Chapter 1
Sebastian
My dick was languishing.
I'd learned that word recently. Languishing. Not depressed but not thriving. Just drifting along, one unsatisfied day melting into another.
And—before you get the wrong idea—this wasn't a performance issue. I performed beautifully. I always rose to the occasion and I stayed standing until everyone was satisfied. Most mornings I awoke to find myself at full salute, wrenched out the quickest flash of gratification, and then went back to feeling nothing.
With the bitter aftertaste of that thought in my mouth, I kicked the bedsheets away and rolled my head to the side. Glaring out the window felt right, seeing as my view consisted of a brick wall and a hazy slice of early morning sunlight. I understood everything about that wall. Hard as fuck and not a damn good thing to be done about it.
Languishing, to be sure.
None of my usual vices did the trick. There used to be a time when the mere mention of college cheerleaders was enough to get me off. God, I missed being twenty-four.
Most people assumed my fascination with hardcore competitive cheerleading was about the skirts. It wasn't. Those competitions—the ones where they tossed small, weigh-nothing women into the air like permanent neurological damage was no big deal—chilled me the fuck out. Cheerleading was to me what true crime podcasts were to women with attachment issues. Also, I couldn't tear my eyes off the bases. There was something about their thick, powerful thighs. They all had them. Of course they did. You couldn't launch a lady into space without some rock-solid quads and they had them. Fuck, did they have them.
I wanted to live in a world of pear-shaped women and wear those thighs as earmuffs every night. Every damn night.
Wanting it didn't mean it would ever happen.
The primary reason for that was the gaping hole where my interpersonal skills should've been, the hole I was certain I'd had from the early days and which had widened over the years. I lived a solitary life and I liked it that way for reasons I was too hard and miserable to enumerate this morning. The fact I had a group of friends at all and they continued to request my presence was a curiosity I still did not understand. I assumed they'd adopted me as some sort of wonky mascot.
The secondary reason—not far disconnected from the first—was I didn't enjoy people and I really didn't like them in my space. If there were to be earmuffs in my life, I'd have to haul myself to the earmuff's apartment. That sounded great at first but I knew it would become a hassle. My work hours tended toward unpredictable—trauma surgery was a pain in the ass like that—and there were many days when I came home too fried to form words. As much as I liked the idea of a sexual relationship conceived without the requirement of speaking, I knew that wouldn't last. It couldn't. The day would come when I'd hear—barely, since her thick, glorious thighs would cancel out most sound—her ask about my day. Or, god forbid, she'd want to talk about feelings or the unholy curse of where is this going.
That led quite naturally to the final reason that nothing so miraculous would ever happen to me: I didn't know how to keep people in my life. I could give all the beard rides in this time zone but that didn't change the fact I was forty-two years old and didn't know how to make anyone stay. My mother was the only person who'd ever stuck around. My little sister Vivi too, but it wasn't as though she'd had much of a choice in the matter.
So, here I was, with my languishing dick and sudden apathy for collegiate cheerleaders with thunder thighs.
Not that my dick ruled my life. It did not. Hell, I didn't know who had the time to live that way. Maybe when I was in my twenties, grossly self-involved and capable of engaging in social activities after work, but I couldn't do that anymore. These days, my life went to hell if I didn't get at least seven solid hours of sleep a night.
Maybe it was wrong but I was more interested in chasing a good night's sleep than a partner for some earmuff action. Just didn't seem like there was any point, and I knew that didn't make sense. Not that any of this made sense. A lot of things were going right in my life these days. I didn't have any reason to be so…bored.
Things were finally, strangely good for me and I was more unsettled than ever. I hated that feeling. It was like my skin was too tight and the sun too dim and every passing minute a second too long.
Everything was off, and my dick, the original canary in this coal mine, had figured it out before I could.
Rude.
What the fuck did I have to be unhappy about? Why couldn't I be content with the handful of decent, functional things I had in this miserable, broken world? Why couldn't any of this be enough for me?
I shifted away from the window with a long, obnoxious sigh. Enough of that whining. I had to get ready for work. I didn't have time for this. Emergency surgery didn't care whether my dick was in high spirits or not—and that was why this was the gig for me. I didn't have to think about myself at all.
My life looked a little something like this: surgical on-calls, sleep, research, complaining about the weather in this dark, frigid marshland of Massachusetts, hunting for good avocados, college cheerleading, clinical care, death march running sessions with my part-time sadist friend Nick, hating everything, third-wheeling it with Nick and his wife because they were the only people who tolerated me on account of me vocally hating everything, migraines, and covering for other surgeons in my practice who, unlike me, went places, did things, and enjoyed the company of others.
And that was how I found myself working a twenty-four-hour surgical on-call shift because someone else in the practice was going to a wedding or vacationing or some other nonsense. When these storms of my own stupidity arose, I always swore up and down I wouldn't cover for anyone ever again, and then I prayed the last few hours wouldn't blow up into a massive shitshow.
Today was one of those shitshows but instead of waiting until the last hours of my shift to blow up, it started the minute I arrived. I was too busy to notice hunger, exhaustion, anything. Surgery had a way of putting those basic needs on the back burner.
All the same, the last hours were a damn mess. All of my residents and their interns were slammed, I couldn't find my fellow anywhere, and every time I cleared one surgery consult, another two sailed in. It was two hours past the end of my never-helping-another-colleague-again marathon shift and I was jamming through the last of my charts when I heard, "Stremmel? Is Stremmel down here?"
There were several reasons I hung out in the emergency department, but chief among them was I could always find a quiet corner where I wouldn't be disturbed. It was the noisiest, most hectic spot in the entire hospital complex but calm could always be found in chaos.
Except right now.
I knew that voice. It had been burned into my brain on a daily basis with all of her perky, peppy screeches of "Hello there!" and "Good morning!" and "Have a good one!"
My god. The last thing in the world I needed was a conversation with Sara Shapiro. I'd sooner fling my body into the Charles River and wait for nature to do its worst than willingly submit to a conversation with the reconstructive surgeon who lived in my apartment building while I was operating on zero minutes of sleep in a whole fucking day.