She waits for him to either argue or reassure her.
It feels like a full minute before he responds. “Just an hour, huh?” He blinks up at her.
“Too optimistic? Fine. Thirty minutes.”
Ari takes one more hit and gently stubs out the joint, taking a seat next to him. She lets the THC and the cocktails dilute the noise from other people’s celebrations. For right now, it doesn’t feel like a park shared with millions of other people.
“You had one bad experience,” he says.
She shakes her head. “That’s the thing. There were really good parts. If it was all bad it wouldn’t hurt so much and I could just let it go.”
It’s quiet except for the occasional crunch of leaves or errant police siren in the distance.
A long lull.
“Music?” she suggests, not wanting to risk Josh gently drifting off to sleep in Central Park in December.
He reaches in his pocket for his phone, sitting up a little bit.
“？‘Auld Lang Syne’？”
Ari shakes her head. “Play something that feels poignant but not overly celebratory.”
He furrows his brow, sighs, and then types something into Spotify. A few seconds later, the reverb-heavy opening strums of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” ring out through his iPhone.
“This is a perfect fucking song,” he says as the bass guitar kicks in. “Just as Neil Finn intended it to be heard: from a speaker the size of a pebble.”
“Neil who? I thought Miley Cyrus wrote this.” Ari smiles innocently, taking too much pleasure in his exasperated expression. She stands up, immediately feeling stiletto torture pain. “Hey, if we stand under the arch, the sound will bounce.”
“Technically, it’ll reflect.”
She takes a step forward and holds out her hand. “Want to?”
“Dance?” He raises his eyes to hers, like he’s not completely sure if she’s being sincere.
“I mean, we clearly both need the practice and I spent most of that song making sure that curator couldn’t see my nipples.” She makes a more exaggerated gesture. “If you’re waiting for me to lift you over my shoulder you can forget it.”
He grabs her hand, and she pulls him up to stand. They step inside the narrow passageway.
The curved walls amplify the sound, enveloping them in a ghostly echo, with a sliver of the harsh light from a streetlamp streaking across the ground. They forego the hand/shoulder/waist combination they got wrong before. Ari puts her arms around his neck, and he puts his around her waist, with the phone in his hand gently poking into her back through the down coat. They sway from side to side, not really to the beat.
“I’m never sure if this song is melancholy or hopeful,” Josh says, looking down—or is this gazing?—at her in that specific intense way, where it feels like he can see inside her. It’s not banter. It’s not amusement or anger or frustration or any other emotion they’ve volleyed back and forth for two months.
“Can’t it be both?” Ari rests her head against his shoulder, maybe to escape the intimacy of unbroken eye contact, maybe because the music and the rocking back and forth feel like a lullaby.
Or maybe it’s all the cocktails and weed.
It’s probably that.
With her ear pressed to his chest she feels his pulse pounding, fast and erratic. He’d said that was a side effect of smoking, hadn’t he?
Somewhere beyond this cluster of trees the occasional celebratory Whoop! goes up, followed by cheers and noisemakers.
“Almost midnight,” Ari points out.
A strong gust of wind cuts through the archway and the layers of synthetic down she’d just purchased yesterday. Despite her best efforts to channel a warm boozy feeling from the champagne, she visibly shivers.
Which is why she nestles into him.
Josh pulls her in closer and tries to wrap his coat around both of them. It doesn’t quite work—they’re making a shadow on the pavement in the light from the streetlamp that resembles Frankenstein’s monster—but the gesture is nice. Ari waits for him to take a half-step back, but he doesn’t.
Neither does she.
“This year was terrible.” She looks up at him, waiting for him to agree. He’s still giving her that look. “But I’m glad I met you again. Becoming friends was the best thing to happen to me in a long time.” She hears herself sounding sloppier, the pot and the alcohol teaming up and wresting control of the wheel.
He works his jaw like he’s fighting the urge to say something. She’s both desperate to hear it and terrified.