“Ari needs time.” She shapes a knob of dough into an almost perfect circle. “I happen to know something about this.”
Timing has already fucked them over twice.
* * *
“I TRULY THINK arms are the new thighs,” Briar proclaims, running her hand over Gabe’s biceps. “I mean, traps? Scaps? Forearms? We’re gonna see more rowing gyms and, like, rooms full of pull-up machines.” She’s managed to tuck her legs beneath her on a small wooden chair and look perfectly comfortable.
“Yes!” Gabe cries, slapping his open palm on the wobbly table, making the beer slosh out of Ari’s glass. “I just tweeted about how I think monkey bars are the next big thing in gym equipment and the runner-up from The Bachelorette retweeted me. He’s starting a weekly running club in Central Park.”
“Ryan?” Briar exclaims. “The fitness influencer? I can’t believe he’s not the next Bachelor.”
They stopped including Ari in the conversation thirty minutes ago, except to ask her to take photos on each of their phones. She looks back toward the kitchen occasionally, waiting for yelling or for someone to storm out.
But when Josh finally emerges from the back there’s a contemplative look on his face, like he’s trying to crack G?del’s incompleteness theorems. He takes his seat without saying anything.
“Your boyfriend’s back,” Gabe announces in a singsong voice.
“He’s not my—”
“—I’m not her boyfriend,” Josh insists. Loudly.
Really loudly.
They glance at each other for a moment before looking away. Ari begins stacking the empty dishes in a desperate bid to occupy her hands. She feels Josh’s knee bouncing next to her.
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Gabe tells Briar. Ari shoots him a vicious warning glance, causing him to put up his hands in surrender and declare, “Okay, I’ll stop.”
Ari has sat across from drunk Gabe at enough tables to know he probably won’t.
“How’d it go in the kitchen?” Briar asks, sitting up a bit straighter from the intimate little huddle she’d had with Gabe.
“It was…” Josh twists his mouth, like he’s choosing his words carefully. “Interesting.”
“You and Radhya should do a collab!”
“And I think that you and Ari should just”—Gabe makes some gesture with his index fingers that could be interpreted in several ways—“get it out of your systems. You already kissed. It’s not going to get less awkward now.”
So much for Gabe’s promise to stop.
“Oh my God.” Briar’s jaw drops. “You kissed? Is that why you keep blowing off my Raya picks?” Briar reaches across the wood table, knocking over an empty glass, and grabs Josh’s and Ari’s wrists. “Guys, I ship it.” She looks pointedly at Josh. “When did this happen? Why didn’t you tell me? How was it?”
Gabe dings his beer glass with a fork like he’s egging on a newly married couple at a wedding reception.
Ari feels like she’s been buckled into the passenger seat of a car that’s careening out of control. She wrenches her hand out of Briar’s grip. Why are people so eager to bury a genuine friendship under the weight of a romantic relationship?
“It was nothing!” It comes out as a shout. A group sitting at the next table pauses their conversation to stare. “People kiss on New Year’s!” Ari glances at Josh for confirmation, to show a united front, but he’s staring at her like she just shivved him between the ribs. “It’s a tradition.” Shut up. “That’s all it was. No big deal.” Stop. STOP. “So just drop it.”
No one at the table says anything. In fact, everyone in the vicinity seems to take a momentary break from speaking. Ari’s heart thuds against her chest.
A little voice pings in her mind: Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong. Josh looks at her with a wild mix of confusion and…something else. Shit. Shit.
Gabe clears his throat. Briar says something that Ari can’t quite hear. Josh’s phone buzzes and he spends a long time looking at what seems to be a short message.
She blinks against the sting of tears, watching Briar and Gabe resume their drunken half-cuddle like it’s the simplest thing in the world.
Why can’t it be that easy anymore?
Josh doesn’t say anything when his phone buzzes again. He deposits his deeply creased napkin onto the empty plate in front of him, pushes his chair back, and stands up, towering over everyone at the table.
“I have somewhere to be,” he announces.
17
JOSH HAS NOWHERE TO BE.
He hasn’t had anywhere to be in approximately eight months.
He just can’t sit at that table with Ari.
The moment Josh shrugs his arms into his parka—the one he’d lent her a few weeks ago—Ari jumps up from the table, too.
“Wait,” she says. “I have…a thing. I’ll walk out with you.”
She trails him to the exit, ruining his attempt to leave the building in a cloud of quiet, stoic anger. Josh ignores her, letting the heavy front door slam behind him. Without the barrier of his patchy beard, the wind bites at his face.
The hinges on the door squeak and Josh picks up his pace, hurrying across the intersection, forcing himself not to look over his shoulder.
Ten seconds later, he hears a pair of footsteps, jogging behind him in double time.
“Hey!” Ari shouts. “Wait up. Where are you headed?” He doesn’t slow down, but she manages to catch up, breathing hard. She looks at him expectantly, like there’s no reason they shouldn’t walk to some new destination together. “Train?”
Josh racks his brain for an alternative before coming up empty—because where the hell else would he be going in Astoria?—and giving her a curt nod.
“Me, too,” she says, putting on the mittens that she claims are warmer than gloves. An adult wearing mittens. This is who he’s losing his goddamn mind over? “I’m meeting up with that couple in Chelsea. Salt-and-Pepper-Man with the hot wife.” Of course she is. Of course that little dress was meant for someone else. She’s not even wearing her new coat today, despite the frigid temperature. Like she doesn’t want to risk reminding him of anything. She’d rather shiver in her unlined, sale-rack-at-T.J.Maxx peacoat.
“This weekend went so fast,” she continues. Since when do they exchange banal pleasantries like this? He should ask Ari what she did yesterday to make the weekend pass so quickly, but he doesn’t actually want to know. Probably went home with one or more near-strangers and left their apartment fifty minutes later.
He’s too fucking agitated to anchor. The emotional storm clearly blew his shitty boat out to sea.
Maintaining a steely silence, Josh takes even longer strides as they round the corner onto Thirty-first Street, as if perhaps he can outwalk the possibility of a conversation.
Instead, she keeps going. “So that girl at the bar was hot, right?”
“Yes,” he says through gritted teeth. It should feel like twisting a knife, but it’s a hollow victory. Mutually assured destruction.
“Gabe said you got her number.”
Josh turns around in front of the wide staircase leading up to the subway platform. “Yes.”
He examines her face for signs of hurt, but her tells are frustratingly subtle. Her lips pinch together into a tight line but there’s nothing he could snapshot and file away under visual confirmation of Ari’s true feelings.
“Cool.” Every monosyllabic word she utters jabs him in the sternum. She takes a few steps up the staircase, transforming her expression back into a placid mask of indifference.
And that? That is exactly why he owes it to himself to try this. To take this nice girl from Connecticut—or was it Philly?—with big brown eyes and full lips on the most standard date possible. Just dinner or a drink. A slightly awkward kiss at her doorstep. It would be perfectly fine and nothing more. There wouldn’t be any stomach-tightening, slow-churning agony.
Which is much better. Healthy. It’s what I deserve.
He takes the stairs two at a time, brushing past Ari.
* * *
ARI FUMBLES FOR her MetroCard as Josh moves swiftly through the turnstile.