Chapter Fourteen
It might have been a problem that it was their very last night together, and Judah couldn’t stop thinking that Arielle Becker was the most unnervingly attractive woman he’d ever seen.
It didn’t help that she was wrapped up in his sheets.
It didn’t help that his entire apartment smelled like her, had smelled like her all week, and the dread he’d previously been feeling about going to the Pesach program by himself had been magnified by the thought of sleeping somewhere that smelled like sterile cleaning supplies and not her tropical flower shampoo.
(His place used to smell like sterile cleaning supplies.
A few weeks earlier, he would’ve been repulsed by the fact that he hadn’t washed his sheets despite spending the past few days getting them very, very dirty.
But that was Normal, Together Judah, and he had no idea who the guy currently inhabiting his body was.)
It didn’t even help to know it was all just physical, and he did know. Guys like him did not end up with girls who wore—who even owned—the kind of unbearably hot lingerie he’d painstakingly unhooked from her body before she slid into his sheets.
(She’d dressed up for him. Or down. Whatever it was, it was going to star in every single fantasy of his until the end of time.)
Nothing helped when it came to ending this week with Arielle Becker.
There wasn’t any point in thinking about it.
It wasn’t as if he could invite her to stay for Shabbos, and he certainly couldn’t go to her place.
And on Sunday morning, he’d be boarding a plane to Cancun and the rest of his Arielle Becker-less life.
But for now, the most unnervingly attractive woman he’d ever seen was, improbably, lying naked in his bed, biting her lip to keep from laughing as she leafed through an old album from his Kol Sasson days, and his heart felt too big to be contained by his chest.
Which was definitely a problem.
His brain—and his dick—might have known it was all physical, but that nagging space in between them was having some trouble keeping up.
“You know,” she said, squinting at a picture of him performing in what could’ve been Dallas or Boca or somewhere in New Jersey, “it was clear from the beginning that you were gonna be the big star of the group, but I had money on Azarya Frankel becoming the hot one.”
“You know we’re ten years old in that picture, right?”
“Yes, but I was seven or eight at the time, and you were celebrities. My dad loved blasting Kol Sasson while he cooked.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I forgot about it until just now, seeing this picture,” she mused, closing the album and putting it aside. “It’s weird to think that my dad would probably be starstruck by the guy I’m hooking up with.”
“Starstruck enough not to kick my ass about the hooking up part?” Judah asked with a grin.
Ari laughed. “My dad was not the ass-kicking type. But probably. He would’ve fucking hated my sister’s boyfriend, so you’d be the favorite by default.” Her cheeks pinkened. “I mean, not that you’re my boyfriend. Ugh, you know what I mean.”
“Yes, Arielle,” he said, despite the rebellion in his chest calling him a liar, “I know what you mean. But wait. Does this mean you had a crush on Azarya Frankel?”
“I’ll never tell.” As if her impish smile didn’t give her away immediately.
Judah swallowed the weird knot of silly jealousy forming in his throat. “He’s a good guy. Married, as you may have guessed. We’ve been texting a bit since the old videos have gone viral. He’s angling for a reunion, but we haven’t been able to make it work yet.”
“Is he still singing?”
“Not professionally—he’s some sort of analyst now—but you know, social media.”
Ari laughed. “You say that so derisively, as if you’re not singing in fifty videos circulating on social media right now.”
“I’m not the one posting them!”
“You’re not exactly rushing to take them down,” she pointed out.
“Lev won’t let me,” he grumbled. “My assistant. He says they’re good for business.”
“Aren’t they?” He shot her a look, and she laughed again. “Look, I’m not pretending I have any idea what your professional life is like. Frankly, I don’t get it. It seems random all the time. No clocking in, no meetings…”
“I have meetings.”
“Yeah, but it’s different. Like, what’d you do today? You woke up, and then what?”
“I don’t know. I went to shul—”
He hadn’t realized he was gesturing at his tallis bag until her gaze followed his hand to it. “Yehuda Aryeh ben Moshe Tzvi. Your parents leaned pretty hard into the lion thing, huh?”
“You noticed that, huh? I think they were hoping I’d defy genetic odds and be built like a wrestler. Did not work out.”
Her fingertips traced the path of one of his barely there pecs. “You can let them know your body is greatly enjoyed as is.”
“Yeah?” he asked before he could stop himself, and then blushed. “I mean, I kinda figured the lion type was more your thing. Danny could probably bench-press me fifty times before breakfast.”
“Yes, but Danny sucks.”
“I thought he was one of your best friends.”
“He is. He still sucks.” She leaned in for what he assumed would be a kiss until she tugged his lower lip between her teeth and gently pulled, jolting his dick to attention. “You in a three-piece suit, Hotmusic. That’s my type.”
God help me. There went that stupid heart-swelling thing again. Quickly, he changed the subject back.
“Anyway, yes, shul. Then I learned with Nate—we finished the second-to-last perek of Sanhedrin. After that, I had a meeting—see? A meeting!—with Lev to go over my calendar. I worked on a new composition. I went back to shul for mincha—”
At that, she tilted her head up to look at him—really look at him—stopping him in his tracks.
“Okay, I’ve really been trying not to ask you this, but I have to know.
You go to shul and you learn and you are the epitome of Nice Jewish Boy, and then you come back here and just absolutely, filthily ravage me and tell me you’re okay with it. But are you?”
He should’ve been prepared for that exact question, especially since he asked it of himself every day, but still, it made his gut churn.
“I know I’m not supposed to be. I know it makes me a hypocrite.
” He cast his gaze down at the sheets, rumpled from the last hour of their activities.
“But we’re not that different, are we? Unless that lunch at Akiva’s was a one-off, you keep Shabbos, no? ”
“I do, yeah. I don’t make it to shul much, but I keep it.”
“And kosher?”
She gathered her curls and swept them over her shoulder. “Again, probably not as strictly as you—I’ll eat vegan pretty much anywhere—but, yeah.”
“So you’ve chosen to be observant, but clearly, this doesn’t present any feelings of religious upheaval for you.”
“That’s true,” she conceded, “but I don’t think Judaism is the same for me as for you.
I love the traditions, the community, the history and culture.
That’s all meaningful to me. I’m happy to have Shabbos force a break from TV and internet, and for holidays to bring my family back together.
And I genuinely like that we have blessings for everything so we don’t even take being able to go to the freaking bathroom for granted.
I just don’t care about things like covering up or not touching.
That doesn’t elevate me religiously; for me, it feels unrealistic and unhealthy.
But those things are meaningful for a lot of people, and until now, that’s seemed to include you. ”
Her hand closed around his wrist, solid and warm.
“I’m not judging you—Lord knows I am the literal last person who could.
You don’t have to justify yourself to me.
I just can’t shake this feeling that I’m this walking, talking yetzer hora, and that as soon as you have some distance from how good this all feels, you’re going to hate me and yourself.
So please, tell me, how do you not see it that way? ”
Again, it was a fair question. He sighed deeply, wondering just how personal to get.
Ever since she’d reacted badly to him making her dinner, he’d been trying to keep things as light and casual as possible, but this was not a light and casual question, and the thought processes he’d been having about it weren’t very light and casual either. He didn’t want her to run.
But she’d asked.
And after tonight, she was running anyway.
He met those gorgeous aqua eyes with his. “So, you know my parents are divorced?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know how much Akiva has told you, especially because he was still so young when they split.
But our house felt like ice all the time.
The silence was unbearable. The only thing worse was when it broke, because that’s when you knew the true awfulness was coming.
And I think my parents are basically good people, or at least my mom is—my dad mostly forgot about us when he got remarried and moved to Cleveland—but together …
there was this frigid, toxic air I never wanted to breathe in.
Traveling with Kol Sasson helped a lot, but the rest of the time, I just …
didn’t breathe. Or at least that’s what it felt like. ”
“No,” she said softly. “Akiva didn’t tell me that.”
Her gaze was too gentle on him now, her voice too … something. It was unsettling. He looked down at his hands fiddling with his duvet. “I swore like hell I wasn’t going to grow up to be anything like that. That my home would never feel that way, that it’d be warm and loving and supportive.”
“Sounds nice to me.”
“Yeah, except I grew up to be an asshole.”
Ari snorted in surprised laughter, then seemed to realize he wasn’t smiling. “Judah, come on. You’re a little uptight, sure, but you’re not actually an asshole.”