Josh takes three of the deepest breaths of his life. His mind feels blank, like there’s a blinking cursor waiting for a line of code.
He lets himself roll onto his back and disposes of the condom, missing the trash can and not caring. He pulls Ari closer, resting her head on his shoulder. Her eyes are still closed. He can feel her pulse racing, her slightly erratic breathing slowly growing steadier until she drifts off.
She might wake up and feel differently about everything. Which, now that he’s coming down from whatever the fuck possessed him thirty seconds ago, seems increasingly, terrifyingly plausible.
On the other hand, Ari is nestled into him, perfectly calm and trusting. That’s fucking amazing, too.
He could let himself sleep.
But he won’t.
He feels good so rarely—why waste it on his traitorous subconscious? Not when she’s clinging—actually fucking clinging—to him. He strokes her hair with his left hand.
No. He’d stay awake for days for this.
19
ARI BLINKS HER EYES OPEN with a jolt. Ten feet over her head, there’s a beige plaster ceiling with a long, disconcerting crack running from the light fixture to the molding. It’s been forever since she’s woken up in a strange bed.
Ari wipes some drool from the corner of her mouth. Her hand connects with a shoulder. Which she’s apparently been using as a pillow.
Oh no.
Several key memories from the very recent past flood her brain. This isn’t a strange bed. She’s seen it several times before. Just not from this angle.
It doesn’t seem to be fully light out. There’s frost on the windowpane but it’s about a million degrees under the covers. She’s forgotten how men magically become radiators at night.
Ari carefully turns onto her side to better position herself for a silent escape, but his shoulder stirs and seems to follow her, definitively shutting the window in which she could have surreptitiously slipped out of bed and retrieved her dress from the living room. Shit. He closes the gap between her back and his chest and hello, yes, we are both extremely naked.
“Hey.” The voice is low and soft. It’s Josh, but some new, weird version of him that’s already speaking to her in a different tone.
“Is it, uh, morning?” She grabs the duvet and holds it to her chest the way women do in PG-13 movies. “Did you fall asleep, too?”
“A little bit.” His mouth twitches. “There was also some quiet snoring and I lost circulation in my left arm.”
“Oh my God.” Ari pushes back, scrambling closer to the edge of the bed. “Why did you let me do that? You should’ve just rolled me over.” Untangling herself from the sheets—when did she even get under the sheets?—she touches her feet to the creaking floorboards and hesitates. “Do you have a shirt or something I could borrow?” It’s not that she’s usually shy about the journey to the bathroom. But right now, in the quiet and without the rush of adrenaline or hormones or pheromones or whatever the hell was coursing through their veins last night, she feels even more exposed. And cold.
Josh looks up at her with a bemused expression. “With your reputation for stealing shirts? No, I’m sorry. I can’t risk it.”
She waits for him to relent and point to a drawer full of black T-shirts, organized by cotton weight.
He doesn’t. There’s the hint of a grin on his face—some new boldness, as if the mischievous element of their dynamic flipped overnight.
“You’re ridiculous.” Ari doesn’t see anything in the immediate vicinity, so she steels herself and rushes out of the room, hoping that motion blur is a thing in real life. She retrieves her tote bag from where she’d dropped it in the living area and locks herself in the bathroom: her preferred location for emotional meltdowns.
After peeing and washing her hands with the kind of fancy soap you’d expect to find next to Ina Garten’s sink, she checks her face and hair in the mirror. Predictably, it’s an eyeliner catastrophe. She gathers her hair back into a bun, thereby discouraging Josh from trying to run his fingers through it again. Reset expectations.
She finds a towel—of course he keeps a neat stack of luxury bath sheets in here—and sets it down over the freezing tile, just sitting for a few minutes in the merciful privacy.
It was supposed to be just sex. An inevitable resolution. It fits in a compartment that has a label and a lid and a compactor pushes it down and out of sight. That’s how this usually works.
Sure, every so often when she’s enraged or can’t stop crying or when the weed isn’t dialing down the feelings from an eleven to a manageable four or five, the compartment explodes and litters the other chambers in her brain with emotional shrapnel. She takes a day off, watches every filmed version of Pride and Prejudice, consumes a couple edibles, and starts the containment process over again.