There was a great seducer of women. And girls. He was ill-fed but glutenous. He was trim and unhealthy. He was a great seducer of women, men, and boys. The women, seduced sexually, regularly, and humiliated afterwards. The men and boys seduced intellectually-- he was likely the last of his kind to have such an effect. This all occurred on college campuses, but I met him years afterwards.

I met this great seducer on the earliest day of summer. I had a well-paying career and was proud of it. It afforded me a mortgage on a house in Santa Monica, a professional espresso machine in my kitchen, a dog that I paid a trainer to train and a walker to walk. To interview the seducer for a position at my workplace made me feel better than him, because I was. I was clearly smarter than him-- I knew this because I had the sense to wear a reasonable mid-length dress to this meeting, but he boyishly wore jeans and a dingy button down. His hair was unkempt and curly and vulgarly blonde. As we spoke, he had the appearance that he wanted to smoke, in the way that all smokers do-- when they eye the door and drum their fingers and nod inappropriately. I also had the sense that he came from a fabulously wealthy background but shunned it in favor of complete freedom. I wondered if he was put up to this interview. Perhaps a disgruntled parent threatened disinheritance.

“The gap in my resume is because I didn’t want a job.” He told me. “I hate being the smartest person in a room.”

The seducers goal in the interview had immediately changed from acquiring employment to fucking me in the nearest adjacent alleyway the moment he realized his interviewer was a woman. He was purposefully bombing. I was completely charmed by this, despite my ego begging me to be resistant to that emotion. He began to tell me about his life, most of which was fabricated.

There was a rehearsed quality to his storytelling, which in the first few sentences I thought might just be the canned way of speaking one has for a job interview, such as, “my greatest weakness is my perfectionism.” But as he went on, I realized he was speaking to me as a writer, reciting his diary word for word, and the “canned” quality was hidden masturbation, maybe even literally occurring underneath the table, which I didn’t dare to verify.

“At first I thought I only wanted to go to places that were exciting, and meet people who excite me, but by the time I reached college I realized that no one had such a quality– my professors were ignorant, my girlfriend was mid, and those lush pastoral green spaces were no different than my hometown suburb.

I also had a sneaking suspicion that my girlfriend was covertly converting to lesbianism to spite me, something I’d learn later in life that women tended to do when they became bored and bitter, so I felt no qualms dropping out of Penn State (my parents cried), and beginning my life’s continuing adventures. She took the news in stride. I had expected her to cry, or to ask me to stay, or to apologize. She did neither of the three. Instead, she said something along the lines of:

‘Are you sure that’s the move?’

I hitchhiked from State College to Columbus. Then to Cincinnati, where I got fed up and booked a flight to New York City. I’m sure you like it here, in California, but I could never live here. Not long term.”

“Well. Are there any questions you’d like to ask me?” I said, not asked, because I knew his answer.

“No, none.” He said, as I had expected.

The cafe we were stationed at switched their menu to their evening wine-bar service. We both had a drink. He ordered half the menu. Mainly desserts. I knew he wasn’t good for it, so I put my card down.

*Now, I’d like you to temporarily imagine that this story takes place in the Jersey Shore, in Ocean City, a dry town with two distinct boardwalk amusement parks, rather than Santa Monica. The beach is darker at night and the air is more humid. At the story’s conclusion, you can revert the location back to California.*

At night, at the beach, there was heavy hot air under the boardwalk pier-- where teenagers had their premier sexual experiences once school let out-- but this was too early in the season, and a quiet school night, so two adults could be alone-- me, an un-adult, and him, a great seducer of women and girls.

I smoked weed with him so I was pliable to be touched. His hands were somehow calloused, but I knew he didn’t work. He touched me selfishly, first my breasts-- he did that without acknowledgement. I was pulled onto his lap. This is how I knew he was a seducer of girls-- because he pulled me onto his lap like a tween. As my legs were spread open, I could not identify which was the hot heavy air and which was the calloused fingers. There was a great warm pressure on my cunt. I sunk deeper into pliability. My head fell back onto his shoulder.

The moonlight glistened on the beads of precum accumulating on his cock, which I only saw for a moment, between my position on the lap to my position on my hands and knees-- when I looked backwards for only a moment and saw his cock, and smiled a little excitedly, girlishly, before he guided my head away to look forward, to the black water, which I could barely make out in the haze of the night.

I awoke the next morning paralyzed by dehydration. Without a mirror I knew how I looked. My lips were pale. My hair covered with wet sand. My sex still leaking between my legs.

My great seducer was gone, and if it was not for what he had taken, I’d question if he had ever existed. My purse was also gone. I forced my still body to roll on my side, to look out to the ocean. It was early enough in the morning that the homeless were taking their baths. An old man stood knee deep in the waves and pulled down his underwear revealing his wrinkled buttocks. The waves crashed violently in front of him. I was suddenly so afraid that in that moment he would be swallowed by the ocean, that I screamed terribly, like an animal, and the scream sobered me, and I gathered my discarded panties from the sand to run to the bus, which I stupidly hoped would let me on without cash.