“Did you ever get it? COVID?” he asked.
“I feel like everyone’s gotten it at this point,” she said. “I was lucky. I had a very mild case, last October. No real symptoms, except fatigue. How about you?”
He told her that he’d gotten it the previous summer; how it had almost been a relief. Lincoln had brought him Gatorade and Theraflu, and Lana had left chicken soup outside of his door every night.
“You’re lucky to have friends like that,” she told him.
Look at me, Sebastian thought to himself as the trail sloped downhill, along the canal, and Abby’s ponytail fluttered in the breeze. Having a conversation with a woman! Being her friend!
She told him about the guy in her bicycle club who never stopped talking on rides, unless he was singing, and how sometimes she could handle it but sometimes she found him so annoying that she fantasized about buying him a muzzle. He told her about how, during the pandemic, he’d ordered hair clippers from Amazon and had tried to give himself a haircut and had ended up using the wrong attachment and shaving a bald furrow down the center of his skull.
They pedaled along, and the grass was very green, and the sky was very blue, and it had been twenty entire minutes, and 4.3 miles, according to Sebastian’s Strava, since he’d thought about TikTok.
“You’re very easy to talk to,” he said.
“Thank you for ending that sentence with ‘to talk to,’?” Abby said. Sebastian thought for a few seconds, then snorted. Abby paused, then said, “You know, I’d hardly ever done anything like that before, the night we met. I’m really not a one-night-stand person.”
Sebastian wasn’t sure what to do with that information. If he’d been going on instinct—specifically, if he’d been going on the instinct telling him to do whatever it took to get together with Abby again—he’d have said It didn’t have to be a one-night stand. We can pick up right where we left off. Instead, he said, “Yeah. Same here.”
Abby turned her head to meet his gaze. Then she started laughing. Then he started laughing, too, and said, “Actually, I was a virgin when you met me. You took my maidenhead.”
“Do you want it back?” she asked. “And also, that can’t be true.”
“Why can’t it?”
“Well.” He thought that, if he could see her face, she’d be blushing; that delicious pink flush he remembered. “If I’d actually taken your maidenhead, wouldn’t we have had to do other things?”
“Other things?”
“You know,” Abby said. “Other things.” She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “Butt stuff.”
“Butt stuff!” Sebastian repeated, laughing. “Oh my God.”
“Why is butt stuff funny?”
“Butt stuff,” said Sebastian, “is always funny.”
“Not the way I do it,” she said, in a pretend-sexy voice that sounded actually sexy to Sebastian, and because he was a guy, a guy who’d slept with her, he found himself picturing sexy things. And then, because he was a guy who was also trying to be friends with Abby, and not sleep with her again, he made himself stop picturing them, and forced himself, instead, to picture Abby with Mark.
Except he had no idea what Mark looked like. “Do you have a picture of Mark?” he asked as casually as he could.
Abby’s smile disappeared. “I can show you one when we stop,” she said. “He’s got dark hair and brown eyes, and he’s terrifyingly fit.”
“Terrifyingly fit?” Sebastian filed that away for future consideration.
“He runs six miles every single day.” Abby related this information calmly, but he thought he could hear something—was it envy? frustration?—underneath the factual tone.
“Six miles every day is a lot,” said Sebastian. “Is he training for a marathon?”
“Only if the marathon is his life. He’s done them before, though. And he’s a very clean eater. Lots of salmon and chicken breasts.”
This felt like a possible minefield, a place where it would be easy to say the wrong thing. So Sebastian said, “You guys met at summer camp?”
“It was actually a weight-loss camp. Fat camp.”
Another minefield, Sebastian thought. Avoid, avoid, avoid.
“Is he the same person he was when you were teenagers?” he asked.
Abby’s voice was very dry. “He’s about half the size he was back then. But yes, I’d say he’s very similar. Obviously he’s got more education now, and he’s lived more places, and done more things, but…” She pedaled and seemed to be thinking. “He’s always been kind. Bighearted. And he’s funny, in a kind of quiet way. That hasn’t changed. How about you?” she asked. “When was your last serious relationship?”
Sebastian didn’t want to tell her that there’d never been one; that, just as she was not a one-night-stand person, he’d never had more than a handful of hookups with the same woman. “It’s been a little while,” he said.
“Like, how long?”
He thought about saying college, or I can’t really remember. He thought of offering up COVID as an excuse. Instead, he told her, “I’ve never really had a serious girlfriend.”
“Wow,” said Abby. “What’s up with that? Like, who broke you?”
“No one broke me,” he said, a little indignantly.
“Are you sure?”
“I think I’d remember.”
“Not always,” Abby said. “Maybe you’ve repressed it.”
“Maybe no one hurt me, and I’ve just never met the right person.”
“Yeah,” Abby said. “But you’re how old? Because at our age, most people have had a few serious relationships.”
“I guess I’m the exception,” he said lightly.
“Are your parents married?” Abby asked.
Sebastian felt his shoulder blades draw together, and his hands tighten on the handlebars. Avoid, avoid, avoid. “They are.”
“Happily?”
Sebastian found himself remembering his college graduation. His parents and Lincoln’s family, out to dinner at a restaurant in Middletown with a view of the Connecticut River. They could see the men’s and women’s crew team, rowing up and down, through the windows. He remembered his mother ordering a bottle of champagne—“To celebrate our sons!”—then drinking most of it, plus a number of glasses of white wine. Lincoln had been looking at Sebastian, and Dr. and Mr. DeVries had been looking at each other, their faces increasingly concerned as his mother’s voice got louder, her gestures more emphatic. His father, eventually, had excused himself and helped his mom to her feet, guiding her out of the restaurant and back to the car.
“They love each other” was what he said to Abby. His voice sounded hollow. He thought that what his mother really loved was white wine, and what his father really loved was having a problem to solve. That, and being the hero, riding to his wife’s rescue, saving the day. “It’s…” He paused. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the healthiest relationship.”
He waited for Abby to press him about it, or connect the dysfunction of his parents’ marriage to his own failure on the relationship front. Instead, she said, “I’m sorry.” Sebastian felt an unexpected lump in his throat. He’d never talked to anyone but Lincoln about what was going on with his parents, or what it had been like when he’d gone home in 2020.
“What about your parents?” he asked.
When she answered, he could picture her rolling her eyes. “Oh, Lord. That’s a saga. Honestly? I don’t think the two of them should have ever been married at all. My dad’s basically a hippie, and my mom… well. You’ve seen my mom.”
“She doesn’t seem that bad.” She was sober, Sebastian thought, and actively taking an interest in her child, both of which made her a significant improvement on his own mom.
“She’s a fancy lady. She has her charities, and her exercise classes, and her friends, that’s all she ever wanted. I really do not know what she was doing with my dad in the first place. But they’re both remarried, and now, I think, they’re both with the people they should have been with all along.”