The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2)(37)

“Again?”

She swallowed around her tongue. No matter how much time had passed, it was still hard to let the words out.

“When I was eighteen, my boyfriend shared naked pictures I’d sent him with my entire high school. He was pissed I didn’t want to sleep with him.” Sleep with him again, actually. He’d convinced her to try it once. Whether it was the guy or the timing or just starting to discover she was queer, she hadn’t been ready to continue.

“Naomi, I’m so sorry. What a horrible betrayal of your trust and privacy.”

He had a good voice for sympathy, smooth and warm and rich.

She let it wrap around her. Wished she could keep it.

“Yeah. It was awful,” she said, the word only a little hollow. “Everyone turned on me. My friends, my teachers, they all looked at me like I’d done the bad thing. Like I’d offended them by making myself vulnerable.” The email on her phone had felt like it weighed down her pocket. “That was the first time that I realized my body could be both desirable and disgusting to people at the same time. That those two emotions could twist inside a person, mixed with their own shame, and turn venomous.” She couldn’t even count the number of times she’d been told she should have known better.

“But in the end, I wouldn’t take any of it back. That moment is pretty much the catalyst for my whole career. I wanted to prove that being naked, being sexual, didn’t make you less valuable, less worthy of respect. In my quest to redeem Hannah Sturm—that’s my given name—I became Naomi Grant. Sex work let me save myself. Let me regain my power.”

“Do you ever miss who you were before, miss being Hannah?”

She drove for a while. Long enough that when she did speak, it startled him.

“I didn’t know who I was back then. It’s hard to miss the potential of a person. I may be a coldhearted bitch now, but I like the life I’ve built. Maybe if I’d stayed Hannah, stayed in Boston, gone to veterinary school like I planned, my quiet life out of the public eye would be depressing and awful.”

“I don’t think there’s as much difference between the time Before Naomi and After as you think there is.”

She shrugged. It didn’t matter anyway. There was no going back.

“Being exploited changed my life.”

“You can change but still be the same,” he said, the words thick on his tongue from the tequila.

She knew what he was trying to say, but where was the breaking point? The threshold where identity fissured? Some experiences must shock the system on a molecular level.

She should ask Ethan. He was a physicist. He would know. But she was tired of talking about herself. Tired of dragging up old wounds. She’d given enough time and energy to the past tonight. To men who had behaved badly. Neither deserved any more of her breath.

“This is my exit,” Ethan said, granting her the favor of changing the subject.

Naomi caught another angle of his face when she turned, and sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth. “Fuck. Does that eye feel as bad as it looks?”

Ethan squinted into the side mirror. “No. Not yet.”

“Don’t worry. The ladies will love it.”

“Oh no.” He squirmed in his seat, groaning. “Not the ladies, please.”

Naomi took a bit of perverse pleasure in his discomfort. “Oh, come on. I heard Rabbi Cohen was finally thinking about finding a Mrs. Rabbi.”

“Stop. Ahh.” He wrinkled his nose. “You sound like my mother.”

Welp. Guess compliment time was over.

“She keeps having her assistant email me write-ups of every eligible Jewish woman in Hollywood. And also some who I’m pretty sure are married.”

“Not above adultery?”

“I asked God not to smite her just yet.”

Naomi turned her head so he wouldn’t see her smile.

“Sometimes I think she forgets that I don’t work for her,” Ethan said, not mad but not fully joking either.

“She’s a boss bitch?” Naomi’s dad was a welder and her mom was a nurse. They both worked extremely hard, but neither of them had much appetite for management. Her career was sort of a black box for them. They weren’t disapproving, at least not to her face, but they didn’t exactly engage with her day-to-day responsibilities.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah.” He dropped his eyes to his lap. “Have you heard of Crowne Artists’ Agency?”

Naomi let out a huff of laughter. “Uh, yeah.”

Everyone in L.A. had heard of Crowne. They were the cream of the crop, repping the town’s entire A-list. Models, actors, directors.

“My mother’s the president of the agency.”

“Your mother is . . . holy shit. Wait a second. Are you loaded?”

Ethan choked on a sip of water. Maybe there was a polite way to ask that question, but she didn’t know it.

“My mother has a lot of money.”

Such a rich-person response. She shook her head. What the fuck? Naomi fought to keep herself from pulling over on the shoulder of the freeway.

“If your mom is the president of Crowne, why isn’t your synagogue full of celebrities? You don’t need me and my singles mixers and seminars. All you need is one phone call—hell, I’m sure even an email would—”