seems to have been designed entirely for the sake of photo ops. It’s difficult to navigate the walkways without running into scantily clad influencers having their pictures taken. I feel schlumpy and undermaintained in my boho white caftan. Everyone else is wearing, like, neon dental floss.
I flag down my waiter and order another margarita to my lounge chair. The sun is too intense for me to strip down and go in the pool, so I’ve been hunkered beneath an umbrella in my enormous sun hat for hours, dragging the umbrella around to fight the movement of the ever-encroaching sun.
I’m glad to be alone. Sebastian and I arrived a day and a half ago and have spent approximately every minute together since leaving Los Angeles. It’s our first couple’s trip, and the long stretches of time when we aren’t either eating a meal or having sex are beginning to exhaust me. Sebastian is smart, in his way, but we don’t have that much in common. In LA this is not a problem, since we rarely spend more than a night together. Here, I’m beginning to feel the conversational coffers run dry.
My phone chirps with a message notification, and I put down my book. I’ve been trying to spend my vacation not fixating on my phone, but reading an actual physical novel is harder than it used to be, now that most of my reading is done via apps.
Alyssa: Molls, how is vacay going?
Alyssa: I’m living for Sebastian’s Insta posts
Alyssa: Do you know how many organs I would sell to go to a child-free resort?
Molly: There is actually one child here. A baby. With two nannies. And the mom has a dog she seems to love more than the baby, because she keeps sending the baby away and snuggling the dog
