If honesty was a virtue, call him a sinner. Oh, he’d tried virtue. But telling women he lived in his parents’ basement sent the wrong message.

Okay: it sent the right message. So? If a woman went out with him because she thought he was an entrepreneur who lived in a swank uptown condo, it was a victimless crime. Not counting the victims.

Let’s be fair: both of them.

It wasn’t like he was bad-looking. And what was wrong with being a writer, anyway?

Okay, maybe not everyone would count posting lesbian Tolkien slashfic online as writing. But he did have a real novel on his hard drive, a beautiful coming of age story set in antebellum Kansas. Twenty-three gorgeous chapters. He even had the last chapter, in which Jonas forgives his dying brother in a hospital tent at Gettysburg. It was just, you know, the middle that had been sort of a problem for three years.

Never mind: this stockbroker he’d met at his therapist’s office and asked out to dinner, that’s what he needed to focus on right now.