“Look,” Gloria said, “I’m not going to tell you not to do this. You’ve had a long dry spell. But seriously think about it. I can’t imagine sleeping with my parents’ best friends’ son. Dude is an ass.”
“Sebastian isn’t an ass,” Amber said, “which puts him ahead of most of my boyfriends.”
“Until today, you hadn’t seen him in years. You don’t know that, and you don’t have a very good instinct for these things.”
“That’s a little harsh,” Roxanne piped up from the corner, speaking for the first time in five minutes.
Roxanne and Gloria were Amber’s closest friends, and in the mostly-white city of Stratford, the three of them stood out.
Roxanne, a black woman with a quiet temperament, was an incredible dancer—she worked part-time at a dance studio. She lived in Waterloo, forty minutes away, where she and Amber had gone to university, but came to Stratford on a regular basis and crashed on Amber’s couch.
Gloria—louder and brasher—was third-generation Chinese-Canadian, like Amber, though she wasn’t biracial. She currently had a pixie cut and was wearing black fishnets with a short black skirt, black sweater, and bold jewelry. She worked as a costume designer and was a wizard with a sewing machine.
Yeah, Amber definitely couldn’t approach the talents of her friends, but that was okay.
“He doesn’t have to be the greatest guy ever,” Amber said. “I’m just going to sleep with him, not fall in love.”
Truth be told, she figured it would be pretty hard for her to fall in love now, after all her shitty experiences. One day, she’d try again, but at present, her “no dating” rule was firmly in place.
A white dude in a trucker hat approached their table. It was clear who his eyes were on: Gloria. “You Japanese or Chinese?”
“I’m Canadian, you punk,” Gloria said.
“Hey. All I did was ask you a question. Can I buy you a drink?”
“Nah, I got a girlfriend.”
The guy smirked.
“And she owns a boxing gym, so I’d watch it if I were you.”
The guy eventually returned to his table of dude-bros at the front of the bar.
“Bet he has some kind of strange Asian fetish.” Gloria shook her head. “Probably thought I’d be sweet and submissive.”
“Pretty sure you’re right,” Amber agreed.
“I love being able to truthfully say that my girlfriend owns a boxing gym. I’ll keep saying it even after we break up.”
Roxanne’s eyebrows drew together. “Are you having problems with Syd?”
“Nah, but you never know. We’re coming up to the six-month mark, and my relationships never last more than six months.” Gloria gestured to Amber’s phone. “You got a picture of this guy of yours?”
“He’s not my guy.”
Gloria made a dismissive gesture.
It took Amber a minute, but she found Sebastian’s profile on Facebook. There was a photo of him—unsmiling—with trees and a tent in the background.
Gloria looked at it in horror.
“What?” Amber said. “He’s decent looking, isn’t he?”
“Tent,” Gloria whispered. “Camping. He likes...camping.”
Roxanne shook with laughter.
Amber laughed, too. Gloria enjoyed playing up her hatred of camping.
Amber turned her gaze back to Sebastian’s profile picture, and suddenly, she imagined that mouth on her neck, where he’d touched her earlier.
It would be crazy to date him. The thought of her parents and his parents finding out they were together...that was the definition of hell. But they wouldn’t actually be together, and Amber was sure Sebastian was sensible enough not to say anything.
In fact, sleeping with Sebastian really was sensible. Safer than sleeping with a stranger.
And sure, Amber didn’t care about size, but she couldn’t help being intrigued, plus she hadn’t felt chemistry like that with a guy in a while. She’d spent a disturbing amount of time thinking about Sebastian since she’d returned from the grocery store that afternoon, and he was certainly a better prospect then any of the guys in this bar.
Amid all posters of The Tempest on the bar’s walls, there was a poster that was out of place: the Justin Bieber one.
Stratford was, after all, his hometown.
So Amber did whatever she, Gloria, or Roxanne did when they had a dilemma and were sitting around The Tempest with their drinks.
She lifted her beer toward the poster and said, “Justin Bieber, what should I do?”
But she was already pretty sure of what she wanted.
* * *
On Sunday evenings, Amber sometimes went to Mosquito Bay to have dinner with her family, but this morning, she’d decided that she wasn’t up for the hour-long drive and would prefer to spend the time doing other things.
Her family, however, decided to take an impromptu road trip to visit her.
At eleven o’clock that morning, her parents and grandparents barreled into her apartment.
Amber’s mother, Rosemary, was white, and her father, Stuart, was Chinese. Her paternal grandparents lived in Mosquito Bay, a few streets over from their son.
“Happy New Year!” Ah Ma said, giving Amber a hug. “You do anything exciting to celebrate?”
“Just hung out at the bar with my friends.”
“Did you dance with any guys?” Ah Ma gyrated her hips as best she could.
“No.”
“Did you kiss anyone?”
“No.”
“Did you get drunk?”
“Not very.”
“Amber, I am disappointed in you! You are supposed to be living an exciting life!”
Amber had been the wild child in high school, to the exasperation of her family. Her brother Greg, eight years older than her, was the polar opposite of wild, which had set certain expectations for the rest of them. Nick’s wild years had come later, once he was in Toronto. Frankly, Amber didn’t think she’d been all that different from Zach in high school, but she was the baby of the family—and the only girl—and anything she did seemed to worry her family more. As a result, they’d received a censored version of her exploits in university, as well as her relationships.
Now that she had a full-time job and lived on her own, they would sometimes ask her to tell them exciting stories, then be disappointed that she’d never been whisked away for a romantic weekend by a star hockey player—or whatever they expected.
In
