“You have to come in. I want a photo of me in there for my feed. Potential spon-con! Plus, they only let cis men in here if they’re accompanied by a woman or nonbinary person,” she adds. “It’s your lucky day.”
On the other side of the heavy glass door, the space is stark white—like an Apple Store without all the greasy fingerprints. A concrete plinth displays a small sculpture in bold fuchsia that almost looks like a toy Sophie kept in her nightstand.
He stops walking. “I thought this was a skincare boutique.”
“Chlo? Sevigny swears by this place.” Briar starts snapping photos of the layout from various high angles.
Josh shoves his hands in his pockets. It’s best not to pick anything up and risk dropping it or touching some invisible on button. “I’m not standing in here with you like we’re shopping together.”
Briar’s attention abruptly shifts.
He follows her sight line to a woman in a plaid peacoat standing under a display labeled Realistic Dildos in a tasteful typeface.
Images flash through his mind, like someone flipping through a stack of half-developed Polaroids. Huge chunks of the past eight years are completely wiped from his brain, but every tiny interaction he’s had with this woman is burned into his memory. He’s never been able to overwrite them.
Ari is holding something phallic, turning it over in her hands, while casting the occasional glance in Josh’s direction. Her hair is longer than last time, brown again, falling softly around her shoulders under a slouchy winter hat. She’s coziness personified, despite the sterile surroundings.
“Do you know her?” Briar whispers, elbowing him in the chest.
“She married your professor.”
“Wow. Is that her?” she exclaims with dawning recognition. “Oh my God. She’s coming over.” Briar ducks behind a row of stark white shelves.
“Where are you going?” He finds himself instinctively looking for a hiding spot of his own, when—
“Josh?”
He turns around. Ari is two feet away. “Uh—”
She points at her chest with a coral-colored glass tentacle dildo. “Ari.”
“No, I know.” Josh watches Briar silently flee the store. “I was just—”
“Shopping for vibrators?” she asks, eyebrows raised.
“—leaving. What are you doing here?”
She shrugs and holds up the dildo again. “You just missed Radhya, actually.”
That’s a relief. It’s within the realm of possibility that Radhya would try to knock him unconscious with something phallic.
“How are you?” he asks, after a few beats of awkward silence and weight-shifting.
“Great,” Ari says quickly. “Yeah, really good.” She nods and looks over his shoulder. “Fine.”
“How’s…your wife?”
A strange expression passes over her face. She shifts the tentacle from one hand to the other. “She’s spending the semester upstate as a visiting scholar. She’s…fine.” Her mouth turns into a tight line before curving into an approximation of a smile. “According to Instagram, she’s fine.”
Josh is genuinely stunned for a moment. Not because of the apparent breakup—that doesn’t surprise him at all. It’s the uncharacteristic shakiness of her voice.
“I’m sorry,” he says, actually meaning it. “What happened?”
“Two weeks ago, Cass showed up at the apartment with a ‘totally brilliant young adjunct professor’ she met at Bard. Katya. At first I didn’t think anything of it, because we’ve been practicing relationship anarchy.”
“？‘Relationship anarchy’？”
“Yeah, we unchained ourselves from society’s expectations of a long-term relationship.” Ari’s nodding as she says it but she swallows hard enough that Josh can see her throat bob. “Then I saw the movers covering the furniture in bubble wrap and I realized that she didn’t bring the woman with a PhD and huge breasts back to our place for a threesome.”
Oh fuck. She’s on the verge of tears because of his awkward attempts at polite conversation and how the hell do you navigate around divorce talk?
“I—”
“I guess she’s doing the relationship anarchy thing with Katya now.” Ari rocks back and forth on her boots with jittery energy. “I mean, this woman is twenty-six and raises goats on a hobby farm and Cass always liked blondes”—she spits the words out quickly—“so why wouldn’t she reinvent herself yet again with an even younger woman?”