You, Again(82)

“You guys have been performing without me for months. You don’t need me.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re actually considering doing this.” He thrusts her phone back at her. “Not you.”

“You played Gaston in Japan for six months!”

“That’s acting,” he insists. “This? Is disloyal. It’s selling out. You’re better than this.”

“I’m just considering my options.”

They stare at each other for a long beat before Gabe shakes his head and walks away. It’s somehow more cutting than a huge blowup. There’s something especially awful about his subdued disillusionment.

Ari takes a breath in, turns around, and heads for the exit, fumbling to swipe the WinProv website off the phone screen.

Something even more fraught replaces it.

Mon, Jan 16, 9:57 p.m.

Josh: Sup.



It’s almost worse than heart emojis.

She stumbles through the doorway and into the chilly night air, hitting call before she can decide not to.



* * *





JOSH PACES THE length of his apartment in large, steady steps.

“You were chatty today,” Ari says. “Is there anyone in this city you didn’t contact this morning?”

“That was an accident,” he points out.

“I don’t want to get a congratulatory message from your mom next…or your therapist, or your accountant.” There’s a long pause.

“Can we talk about this?”

“Can we?” The line goes silent for thirty seconds. His jaw is practically grinding into the phone until she adds, “It was—”

“—fucking amazing.”

“—kind of insane?”

“But in a good way.” He’s careful not to add any hint of a question mark to that statement. He wanders aimlessly into the bedroom and flops down dramatically on his uncharacteristically unmade bed.

“Why is this hard all of a sudden?” she asks. “No pun intended.”

“Because there was no way we could keep going like that forever.”

There’s another long pause. Too long.

Uncomfortably long.

Finally, she breaks the standoff. “Like what forever?”

“Like two people who desperately want to be more than friends but never act on it.” There’s another thirty seconds of silence. “We could just start with a normal conversation,” he suggests. “You could tell me about your day.”

“Okay, let’s see.” She clears her throat. “So interesting thing happened yesterday. I went home with this guy I’ve been hanging out with. And we just, like, boned. Out of nowhere.”

“You boned?” he says. To be fair, this is the kind of thing she would tell him on a random Monday. “How intimate. Definitely the biggest dick you’ve ever encountered, right?”

She makes a kind of squeaking noise. “Honestly,” she says in a solemn tone, “I was frightened of its massive girth.”

Josh nods. “I can see why you’re so into him.”

“When did I say that?”

“That’s true.” He leans back into the headboard. “You never have.”

“That’s the thing,” she says. “Who am I going to text about you?”

“You can text me about how adequate I am. It’s probably the most positive feedback I’ve received in a year.”

“I hate when you say things like that—”

“Do you want to have dinner? Just dinner.” Fuck it. “Unless you also want to have sex. In which case it would be both.”

She sighs. “I’m waiting for Gabe to go on. I promised to come to a bringer show. That’s, like, a sacred pact.” There’s another interminable silence before she says, “Let’s just…pause for a few days?” There’s a careful quality to the way she says it that sets off alarm bells in his head. “Don’t read too much into this, but”—great, now his brain is ready and waiting to assign subtext to words she hasn’t even spoken—“I don’t think we should get swept up in something without really considering it in the cold light of day.”

“It sounds like you’re considering it in the dark confines of a comedy club.”

“Josh, every part of my life is in some stage of upheaval right now.” He can hear the swirling panic in her voice. “I like you in, like, fourteen specific ways and we probably just blew up our entire relationship. Can we just…give ourselves some time to—”

“Okay. Okay you’re right.” He adopts the calming inflection of a hostage negotiator. “Let’s talk in a few days.”

“Cool.” Hearing the obvious relief in the sigh she lets out makes his own throat feel tighter.

“You know,” he says, adjusting his tone, “I noticed I didn’t get a polite thank-you text today. I thought that was your standard operating procedure.”

“Well, you didn’t actually go down on me.”

“Because you never put on the clown costume like I told you to.”

He imagines her smiling at that—that little glint of sly charm that feels so fucking good to see. “I’m not much of a good girl. More of a brat, really.”