“I’d like that too.”
It’s too far. It’s way too far.
It isn’t far enough.
She’s the one who shifts in and slides her nose along my cheekbone with a soft sigh, her exhale hot on my skin. I can smell the clean-linen scent of her detergent—or maybe it’s her shampoo, as a lock of her hair drifts forward to graze my jaw.
We are held together in a castle of our own making, an existence of breath and skin and the marvel of Ely’s lashes skirting her cheek.
I kiss her, and I don’t regret it.
She makes a soft sound against my mouth, as if she didn’t think I’d actually go so far—but then she kisses me back, parting her lips for me. I’ve leaned in so far that I’m in danger of falling out of the desk chair and right into Ely’s lap. And that seems to be her idea too; both her hands are on my back, dragging me in closer, and god, I want to go there. I want to go wherever the hell Ely Cohen takes me.
The chair finally tips me out and I stumble forward, halfknocking Ely back onto the bed. My self-control gives in about as easily as the chair and I follow after her, pushing her the rest of the way down. She hums against my mouth, dragging one knee up along my side to curl her leg around—
Shit, stop, stop, fuuuuuck.
I yank my mouth away from hers. Even if I can’t quite make myself stand upright yet, I can do this: stay here half-crouched over her body on this tiny twin bed with my face turned sharply away from hers, gasping.
“Sorry,” I manage at last, around the time I gather the ability to slowly push myself away from her and back into the precarious-feeling desk chair. “Wasn’t really supposed to end like that.”
Ely is still half-reclined on the bed, propped on one elbow with almost-black hair tangled in front of her face and a flush of color high on her cheeks. “You can end it like that anytime you want, mister.”
JesusChrist. Even looking at her feels sinful.
“Yeah, no, rules, et cetera; you’ve heard the lecture before. Goodlord,I’ve got to get out of here. You just relapsed. I shouldn’t be doing this right now.” I let out a fragile laugh and wonder if I sound as terrified as I feel. “Are you going to be okay without me?”
Her brows lift and she says, “I mean, if I sayno…?” But then she sighs and nods. “Yeah. Sorry. Not trying to play the woe-is-me, I’m-vulnerable card. You can go. I’ll be all right. I’ll just be lying herewishingyou’d stayed.”
Probably thinking,What the hell happened to his boundaries?because that’s what I’m thinking right now. I still feel overheated, as if the radiator’s on even though it’s late June. I scrape both hands back through my hair and blow out hard. “You don’t make it easy, do you?”
“Would you like me any better if I did?” she says with a sly grin, and as always, I’m the one left on the back foot.
I don’t even have anything to say to that; I just shake my head and fumble around to find my phone and shove it in my back pocket as I stand. She still hasn’t moved. Because why would she? She’s got me right where she wants me. Right whereI’dwant to be too, if only I weren’t so infuriated with myself for losing control. Again.
I do finally make it out, but I text her from the bus and again from the train just to check that she’s still okay.
Looking, maybe, for an excuse to go back.
25
ELY
As with most things, the timing could not possibly be worse. I’m less than a week out from my mini-relapse when I get an email back from Nechama Rubenstein, the rebbetzin of the Chabad House in Astoria. I’m in desperate need of more content for my capstone, so I can’t exactly blow her off.
I scoped her and the rabbi out carefully before writing them and asking if I could photograph one of their events. Chabad is big but also, like, not really. I had to make sure they didn’t know my family. Which meant—with a young couple like Moshe and Nechama Rubenstein—I had to make suretheirfamily didn’t know my family. Because otherwise I could imagine how things would go: me, the Cohen girl with drug problems, lurking around Chabad House events as if she didn’t run off and break her mother’s heart. It would have been a bad look.
But neither Moshe nor Nechama is from Crown Heights originally. They’re both children of shlichus families—that is, their parents led their own Chabad Houses in other cities, little outposts of Orthodoxy reaching out to Jews who didn’t know how to light a Shabbos candle or pronounce a Hebrew prayer.
So I’m pretty sure it’s safe.
“Is this a leech thing to do?” I ask Wyatt over the phone as I walk from Thirtieth toward Broadway. A part of me wanted to ask if he could come with me, but that felt childish, as if I were a little girl afraid to go to camp on her own. But that hadn’t stopped me from calling him as soon as I left my apartment. “Like…isn’t it a little parasitic of me to impose on them like this and use them for my project, and the whole time I’m just, like…masquerading as this random secular Jew who doesn’t know anything about being Orthodox?”
“Youarea random secular Jew,” Wyatt says. “You aren’t practicing now, are you?”
I chew my lower lip and sidestep a pile of dog shit that someone considerately left right in the middle of the sidewalk. “I mean…I guess not. Not really. I don’t know that I’d say I’msecular,though.”
I still don’t know how I feel about G-d. I’m pretty sure he exists. But I thought I was done with all this. Iwasdone with it before I went to Shabbos with Michal and felt that magic lighting up inside my chest.
