“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.
“Ari, I—”
“Because you’re so important to me. You have no idea. You’re kind of the best thing to happen to me in a long time.”
“You said that already.” His eyes move across her face.
“I did?”
The arch seems to be rocking back and forth like a seesaw. She puts her head back down on his chest and closes her eyes. That helps. Neil Finn sings about counting the steps to the door of your heart.
The fuzzy sounds of revelers on Central Park West become louder. A noisy group stops on the bridge directly above them, over the arch.
“I think it’s almost midnight,” she says, lifting her head. The cheering in the distance grows louder.
“You said that already, too.” Friends don’t look at each other like that, eyes darting down to her lips every so often. “You’re so—”
“Are we going to—you know…” Ari trails off, feeling him breathing through his tuxedo jacket, heavy and even. “Um…after the countdown?”
“Yes.”
The song seems to grow bigger, the bass line of the chorus echoing off the stone over their heads.
There’s chanting from the buildings across the park. “Ten!…Nine!…”
She swallows. “Like, a peck on the cheek or—”
“No.”
“Eight!…Seven!…”
“So, quickly, but on the lips?”
“No.”
“Six!”
“I just want to know—”
“Five!”
“—so we don’t do something awkward, because—”
“Four!”
“—it’s kind of a one-shot deal.”
“Three!”
“It is.”
Ari feels his right hand move up her spine all the way to the back of her head, and God, she really can feel everything through this coat. They stop the half-hearted swaying, even though the song isn’t over. His fingers twist slightly in her hair.
“Two!”
The prickly sensation running along the back of her neck is probably from the wind kicking up. It’s not because he tugs her head back a little bit and looks at her in that way that makes her feel completely exposed, even though she’s wrapped in a thick layer of polyfill and down. She closes her eyes.
There must be a “One!” but neither of them hear it.
Her head tilts to the right and she feels Josh’s lower lip graze hers. That tiny amount of contact ignites something in her chest. Ari grabs at his lapels, pulling him closer, parting, opening, inviting. He obliges with a trace of caution, pressing in again.
His lips are soft and tentative against hers, the friction warming them against the winter air. He pulls back for a moment, just far enough to search her face. His expression is resolute but he’s waiting for something. Ari lets out a shaky exhale and nods.
He doesn’t move yet.
“Josh…” She’s about to tug at his coat again, when he suddenly lowers his head, moving just past her left cheek.
Her breath hitches as Josh’s nose brushes behind her ear, followed by his lips. He pulls her hair again, this time to the right for better access to her neck. Her whole body shivers as his mouth passes over a thousand tiny nerve endings, all of them firing at once. Her stomach tightens. How is he doing this? Why does he have this innate sense of where and how she wants to be touched?
Some first kisses are hurried—an awkward tangle of hands and noses.
But Josh takes his time, spurred on by little whimpers that she can’t hold in, moving lazily down her neck and kissing along her jawline until they come face-to-face again.
This is the first point at which they could—should—stop.
But they don’t.
The celebratory roar of a million strangers recedes into the background. Ari murmurs his name just before she pulls his head down, so their lips meet again. Some element of his restraint snaps as he slides his tongue into her mouth with an urgency that leaves her breathless. Josh’s fingers move across her collarbone, thumbs meeting at the base of her throat.