Gettin’ Laid
Ethan is thirty-four years old, a Houston medical device sales rep with Croatian-New Zealand heritage and a system he has spent twelve years perfecting. No third dates. No sleepovers past 4 a.m. No meeting the friends. The system is not cruelty — it is physics. It works. It has always worked.
Then he meets Lena, a Greek-American ER nurse at the Texas Medical Center, and the system stops working entirely.
Gettin’ Laid is a literary novel about a man who built an elaborate architecture of self-protection and the woman whose refusal to perform anything — warmth, interest, patience, hurt — makes the architecture visible for the first time. Set against the specific heat and geography of Houston, from the trails at Barker Reservoir to the bars of Montrose to a seven-day Category 4 hurricane that strips everything back to what’s actually true, it follows Ethan’s first-person voice from full comic performance through disruption and into the stripped silence of a man finally looking at himself without flinching.
At the center of the novel is a question Ethan has been avoiding for twelve years: what is the difference between solitude and loneliness, between control and captivity, between being very good at leaving and being good?
Surrounding him is a cast of characters who know things he doesn’t — Santos, his oldest friend, who carries a story from a market in Reynosa that took thirty years to tell. Danny, the cautionary mirror at fifty who is genuinely fine and fine is all there is. Morgan, Lena’s person since high school, who delivers the novel’s key verdict with the precision of someone who has been watching from the beginning. And Lena herself, who comes through Ethan’s incomplete and self-serving narration more fully than he intends.
By turns comic and devastating, Gettin’ Laid traces the arc of a man who confused distance with freedom, and what it costs him to find out.
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| ISBN (Paperback): | 978-1-972810-43-9 |
| ISBN (eBook): | 978-1-972810-44-6 |
| Publisher: | The Writing King |
| Publication Date: | April 20, 2026 |
| Print Length: | 316 pages |
| Language: | English |
Questions
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Chapter One
Thursday
I give myself two extra minutes in the car with the AC running, which is the window I’ve learned to leave between arriving and walking in. Any less and I’m a sweat stain. Any more and I’m stalling.
Houston in August. The parking lot outside smells like the inside of a mouth — hot, wet, close. I check my face in the rearview and have the brief private word I always have with myself before a Thursday.
Here we go.
I look good. I know I look good. Not fishing, just accurate.
The bar is called Provision and it’s been on this block in Midtown for eleven years, which I know because I’ve been coming here for six of them. Progress is Houston’s middle name. Progress and also Sprawl.
I get out of the car. The heat lands on me like a personal insult. Forty steps to the door and I take them at the pace of a man who has nowhere more important to be, because I don’t, and because hurrying in Houston heat is a form of surrender.
Here is the thing about a bar you know well: you stop seeing it. You move through it like your own apartment in the dark, by memory, by feel, and what you’re actually doing is reading the room.
First thing, every time: exits. Two. Front door I just came through, fire exit left of the kitchen. I like knowing the shape of a room before it has a chance to work on me.
Two-thirds full, Thursday in August, exactly right. The lighting doing what good bar lighting does, which is make everyone look like a better version of themselves. I do a circuit with my eyes. Table near the window: four women, celebrating something, birthday or promotion or divorce, the distinction matters less than you’d think. A couple in the corner on either a second date or a bad first one, angle of their bodies says second, the way she’s checking her phone says it might also be their last.
At the far end of the bar, alone, a dark-haired woman actually reading something on her phone. Not scrolling. Reading. You can tell the difference at forty feet if you know what to look for.
I order a Topo Chico with lime. Ninety-four degrees outside, I drove here, I have standards.
I pick up my drink, lean against the bar in a way that takes up space without being rude about it, and look at the woman at the far end.
She’s been here a while. Not the posture of someone newly arrived. Her friends are at the birthday table by the window. She came with them and then peeled off. She’s either introverted or bored or having a night where the group gets to be too much. Either way the window is narrowing.
I move to the gap two stools down. Not straight at her. I’m not going to her. I’m just going somewhere nearby.
She doesn’t look up when I sit. Women who are waiting for something look up.
Two or three minutes. Then: “What are you reading?”
She looks up. Brown eyes. The look means: really?
“An article about concrete.”
“Concrete.”
“Concrete.”
“Any good?”
“It’s about whether Roman concrete was better than modern concrete and why we stopped making it that way.”
“Was it?”
“Significantly.”
“That’s depressing.”
“A little.”
I let that sit. She goes back to her phone. Then she says, without looking up: “You came to a bar on a Thursday night alone.”
“I did.”
“Looking for something?”
“Found it,” I say. “About forty feet ago.”
She looks up. Something moves through her face, not flattered exactly, more like she’s turning the line over to see what’s underneath it. “I’m Claire.”
“Ethan.”
We shake hands. Firm. Someone taught her it matters.