It’s the romances that feature the difficult people who feel unlovable that get to me every time. Add in some hurt-comfort and I am trash for your book. Kate Canterbary’s The Worst Guy gives us two people who feel like they are too difficult to love finding out that they love the most difficult parts of each other and then building a relationship that works for them.
Sebastian Stemmel is a trauma surgeon at a Boston hospital. Sara Shapiro is a plastic surgeon at the same hospital and they live in the same apartment building, known as the doctor dorm. Sebastian’s friend group would like to include Sara more, but she resists social interactions. Sebastian avoids Sara because she’s chirpy and Sara dislikes Sebastian because he is rude and grumpy. She challenges the way he treated a patient and in their altercation, she accidentally brings down a privacy curtain, leading to a cascade of things falling and breaking, resulting in the two doctors slapped with 8 weeks of HR mandated conflict resolution counseling.
At first I thought this was going to be a grumpy/sunshine paring. While Sebastian is grumpy and loves hating everything, Sara is no sunshine. She is prickly and bitchy, a reformed people pleasing perfectionist who puts on a sunshine mask so that people will leave her alone. It’s interesting reading a forced proximity, colleagues, enemies-to-lovers romance with a therapist thrown into the mix. The passionate anger turns into passionate sex and they have to start facing their softer feelings. They push and shove at each other and go too far, but in doing so find that they are freer to be themselves with each other. They love the hurt, raw places and the callouses they grew to protect them.
Sara is recovering from an eating disorder, which has turned eating with others into a minefield she would rather avoid. I have not had an eating disorder, but I have had digestive issues develop which make it difficult for me to let other people cook for me. It’s excruciating to have send someone a long list of things you can’t eat when all you want to do is have a nice dinner and not make waves.
Argument is truly one of my love languages so I appreciated the way they argued with each other about everything all the time. I also deeply value complaining. Sebastian bitches and moans about so many things. His rant about why he can’t leave Boston made me fall a little in love with him myself.
“Because I hate the cold and the forty-two different seasons this city experiences and the leaves”—it had to be noted that he said leaves with jazz hands, and I couldn’t tell if those were ironic jazz hands or not—”and then cobblestones, which must’ve been invented by an orthopedic surgeon, and everything is old as fuck and that’s supposed to be special, and the roads”—he cringed with his entire body—”the fucking roads look like a child with no object permanence drew them. They make no sense, none at all, and don’t get me started on the sports. These people and their sports. My god. Do you know about the turkeys? There are turkeys here, Shap, they’re all over the place, they don’t appreciate that we’re sharing their habitat, and they’ll chase the fuck out of you if you’re not careful. And then there’s the coffee, which used to be the only part of my day that didn’t piss me off but now I can’t just order coffee, I have to also join a cult. And you can’t park. You just can’t park in this town. Don’t try. Not worth it, but it means you have to walk on the danger rocks and you better believe they’ll be slippery as hell because all the leaves came down between hot wind season and cold hurricane season so you’ll roll an ankle just to dodge the turkeys and order a regular coffee which you must drink with cream and sugar by order of the cult but it’s going to be free because one of the sports teams finally won a game—and thank fuck for that because they’re not out driving drunk or beating on each other for one blessed night.” He gave a brisk shake of his head. “That’s why I can’t leave.”
I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “Because you hate everything?”
“Yeah. I hate it all so thoroughly that I’m sure I’d never find anywhere else to hate with such completeness. Without all of this resentment, I’d be empty inside.”
I had seen The Worst Guy show up on my social media feeds a lot over the past few weeks. I wasn’t at all sure what I was going to be getting into, and I haven’t read Kate Canterbary before. She does a nice job here of balancing the emotional, the sexy, and the funny.
Content notes: discussion of medical procedures, terrible fathers, past disordered eating, social anxiety and migraines.