Okay, yes, the office is basically still Cass’s. But Ari has more than half the dresser drawers. And in this city, offering storage space is the ultimate expression of love.
Among the many pleasant discoveries when Ari moved in: Two of the three drawers in Cass’s bedside table are filled with sex toys—a bounty of purple vibrating silicone that Ari could only have concocted in a dream. Maybe she would have been more open to the idea of committed relationships earlier if she’d known that married life is like a never-ending sleepover, with a lot more sex.
* * *
CASS TUGS AT Ari’s wrist. “Ar, this is Briar and her date, Josh, uh, Something.”
“Ew, no,” Briar says, backing away, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“Ar” takes a step forward. Josh braces himself for her to splash a drink over the front of his suit, but she doesn’t erupt in anger. Her glassy eyes move around the room, unfocused, aiming at nothing—over his shoulder, to his left, up at the ceiling—before finding their way to his face.
“I know you.” She squints through the dim lighting, pushing her index finger into his chest with each syllable. “Tall Nightmare Sweater Man!”
Briar watches this unfold in a hard-seltzer-tinged state of astonishment.
“W-what?” Josh angles his head back an inch as she lurches toward him again, squinting at his face. He blinks, trying to process this new version of Ari Sloane run through a high-contrast filter: the blond hair, dark lipstick, dramatic eye makeup.
“Ar, come on. Stop harassing him.” Cass laughs. She tucks a shiny lock of hair behind Ari’s ear, letting a finger graze her neck. “Ar” bites her lower lip and rolls her shoulder in apparent pleasure.
Sophie says his Love Language is “words of affirmation,” rather than “physical touch.” It sounds accurate. Reasonable. Convenient for two people who primarily communicate through their phones. But watching other people express affection, he feels the lack of it.
He and Sophie aren’t the kind of people who need to be joined at the hip at social events. They don’t have those unsubtle “help me” signals. They’d never developed a goofy shared dialect of nonsense inside jokes and nicknames.
In these moments—the occasional pang of envy over something subtly tender—he reminds himself that long-distance relationships foster a different kind of connection. All the mundane trappings of daily life get stripped away. You’re left with the most important things, not the arguments over who ate the last of the almond butter.
“Will you keep touching my hair?” Ari asks. “It feels amazing.”
But something draws Cass’s attention across the cavernous space.
“Dasha!” Cass calls, looking over Josh’s shoulder. She waves and turns back to Ari. “Be right back.” With a quick glance over her shoulder, she pushes through the circle and marches across the warehouse floor toward a gaggle of podcasters and someone who probably played a corpse on two different iterations of Law & Order.
Briar’s sitting on the floor in a circle of rich kids dressed like dirtbags, held rapt by one particularly loud dirtbag.
What a fucking mistake it was to come here. He makes two slow circles around the room. Josh climbs the stairs to the upper level and examines the spines on a dangerously leaning bookcase while nursing a subpar merlot from a clear plastic cup, clutching his phone like a security blanket. He taps on it every so often, as if to say, “I’m so in-demand and important that I need to answer my correspondence at eleven forty-two on New Year’s Eve.”
For a while, Ari is at the center of an impromptu dance floor, sometimes rubbing up against strangers, some of whom are very receptive. He wouldn’t describe it as good dancing, but there’s a fluidity to the way she moves. Not self-conscious at all.
After the second serving of wine, which somehow tastes worse than the first, he loses track of her.
He checks his phone again.
Josh: I’m ready to leave.
Briar: who is this
No message from Sophie yet. The Uber app is stuck on an endless loading screen.
Josh wanders into an empty bedroom where a dozen coats have been deposited on an unmade bed, shuts the door, and calls Sophie. Being alone provides an immediate sense of relief, putting distance between his ears and the subwoofers. Straight to voicemail. He sighs, tapping the red X on his iPhone.
Maybe she’s at a similarly bleak party. Maybe she’s pacing around some stranger’s bedroom, seeking refuge from the thumping music on the other side of the thin drywall.