A couple weeks ago, she had just started The Grand Budapest Hotel when Natalie got home from some underground supper club, wine-drunk but not quite sleepy. Ari pretended to pay attention to the art direction, while breathing in the subtle scent of the mysterious product that makes Natalie’s hair shiny and soft. She touched Ari’s thigh every time she laughed. If making someone laugh is the best feeling in the world, making someone laugh while they’re touching your thigh is like…the best feeling in the world plus a tiny hit of ecstasy. The arm touch was almost better than the orgasm Nat gave her ten minutes later.
Almost.
There have been two-and-a-half repeat performances of “movie night,” after which they each retreated to their separate rooms to sleep. Or, in Ari’s case, lie in her rickety lofted twin bed with a goofy smile on her face, staring at the remnants of some previous tenant’s glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Perhaps she’d stumbled on the perfect sexual relationship: reasonably satisfying and free of emotional turmoil.
But she hadn’t met any of Natalie’s dates until now. Why has Nat automatically granted this guy “boyfriend” status, while Ari is an uncredited cameo? What makes him lovable （seriously, how?） and Ari merely fuckable?
The sound of a sharp blade against the wooden cutting board resumes behind her, in steady, exacting strikes, like a constant audio reminder of his presence in her space. His assumptions. His opinions.
“So you’ve never even cooked Natalie breakfast?”
“We go out,” he replies, over the chopping. “Why? Do you usually treat your dates to Red Bull and Pop-Tarts when they finally roll out of bed?”
She lets out something between a laugh and a snort. “I’m long gone by the time they wake up.”
There’s a slight hiccup to the rhythm of his knife strokes. “What do you mean? You just get up and leave?”
“I like to wake up in my own bed,” she explains, polishing off the second corn dog. “It’s simpler.”
“Ah.” He resumes his knife work with a dramatic eye roll. “A true romantic.”
“You think it’s romantic sharing a bed with a stranger?” Ari stands up and walks her plate to the sink. “Either you wake up in a weird place in the morning or you have to kick someone out of your apartment. Anyway, I don’t participate in the romance industrial complex.” She scrubs the dish with enough vigor to leave scratches. “It’s a distraction that keeps women dependent on men for validation.” Maybe that statement is troublingly heteronormative but Josh is probably troublingly heteronormative, too.
She watches Josh place a pat of butter in a large pot on the stove. Upon closer inspection, he has the type of face that photos get wrong: a prominent brow, weak chin, serious dark eyes, and a long nose. His profile could’ve been chiseled into marble twenty-five hundred years ago. Handsome from some angles, harsh from others. The sort of person you meet once in passing but remember five years later.
Ari doesn’t have that thing—that distinctive quality. People glance at her and decide there’s someone more interesting to her left. Even dying her hair an outrageous shade of pink didn’t help her stand out in this city. After attending just one festival in McCarren Park, she concluded that at least one fifth of all women in Brooklyn also have pink hair.
“Did you form these opinions based on life experience?” He fiddles with the knob on the dreaded electric stove, lowering the heat. “Or a handful of readings from Intro to Women’s Studies?”
“Are you always this condescending?”
“Are you always this na?ve?” He’s still crouched down, at eye level with the stove top.
She reaches across him for a dish towel, blocking his access to the stove. “It’s ‘na?ve’ to buy into the patriarchal myth of monogamy.”
“The patriarchal myth?” He grabs the towel from the hook on the lower cabinet door and thrusts it in her direction. “Move so I don’t scorch my Le Creuset on this fucking Maytag coil.”
“You genuinely believe the soulmate narrative peddled by Hallmark and those tacky Kay Jewelers commercials? Where a man surprises a woman with a little black ring box and it’s supposed to be some kind of huge life achievement?”
“Hallmark didn’t invent soulmates,” he says. “They just made it more marketable.” Josh places a cover on the pot of simmering water and turns to face her. “If you want to assign blame, take it up with Plato.”