Chapter Eighteen
“If you don’t want to watch a movie, how about a spa night?”
Ari puffed out her bottom lip and expelled a frustrated breath. She knew she was being a brat, but she was in a bad mood, and she couldn’t help it. “I told you, I just want to relax in bed tonight, Mom.”
“Spa nights are relaxing,” Mrs. Becker argued. “You’ve been reading and doing Lego all yuntif. I just want to do something fun with my girls while I still have you. It’s bad enough Dana already left.”
Okay, now Ari felt bad. Her mother loved having her girls back home for the holidays, and she hadn’t missed the way her mother’s face had fallen when Dana had announced she and Evan would be leaving before the second Seder.
There was no reason to take it out on her mom that a certain someone hadn’t called after yuntif the way she’d assumed he would and she was having surprising Feelings about it.
But before she could relent, Hannah spoke up.
“Ari’s just in a bad mood because her boyfriend’s got a new girlfriend.”
“I can’t even begin to count the number of things wrong with that sentence.” Ari rolled her eyes, but then her brain processed the content of Hannah’s words. “What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t seen the creepy stalker videos from the Pesach program he’s on? They’re kind of totally gross, but these girls are clearly obsessed with Judah Klein, and apparently he’s been hanging out with some girl there a ton.”
There was zero reason for that information to make Arielle want to throw up, and yet.
“That does sound creepy stalkerish, and you should stop watching them,” she told Hannah, hoping that stating this out loud would stop her from looking at them later, though she knew it wouldn’t.
“Let the guy have some privacy, for God’s sake. ”
“In my defense, I know the girl.” Hannah handed over her phone, and Ari hated herself for taking it. “We went to camp together for a few summers. Mira Winkler. She was really nice.”
The video wasn’t scandalous or particularly interesting; it was literally just a voyeuristic shot of Judah and some girl in conversation in a hotel lobby, with the account owner giving a tearful heads-up to other Kleinatics that she’d asked her parents to go on this program specifically for Judah Klein and then had to watch him flirt with this girl the whole time.
They weren’t touching in the picture, let alone kissing, but somehow that felt even worse. If he’d been kissing someone, she could’ve written him off as a horndog who’d moved from one girl to the next, maybe even convince herself he was just testing the very chemistry he’d asked her about.
But this? This looked like him bouncing back from her to find a girl who was exactly his speed. Who was wife material.
Twenty-five and skinny. Of fucking course.
Mira didn’t look like the kind of girl who got on her knees in a bar bathroom or showed up at her boyfriend’s apartment in nothing but a coat and lingerie.
Mira looked like the perfect bride, a mother-in-law’s dream, the kind of woman who’d have one of those adorable little basketball-belly pregnancies and then promptly lose all the weight by the bris.
He’d gone for her exact opposite, and it felt like shit.
“Is Hannah right?” her mother asked, smoothing down the curls hanging in Ari’s face. “Are you upset about a boy?”
“I don’t think you can call someone in his thirties a ‘boy,’” she deflected.
“If he’s your generation, he’s a boy.”
“Either way, no, I’m not upset about Judah Klein. I’m upset that Hannah’s a pain in the ass.”
“Wait, I know this boy.” Her mother furrowed her brow.
“Isn’t he the one who sang at Aleah’s wedding?
The one Steph said she had to book six months before Aleah even got engaged?
” She leaned in to look more closely at the picture.
“It is. What a beautiful voice on that one, and very handsome. He’s single? I don’t believe it.”
Hannah snorted as Ari buried her face in her hands. “Please can we stop talking about Judah Klein?”
“Not if he’s making my baby sad!” Her mom wrapped an arm around Arielle’s shoulder and kissed the top of her head. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you with a crush. It’s very sweet! Did you introduce yourself at the wedding?”
The absurdity of it all made Ari want to scream. “First of all, we already knew each other. Second of all, I didn’t say I have a crush—that’s something Hannah made up based on seeing me watch the same video of him that every freaking person on the planet has watched in the last week.”
“Actually,” said Hannah, a little smile playing on her lips, “I’m basing it on the fact that I saw you guys kissing in the bridal suite after the wedding.”
Ari and her mom both whirled on her sister. “What?”
Hannah’s smile gave way to full-blown laughter. “I’m sorry, I just wanted to see how long it’d take before you admitted it. But if you’re keeping that in the vault, you must really like him. Now I feel a little bad about showing you that video of him and Mira. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Ari growled, “and you should’ve told me you saw. You know you can’t tell anyone that, right? Please tell me you didn’t tell Molly and Shira.”
“Are you kidding? They would’ve murdered you in your sleep.
Anyway, I opened the door for like one second and then ran out.
I didn’t even realize it was him until I saw you getting in the car with him to go back to the city.
And of course I didn’t tell anybody, but I’m a little hurt it took you months to tell me. ”
“I didn’t tell you,” Ari reminded her, “and there’s nothing to tell. He’s dating and wants marriage and babies with a girl like Mira, and I’m … whatever.”
“You are not whatever,” her mom said firmly.
“You are brilliant and kind and beautiful, and if you’re interested in this boy, you should tell him so.
Just because he spent a couple of days talking to another girl doesn’t mean they’re dating.
He’d be lucky to have a girl like you, and it certainly sounds like the interest is mutual. ”
Ari’s eyes shot daggers at Hannah, but her little sister just beamed smugly. “You heard Mom. Tell the boy you like him, Arielle.”
“I would like to hit you with all the plagues, Hannah.”
“Well, that settles it,” Mrs. Becker said cheerfully. “We’re doing spa night. I will not be responsible for you looking anything less than your best when you ask the boy out.”
Despite her tremendous eye roll, Ari let them drag her out of bed and into her mom’s large bathroom, where they got to work picking out sheet masks and lotions and filling the enormous tub with bath oil for soaking their feet.
As Ari dipped her purple-painted toes into the floral-scented water while Hannah gently splashed, she had to admit—if only to herself—that it felt kind of good that someone else knew her secret.
At least until her sister opened her mouth and asked, “Is he a good kisser? He looked like a good kisser.”
“Hey, Han?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up.”
Ari swore under her breath as an unidentified object in her purse scratched her hand in her quest for her keys. She’d only been out of her mom’s house an hour, and already she was back to barely functioning like an adult.
She finally fished her Lego keychain out triumphantly and let herself back into her building, a strange mixture of sadness and relief filling her at her return.
Her mother’s house was so constant, consistent—other than some small décor changes here and there, it still looked so much like the house Ari grew up in, full of family photographs from when there were five of them.
Her apartment was ostensibly her home—had been since she, Liana, and Bella graduated college—but in a few months, if she couldn’t find a new roommate to replace Liana, she’d be on the hunt again.
The thought was too exhausting to deal with, as was putting away the laundry she’d taken advantage of being at her mom’s house to do.
Obsessing over Judah was so mentally draining, it reminded her why she never had Feelings in the first place.
All she wanted to do with her last day of vacation was collapse on the couch with a can of moscato and—well, not an episode of her favorite show about tiny homes, because he’d ruined that for her too, but something mindless.
Unfortunately, a quick scan of the fridge revealed that they were officially wineless. They didn’t even have beer. And seltzer was not gonna cut it.
She could swing around to the bodega on the corner, but she didn’t really need anyone seeing her picking up beer at noon. Did they even sell beer at noon? She had no idea, because she’d never been a person who needed a beer at noon until Judah Klein made her one.
Groaning, she reached for her phone and tapped out a quick text.
Ari: Tell me you’re back and also have cold beer
Akiva: That bad huh
Akiva: Yeah come on up
Ari didn’t need to be told twice.
She took the stairs two at a time and had a cold Corona and her feet up on the couch in less than a minute. “Perfect,” she said after taking a long drink. “Bless your soul.”
“Guessing your Pesach was about as good as mine,” Akiva said, cracking open his own bottle. “How many times did your mom ask if you’ve met anyone nice yet?”
Ari’s stomach twisted as she thought about the way-too-real conversation she did have with her mother about her romantic prospects. “I think she’s pretty much given up on us, actually. Given Dana’s choice of partner, I don’t think she even wants to see who Hannah or I would bring home.”
“Evan continues to be a charmer, huh?”
“I’d rather have had a Seder with Pharaoh himself,” she said sourly, turning the bottle around in her hands. “Sorry your mom was on your case, though. Guess this year wasn’t the grand Coming Out?”