“Okay, but she’ll be dating a man who can make blintzes. And you can still cook,” Ari points out, because for some reason, other people’s problems always seem obviously fixable. She hasn’t had a reason to absorb someone else’s pain since Cass left. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s an odd sort of relief from wallowing in her own misery.
Josh stares into the dregs of his wine, his shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths. “I have no interest in stepping foot in another kitchen, not that anyone wants to hire me.” His voice is softer than she’s ever heard it. Resigned. Like the furious, know-it-all energy that used to surround him burned away and left a shell of a person. “Every morning I wake up and remember I have no plans and nothing to look forward to.”
“Well, that’s not true.” Ari swallows, searching her brain for a way to cut the grim direction of the conversation, even though she had the exact same realization when she lay awake at four a.m. on the inflatable mattress. “You just spent eighty-six dollars at CreamPot.”
“I did not need to buy a hands-free lube dispenser,” he points out.
“It’s convenient and hygienic.” She laughs, the last sip of whiskey still burning a streak down her throat. “You’ll thank me the next time you bring a girl back to your place and you’re not fumbling around in your nightstand.”
He finishes his wine. “Don’t be nice to me. It makes me uncomfortable. And I don’t deserve it.”
The Jim Beam makes her want to reach over and squeeze his arm or something. But that much human contact would probably shatter him at this point.
“I think I prefer this version of you. You’re morose as shit, but for once, you’re not acting like an entitled prick.”
The look on Josh’s face is hard to parse, like he’s both offended and pleased. When their eyes meet, it’s as if he sees behind the tight smile she’s been plastering on her face.
Ari slides down from her stool, grabbing her shopping bag—filled with high-end vibrators that she cannot afford—from the hook beneath the counter.
“And men rebound quickly,” she says. “You’ll be knee-deep in some soulmate-level romance in a month or two and you’ll forget we ever had this conversation.”
Ari glances out the window, watching pedestrians move down Greene Street, meeting friends outside restaurants or hurrying home to their loved ones.
There’s no one waiting for her anywhere.
She nods at the street. “Do you…want to take a walk?”
* * *
“AT LEAST YOU don’t have to get divorced,” Ari says.
Josh watches her wrap a crocheted rainbow scarf around her neck as they walk north, auto-piloting vaguely toward Washington Square Park.
“Sophie thought weddings were tacky.” He pauses. “She used the word ‘gauche.’ I always pictured a city hall ceremony. Something simple.”
A trio of tourists brush past him, their Zara shopping bags trailing behind them.
“We got married while I was working on a cruise ship. I wore a striped two-piece.” Ari takes out her phone and scrolls through approximately ten thousand pictures—many of them distractingly…flesh-toned—before selecting a photo and holding it up for him.
He tries to focus on Ari’s bright smile in the photograph and not the bikini. Her nose is a little scrunched up, like she’s about to burst into a laugh next to Cass. There’s nothing artificial or posed about it.
“You keep this picture on your phone?”
“I know, I know.” She tosses her phone back into her tote bag, shaking her head. “Radhya tells me to delete all that stuff but sometimes I find it comforting? The tangible artifacts of happiness. Every time I get a text, it’s like…my heart leaps because I think it might be some huge apology.” Ari buries her chin a little farther into the rainbow scarf. “I can’t believe I just told you that humiliating tidbit.”
I’d give anything for Sophie to text me, he thinks, unclenching his cold, stiff hands.
“You still have the apartment, though?”
“Yes, but I’m living the involuntary minimalist lifestyle,” she continues. “Eating on the floor. Re-inflating my mattress every night.”
“She took the furniture?”
“Well, I guess almost all of it was hers.” A little wrinkle appears above the bridge of her nose. “When I moved to New York, I had one set of utensils and my water bottle. After a couple days, I bought myself a single bowl at Pearl River Mart. It was white, with a blue border around the rim and a dragon at the bottom. I thought it was beautiful. It felt like a New York ‘thing.’？”