She wants to answer. She wants to argue that he was so much more than that. But the words don’t come. He should be with someone who doesn’t make it so fucking difficult to be in love with them.
“You warned me, you know. You said we’d hurt each other. And I was so concerned with making you feel safe, it just didn’t occur to me that…” He sniffles, maybe. “You were right.”
Josh walks toward her, and for two ridiculous seconds, she thinks maybe it was all some big fake out. Like he might reach out his hand and just…
He walks right past her.
Ari watches him quietly stomp down the back hallway, leaving her in the dark kitchen.
She’s still in a liminal space, where her brain hasn’t quite processed the conversation. It feels like it might still be possible to rewind five minutes and try it again. Only she’s not sure how it could have gone differently. They’d have to take it back so much further to make any kind of meaningful revision.
It only takes a few more seconds for her brain to turn a corner into emotional torture porn.
This is the last time we’ll ever speak. This is the last time we’ll ever speak.
Yeah. That feels good and painful. The sweating, the panic setting in, the churning thoughts stabbing at her brain like a needle into the skin. Like getting a really detailed tattoo over scar tissue. All her good Josh memories getting rewritten with this one.
Ari takes a wobbly step farther back into the dining room. The shock wears off and morphs into giant waves of emotion building in her chest, unstoppable and overwhelming. She covers her mouth with her hand to muffle the sobbing in case Josh can still hear. On the radio, there’s a commercial for a personal injury attorney. How fitting.
Ari’s about thirty seconds deep into the breakdown when a few familiar notes, heavy with reverb, ring out through the boom box speakers. Neil Finn launches into the first verse and it’s clearly a cruel cosmic joke that the “classic feel-good hits” DJ would put on “Don’t Dream It’s Over” at this precise moment.
27
ARI SIPS FROM A LUKEWARM bottle of Bud Light. She’s both jealous and relieved that she’s not the sweating guy at the microphone with a quivering handful of index cards.
It took two trains and a bus to get here from her sublet and she’d been relieved to find that the trip wasn’t for nothing: Gabe still hosts this open mic every Thursday evening. There’s no better setup for an apology than showing up at one of his events.
Gabe finishes reading Brad’s email and hands the phone back to her. “Did you burn that hideous blue shirt?”
“He withheld my last paycheck until I returned it.”
“And now you want to rejoin our Harold team?” He checks the timer on his phone. “Is that why you’re here?”
“You never made me perform in a button-down,” Ari says.
“Well, there is no team. Tim and Kamal left for Second City. Selina went to L.A. for pilot auditions and never came back. It’s been kind of hard to perform with only two people.”
“Gabe.” She sets the bottle down. “I’m sorry. I get that it was a sellout move, I just…needed a reset. And money.”
“The paycheck I understand.” He looks over his sign-up sheet and checks his watch. “You abandoned the group months before you left on your adventure in corporate America. You fed me some bullshit about being too busy. That was the insult. You could have just been honest.”
“You’re right.” Ari swallows hard. “Can I cash in my spousal abandonment sympathy points for another drink?”
Gabe signals the bored bartender for another round.
“The thing is,” he says, “I think you already cashed all of those in.”
She peels the label from the new beer bottle. “Why do I feel like I’ve been running laps for the entirety of my twenties, trying to make this a viable career?”
“Ari.” He looks her right in the eye, like they’re in the middle of an uncomfortable acting exercise. “You feel exhausted because you’re specifically not doing the thing that used to replenish your well. We came here to work shitty service-industry jobs so we could do that.” He gestures at the makeshift stage.
“Bombing at an open mic is some kind of reward for refilling pitchers of bottomless mimosas every Sunday?”
“No, but at this point you’re only doing the shitty service-industry part.” Gabe flashes the one-minute light at the open mic performer with the glistening forehead. “At least that guy is living his dream.”