Excerpt from The Dry Season by Melissa Febos, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
The Dry Season

One of the last people I had sex with before I stopped having sex was a museum curator. She was going through a divorce and had the manic eyes of someone desperate to escape their current situation.

In the Brooklyn lesbian tradition, we did not call our first date a date but simply dinner, therefore maintaining the possibility that it was not a date, just a meal between potential friends, until we decided whether or not we wanted it to be a date. We met at a wobbly table in a nice-ish restaurant in Williamsburg. She was beautiful in the candlelight, with high cheekbones and a shapely mouth, though our senses of humor seemed incompatible; she barely laughed at my jokes and didn't make many herself.

As I sawed into my cauliflower steak—the biggest scam of all vegetarian entrées, though I kept optimistically ordering it in all the little restaurants of New York City that had discovered they could charge meat prices for a slab of fibrous water sprinkled with capers—she squinted at me.

"Is this a date?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know, is it?"

I didn't mean for it to sound like a riddle, but it did. Things deteriorated from there. She spoke about her ex-wife in a bereft, castigating tone, and I nodded noncommittally.

Still, she texted me the next day and I did not hesitate to respond. We flirted all day, which was exponentially more fun over text than it had been in person, though our jokes kept failing to land. I texted her while I ran on the treadmill at the gym, while my students wrote in class, at red stoplights on the drive home, and while I brushed my teeth, spattering my sleep T-shirt with toothpaste as I smiled at my phone like a baby. I ignored the bored feeling I'd had in her presence, which seemed reciprocal, and the way her grief had repelled me, an alarm that I chose not to heed. Instead, I thought about her beautiful face and the way my body vibrated when my phone did with her messages. I found my jokes funny, and maybe that was enough.

We kept this up and a week later, I flew out of state for a reading. During the trip, our texts accelerated in a sexual direction. Tucked in the stiff white sheets of the hotel bed, I called her and we masturbated together without speaking, just our breath in each other's ears.

After I returned, we met up again, but skipped dinner this time, as if dinner had been the problem. Instead, I put on some Nina Simone and we perched on my gray sofa drinking seltzer. Two weeks of sexy text messages had not improved our rapport. We went to bed abruptly, as if that were the only way to end the conversation.

Though I had stubbornly tried to prove otherwise, for me, sex without chemistry or love was a horror, and I felt quietly horrified as we lay together in my bed. None of the excitement of our text correspondences translated. Still, it seemed inexcusably rude to interrupt the interaction after all of those texts. I brought her to orgasm with my hand and then lay there for a few moments before slithering out of bed to go to the bathroom.

Mercifully alone behind the closed bathroom door, I splashed cold water on my face and avoided the mirror. I considered how to get her out of my apartment without being a complete asshole. I considered the possibility that I was already an asshole. I spat into the sink and then pressed my hands against my face, as if I could smear it away and start over.

Here I was, again. There wasn't anything extraordinary about my situation except that I felt ready to do something about it. Well, almost ready. A few weeks later, I decided to spend three months celibate. I had no idea that it would become a whole year, nor that it would be the happiest year of my life.

"You'll want to use some discernment when deciding who to talk to about this. I mean, making such a big deal out of three months of no sex," my mother, a therapist, cautioned me over the phone. "There are people who—"

Excerpted from The Dry Season by Melissa Febos. Copyright © 2025 by Melissa Febos. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.