The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2)(44)

Since he’d become a rabbi, his work had exposed him to so much suffering. But anguish wasn’t something you could build up a tolerance to. Increased exposure didn’t stop Ethan from closing his eyes against the memories of his father, sick and suffering. How many times had Ethan wished he could take up the doctor’s scalpel and carve out his dad’s pain from his own skin? Pound for pound. Flesh for flesh. It was a macabre recollection. Naomi didn’t need to hear it.

“There’s no right or wrong way to grieve,” she said. Her hair was falling out of her hasty bun. He drank in its downfall against her cheeks.

“I tried to run from it.” He’d booked a plane ticket as soon as shiva had ended. “I left everything—everyone—here. Went to Brooklyn to stay with my cousins, because it was the farthest place from L.A. with a couch to crash on.”

“What did you find in Brooklyn?”

“Well, I ended up teaching Sunday school at my cousin’s shul. They needed people, and I had classroom experience and no other job. I didn’t tell them that I’d barely practiced in years. It was classic. I’d left L.A. to escape memories from my childhood, memories of my dad, but then I had no choice but to paw through them, searching for scraps of language and memories of rituals I’d forgotten. All of it covered with his fingerprints.”

“You had to put yourself back together from the fragmented pieces of your former life.” Naomi crossed her arms, and he had the distinct impression she was trying to hold in her emotions, giving his words space.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“It’s hard,” she said, like she knew.

In an auditorium with forty-foot ceilings, their shared experiences became magnetic, pulling them together.

“They had a rabbi there, her name was Mira, and she’d come visit my classroom occasionally. She’d heard I was new, from out of town. One day, she asked why I never came to services.” Ethan couldn’t stop the words tumbling from his mouth. If Naomi had given him a sign that she didn’t care about his history, a subtle, polite nod, maybe then he could have brought himself to heel, but she didn’t.

“I think I’d been there three months before I finally went. I showed up full of anger and fear and pain, and it was different than what I remembered. Saying the Kaddish in shul instead of at home somehow made me feel closer to my dad, so I kept going.”

Tension released from his chest. Ethan spent so much time listening, sometimes he forgot how much he missed being heard.

“The more I went to services, half because I didn’t have anything else to do, the more I realized that all the things I loved about physics, the questioning and the interconnectivity and the practice of it, the testing and the iterations and the debate, they were magnified when I practiced. The language came back to me, then the rituals, until I wasn’t alone in my grief any longer.”

“And so you decided to become a rabbi?”

“No, actually,” Ethan said. “I just wanted to study. I’m a career academic. The rabbinate was just another excuse to go back to school at first. Besides, I was worried about my mom. So I applied here in L.A. Got in. Substitute taught while I did my course. I never really expected to get my own synagogue. There are more applicants than positions. But after I graduated, Beth Elohim started interviewing. Most people said it was a lost cause. Attendance has been on a steady decline for over a decade. The location is tricky, with two other, well-funded synagogues within walking distance.”

“But you took it anyway.” She didn’t sound disparaging. If anything, she sounded glad.

“I took it anyway,” he said. “I figured my path to becoming a rabbi was nontraditional—why not adopt a nontraditional approach to building a congregation? I’d found my place in an unlikely ecosystem once. Why not again?”

“I get that.” Naomi nodded. “I thought I’d never trust anyone after what happened to me in high school, but then I came out here and I found my people. I got to build my own community, and then when Shameless happened, I got to give them a home. Your shul and my start-up, they look drastically different on the outside, but in a funny way they serve a similar purpose. We built the spaces we needed.”

“Sounds like a common value to me,” he said, bringing the conversation full circle to matchmaking, his whole heart in his throat. The words hung in the air, accompanied only by the hum of the air conditioner.

“I’ll make sure to add community-oriented to my scouting list.” Naomi turned away from him, uncapping the marker again, and he felt the loss all the way to his bones.

“Thank you.” Ethan got up and met her at the board, reaching out and wrapping his hand around her wrist, pausing her list making. “For listening. I mean.”

“Don’t mention it.” She stared down at his hand. “You know, I don’t think you’re as innocent as you’d like me to believe.”

“I never claimed innocence.” He stepped back and away, guilty.

“You don’t have to say it, it’s written all over you.” She waved a hand in the general direction of his face. “Those long-lashed eyes, the tousled curls, that eager ‘can I help you, ma’am?’ expression. You’re a trap, Ethan Cohen.”

“What sort of trap?” That description sounded like a compliment, and he was desperate for her to keep going.