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“I… thought you were into it,” he said.
Abi winced. She had been into it. It had been hot.
“Should I not have done that?”
“No, I mean, okay, it was hot. I was into it. But why was it, like, a thing?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and she hated it when people said that.
“Ilan,” she said, hoping that just saying his name would be enough to get him to elaborate.
“If I’d kissed you, I would have fucked you,” he said baldly.
“That would have been a bad thing?” she was confused now. “It’s not like we’ve never fucked before.”
“We were out in the open. I wasn’t sure how you felt about getting railed—”
“Seriously—”
“You asked, Abi,” he said, he was definitely annoyed now. “You can’t ask a question and get pissy just because you don’t like the answer.”
“There are ways to say it that don’t make me sound like a piece of meat,” she said, reminding herself that ten percent less bitch meant she was still allowed to be ninety percent bitch.
“Yeah, nobody likes feeling like a piece of meat,” he said, and she couldn’t help but hear the sour note in his voice.
“When have I ever treated you like a piece of meat,” Abi asked, wondering if maybe she was just picking a fight on purpose.
“Are you really asking me that?” His tone was harsh. He laughed, and she didn’t like the jagged edge of the sound.
“I don’t treat you like a piece of meat,” she said.
“Yeah you do,” he said. “But it's not as if I’ve ever told you not to.”
“What the fuck, Ilan,” Abi stood up, stalking into her kitchen for something to do with her hands. She thought briefly about the bottle of wine in her fridge but grabbed water instead. If they were going to fight, she wasn’t going to do anything that could be construed as giving him an edge. He wasn’t driving her to drink that easily.
“Oh, come on, you know we only talk when one of us is in a shitty mood so we can have a fight and then screw.”
She said nothing because he wasn’t wrong. Her cheeks burned at the assessment, though. She didn’t like how it made either of them sound.
“I guess everyone should have such problems,” he said, and his tone was bitter. Abi’s mouth twisted in something like a grimace, and she twisted the cap off the water bottle.
“So, what are you saying? If you don’t want to do that anymore, we can just not do that.” She hoped she sounded reasonable. She wouldn’t hate it if they stopped doing that. She didn’t like feeling like in order to scratch a certain itch then she had to work herself into a state of—what, exactly? Persnickety resentment? That wasn’t right.
But he was right, they had a pattern.
“If we stopped calling each other when we were pissy would we ever call each other at all?” Oh yeah, he was definitely bitter now. Abi bit her lip. She didn’t have the energy to work out what was really going on here.
“It feels like we’re having two different conversations,” she said at last. “What are you trying not to say right now?”
NINE
Ilan sucked his teeth. Even when he wasn’t trying, somehow, all he and this woman did was bicker. And it was such a stupid disagreement. They weren’t eventechnicallydisagreeing. He forced himself to breathe, reaching for his beer bottle and realizing a second too late that it was empty. His conversation with Ari floated back to him, and he realized his brother was right: he was going to have to tell her everything. Talking around what was really bothering him was clearly doing him no favors.
“So, you know about me and Rachel breaking up, right?”
“Rachel who?” She sounded genuinely confused, “You’re not talking about Rachel Melfie?”
“Yeah, that’s her,” he said, taking his empty sandwich plate and beer bottle into the kitchen. If he was going to have this conversation, he needed to be doing something productive.
