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His jaw flexes briefly. “You know what, you’re right,” he says. “This was misguided.”
“Thank you.” I glare around the restaurant, still feeling painfully annoyed.
“Tannis.”
My eyes flick in his direction. “What?” I ask.
He studies my face with soft, pensive eyes. “May I ask you a question? It’s personal.”
I bite my cheek in hesitation. “Fine,” I say.
Ari leans forward slightly, his gaze never straying far from mine. “Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten? One?”
“Is this a job interview now?”
He doesn’t answer. He sits still, waiting for a response.
I exhale hard, giving in. “College,” I answer. “Grad school, maybe.”
“What would you study?”
“Psychology,” I say, feeling foolish. “I thought it’d be nice to help people.” I scoff. “No wonder my parents didn’t want me going. There was no point in throwing away money on a degree their daughter would never use.”
“Or, perhaps, they thought to wait out for a better teacher,” he says.
“Who? You?”
“Yes,” he says. “What if I told you that you had the entirety of the world’s knowledge at your fingertips? Every fact, every text. Everything you could ever dream to learn was right there waiting for you? And not only that, you had eternity to pick through it bit-by-bit. Would you like that?”
“Sounds nice but it’s not the same,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because...” I shake my head. “It’s not just knowledge, Ari. It’s experience. I wanted to go away to school and make friends and skip classes and go to parties and all that stuff.”
“That stuff doesn’t matter.”
“It does in the moment,” I argue. “I wanted to carve my place in the world. To earn it. To find myself — just like everybody else does.”
“And you’re sad now that you think you can’t?”
“Sad?” I repeat. “No, I’m not sad. I’m pissed off.”
“Why?”
“Because—” I bite down. “For twenty years, people have told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. Teachers, books, every goddamn movie told me that if I really wanted to be something, I could do it. Just believe in yourself, Tannis, and the world is yours. Now, I come to find out that... they were never even talking to me.” I swallow hard. “It would have been goddamn nice to know earlier that my life has no purpose.”
Ari’s face shadows with sympathy. “You think your life serves no purpose?” he asks.
I look at the table instead of answering.
“Tannis,” he says, his voice soothing, “I have seen with my own eyes what a life without purpose looks like and I can tell you, with great confidence, that you are wrong.”
“And what purpose do I serve, Ari?” I ask. “Your playmate?”
“You think that’s why I chose you?”
“Why else?” My eyes sting with tears. “Isn’t that why we’re here? Because you want to get into my pants?”
“If that’s what I wanted, I would have taken it a long time ago,” he says.
“Then what do you want?” I ask him. “Please. Just out with it already. What do you want from me?”
Ari slowly fixes his jawline for a moment as a server pauses beside our table. I sit back and they rest a small plate between us full of snails and brilliant green garnish.
“Escargots a la Bourguignonne,”she says with a wink.
As they leave, I fix my stare on Ari again and he smiles.
“Bon appetit,Tannis,” he says, refusing me an answer.
