Ari silences her phone and turns it facedown on the tabletop. “I’ve been dealing with a…divorce.” She says that word carefully. “I’m just trying to do a five-day plan here.”
It’s more than she’d normally share with a near-stranger, but her emotional reserves must be reaching capacity and starting to leak.
To her credit, Abby appears unfazed.
“Following your passion is so important. I learned that lesson far too late. When I sold my first property, I had a teenage son who resented me, a precocious kindergartner, and a husband who had been doing things the same way for twenty years. Everyone needed something from me. But I couldn’t live a life where my only purpose was to make theirs more manageable. You can’t just wait around, letting things happen to you.” Abby clicks her nails against the tabletop. “A divorce is the perfect time to rebuild your career.” She pauses. “And relationships.”
Oh no. Abby looks at her with a shameless grin.
“I think you have the wrong idea about—”
Abby’s hands shoot up in surrender. “You don’t have to explain.”
Then she winks. Oh God.
Ari reaches for her water and Abby surprises her by closing her warm palm over the back of her hand.
“Give Brad a call. It might be exactly what you need. It’s improv, right? There’s travel. And it pays well. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. I think they only pass around that memo to men.” Abby gives her hand a little pat and settles back into her seat. “And I want you to know, I’m not offering just because you’re sleeping with my son.”
* * *
—
TWELVE HOURS, TWENTY-SEVEN UNANSWERED TEXTS, and two hundred passed canapés later, Ari hears Gabe’s laughter outside the comedy club, where he’s standing in the center of a cluster of smokers, his laugh bellowing a decibel louder than anyone else’s.
“Why do you smell like ham?” he asks when she forcibly inserts herself into the circle.
“Four hours of serving pancetta-wrapped peach slices.” Ari musters up the simmering anger that she hadn’t gotten the chance to unleash at Radhya’s pop-up. “And what got into you yesterday?”
“Funny. I was about to ask you the same thing.” He exhales a smoke ring. “Let’s have a drink. I’m not up for another half hour.”
Gabe claps her on the shoulder and leads/shoves her through the door to the bored host, scrolling her phone behind the podium. The woman barely looks up as she collects Ari’s $23 cover, heaving a little sigh.
There’s no one onstage yet inside the club’s “Rising Star Room,” which, frankly, resembles a community center basement where one might attend an AA meeting. Accordingly, Ari heads immediately to the bar for a Long Island Iced Tea.
“That kinda day, huh?” Gabe observes.
Ari answers by flaring her nostrils, determined to give him nothing. She sips from the plastic cup, scanning the room, squinting into the darkness at a tall woman with heavy bangs lying perfectly over her forehead.
“Is that…Briar?” Instinctively, Ari stumbles two steps back, moving out of her line of sight.
“It’s a bringer. I blasted out invites to everyone I’ve ever hooked up with.” He shrugs and does something weirdly seductive with his left eyebrow. “She likes me.”
Ari leans forward. “Did you—”
“We made out in the bathroom of the beer garden.” He pauses. There’s a threat of mischief in his eye. “It’s not like I said ‘I love you’ or anything.”
If he follows that up with another punch line, Ari doesn’t hear it over her internal screaming.
“Why does everyone know about this?”
“Probably because you sprinted out of his apartment this morning and he immediately started spiraling and you haven’t talked to each other all day?”
“I’ve been…processing.” Yes. Processing. Processing and avoiding.
“You sound a little hoarse. Is it from all the screaming?” Ari is certain cartoon daggers shoot out of her eyes, puncturing Gabe’s perfect, waxed chest. “Okay, look. It was less of a frat-boy-bragging-about-banging-a-girl-on-Reddit recounting of the mechanics and more of an ‘all my dreams came true last night so how do we avoid fucking this up’ thing.”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s dream.” Josh couldn’t even casually gloat, like a normal douchebag?
Gabe moves a little closer, creating the illusion of intimacy. “How was it?”
“It was…” Ari chews the inside of her cheek. “You know that old song lyric, ‘we make love and then we fuck’?”
Gabe barely stifles an impressed sort of chuckle. “No, but it sounds like you each got what you wanted.”
Ari downs the rest of the drink, tossing the cup in the trash can by the exit. “I need to leave. I can’t do this right now.”
Gabe grabs her biceps and walks her back to the bar. “You already paid the cover and I need you to laugh incredibly loud at my set and sit there stone-faced for everyone else.” He flags down the bartender. “Seriously. I invited a casting assistant.”
Ari orders a double as she looks at the back of Briar’s head. “Were you and Briar sitting here, discussing it?”
“Of course not,” he says, checking the time on his phone. “We discussed it over text first thing this morning.”
“See, you’re the ones making it into something more than it is.”
Gabe puts his phone in his pocket and puts his hands on Ari’s shoulders. “There’s a window. You waited too long. The window for a nostrings hookup closed on the two of you months ago.”
“That’s not true. I always leave the window open a crack.”
“Say whatever you want, but it’s gonna be one hell of an awkward DTR conversation,” he adds. “He has heart-eyes.”
“I think we can just…walk it back.” Even as the words leave her mouth it feels hopeless.
Gabe gives her a patronizing “sure you can” nod. “I have to ask…what the hell was he doing to you that made you say the phrase that shall not be named?”
Ari chokes on her comically large drink. She feels nauseous—not just because of the smell of sour alcohol and musty garden-level air. “Hey,” she says after the coughing fit subsides, “have you ever heard of something called WinProv?”
“Great segue. You should teach classes on avoidance.” He tosses back his drink. “Some corporate comedy training bullshit?”
“Bullshit with travel and an actual paycheck.” Ari pulls out her phone and shows him the WinProv website.
Gabe scans the screen, narrowing his eyes.
“No,” he says. Something passes over his face—worse than actual anger. Disappointment. “What about LaughRiot? Our Harold team? You’re really going to walk out on us?”
“You guys have been performing without me for months. You don’t need me.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re actually considering doing this.” He thrusts her phone back at her. “Not you.”
“You played Gaston in Japan for six months!”
“That’s acting,” he insists. “This? Is disloyal. It’s selling out. You’re better than this.”
“I’m just considering my options.”
They stare at each other for a long beat before Gabe shakes his head and walks away. It’s somehow more cutting than a huge blowup. There’s something especially awful about his subdued disillusionment.
Ari takes a breath in, turns around, and heads for the exit, fumbling to swipe the WinProv website off the phone screen.
Something even more fraught replaces it.
Mon, Jan 16, 9:57 p.m.
Josh: Sup.
It’s almost worse than heart emojis.
She stumbles through the doorway and into the chilly night air, hitting call before she can decide not to.
* * *
JOSH PACES THE length of his apartment in large, steady steps.
“You were chatty today,” Ari says. “Is there anyone in this city you didn’t contact this morning?”
“That was an accident,” he points out.
“I don’t want to get a congratulatory message from your mom next…or your therapist, or your accountant.” There’s a long pause.
“Can we talk about this?”
“Can we?” The line goes silent for thirty seconds. His jaw is practically grinding into the phone until she adds, “It was—”
“—fucking amazing.”