The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2)(43)

“Love is valued at an individual, societal, and evolutionary level, and certainly Judaism tells us to honor marriage, the most commonly held institution in love’s name,” he conceded instead. “But I think in the simplest terms, love makes surviving easier, and everyone deserves that.”

Naomi flattened her mouth into a hard line. “Not everyone.”

Her undercurrent of anger warned Ethan to tread carefully. He bent and made a little Lost and Found sign out of notebook paper and placed it with the pens on the lectern.

“Anyway,” Naomi said after a long moment, picking her supplies back up and resuming cleaning. “Tell me what you’re looking for in a partner.”

“Now?” Ethan’s insides twisted in alarm. He sank down into a seat in the front row.

“Now seems as good a time as any.” She finished up her task and joined him.

Ethan racked his brain for adjectives Naomi might not immediately recognize as describing her. He settled for a trait she held but thought she masked.

“I’d like someone kind.” He couldn’t keep himself from adding, “Who knows themselves and what they want.”

Naomi frowned. “Kind is too subjective to use as a filter for potential dates.”

Ethan turned toward her. “What if we settled on a common definition?”

“You and me?” She gestured between them skeptically.

He nodded. “What if we define kind as someone who treats others with respect and tries to think the best of them?” Surely they could find common ground, in language if not in practice.

Naomi granted him a bitter smile. “I think the word you’re looking for is naive.”

A shot of pleasure ran through him. He liked when she was a little mean, could feel the affection underneath it. Sitting so close to her was a privilege, as ridiculous as it might sound. She was so often in motion when he saw her, splitting her attention in ten different directions. Juggling. Performing. Relative stillness made her appear deceptively docile, even as she remained fearsome to behold. Eyes flashing. Mouth too quick by half.

His wanting was so palpable, he could feel it in his throat.

“I’ve always found that shared values are more important than common interests,” she said. “People bond over a love of football or classical music or whatever, but studies show that hobbies are a terrible indicator of long-term compatibility. We covered it my social psych courses.”

“Who said anything about long-term?”

Naomi lowered her chin and gave him a look. “You’re a rabbi in his thirties.”

“So?”

“The rabbi part means you’re responsible and you like taking care of people.” She reached over absently and straightened his tie. Ethan hoped she couldn’t detect the flurry of his heartbeat. “And the thirties part means you understand your biological imperative to breed.”

He supposed he had signed up for this kind of analysis when he recruited her, albeit reluctantly, to find him a date. Still, he wished she hadn’t said the word breed. He shifted in his seat against an inconvenient tightening in his pants.

“You asked for this,” Naomi said, reminding him in the face of his discomfort.

“I had a feeling you’d already sized me up anyway,” Ethan admitted.

“You’re easier than most.” Naomi’s voice wasn’t unkind. “You wear your emotions on your sleeve.”

Well, he couldn’t argue with that. Ethan had learned long ago that his feelings didn’t care whether he found them at all convenient. They made themselves known. He might as well face them headfirst. Better than letting them take him out at the knees.

“Let’s start with the basics.” Naomi hopped up to write on the recently cleaned whiteboard. “You have to marry someone Jewish.” She scrawled the imperative.

“It certainly makes it easier if the person is Jewish,” Ethan acknowledged.

“Family-oriented.” She kept writing as she spoke. “I saw you with Leah. You want someone who cares about keeping family close.”

“I love Leah and my mom,” he agreed, “and I spend as much time with them as I can, but family has a lot of definitions. I would never disqualify someone because they weren’t close to their parents or siblings. Sometimes people don’t have a choice.”

Naomi pushed her hair out of her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Well, my dad’s dead.” He’d said the words before, many times even, but always they felt as wrong in his mouth as they did in his head.

“Shit.” Naomi took a step toward him and then, almost immediately, two steps back. “I mean, I’m sorry.”

Ethan forced himself to smile, because she looked so worried, so serious, and he wanted her to relax. “It’s okay,” he said, and found that today it was closer to being true than the last time he’d said it.

She wrung her hands for a moment. “When did he die?”

“Six years ago. Cancer,” Ethan said so she didn’t have to ask the second question. Normally that was the end of the conversation. He might wear his emotions on his sleeve, but he didn’t like to splash around in his grief.

“It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.” At the time, it had been the worst thing he could imagine. “My dad was my compass. The reason anything in the world made sense. And when he was gone, nothing mattered anymore. My teaching job didn’t matter. My friends didn’t matter.”