“My mom?” When did this happen? Why hadn’t Ari mentioned this? “Consulting?”
“I’ll be traveling around, teaching improv games to employees of different companies.” She pulls her shirt back down to cover her belly. “It pays really well. Like, an actual salary.”
“Hold on.” Josh shakes his head. “Since when do you want to be a consultant?”
Ari scrambles into a seated position. “You have no idea what I want.”
“What about getting back to performing? What happened to ‘comedy is like magic’？ You’re just giving up?”
Ari’s eyes flash with anger. “Says the person who hasn’t stepped foot in a kitchen for…a year?”
“What about me? Where do I fit into this?” He doesn’t bother to filter out the desperate edge to his voice. He waits for her to present some solution: long visits, weekends in Philly, phone sex. Could he go with her? It’s not like he has a reason to be in New York. He doesn’t have a reason to be anywhere.
She continues in the same suspiciously careful tone: “We can go back to the way things were. Over the phone. Before the…” Ari tilts her head and gives a little shrug.
“Before the what?” He waits for her to utter the word, knowing it’s not coming. “Say it.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Josh. You can keep dating. I’ll keep, you know, whatever—”
“We had sex.” God-fucking-dammit. “And I don’t want to go back, Ari. You’d rather be lonely together, over the fucking phone? Do you honestly think I want to hear about you doing ‘whatever’？ Listen to yourself.” He feels his hands balling into fists and unfurling and balling again. “It unlocked something.”
“I’m not good at this part,” she insists. “It’s not personal.”
“？‘It’s not pers—’？” He looks up at the ceiling like he’s begging for divine intervention. “We’re not pretending this didn’t happen. Not this time. We already crossed that line, Ari. You can’t move it again.” Josh’s face turns from confused to mildly accusatory.
“You’re not listening to me.” It sounds like a warning, but she doesn’t get just how much he already understands her. “I’m not ready to unlock anything right now. I’m still grieving.”
“You’re ‘grieving’？” He grabs one of the shirts and throws it down onto the wood floor with a surprising amount of force. “She’s a narcissist who cheated on you and left. You’re letting this woman dictate your life and she doesn’t give a fuck about you anymore. I know it hurt your pride when she walked out. Because you’re the person who disappears in the middle of the night. You’re the one who leaves. Which is exactly what you’re trying to do right now.”
The look on her face is surprisingly wounded. “You already got the fun part. I don’t know what else you want from me.”
Josh gestures at the space between them. “This is supposed to be the fun part.”
“I’m having a great time, how about you?”
He leans closer to her, so that he can see her exact reaction to the words that are on the tip of his tongue. “I know what I want.” He has a heady, dizzying feeling like this is it. The last shot. “I want everything and I’ll give you everything.” He reaches out and brushes his hand over her hair. “You don’t just find that with someone and walk away.”
“We’re already fighting!” Her head moves back, away from his hand.
“I know there’s something here. I know it, Ari. I know you feel it, too.”
“Every bitterly divorced couple feels that way in the beginning. None of your problems matter because there’s someone to be your everything and take care of you. They’re the antidote to every little thing you hate about yourself. They can see past it when you can’t.” She shifts her whole body another inch away from him. “But eventually, you wake up and all the stuff you pushed down comes back up again. Every stupid, irritating thing about the other person becomes an argument. They get needy and demanding, they hide things from you—little things that your gut tells you are actually big things—and you start to feel paranoid and insane. You blame each other for all the ways that your lives aren’t working out. For all the decisions that made sense at the time but were fucking terrible in retrospect. And suddenly there isn’t any magic gluing the two of you together. You’re just two idiots arguing over who gets custody of the dinnerware.”