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’tmutual? 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.
Sothat’swhy 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 therewassomeone 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 herfault—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.”
Gideon laughed. “Yeah, I definitely got lucky,” he said, smiling fondly as he tapped his fingers against the amber glass. “I left an entire life behind in the hopes that someone like Liana existed, evenconceptually, and then I met her someplace I never should’ve been. Makes it easy to believe in love, and fate, and even God.”
“You do make it sound easy,” Judah said wistfully. “Or clear, at least.” He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the fans whirring like propellers from the ceiling of the bar. “The girl who entirelyunmoors you is probably not your future. Noted.”
“I think it’s probably a little more complex than that.” Gideon grinned as he lifted his bottle to his lips. “Arielle Becker throwing you off your game is an entirely different situation.”
