“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.
She doesn’t have any mind-numbing substances right now. Not even a Xanax. In fact, she’s never felt more terrifyingly sober.
Sex was supposed to resolve the tension. So why is her stomach still a giant knot?
There’s no way to rationalize it. Ari is almost certain she’s never used a cringe term like “making love” before. Her stomach tightens just thinking it, silently.
She cried. Fucking cried while he declared things to her. She’s never done that—not with Cass or anyone. Ever. And she had several borderline-religious experiences with Cass.
Ari forces herself to take some deep breaths.
Find the exit. It’s the smartest course of action. She has put her underwear back on in an elevator on several other occasions; she can do it again. Her brain serves up an array of excuses. “It would be terrible to ruin the friendship.” “Let’s not rush into anything.” “Your dick is phenomenal and I need time to process that.” Or, better yet, “I have an early appointment.” A valid reason that also has the benefit of being true. It’s just not the Reason.
She hasn’t slept with anyone since Cass. Nothing like burying the lede in your own mind.
Maybe she should say these things with clothes on. Yes, clothes first, then excuses, then exit.
She’s about to tiptoe into the living area to track down her dress, when a ringtone shatters the silence.
“Call from…Dust. Daddy.”
Ari grabs her phone out of the bag and swipes away the notifications she’s racked up. The battery is at two percent. She clears her throat.
“Twenty-four hour Erectile Dysfunction Hotline, how may I direct your call?”
There’s a quiet moment in which Ari can hear the trace of a resigned sigh.
“I’d like to file a complaint about one of your service providers.”
“Oh,” she says, quickly transitioning into a singsongy customer service voice. “I’m sorry to hear that. What’s the nature of the problem? Failure to deliver a blow job?”
“I’d describe it as a failure to communicate. Sometimes she even uses humor to fend off serious conversations.”
Ari gasps. “I see. There must be some malfunction in our training program.”
“Clearly.” There’s a long silence. “Are you planning to come back to the bedroom?”
“No,” she admits.
“What’s the worst thing that could happen if you come back?”
Ari searches her potential-sex bag for her toothbrush. “Spooning.”
“You can be the big spoon,” he offers. “It could just be sleeping.”
“It really couldn’t, though.” The wood floor creaks beneath her feet as she pads back to the bathroom. “I don’t do this—”
“This is different,” he insists.
Except, it’s not different at all. Every relationship starts this way. And most of them end in tears and half-empty bookshelves.
“You said some really intense things.” She squeezes some of Josh’s toothpaste (Colgate Total—she’d expected something more exotic) onto her toothbrush.
“I was ‘intense’?” he replies. “You invented a new dialect. For all I know, you proposed marriage.”
“Yeah, because I can’t wait to jump back into one of those again.” She brushes vigorously and spits. She’s never been more passionate about dental care.
What the hell does she do with her toothbrush? Just set it in the little stand, mingling with Josh’s Oral-B 7000?
Ari snoops around the artfully distressed metal basket attached to the side of the tub, which contains a lot of “product.”
“You use Russian leather scented body wash?”
“Ari.”
She pops open a bottle of Aesop “Calming Shampoo” and inhales a whiff, hoping for some immediate effect.
Nothing.
What the hell does someone with such ridiculous taste in grooming products know about the reality of relationships?
Ari stares at her reflection. She has a terrible case of raccoon eyes and a burgeoning hickey where her neck meets her shoulder. “I haven’t had missionary sex with a man—like, vanilla, face-to-face, whatever—in a really long time.”
“What? What about the couples?”
“They usually want to do that with each other. It’s too—”
“Intimate?” Josh suggests.
“—awkward.” She makes a face. “All that eye contact.”
“You know,” he says, “Zeus ordered Apollo to rearrange the entire human body so people could have sex face-to-face. When they found their missing half, it healed their existential wounds.”
“So, that’s why I’m such a disaster.” She turns away from the mirror. “I’ve been bleeding from my existential wound this entire time.”
“We should definitely spiral about it in separate rooms for twelve hours,” he says, probably lowering his memory foam pillow over his air passages.
“Works for me.”
Her phone goes dead.
Ari shuts off the bathroom light. Pushing against all her deepest impulses, she peeks into the bedroom, hiding her body behind the doorframe. “I’m scared, okay? We could really, really hurt each other.”
“Do you think I don’t know what it’s like to be hurt?” Josh sits up on his elbow. “You’re the only good thing in my life.”
Ari stares at him, holding her breath. She could raise serious objections to that statement. There’s a construction worker in a neon vest waving a slow down sign in front of that statement.
“Let’s just…watch a movie or something. Please.”
She shifts her weight. “You know I don’t watch movies naked.”
“I know.” He tosses a soft white ball at her. “Put these on then.” She looks down at a neatly rolled up pair of socks.