I got to the Whitney Art Party early this year, not because I was excited, but because I needed time to rehearse the part of me that knew what to do at a party like this.

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Arriving on time meant stepping into a room that had already formed alliances, set the power rankings, and silently agreed on who mattered. I needed a practice lap before merging onto that highway.

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I also wanted to watch the Whitney lobby fill up. The best part of an event like this isn’t the party itself; it’s the prelude. The empty space before it becomes a total scene. The slow, deliberate, familiarly anxious entrances. People scanned the room, much like I do, and decided where to deposit their importance for the night.

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Having borrowed my friend Lennon’s vintage Mugler pinstripe suit, I looked better than I deserved to. The jacket was tailored within an inch of its life, cinched and structured like it had its own CV. The pants, on the other hand, were loose, pooling just slightly over my heels. I looked and felt like I had somewhere better to be but was indulging this event for now.

I hadn’t spent too long getting ready, which, standing outside staring at the iconic Whitney smoking, I was proud of. And when I walked up to the museum’s entrance and saw the step-and-repeat, it became a choice I pretty much instantly regretted.

I am not a red carpet person.

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Alex is a red carpet person. Lennon is a red carpet person.

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I, however, am a side-door person. A back-of-the-party, lurking-in-the-shadows, nook person (s.o. Durga Chew-Bose). And I was too late to bypass the press line but too early to disappear into the crowd.

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I walk at a normal human pace (I’m telling myself today), flick my eyes up to the lenses, and settle for a neutral expression. The moment stretches forever in my head but lasts 1.5 seconds in reality. No one whispers to anyone else. No one laughs. No one cares. One person asks my name, and my panties are already wet before I realize he was paid to.

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In an attempt to shrug off shame, I glance back over my shoulder to see if any other idiots step in front of the cameras.

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Alex does, and somehow the flashing lights get brighter.

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She wasn’t dressed for a party; she was dressed to leave the house. For whatever. She was wearing Timbs and a cashmere sweater that probably (definitely) belonged to her ex. Her blonde ’60s bangs ushered their own rogue breeze and she moved through the space like she curated the guest list herself. She laughed at something someone said behind her, both making their day and making the cameras cream. She left the carpet before 30 seconds were up, leaving the crowd behind her in a murmur suggestive of “I totally know her…” (they don’t).

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While I’d agonized over whether to smirk or not fucking smirk, she had barely been here a minute and already had a following.

I had positioned myself near the end of the bar, watching the crowd part for Alex and her eponymously embroidered and precariously perched “Gossner FIlms” dad hat, which, in fact, her dad actually had made when her and her sister had a production start-up in LA.

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It was going to take her a solid ten minutes to get to me. That wasn’t accounting for whomever she swept off their feet along the way. So I kept observing (editor’s note: she was still just stalling). Near the DJ booth, an indecently delicious Alaïa dress and the influencer wearing it were subjecting a man (who absolutely did not know who the influencer was) to a seemingly deep monologue. His face expressed either that he was racking his brain to figure out who she is or that her story involved her finding a designer shih tzu tied to a post on 72nd and 5th and taking it home to give it its own IG handle. Next to them, an actor from Euphoria was making out with someone who was not his girl. A Knicks player was in a semicircle with seven females, all with wetter panties than mine (I prayed).

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That’s when I noticed him — mid-50s in the L.A. hot shot uniform (off-black James Perse tee, tan too-taut skin, sneakers that cost more than my rent). I watched him clock Alex and lock in like she was a concept he already knew he wanted to option. He pulled her arm as she swished by, and this time, they were close enough for me to be within earshot.

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“You have a vision,” he said, sliding them into a conversation like a man who had used that phrase successfully before.

Alex didn’t flinch. “I do.”

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“I can tell. You think in frames.” He meant it as a compliment, and she took it as one. “What do you do?” he asked, the most important question in the goddamn world.

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“I’m a director,” she said smoothly. The producer nodded like he was the one who gave her the gig. Then he waited, expecting credentials.

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Alex most recently made a short film that got into a couple of mid-tier festivals, one she was pretty much roped into making, but the bulk of her paid work (which she would never admit) involved directing episodes of The Resident. Interesting, considering her bedside manner was the social equivalent of imitation crab. She is a director, but with enough delusion and access, she became the director he had been waiting for.

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“It’s a half-hour dramedy, HBO-style,” she muses, already selling it. “About a woman in New York — mid-thirties, way too hot to be as totally fucked up as she is — who cons her way into high society by pretending to be a grief counselor.”

Two other guys next to the producer turned to face her. She licks her lips and adjusts her hat. She’s turning herself on, and the men can smell it.

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“She’s never actually been trained, she just knows how to mirror wealthy women’s emotions back at them in a way that makes them feel seen,” Alex continued. “They start bringing her to dinners, introducing her to actual power players — billionaire widows, finance guys on the verge of collapse. She’s collecting secrets, making connections, working her way up.”

I shift my eyes to the producer. By her design, he’s captivated, watching her mouth with his hanging wide open.

“Then,” Alex purrs, leaning in, “one of her clients kills herself — and she realizes she might have accidentally made it happen.”

The producer inhales deeply. She may as well have had his cock in her hand and tightened her grip.

“Jesus Christ,” the producer exhaled. “That’s…that’s good.”

Alex shrugged like she hadn’t just spun this out of thin air. “It’s called Good Mourning, New York.” The producer lost it. “That’s fucking brilliant.”

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That’s my girl.

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Someone taps my shoulder. I fully pretend it didn’t happen and walk up to Alex and her possy of hard ons. She greets me in rapture and another immediate, off-the-cuff pitch. “This is my best friend Dylan, the best writer…” She continued talking me up while I continued sizing them up. They stared at the sweet spot between her giant brown eyes and her giant natural tits while their young wives sipped their little straws and clutched their pearls. I noticed the second one of them began losing interest in hearing about my latest column, and interrupted her. “I hope you don’t mind if I steal my girl.” The men pounced. “Let me get your card before you go,” one said. Card? I giggled to myself before noticing the wives clucking bitter comments and rolling their eyes.

I turn to face the bar and chase my second drink, when I spot another LA producer. I’d seen his name on Dateline recently. Probably because Alex sent it to me. He’s the kind of guy you pretend you already know when you approach him because it gives you an in and him a semi. Win-win. I walked up, still just trying to make my way to the damn bar, and said something I don’t remember but that made him turn toward me. He returned a comment, I laughed, and before I’d even closed my smile Alex appeared at my side.

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“Alex,” I said, introducing her like she was already famous. To me, she was. I’d already spent half my night obsessed with the friend I came with. But I usually do. The producer sized her up, already interested. “What do you do?”

“I’m a director,” she said smoothly.

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“Oh?” the producer said. “What’s your latest project?”

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“It’s a satire — high-concept, really — about a disgraced pop star turned megachurch pastor...”

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I swept a piece of hair from her face as she spoke like a proud mama. It was also a trick we liked to use when speaking to men in pairs…to heighten the stakes. He stepped closer to her.

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“Excuse me,” I cooed, giving her an air kiss and stepping closer to the bar. When I turned back with a fresh flute, she was getting his number and setting a date to meet in L.A. Someone tall obstructed my view, and it took a moment for it to register that he was… quite handsome.

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Tall, mid-30s (on the younger side for me, but he had scruff), with the kind of face that suggested he once played lacrosse but now spent his time talking about “dividends.” He was in a tuxedo that looked both expensive and slightly undone like he wanted people to know he had just come from something important. In retrospect, he wore my look better than I did.

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“You don’t look like you belong here,” he said. Contact. But a backhanded compliment disguised as interest. Classic. I could leave now. Or I could see where this goes.

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“Go on,” I feigned confidence and interest in more than just the suggestive veins in his neck. He grinned, leaning against the bar like he thought we were about to have a moment. “You’re just…different from the rest of them.”

And with that, he’d almost lost me in half the time I took to give him a shot. He gestured vaguely at the room. “The scene-y people. The ones who are here just to be seen.”

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I took a sip of my champagne. “Like you?”

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His grin faltered for half a second, which was deeply satisfying. “I—well, sure, I guess. But I also—I mean, I actually—”

“Relax,” I said, forgiving his dreadful introduction the way you forgive a deer for running directly into your moving vehicle. He was me in this moment, after all. “I’m fucking with you.”

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He exhaled. “Jesus.” Then, a beat later, “I like you.”

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“You don’t know me.”

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He looked me over like he was trying to decide if that was a challenge. “Then let’s fix that,” he said.

An hour later, we were kissing in the back of Le B., pressed into a blue velvet booth like we had nowhere else to be. His hands on my waist, my fingers in his hair, the kind of champagne-soaked indulgence that feels fun until it doesn’t.

He whispers, “It’s beddy-bye time,” and I felt my pussy contract in self-defense.

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I took his hand from underneath my blazer, held it to my heart, and gave him the kind of smile reserved for toddlers who trip on nothing. Then I placed it back into his lap, where it could think about what it had done.

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He blinked. “Leaving?”

“Yeah.”

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He looked deeply confused. “I could come with you —”

I shook my head. “Next time.”

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I will say I appreciated the way he paused to consider that I was, in fact, telling the truth and not baiting him to press me. “Alright,” he said, nodding, reaching for his wallet like us parting there had been his idea all along. “Let me get your Uber.”

I let him, unsure how else I would score one with the current lack of digits in my Chase account.

Outside, as we waited for the car to pull up, he leaned in one last time.

“So I’ll see you again?”

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I tilted my head up, giving him the kind of bless your heart smile that guarantees he’ll dissect it later, and gave him a brush-by kiss, just enough for him to feel the aftershock of what he had just done. For the first time last night, my panties were bone dry.

Somewhere across the city, Alex was on a rooftop nursing her third cigarette, already ready to wake up and write two shows she hadn’t known were in her head seconds before they were.

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I was heading home, reliving the moment I shut the Uber door over and over again. It wasn’t perfect, and I probably looked like I was just avoiding a parking ticket, but it was over. I erased the taste of yet the latest man to send my libido into witness protection with a rogue droplet of champagne from the corner of my mouth.

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Alex walked out of the Whitney Art Party with a reason to wake up early tomorrow. I walked out of Le B. with a reason to sleep in. This morning, neither of us remembers any names.