@FoxyNaTal:I’ve seen him! He’s so good.
@EriBeriGel:Lol I’ve never heard him sing in English before. He can sing it to me annnnytime
@MyPerfectTree:Why does the beanie make it hotter?
@Bbkstar13: @MyPerfectTree:It’s called a yarmulke, and bc Jewish boys are hotttt
@ArtBug:Forgive me Jesus but I’m Jewish now
And on, and on. He’d had no idea there were so many Orthodox Jews on social media, but the comments were full of people talking about where they’d heard him—at weddings or bar mitzvahs or shul events—and there was even awhoa that guy totally dated my roommatewith a bunch of responses declaring various degrees of jealousy. Never mind that “dated” was definitely a strong word for whoever the girl’s roommate was; Judah’s record was three dates with the same girl, and only because Mrs. Ruziak threatened to cut him off if he didn’t see at least one girl past two.
He glanced at the views again and saw they’d already doubled, all to watch him singing covers that’d been done by people far more famous than he’d ever be.The internet is such a weird place.
Just as he was about to slide his phone back in his pocket and get on the subway, his eye caught on a new comment.
@KeaverBeaver:yoooo that’s my brother! He’s single, ladies!! Come and get him!
Oh, he was going tokillAkiva.
Chapter Three
Ari pushed the door to the coworking space open with her butt and set a tray of three coffee cups down on the table she shared with Naima George and James Yang, her only two New York–based coworkers at KisStory, an interactive fiction app specializing in the smuttiest of the smut. “That line was out of control,” she grumbled. “I don’t know if these are even still hot.”
“The coffee can wait,” Naima said, leaning forward on her elbows. “We have a question.”
“The coffee definitely cannot wait,” James argued, spinning the cups until he found the one with his name. “But okay, we’re ready now. Do you know the hot Jewish singer going viral?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Ari selected her own peppermint mocha and took a long, soothing drink before setting up her laptop and plugging it into a dock. “You know we don’t all know each other, right?”
“You do seem to know a lot though,” Naima pointed out. One hand tipped in masterfully done nails—neon-orange ovals that glowed beautifully against her dark brown skin—wrapped around the white paper cup holding her vanilla chai latte while the other held her phone out to Arielle. “You really haven’t seen this? It’severywhere.”
It took Ari all of two seconds to realize she did, in fact, know the guy in question. “You’re joking. Yes, fine, I know this guy, and he sucks.” Her forehead pounded with phantom pain at the memory of their last “meeting,” and she rubbed at the small bruise he’d left her as a souvenir.
“Really? I think he’s great, and so do the fifty millioncomments,” Naima said, replaying the video for what Arielle would guess was the thousandth time that morning. “You should read them.”
“Hard pass.” Ari took a quick look at her email—nothing, which wasn’t surprising since pretty much everything at the company ran through group chats—and then opened up the KisStory homepage. “Are we seriously featuring ‘Pregnant by the Vampire Don’ on the main banneragain?”
“We’re giving the people what they want,” James said in a singsong voice, “and the people apparently want vampire mafia secret baby books. Get with the times, Becker.”
“I continue to understand absolutely nothing about our readership,” she grumbled as she skimmed through the stats of their biggest hit books for the past week, and sure enough, “Pregnant by the Vampire Don” was number two in both the number of readsandthe number of bonus (read: sex) scenes purchased, behind onlyThe Alpha CEO’s Soulmate.
“On the contrary,” said Naima, “you understandeverythingabout our readership. Not sharing their kinks is a different story. But you did call that it would be a massive hit. You’re why Ross sank so much money into marketing it in the first place.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ari said with a slow smile, lifting her cup back to her lips. “Iambrilliant.”
“Which is literally what we’re always telling you,” James pointed out, pressing his greige-painted fingertips into the desk. “Nowwill you apply for the lead position?”
She took a long drink, hoping the conversation topic would change before she set it back down. As the longest-tenured editor at KisStory, it wasn’t that she didn’t think she was qualified for the lead position that was opening when their boss, Millie, left to join a new game startup in Stockholm; it was that it would mean becoming Naima and James’s boss. She liked what they had going, meeting up at a coworking space on Mondays so they could kickoff the week by shooting the shit in person, even though their jobs were fully remote. Would it be nearly as fun if she were their supervisor? Absolutely not.
Why was everyone always so eager for things to change?
“Can we talk about something else?” she asked as she skimmed the rest of the top twenty-five. Unsurprisingly, it was heavily populated by their smuttiest paranormal romances, and she smiled as she thought of the new book set to launch that week that would undoubtedly leap to the top. A gay werewolf hockey romance felt like a particular stroke of genius.
“Sure—we can go back to talking about the hot guy from the video,” James suggested cheerfully. “How do you know him?”
“He’s my friend’s brother,” Arielle said sourly, “and he sang at my roommate’s wedding on Sunday. I was a bridesmaid, and he glowered at me under the chuppah the entire time because he’s wildly lacking in sympathy for women in heels. And then we whacked heads—literally, so do not try to make a sex pun out of this—before he yanked his hand away from me as if touching me for half a second was going to send him straight to hell.”
“Wait. You, like,knowhim know him,” Naima said in awe, her warm brown eyes widening.
