“Oh my god,” Wyatt comments between mouthfuls, pointing down at the borscht with his spoon. “This is incredible. Can I convert?”
“Nope,” I say. “But I’ll send you my grandmother’s recipe.”
Shoshana smiles at us from across the table. “So, how long have the two of you been together?” she asks, punctuating the question with a sip of her wine. Next to her, Hadas smashes some mushy carrots against her mouth. “Am I allowed to guess?”
I almost choke on my bite of kibbeh. I’m still struggling to clear my throat and fumble up some appropriate words to say when Wyatt—thank fuck—steps in.
“We aren’t,” he says, easy as anything. “We’re friends. I’m helping Ely with her photography project, so she invited me to tag along.”
One of Shoshana’s thick brows goes up. “Aha. Friends. Yes. Michal and I used to be ‘friends’ too.”
“Shosh,” Michal interjects, covering her eyes with both hands, but I can’t help it—I laugh. Which earns me a predictable kick in the ankle from Wyatt.
“Sorry, sorry,” Shoshana says, waving her fork through the air like a conductor’s baton. “I’ll stop. I just can’t help myself. I watched too many Disney movies as a child.”
“Same,” I say. “Holding out for a suitor on a horse.”
Wyatt quirks a smile and gestures toward himself, almost self-deprecatingly. “Horseless.”
If I thought I’d be ready to flee the premises by this time in the dinner, I was mistaken. That is, I don’t fully want to yeet myself out the window just yet. Reserving the right to change my mind in the future.
But this is easier than I thought it would be. Maybe that’s the Wyatt effect.
“So what made you decide to do this project in particular?” Kinneret asks later in the evening, once the main course is just bone and sinew on our plates and everyone (aside from me and Wyatt) has gulped their way through at least three glasses of wine.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“You’re doing a project on Judaism, right?” she says. “You said you’re taking photos of different ways people approach Jewish spiritual life. What got you interested in that?”
She has no idea what a loaded question that really is. I find myself glancing toward Wyatt, as if he could answer in my stead—but of course he just looks back at me, opaque as ever. The fucker probably sees this as a learning experience. Like I’m supposed to take this opportunity to practice what I’d say at my hypothetical gallery opening or some shit.
I take another bite of now-cold food to buy myself time. A mistake, frankly; room-temp meat never tastes great.
“Um…well…I guess I’m still trying to figure out where I fit. Spiritually.” I had hoped that would be enough, but everyone’s still looking at me like they expect there to be more information coming. “I grew up Orthodox. My parents are Chabad.” I’m not sure how much anyone here even knows about Chabad or if they just think we’re the guys in college towns who host Seders for religiously confused freshmen. “But I left the community…obviously…and now I’m just…I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re still Jewish,” Michal says, punctuating her words with a gesture of her fork. “That never changes.”
“Do you believe in G-d?” asks Shoshana, because why not cut right to the real questions.
My palms are sweaty; I scrub them against my thighs under the table and laugh awkwardly. “Yeah. I do. I guess that never changed either.”
I can feel Wyatt looking at me. His gaze is like a hot coal boring into the side of my face. Suddenly I’m too keenly aware of the effort it takes not to look back—to keep my eyes fixed forward on these strangers across the table. My heart is beating so fast I can almost taste it like blood in my mouth.
I don’t know why I’m scared. And I don’t know what cosmic fist I expect to come crashing down on me right now.
But I know it’s coming.
17
“Do you have an easy way home from here?” Wyatt asks once dinner is over and we’re back out on the curb, loaded up with more than our fair share of leftovers (including the remaining grape juice).
I make a face. “I mean…sort of. I can take the G to the 7 to the N.” Wyatt raises his eyebrows at me. “On second thought, I might call an Uber.”
Although now that I’ve said it, this tiny voice in the back of my brain keeps wondering if this was Wyatt’s way of offering to escort me home. Only that can’t be right. Because that would be, in his universe, inappropriate. People only take other people home when they wanna…you know…take them home.
For somebody who’s only drunk off grape juice, I sure am getting ahead of myself.
Wyatt shifts his load of Tupperware in his arms. “How much of this do you want?” he asks. “I’m happy to split it fifty-fifty. Or I can take it all, but…”
“But you’d devour all five boxes in one sitting. Yeah, I bet.” From the sheer volume of brisket Wyatt consumed at dinner, it seems like he is a bottomless pit. “I have no idea where you put it.”
“Excuse you,” he says. “I am very bulky and manly.”
“You’re like a culinary Mount Doom. Or the ghost character in Spirited Away who eats the entire bathhouse worth of baked goods. It violates the laws of thermodynamics.”
“His name is No-Face, and the laws of thermodynamics are overrated. Besides, that’s why I became an artist, not a physicist.”
“The laws of physics don’t apply to artists?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I? That’s the point!” He winks at me—freaking winks—and I dig out my phone so I can stare at the Uber app while I call a car instead of letting him see the way my cheeks go pink.
I’m still hyperconscious of him standing next to me. I wish I could shut off the part of my brain that seems to be custom tuned to the presence of Wyatt Cole.
This is one of those moments where you’d usually start waiting for one of you to offer to take the other person home. And then you’d have the whole scene lingering on the sidewalk outside until do you want to come in and the inevitable cascade of touches that follows.
I could spark that flame, if I wanted. Or I could at least try. I could reach out and drag my fingertips along the line of his hipbone and tell him it was too late to go back to Queens. That he’d better take me to his place instead.
“Hey,” Wyatt says, and I look up, maybe a little too abruptly. Some weird, paranoid part of my brain immediately worries he can somehow psychically tell that I was obsessing over the smell of his laundry detergent.