The Game

night it felt as if you’d known each other forever.
    “Why don’t we all grab a bite to eat?” Mystery suggested.
    We walked to a diner nearby, arm-in-arm with our instant dates. During the meal, everything suddenly clicked in the group. Carly felt comfortable enough to unleash her biting wit, and Caroline began to radiate empathy and warmth. We didn’t need any routines or tactics. We all just made fun of ourselves and each other. Juggler was right: Laughter was the best seduction.
    Afterward, Carly invited us to call a cab from her apartment around the corner. She had just moved in and the rooms were bare of furniture, so Mystery and I sat on the floor. We didn’t call a cab—and the girls didn’t remind us to, which we took as an IOI.
    Carly soon left the room with Mystery, giving Caroline tacit permission to fool around with me. As we wrapped ourselves around each other, the chasm that had separated us in the bar disappeared. Caroline’s touch was soft and gentle, her body frail and forgiving. Now I understood why it had been so difficult to get rapport with her when we’d first met. She didn’t communicate with words; she communicated with feelings. She’d make a great nurse.
    After Caroline brought in some blankets to make the hardwood floor a little more comfortable, I went down on her. I stacked her orgasms as Steve P. had taught me, until it seemed like her body was melting into the ground. But when I reached for a condom afterward, I heard the five words that had taken the place of “let’s just be friends” in my life: “But I just met you.”
    It was a much sweeter sound, and there was no reason to push for sex with Caroline. I knew I’d see her again.
    She lay on my shoulder, and we enjoyed the afterglow. She was nineteen, she said, and hadn’t had sex in almost two years. The reason: She had a one-year-old child at home in the suburbs. His name was Carter, and she was determined not to be another neglectful teenage mother. This was the first time she’d been apart from him for a weekend.
    When we awoke the next afternoon, awkward from the passion of the night before, Caroline suggested having breakfast at a restaurant next door.
    In the days that followed, I must have watched Mystery’s video of that breakfast a hundred times. At the diner the night before, Caroline’s blue eyes were flat and distant. But at breakfast in the morning, they glittered and danced when she looked at me. Whenever I made a joke, even one that wasn’t funny, a broad smile spread across her face. Something inside her heart had opened. It was, I realized, the first time I’d made a real emotional connection with a woman since I’d started picking them up.
    I don’t have a particular type of girl I’m attracted to, the way some guys are Asian fetishists or chubby chasers. But of all the women in the world, the last type I ever thought I’d fall for would be a nineteen-year-old single mom who waited tables at Hooters. But the great thing about the heart is that it has no master, despite what reason may think.
    After the girls dropped us off at home, Mystery and I broke down the events of the previous night, trying to figure out what we did right and wrong. Despite what Caroline and I had thought, Mystery hadn’t even gotten a kiss from Carly, though not for lack of trying. She had a boyfriend.
    She was clearly attracted to Mystery, however, despite having resisted his advances. So we concocted a plan: the freeze-out. It was based on my Moby experience. If women have sex for validation, Mystery figured, why not take validation away from her? His plan was to be cold and ignore her, until she became so uncomfortable that she wanted to cozy up to him just to make things normal again.
    We loaded the footage of Carly and Caroline into Mystery’s computer and proceeded to spend the next six hours self-indulgently editing it into asix-minute video. When we finished, I called Caroline and she picked us up that evening.
    Juggler was in town, running his own workshop. He’d met a preternaturally bright jazz violinist named Ingrid and had started dating her exclusively. So we all went to dinner together.
    “I’m going to get out of the seduction business,” Juggler said. “I want to devote the time to my relationship.” Ingrid squeezed his hand approvingly. “Some people may say I’m pussy-whipped, but I say it is my choice. These workshops are too stressful for Ingrid.”
    It was good to see Juggler