“God,” he groaned. “Would you stop it?”
“One day, you’re going to make someone so happy,” Jace told him with a smile.
Remington returned the look, but not the optimism.
He was a twenty-seven year old virgin. His time was running out.
Chapter Two
Sebastian Would Marry Vodka if he Could
Being divorced was weird.
It shouldn’t have been, considering he’d courted, married, and divorced Daniella in less than three hundred and sixty-five days, but Sebastian St. George found it very near painful to be alone. He hadn’t felt this way before he’d met Daniella, and he’d been alone then, even though it had been a different kind of alone.
Before, he’d had his best friend Callahan, his partner in crime, the one person who knew him better than anyone in the world. They’d grown up together, side-by-side copies of the promise that came with names like McMillian and St. George, but good things didn’t last forever. Not that being a McMillian or a St. George was good, but it had privilege and responsibility and…
Sebastian sighed.
Misery.
Being a St. George came with more misery than Sebastian would ever know what to do with. Sometimes, he envied his older brother Rhys and the way he so easily accepted the things that people asked of them or, rather, demanded. But their life had turned Rhys into a cruel man, full of selfish intentions and an alarming lack of empathy. Throughout high school, Sebastian had watched the way his brother manipulated his way through the socialites in Mallardsville before he’d set his sights on Callahan. He’d wanted to warn his best friend, but Callahan looked at Rhys like he hung the moon, and Sebastian couldn’t ruin that for him.
It wasn’t long before Rhys ruined it himself, and Sebastian’s life became a game of keeping his best friend and his brother away from each other. When Callahan had come up with the idea to move to Myers Bluff after they graduated, Sebastian had jumped at the chance. Putting space between Rhys and Callahan—and between himself and his family—was a welcome change from what his life had been.
Even with the time and the distance, Sebastian had never been able to shake free of his life and his name, wearing St. George like a burden. He’d always assumed it was something he’d have to find a way to live with, but about three months into his marriage, he started to wonder if he’d been wrong about it all. Daniella was working her way through his checking account like his money was ready to expire, but that wasn’t the problem.
Sebastian knew he couldn’t take his money with him when he died, so he could not have cared less what Daniella spent it on. She could have bought the entire Christian Louboutin store in one go and he wouldn’t have blinked an eye at the receipt. It was her attitude toward him that brought about a very unexpected change in him.
They’d been drinking one night, something they often did to ignore how unhappy they were, but also how unwilling they were to admit to his family they’d fucked up by getting married so soon.
Daniella looked up from the bottom of her empty wineglass and cocked her head to the side. Then she asked him, “Have you ever wondered what it’s like to get fucked?”
He hadn’t.
Not until that moment.
Two days later, a box showed up on the front porch and Daniella poured him a pint glass of vodka, and an hour later, the answer went from no to yes.
Sebastian couldn’t sit right for a day. Then he’d poured Daniella a pint glass of wine, taken off his clothes, and asked her to do it again. It became their norm until Daniella had grown bored with pegging her husband, choosing instead to whisper horribly cruel words in his ear while she pounded against him. He knew she’d been trying to turn him off. But the opposite happened, and then Daniella stopped doing it altogether.
She stopped doing everything besides spending his money.
The weekend they went back at Mallardsville for an event at the college had been the last straw. By then, they were on week six of him begging for a divorce that she refused to agree to. She made threats, she made promises, and Sebastian finally had enough. He returned to Myers Bluff, filed some papers, and signed away thousands of dollars a month from his checking account to keep Daniella quiet and away.
He threw himself into drinking like it was a job. With no one to spend the evenings with, now that Callahan had gone and fallen in love, he frequently found himself alone with his television and the bottle of lotion on his bedside table. And that was fine… until it wasn’t.
When he and Daniella had left his attorney’s office, she’d had some choice words for him, mostly vulgar and offensive terms for a gay man, which were misguided since he clearly wasn’t gay. He’d dicked her down out of rage and spite more than he could count. In fact, there had been a time when he’d found Daniella attractive, at least before her personality had soured him completely. And before her, there’d been other women. A trail of them, even through college, though his escapades had only tapered off the older he’d gotten.
Halfway through his third beer of the night, his phone buzzed, skittering across the nightstand and falling onto the floor. Sebastian leaned over the edge of the bed and hooked his finger around the charger cord, pulling the phone up and dropping it onto his lap. His screen lit up with an alert from one of the dating apps Jace had convinced him to download over lunch the week before.
“This is a useless idea,” he’d told Jace, eyes narrowed in doubt while Jace tapped away at the screen to set up Sebastian’s profile.
“How tall are you?”
“Six even,” he’d said.
“Interested in women?”
