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“I have faith in you to do the right thing, man,” Ari said, and he possibly would have said something else, but Ilan ended the call. It was a good thing, too, because at some point during the conversation, Abi had responded to his text.
Great.
* * *
Latke made a protesting noise as Abi lifted the little fluffball from her shoulder. If she was going to talk to Ilan Efrat, she was going to have to do it without the comforting warmth of two little furry piles of squeak. Applesauce was equally annoyed to be moved from her perch in Abi’s lap. Abi clicked her tongue at the two little animals in what she hoped was a reassuring way. She could communicate with angry toddlers all day, but she was clueless about mammals for some reason.
Well, she knew the reason. Her family preferred non-mammalian critters. Her dad had his lorikeets. Her mom had chickens, which Abi realized were also birds, but the vibe was different. Her sister had fish. Abi had never chosen to adopt a pet before, so it was all new territory for her. Her phone chirped again, and she glanced at it over her shoulder as she wrangled the also chirping guinea pigs into their enclosure. Abi gave them a few little pellets from the pet store as an apology. The store clerk assured her that guinea pigs liked them.
Neither animal appeared interested, and she sighed. Well, she was used to people being angry with her, she could handle fuzzy fluff balls in a pique too, she guessed. She considered going to get herself a glass of wine before looking at the phone but decided that was just her being a coward. She’d responded to his text in the first place. She could be a grownup and see what he had to say back. That’s how conversation worked.
“Did you not want to talk about it?” she read, and her mouth twisted in a hard scowl. He couldn’t be serious. Her fingers started flying over the phone screen, and she was halfway through a scathing response when her better sense told her to step back. She forced herself to delete everything she’d written out and simply type back a more measured response.
“Which part did you mean?” She said aloud as she typed it out. Because it would be very easy to all-caps the man for showing up at her house to talk about her concerns regarding the massive land clearance happening in her neighborhood, only to turn it into a mutual masturbation-fest, but if he was only messaging her to answer the questions he’d ignored in the first place, then she’d feel like a deflated balloon. If he wanted to talk about the sex, well then she would all-caps him.
“Any of it. All of it. We should probably talk at some point, right?”
“Well look at this guy being emotionally mature,” Abi muttered, knowing that was unfair. She sighed, knowing he was right. Eventually, they were going to have to talk about how they couldn’t seem to meet up without ending up naked together. It wasn’t something she minded so much, but she figured if they ever did met in public people would have questions. She decided to tell as much of the truth as she could without telling him more than he needed to know.
“I am not in the best headspace, to be honest,” she typed out, then deleted the ‘to be honest’ and replaced it with a ‘tbh,’ figuring that if she didn’t use shorthand he would think she was actually pissed off, and then she’d have to deal with that instead, and it just made her tired.
“Same,” he replied back almost immediately. Abi’s head quirked to the side, and she wondered what was going on over at Ilan’s house. Then she immediately quashed that thought. She didn’t care what was happening in his life. They weren’t friends. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was just a guy she’d known since she was in grammar school.
A guy she’d never cared for, because he always seemed to know exactly the right thing to say to make her want to smack something, and who, most recently, she’d been unable to stop undressing.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she sent before she could stop herself. She scowled down at the glowing grey ellipsis that appeared almost instantly at that.
“I think that’s what I was trying to do,” he said back. Abi sighed. He had a point, drat him.
“You’re right, sorry,” she sent, then started typing again, “like I said--really rotten night.”
“Yeah, I get it,” he said back.
Why did this feel like pulling teeth? She wondered if she was going about this all wrong. She sat back in her chair, thinking through the situation. A man she had a sexual relationship was texting her relatively late in the evening on a weeknight. If Shoshana were telling her this story it would be to ask if she should be flirting or if she should take it as an invitation to come over.
Abi sighed, giving Shoshana dating advice had always been so easy. But this wasn’t one of Sho’s casual flings. Not that she had those anymore, Shoshana and David were obnoxiously committed to each other at this point. This was different. This was…
This was Abi, not Shoshana.
Abi didn’t do casual relationships.
She had only ever in her life had very solid, committed relationships. The kind where she was a unit, an Abi-and-Person. Because that’s what you did, right? You had a relationship, and you eventually got to a place where you were ready to get married, and then you got married. None of her past relationships had ever progressed to that level, but that was just the nature of dating, she supposed. She wasn’t particularly happy that she was in her late thirties and had never been married, but she also wasn’t very sad about it either.
Marriage and starting a family required a level of attention Abi just didn’t have.
She spent her days running a successful preschool. She agonized over making sure that other people’s children were hitting their developmental markers. She worked really hard to be sure that those kids were happy and healthy, and that their parents were just as involved as they were willing to be. And she was good at it.
But, good lord, there was no time in her life for children of her own.
Also, it felt like betraying Leah, almost.
Well, that was weird, she shifted on the overstuffed chair, wondering where that thought had come from, though she wasn’t surprised by it. Leah would lose her mind if she heard that Abi didn’t think she could ever have kids until her sister did. But that didn’t stop it from being entirely true. It feltwrongreaching certain life cycle events before her sister did. And she wasn’t even sure if kids were a thing Leah even wanted ever, so saying she couldn’t do it until Leah did meant she may not ever do it and it meant she was limiting herself, which just felt shitty.
She shook her head, none of this had anything to do with the situation at hand.
The situation at hand was that the man she had a nasty habit of shtupping was texting her at ten-thirty on a weeknight and didn’t appear to be doing so because he was trying to get her to come over.
She eyed her phone screen. If he were a friend of hers, she would just call him to see what was wrong. Because something must be wrong, right?
