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“Attaboy,” Finn said, his stupid accent making me question my own sanity.

In that moment, I don’t know what made me look down the bar. Maybe it was the same instinct that screamed a joist was about to give before it went. Whatever it was, I looked, and there was Dante. He was sitting on a stool with his book, though he wasn’t reading it. He was staring at me. His eyes had gone narrow, only slightly, only for a second, a man watching someone back toward a ledge he couldn’t see. Then he turned back to his book as if he’d never looked up.

The bar just down Seventh from Barbacks was called Fuse. I knew inside of ten seconds going there was a mistake, because the youngest person in the room was maybe twenty-two. The oldest person in the room was now, by a comfortable margin, me.

The music was the kind you felt in your fillings.

The lighting was doing something purple and flashy that looked incredible on everyone under thirty and made me feel like I was being processed for intake.

I got a drink and told myself to give it a chance.

Finn was right—in theory. People met people in bars. I was a person in a bar.

The first guy found me before I’d finished the drink.

He was beautiful, maybe twenty-four. He strode up with the confidence of an Olympic gymnast about to perform, put a hand flat on my chest with no hello, looked up through his ridiculously long lashes, and said, “You are exactly what I came out for tonight.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, hi.”

“You’re such a hot fucking daddy. You know that, right?”

“I’m a—” I genuinely didn’t know how to field this. “I don’t have kids.”

He laughed as though I’d said something coy, then his hand moved down over my stomach, not exploring so much as inventorying, the way one might check a melon in the produce aisle. “You’re so big,” he told my sternum. “You could just, like, throw me around, Daddy.”

“I could probably help you move a couch,” I offered, which was the truest thing I could think of.

“Is that a kink thing?” He blinked. “Does Daddy like role-playing he’s a mover? I could get into that. You could sure move me with all your big equipment.”

“No, it’s a—if you ever need a couch moved, I have a truck and a working back. That’s all I meant. I was—shit—being nice.”

He cocked his head, utterly perplexed, then drifted off. I’d apparently answered in a language adjacent to the one he’d asked in, but not in one he understood. I watched him go and thought, One down, and turned directly into the next one.

This child was shirtless and glittered. Benji wore the stuff on his face. This boy bathed in it. He looked me up and down like a man appraising a used truck he’d already decided to lowball.

“Okay, silver fox,” he said. “What are you into?”

“Conversation,” I said honestly.

He waited.

I waited.

It became clear he thought I was being cute and was holding out for the real answer.

I decided to try again. “Like, talking. You know, getting to know someone? Finding out their last name.”

“That’s so hot,” he said, in the flat voice of a man who didn’t find it hot, then he reached up to squeeze my bicep with the thoroughness of a nurse taking a blood pressure. “God, you’re built. You should get on the apps.”

“I was on the apps.”

“You should get off the apps and come home with me.”

“I don’t even know your first name.”

“You don’t need it,” he said, which I have to admit was at least internally consistent. When I declined, he squeezed my bicep one last time and evaporated into the purple haze.

It kept happening, over and over.