He rolls his eyes. “Should I leave you three alone?”
“Is it suspicious that the man is a lot chattier than his wife? I think he copy-pasted one of those listicles with sexting tips. Look.” She hands him her device. “？‘What panties are you wearing?’？”
“Costco?” He scans the brightly colored text bubbles. “You responded ‘none.’？”
She’s labeled her conversational partner salt & pepper man + blond hotwife .
He continues reading. “？‘You look so beautiful, but you’d look even better with my tongue inside you.’？” He places the phone back in her palm without looking her in the eye. “These are people you want to spend time with?”
“I know, right? They didn’t even specify whose tongue!”
The clerk offers Ari a grand total of $1.35 in store credit, even though Cass’s copy of Daring Greatly had been inscribed （“To Cass, without whom I would never have dared at all. —B”）。
His cookbooks fare better, but he doesn’t care about the $7.78. It’s the principle of the thing. He doesn’t need David Chang and Grant Achatz taunting him from the covers of their memoirs.
Ari grabs a shopping basket and pulls a half-dozen books off the shelves on the main level. Josh peels off and spends a few minutes in the Linguistics section, eventually meandering, accidentally or not, to Cooking.
The glossy covers—grinning chefs holding artfully composed dishes—remind him of the life that seems like a false memory now. The food itself looks appealing, even though it’s all lighting and shellac. He can barely remember what part of it appealed to him.
Josh descends the stairs to the lowest floor, where Ari is leaning against the railing on the landing.
“See, I could’ve ghosted you ten minutes ago.” She’s standing one step above him, making them almost the same height. “But here I am.”
Maybe it’s seeing her face from a shallower angle, or the way her mood lifted after getting rid of the last remnants of Cass. Or the slight case of raccoon eyes from wearing non-waterproof mascara in the falling snow.
“You probably realized that you need my seven dollars of bookselling profit to pay for your pierogis.”
“Actually, I need your muscular forearms. Here,” she says, handing him her full basket of books and nearly overextending his elbow with the weight of it. “Put the gym time to good use.”
“You’re expecting me to carry these all the way back to my place?”
The elevator dings.
“Yes, because I just agreed to spend a national holiday making small talk with your mother.” Ari makes a sweeping gesture in front of the bright red elevator door. “Reason number two why the Strand is the perfect date location: good make-out spots.”
“You bring dates into the elevator to make out?” he asks, stepping inside. “It’s only four floors. I hope you didn’t have anything gymnastic in mind.”
“I meant the Rare Book Room. But I like the way you think.” They stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the doors close. The elevator lurches to the next stop. “You’re the one taking all those yoga classes.” Ari turns her head and looks up at him. Her parka—his, actually—grazes his cashmere coat.
“Are you asking for a demonstration?” His eyes move back and forth across her face, taking in the small details that are only visible close-up: the little scar on her forehead, the flicker of a smile, the dimple. She’s leaning against the back wall of the elevator so casually. Too casually? He can’t quite decode whether she’s merely playing along or there’s some glimmer of potential behind it. Had they met here eight years ago—or five years ago, or three years ago—as total strangers, maybe everything would’ve been different.
“That depends,” she says. The doors open onto the Rare Book Room but neither of them move, even though there’s someone—a tall figure in glasses and a blazer—waiting just outside the elevator, reading a brochure. “Are you one of those men who goes down on a woman for three minutes with minimal enthusiasm, but also expects a messy blow job thirty seconds later?”
Before he can summon a response to…that, the figure looks up.
“Ar?”
14
NEITHER JOSH NOR “AR” LOOKS over right away, like they’d rather not break whatever spell they’d been under by acknowledging the metaphorical elephant standing three feet away.
“Oh my God.” Cass takes a step forward. “How are you?”