Chapter Twenty-Six
If Judah stared any harder at the dark screen of his cell phone, he was liable to set it ablaze.
He wasn’t sure how many apology calls and texts he’d made already, but Arielle was making it pretty clear she wasn’t interested in any of them.
It’d been hours since she’d walked out on him at Migdal, and in that time, he’d done nothing but alternate between reaching out to her and typing angry responses to all the social media comments, and then deleting them before he could set his career on fire.
Finally, the screen lit up, but it was just Lev, responding to Judah’s last message exactly as he knew he would: Keep your mouth shut. I’m sorry, but if you answer, it’s gonna make things worse.
Another text. Still Lev. I changed all your passwords, so don’t even think about it.
And then, But tomorrow, you’re buying me lunch and telling me everything.
Judah snorted. Lev was a good assistant and a good cousin, if you ignored the fact that he constantly gave free concert tickets to his mom’s friends.
But there was no chance in hell Judah was giving him the Arielle backstory.
He could already picture Lev’s look of disappointment, hear the lecture about how he wasn’t just destroying his career but “abandoning his relationship with HaKadosh Barukh Hu,” because Lev Feldman was the picture of consistency and did not believe in “picking and choosing” which Jewish laws to keep and which to discard.
He slipped the phone onto his nightstand and collapsed back onto his pillows with his eyes screwed shut.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the pain in her eyes at the end of the night, how they’d shone in the worst way.
Those were eyes meant for laughing, dancing, teasing, smoldering …
He’d never imagined making them fill with tears.
Of course, he couldn’t have imagined any of this—how much he’d miss her, how much he’d like her, how much their first real date would feel like he’d literally prayed for a first date to feel. He’d barely scratched the surface of her, and he ached with how badly he wanted to know more.
She’s scared of blackouts, he thought, frantically raking up the crumbs he’d already gathered.
She loves Lego because her hands feel fidgety if she has nothing to do with them, and she likes having something to show for it.
She has a little scar on her knee from the one and only time she ever tried to learn how to skateboard.
None of it made him feel better, not that there was any reason it would.
He didn’t know how to make this work, didn’t know whether there was even any point in trying.
Against his better judgment, he looked at the comments that’d made her run off in the first place.
They’d multiplied in number, though there still appeared to be no consensus about what it meant that there was a photograph of him holding a girl’s hand on an obvious date in the first place.
He looks so happy, one comment said, with a row of emojis he supposed were meant to be faces brimming with tears. (He strongly agreed.)
Those tits tho, said the comment underneath it. (He strongly agreed with that one too but wanted to punch the guy who said it.)
Wasn’t he just with that other girl?? (That one was sort of correct, but he’d been broken up with Mira nearly as long ago as he’d dated her, which felt to him like an acceptable time to date somebody new, though he was hardly an expert.)
Is he cheating? Omg he better not be cheating. (That one was just offensive. Besides the assault on his character, if he were cheating, he’d have to be a complete idiot to bring her to a kosher restaurant in Manhattan, where you were always guaranteed to see people you knew.)
He wondered how many of the comments she’d seen, and he scrolled to the ones he knew for sure she had—the ones that’d popped up while they were still together at the table.
His stomach roiled at the sight of the one about Arielle being a downgrade, and the temptation to reply to it was so strong that his thumb hovered over it for a second before he realized someone else already had.
@KeaverBeaver: Your face is a downgrade, loser
Judah laughed out loud for the first time since he’d watched Arielle walk away, his heart filling with a rush of love for his little brother. He switched over to his text messages, and after a quick glance to make sure Arielle still hadn’t responded, he opened a new one to Akiva.
Judah: I see you’ve been busy on the internet
Judah: Thank you
It was a while before Akiva responded, though Judah could see the three dots appearing and disappearing.
Akiva: You fucked up. You need to fix this.
Judah hung his head as he wrote back.
Judah: I know. She won’t return my calls or texts.
Akiva: So? Maybe it would help if YOU told these assholes to go fuck themselves.
Judah: You know I can’t do that.
Judah: And now I REALLY can’t do that—Lev changed my password.
Akiva: That’s a shitty excuse and you know it.
It was, and he did, but it didn’t make things any easier.
If he set his career on fire, then what?
And what if she didn’t even want him? What if he threw everything away for a girl who didn’t think he and the attention that came with him were worth it?
There were so many things he admired about Arielle, but what if that wasn’t mutual?
Given his rather unimpressive display of cowardice right now, he could hardly blame her if she thought he was nothing but an inexperienced manbaby.
Frankly, that’s exactly how he felt.
What do I do? he typed, but he deleted it the same way he’d deleted every one of his responses.
He knew what Akiva thought he should do, but Akiva didn’t have any more relationship experience than he did.
The fact that he’d always been “Set things on fire first, ask questions later” didn’t really line up with Judah’s way of doing things.
He felt like he needed to talk to a grown-up.
It would’ve been really nice if he and his dad had that kind of relationship, and if his mom didn’t still ask him weekly to reconsider Mira.
He contemplated calling Nate, but they hadn’t talked about their personal lives much since Judah’s last miserable attempt, and Judah wasn’t rushing to do it again, or to catch him up on everything since then.
And that was it. Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped having confidants, stopped having friendships that went deeper than some chitchat at minyan, stopped having people he could turn to if he needed something.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had an in-depth conversation about himself with someone. Well, except for—
“Oh.” His grip tightened around his phone until his knuckles turned white and his heart felt as if it were trying to claw its way out of his chest.
So that’s why losing Arielle hurts like hell.
He tried calling her one more time, but it didn’t even ring, just went straight to voicemail. With a sigh, he plugged his phone into his charger, washed up for the night, and turned himself over to a restless sleep.
It took a few miserable nights, but Judah finally realized there was someone he could call—someone kind and nonjudgmental he was reasonably sure didn’t need to be caught up, and who had experience making a relationship work.
It took another few nights for him to actually work up the nerve to ask for that conversation, but now there he was, sitting at a high-top pub table in Midtown, squeezing the neck of his Stella for dear life as he finally managed to ask the question he’d been dying to for days.
“How did you know Liana was The One?”
“Ah.” Gideon smiled knowingly, tracing a line in the condensation around the neck of his own bottle. “I probably should’ve seen that coming. What do you know about me from before I met Liana?”
“Just that you’re a ba’al teshuva,” Judah said, recalling it from the recesses of their wedding-planning conversations.
Gideon had mentioned not having grown up religious or having religious family, and that he’d want to incorporate more English into the ceremony than was customary for Orthodox weddings.
“Yeah, so, that started a few years back when my dad passed away from Covid.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Baruch Dayan HaEmet.”
“Yeah, it sucked.” Gideon’s thumbnail slid down to pick at the label.
“Anyway, I didn’t know what to do with myself, and even though we’d never been observant, my mom decided we should sit shiva.
Having guidelines and customs and a clear path …
it just clicked with me. And the more I learned—the more I took on—the more I felt a life that had stopped making sense was piecing itself back together.
But I was living with my girlfriend at the time—Meredith—and she wasn’t interested in taking that particular journey with me.
Which, I can’t blame her, right? She didn’t sign on for that.
“But I just kept feeling increasingly … unmoored, and I realized that if she’d been my anchor, I might not have had to go searching for something else in the first place.
And again, not her fault—no one expects a global pandemic, or instinctively knows how to handle it when their boyfriend’s dad dies.
But it wasn’t working, and eventually, we split and I got my own place.
“A year later, I tagged along with my boss to his family’s Chanukah party, which was the absolute most ridiculous place for me to be, and I meet this girl, and she’s funny and beautiful and the warmest human I have ever met, and every night of the holiday, we find new excuses to hang out.
By the end of eight days with her, I just felt …
at home. Like home was wherever she was.
And I realized that’s what having a person who’s your anchor feels like. ”
“Well, hell.” Judah took a long sip of his beer. “That might be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”