Free So 5 Minutes Ago by Hilary De Vries

force that I had to grip the edge of the table to keep from falling backward in the booth. I was just on the verge of pulling out of the kiss, of putting everything back where it had been, when Josh dropped his forehead on mine in a way that was actually endearing and said, quite quietly given the roar of the restaurant, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”
    I can’t say I loved him. Maybe I just loved the
idea
of being with Josh. At the very least, that kiss seemed like an answer to a question I’d given up asking myself. But like I said, it’s easy to confuse running away from something with running toward something.
    And being with Josh was
interesting,
and so different from the guys back at Brown, all those sun-streaked lacrosse players who were so big and taciturn and beer-filled that you never knew what they were thinking—at least off the lacrosse field—but it didn’t matter, not for the two or three months those relationships lasted, because they were just so pretty.
    Josh wasn’t like that. He was talky and eager to tell me
exactly
what he was thinking and feeling and he wanted me to tell him everything I was thinking and feeling. Even when I really didn’t feel like doing that, Josh always wanted to know, and after a while it was sort of flattering and even a little addictive to be the center of so much attention. Only later did being with Josh start to seem like a bad episode of
Mad About You.
When the differences between us became unmistakable no matter how hard we tried.
    Even Josh’s proposal was interesting—during our first and, as it turned out, only trip to Israel. The trip was ostensibly about introducing me to his old kibbutz buddies, guys like Josh who’d grown up in New York but who’d spent high school summers milking cows and picking grapes in Israel. But unlike Josh, his friends had moved back to Israel after graduation and were now teaching in Tel Aviv or studying in Jerusalem or shooting at Palestinians in the desert but mostly living off money their parents, comfortably back home in Westchester, sent them every month.
    “Don’t try to figure it out,” Josh had said when I asked how American college graduates who could have been going to law school or med school or earning a bundle on Wall Street were living like refugees in a war zone. “Chalk it up to Zionism—or better yet, guilt,” he added, as we’d headed out from the King David to the Old City. It was only our second day in Israel and I was still getting used to the heat and the blazing desert light. After several minutes of walking down one alleyway and then the next, I started to feel dizzy. At first, I thought it was the jet lag or just the strangeness of the Old City, all the twisty cobbled streets with their deep, slashing shadows and the smells of smoke and blood—like that kid pushing a freshly severed cow’s head in a wheelbarrow—and the old men sucking on water pipes in the cafes. I thought I needed to sit down or maybe just head to the Christian quarter, when I turned to Josh and all but collapsed on his shoulder.
    I was close to tears, when Josh steered me down an alley and leaned me against a wall and put his arms around me and whispered that we should get married. Maybe it was the shock or just too much Jerusalem but Josh took my sobbing as a yes. Only later, when we were having lunch at an outdoor cafe back in the new city, where thankfully U2 poured from the tinny little speakers and I downed about four glasses of iced tea and felt suddenly so much better, had I realized we’d mistaken dehydration for trembling passion. I was on the verge of telling Josh he could take it all back, that I felt like myself again and where was that cool shopping district he’d mentioned, when I looked over and saw him looking at me in a way that I had never seen and realized that however inadvertently, I was engaged. That what I had been playing at—what we both had been playing at—was for keeps.
    Of