As soon as the door slams shut, Ari appears at Josh’s left side, holding out her donation binder and a ballpoint pen.
After he sets down his bags and prints his credit card number in neat block letters, Ari gestures grandly and announces, “This is the kitchen. Don’t burn the apartment down.”
Josh tilts his head, looking past her. “A fucking electric stove?”
Ari glances at the aging unit that doesn’t even have a vent hood. “What’s wrong with it?”
“There’s no heat control, no subtlety, no flame. It’s either scalding or lukewarm.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” She shrugs. “Pretend you’re on one of those cooking competition shows where you have to start your own fire.”
He narrows his eyes at her and begins digging in his backpack, removing his supplies. There’s barely enough room on the granite-patterned vinyl counter to organize the ingredients and the equipment he’s brought. When he looks up, he’s surprised to see Natalie’s roommate opening the magnet-covered refrigerator door. He’d assumed she would make herself scarce.
“I’m also making dinner,” Ari explains, bending at the waist to grab a box of MorningStar Farms veggie corn dogs out of the freezer drawer below.
“You have a little bit of an accent when you’re ranting about appliances,” she says, setting two corn dogs on a plate. “Did you grow up here?”
“Upper West Side.”
She looks thoughtful as she shuts the microwave door. “Maybe it’s the transplant in me, but I’ve always been jealous of the weird accent. I like it.”
He blinks, unsure how to take the—well, it’s not technically a compliment is it?
He removes a crisply folded list of timings from his bag and centers his maple cutting board over a clean white dish towel. With the space back under his control, he can channel his energy into transforming organic carrots into identical batonnets.
For a few minutes, they manage to ignore each other despite the tight confines. Once the carrots look as if they’ve been processed at a tiny lumber mill, Josh places a small kabocha squash on his cutting board and retrieves his cleaver. Overkill, perhaps, but the kabocha has extremely firm skin and he hadn’t wanted to risk struggling with it in front of Natalie. Plus, cleaving anything provides a nice amount of drama. He gives the squash a small thwack next to the vine, covers the spine of the cleaver with a towel, and forces it down through the flesh.
“You didn’t mention you were wielding a cleaver when you asked to enter my apartment,” Ari says, removing her dinner from the microwave and setting it on the counter. “Can I try it?”
He takes a breath, but not so deep as to inhale the aroma of corn dogs.
The automatic response is obviously no. He hadn’t planned on audience participation. But if he did hand her the cleaver, what could happen?
She could drop it. Dull the blade. Waste the squash by incompetently hacking away at it. He might need to demonstrate using a rocking motion. She would have to get close to him.
It’s a terrible idea.
To his own surprise Josh nods at the space in front of him. “Stand here. Grip the handle like—no, like this,” he says, moving her fingers.
“Are you always this bossy?” she mutters, setting the cleaver through the skin and pushing the blade down, leaning all her weight on it. “I mean, I’m not not into that.”
As a rule, Josh doesn’t let other cooks—let alone amateurs—touch his knives. He doesn’t want their grubby fingerprints on his equipment, selecting the tongs when a spoon is needed, sprinkling an unnecessary pinch of salt over his perfectly seasoned protein.
And yet…the way she’s touching something that belongs to him creates this strange, buzzy sensation on the back of his neck.
“I never learned to cook,” she says. She cuts the squash into an array of sizes and wedge shapes that Josh will have to trim in a few minutes. At least she manages not to chop off a fingertip. “I lived with my grandma, and her culinary skills began and ended with the microwave.” Ari rocks forward each time she presses the blade down and Josh is eighty percent certain that she’s not wearing a bra.
He clears his throat. “So you came to New York to work for a pyramid scheme that tricks college students into marketing scams disguised as do-gooder bullshit?”
“I came here to do comedy.” Josh makes a mental note not to ask a follow-up and risk being invited to a terrible open mic. “But I actually am an excellent canvasser. I’m very good at finding common ground with strangers.” She looks up from the cutting board. “Except for right now.”
He finds himself analyzing the details of her features. Round, flushed cheeks and a sharp chin, with a lower lip that’s significantly fuller than the upper. There’s some expression spreading over her face—confusion, if he’s being optimistic; kindling annoyance, if he’s honest. But he’s always been better at arguing than flirting.
Not that he wants to flirt with her.
After a beat, Ari sets down the cleaver and pushes the cutting board toward him. He feels himself exhale.
“Thanks for the lesson.” She wipes her hands on a towel and fills a water glass directly from the faucet. Josh makes a mental note to buy Natalie a filter pitcher. “But I guess it’s the least you could do after interrupting my evening.”
“I interrupted your evening?”
“Yes.” Ari tucks a bottle of yellow mustard under her arm and returns to the living room, plopping down on the couch. “I had big plans for my night alone.”
“But you weren’t really by yourself, were you?” He pauses. “If you want privacy you could…go to your room?”
“It’s sweltering in there. The window in my room is too small for an air conditioner.” She reaches for the remote. “Why should I have to go anywhere? This is my apartment.”
* * *
“ISN’T IT NATALIE’S apartment?” Josh grabs the handle of the saucepan and shakes it around. “Technically?”
“I pay half the rent,” Ari says, seething at the TV, unpausing the movie from where she and Gabe left off, dipping a corn dog into a giant puddle of mustard.
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.”