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“Night, Ange,” Arasha says, pausing beside the couch nearest the parking lot doors.
Angela, typing on her laptop like the keys might get up and make a break for it, hardly glances up. “Yeah, night.”
As she goes to move again, Arasha finds that her momentum has left her. She needs to call that uber. But the evening’s gone cold with the dry chill of summer she still hasn’t gotten quite used to—she never misses the humidity when the sun’s out, but sometimes at dusk she misses her desert, just a bit—and she only has the thin cardigan she stole from wardrobe. She’s been freezing on the games stage already for the last hour. She should just call the uber in here, right? She should pull her phone out of her pocket now. God, she has to call AAA.
“Hey, uh.” Angela’s eyes briefly flick to her over her glasses, still glazed with focus, line between her brows. “You good?”
“Yeah.” Arasha blinks. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, I just– You know.”
“Mm,” she says. With the finality of a command-s click, she looks up properly. Her eyes widen. “Oh, shit. Did you get your car figured out?”
Arasha props up a smile. “Not yet?”
“Jesus, what a nightmare.”
To her horror, Arasha finds she has no quip to come back with. She reups her helpless smile instead.
“So how’re you getting home? Fabian?”
“He’s out of town. It’s cool, I’m just gonna call an uber.”
“No, hold on.” Angela flips closed her laptop and slings it under her arm. “I can give you a ride.”
“Oh, you do not need to do that.”
“Nah, it’s good. Give me a sec to pack up.”
“But– Your thing?” Angela had been getting her writing done in the office since the gap between her last shoot of the day and her night commitment was too slim to justify a third location between.
“Canceled. Thank god.” Angela leans forward to pull her tote bag from the coffee table, sliding her laptop in the case. She zips it and stands, strap over her shoulder.
“You seriously do not need to, it’s out of your way.”
Angela frowns. “We’re like fifteen minutes apart. Come on, it’ll cost you like fifty bucks at this time of night. Two hundred an hour is not my friends and family rate.”
“Good math,” Arasha notes, slightly taken aback—both by the math and by the ease of the “friends and family.” She’d describe them as friends, of course, but something about hearing it out of Angela’s mouth, especially when she’s in one of her more serious and reeled-in moods, catches her off guard.
Angela blinks, looking surprised herself. “Thanks. I know.” With that looseness that’s too casual to be snarky, she adds, “Hard to believe, but I did pass fourth grade.”
Arasha gives her a look. She needs to protest again, even though every exhausted particle of her is screaming how nice a free ride she doesn’t have to wait for sounds. Halfhearted, she tries, “You really don’t have to.”
Angela waves her whole hand the way somebody else might wag a finger. “Shush. Come on. We’re going.”
“Thank you. Seriously.”
“Uh-uh. We’re not doing all that.”
“Saying thank you?”
Angela hip checks the bumper bar open on the exit and holds it open for Arasha with her back. A small smile crooks the corner of her mouth. “Get out of here with that shit.”
Arasha smiles back. She shakes her head.
Outside is brisk, like she’d expected. The dim, pale sky has a smoggy band of yellow at the horizon. A half-moon glows gently. The leaves on the parking lot strip tree shiver. There’s a tiny puddle in a dip between two parking spaces that she would bet on someone having emptied their owala rather than any dream of rain.
She hugs herself.
Angela, clocking this, gruffly ushers her to the passenger door of her sedan. “Ignore the mess,” she directs, yanking the handle. “It’s been a week.”
“Oh, ignored.” Arasha slides in. She has plenty of leg room—a perk of Angela having a lot of tall friends—which does mean there’s plenty of real estate for a couple discarded yerba mate cans and a few loose unused napkins. She rests her feet atop them without a second thought. She’s at the point where she almost wouldn’t care if it was detailed with ten-year-old twinkies. Her head leans back nearly of its own will.
“You look wiped.” Arasha flutters her eyes open—when had they shut?—to find Angela’s brown ones studying her from across the console. The nearness of it feels intimate. She becomes more aware of her limbs and the quiet inside the car, of her breathing.
“Dang,” Arasha manages, trying to sound easygoing. “And that’s coming from you.”
“And that’s coming from me.”
Arasha can’t quite handle a smile. “It, uh, wasn’t the easiest morning, even before the car shitshow.” Despite herself, she finds her nostrils flaring. She blinks. “Nothing that– Oh, crap.”
“What?”
“Nothing, seriously.”
Angela twists her keys in the ignition. The car thrums, and 90s pop punk blares. “Fuck me,” she mutters, jabbing it off.
It startles a chuckle from Arasha. Angela looks at her from the corner of her eye, her reflexive self-consciousness shifting into something more pleased with herself. “So what was the nothing?” She checks her rearview camera and cranes her neck to see behind her.
“I just…. I remembered I have to throw out everything in my fridge.”
She reverses. “Damn, how much did you piss in the universe’s cornflakes?”
“…Full bladder, apparently. I mean, it’s fine, it’s just a doordash night.”
Angela brakes to let one of the editors cross through the parking lot. They wave.
When Arasha looks back at her, Angela’s furrowing her brow, running a hand through her hair. “Okay, stop me if this is weird, for real. Seriously, I’m more than happy to just drop you. But would you want to just come to mine? I actually grocery shopped, I can make us something. Or we can doordash together and save on the delivery fees, I don’t care.”
“You have a dashpass, don’t you.”
“Hundred percent.”
Arasha sucks on the inside of her bottom lip. A panicky feeling jitters under her ribs.
She works every day to prove to herself and everyone that her age, her relative inexperience in the comedy scene, her fresh roots in LA, do not define what she can handle. She’s mature—more mature than Angela, most of the time. Fuck, she shouldn't think that. It’s not true. Maybe a bit true, but she shouldn’t think that. Even if she couldn’t behave the way Angela behaves and get away with it—it’s not like Angela even behaves badly. She’s an enthusiastic performer. A generous coworker. And a friend. A friend who is currently offering to cook her dinner.
Arasha bites down on the soft bump of her inner lip between her teeth.
If Angela cooks or they doordash from a place she’s never been to, she might get too in her head and freaked out about the food. That would be ruder than if she just turned her down. But the whole process of figuring out a safe food to order sounds so exhausting, and the idea of spending even more money so daunting, that she can easily see herself going home alone to eat dry cereal and stare bleakly in front of her bacteria-filled fridge. That idea makes her guts feel like they’re being pulled into a vacuum.
She’s so tired. And she wants somebody nearby, she does. “I couldn’t ask–”
“Well, great, ‘cause you’re not. I’m offering. Dude, you’ve had a fucked day.”
It’s the bluntness that does it. Arasha slumps, face hot against her fingers.
“Whoa, hey, hey." Surprise mixes with worry in Ange's voice. The gear shift clicks. "It’s okay, I can drop you off, same as before. That’s totally cool, Arasha, I promise.”
“No,” she croaks. “It’s–” She breathes in, shaky.
“Oh.” Angela hesitates. “It wouldn’t be like a big thing—we could put on some stupid TV and lay on the couch for a while. I do it with Amanda and Chanse like all the time. Would that…?”
Arasha nods. She feels, for the first time in a second around Angela, as much younger as she is.
“Yeah?”
She swallows. “Yeah. Please.”
Her words defuse the mounting nonchalance with which Angela has been talking. “Awesome. Hey, c’mere.”
She feels herself pulled into a sweet, awkward hug, made even a bit uncomfortable by the center console. She reaches a hand to Angela’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says, after a moment, pulling back. “I don’t know what happened, my brain was going totally crazy and it just–”
“No, but like, it can get you.”
She laughs, breathy and wet. “It got me.”
Angela watches her for a moment, eyebrows bowed in concern, fingers picking at each other. “If you need to let it all out, that’s okay. I have had breakdowns in this car like you wouldn’t believe.”
“No, that, um. That helped.”
“Sick. Alright.” Angela’s hands come back up the the steering wheel, her eyes to the windshield. Arasha remembers they’ve been stalled in the middle of the parking lot this whole time. Angela rolls them forward, to the outlet of the parking lot. “Want aux? You don’t want me on aux.”
Clearing her throat, Arasha holds up her phone, pretending it’s Angela’s. “Heartfelt musical theater Wednesday evening?”
Angela does a double take. “Shut up. You’re kidding, but that’s– I’m deleting Spotify.”
“I love you,” Arasha says, reflexively, because her whole body has breathed out and there’s a fond pressure sitting in the middle of her face.
Angela grins at her. “My terrible taste in music got you, huh?”
“It’s not terrible,” she replies, smiling back. “Don’t do that.”
“Go on, play your little Swiftie heart out.”
“Hey. Just for that, now I might.” She connects to the car’s Bluetooth but puts on an Indie Girlie playlist that she’s banking on having an even enough split of their taste instead. She turns it down to comfortable ambience as Maggie Rogers starts to croon.
Angela gets them on the road properly. The rolling motion, the warming air, and the soft music slow Arasha’s blinks. Her mind loops murky, disjointed fragments of her last twenty-four hours—candlelight across her kitchen table, flashlight beams through the shower curtain, keys that twisted in the ignition without a cough.
When her eyes open again, she finds the sky has gone a duller, hazier pink. They’re on the highway. Dozens of red taillights before them flare along the darkening road.
She shifts her head. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Angela.
Colors and shadows play against her cheeks and the lenses of her glasses. Her thumb taps the steering wheel in time with the music. Periodically, she runs her hand through her hair. While their conversation doesn’t seem to have pulled her fully from her reserved vibe, she doesn’t seem in one of her low, anxious frets, either. She’s calmer, tired.
Arasha did okay in high school chemistry (which, her coworkers like to remind her, was not long enough ago for their taste). And it’s weird, but Angela reminds her of an electron. She has discrete energy levels. She can jump between them quickly and dramatically. When she’s high energy, she’s spilling out of herself, spinning through the room; when she’s low energy, she pulls in, spiraling deeper and deeper into herself. Right now, she feels lower middle.
She wonders, if she said something, if Angela would have any idea what the hell she was talking about.
She remembers the clip Tommy showed her. A flicker of a flame.
Probably not.
Eventually, a couple exits short of Arasha’s own, Angela pulls off the freeway. Streetlights fuzz in balls between the trees. Arasha hasn’t noticed them so clearly in years.
They slow as they turn into the parking lot for an apartment building Arasha assumes is Angela’s. She hasn’t been over since she moved. She actually doesn’t remember if she’s ever been to Angela’s apartment for a one-on-one hangout before, even at the old place. She’s maybe never hung out with Angela one-on-one outside of work, period. Did Angela think this through? Will she regret this in twenty minutes and Arasha will have to figure out the signals on the fly? What’s she thinking?
Shifting to park, Angela looks over at her. “Are people who are allergic to nuts allergic to pine cones?”
“What?”
“Just saw a pine cone and now I’m thinking about it. Is a pine cone a nut?” She rubs her eye. “What is a nut?”
Arasha shakes her head, bemused. “You know, I don’t know.”
Angela unbuckles her seatbelt and gets out of the car. “But there’s also pine nuts, right? Like for pesto. So where do the cones fit into this?”
Arasha follows her. The car beeps and they start walking to the back door. “Right, feels like they’d both be gunning for the same niche, there.”
“Exactly. And there’s only one casting spot open, bitches. We can’t both be nuts.”
“You do such a great job, you can take it.”
It takes a pause for Angela’s tired brain to run back her own words. She stares at her, mouth dropping open, and laughs, reaching out and grabbing Arasha’s arm. “Wow.”
Warmth flushes Arasha’s cheeks. “You laid me a red carpet, I mean.”
“You had to, you did have to. Both be nuts. I mean, we can both be nuts. Maybe pine cones can too.”
“I, uh, don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m the sanest person on earth.”
“Right, of course, of course.”
They grin at each other.
Angela unlocks the back door and they climb up the stairwell. The physical exhaustion of a back-to-back shoot day pushes down on Arasha. Her body aches. She tugs herself up the handrail as Angela trudges to her right.
Keys jingle. Angela opens her door.
“Sporky,” she singsongs, her voice raspy. “Hey, buddy.”
Spork’s bed sits on the floor at the end of the couch. He stays curled up in a donut until Angela’s only a few feet away—then his little doggy head pops up, swivels without focus, and he stumbles to his feet. He toddles off the cushion and takes two steps on the hardwood.
“Hey, sweet boy.” Angela drops her tote on the table and kneels beside him, gently peeling apart the white loop around his lower back with a staticky separation a touch lighter than velcro. She leaves the diaper to the side, wet side up, like a crinkled, lopsided U. “How we doin’, huh?”
He shivers, filmy, buggy eyes settling near her. His tongue licks at the air. His back is hunched, slightly, which Angela has described as a side effect of how much he hates the diaper.
She gathers him in her arms. “Hi.” She presses her eyes closed, folds her face into his neck. “Hi, Sporky. Missed you.”
His tail wags feebly against her arm.
Angela looks up at her and breathes an embarrassed laugh. She lifts the knuckles of her free hand to her cheeks. “Not me having an emotional reunion with my dog who I see every day. This is insane behavior, I know.”
“Hey, no.” Arasha pushes through her suddenly clogged throat. “It’s sweet.”
“Yeah, yeah. Total pine cone, am I right?”
Arasha rolls her eyes.
Angela kisses the top of Spork’s head. She hugs him to her chest for one more beat then picks him up, pushing herself to her knees and delivering him to the couch. “No diaper for now, I’ll let you air out a little bit.”
He shakes again and stays standing, front paws spread a little too wide, looking lost.
“He’ll settle,” Angela dismisses, as if it were a concern that Arasha had raised. She pulls off her shoes and Arasha does the same. Then she stands up, dropping the wet diaper in the trash and moving to the sink to wash her hands. Arasha follows her. “What do you want for food?”
“Maybe, uh, something simple?”
Angela looks at her, frank and canny. “Something safe?”
A feeling, known and seen and shared, sprouts in Arasha’s chest. She nods a couple too many times. “Yeah,” she says, an edge of embarrassed relief catching at the end.
“Got it. Okay, comfort food. I’m partial to a, uh, a cacio e pepe moment. Super quick, pasta, butter, cheese, salt, pepper. She sounds boring, but she’s classy.”
Tension unknots in Arasha’s shoulders. “You’re gonna eat carbs for me?”
“Yeah, well. I’m trying to do better on that front.”
“Hey. Proud of you.”
Angela makes an old man noise and turns to her pantry. “Okay, cacio e pepe is on the way-ey. I can make a salad with it, I have– Well, I have cucumbers. I can chop cucumbers to go with it. Everything else is kind of a cook it type thing. Oh, I could get out the airfryer, I could do some–”
“I would love cucumbers. Honestly, if you grab a cutting board, I can chop and we can snack while you make the pasta.”
“You’re perfect—hey, listen, you’re perfect—but no. Your job is to sit on the couch and get bundled under like fifty blankets.”
“Are you sure? I love a task.”
“Your task is to lie there.” She gestures with the knife she just pulled out of the drawer. “Cuddle Spork. Scroll on your phone. Laugh at my jokes.”
“You’re waving a knife at me.”
Angela looks down at her hand on the handle. “Yes, I am. Go.”
With a beaten smile, Arasha curls up in the corner of the couch that still affords her a good talking angle with the kitchen. Spork lies on the furthest cushion. He has a leg up in the air and is audibly licking his dick. Arasha watches him, perturbed.
In the kitchen, she hears the rush of water as Angela fills the pot. It clunks as she sets it on the stove. The gas clicks. When Arasha looks up, she’s bent over, pulling out a cutting board. She sets in on the counter. After she rinses the cucumbers, she slices them into spears and puts them onto a plate. The tap shushes again as she fills a glass with water. She delivers both plate and glass to the coffee table in front of Arasha, frowning distractedly, and veers off without a word. When she returns, she has three blankets in her arms.
“Normally on the couch,” she mutters. “Laundry day.”
She opens one that looks like a tortilla over Arasha’s lap. The other two she leaves on the armrest.
“Thank you,” Arasha says. “Thanks, Ange.”
“You’re always cold,” says Angela. She walks back to the kitchen.
Arasha pulls the blanket around herself, realizing that her feet had been aching, lightly buzzing. She wedges them under her ass and tucks the blanket tightly. She reaches forward and plucks a cucumber spear from the plate—her teeth part it easily, soft and then crisp. Her stomach growls almost painfully. She finishes the piece and reaches for another.
Angela has pulled into herself, back to the level she’d been on while she was driving. In part, it’s a relief: the deeper she sinks into the couch, the firmer the grip the day takes on Arasha’s head, pricking at the backs of her eyes, thumbing up on the roof of her mouth. She only has so much banter left in her.
Angela quiet cuts deeper, though, which is almost as hard to bear. Honestly, she hadn’t expected her to be so good at caretaking. She’s been fussed over in the office before, of course. Been bullied into lying down on breaks when she got sick at the tail-end of a shoot week, been hyped up when she was doubting herself mid-self-tape. But that had all been amped with her energy, her bluster, performing for, if not everyone around them, then for Arasha. Not in a dishonest way, and not in a way that it didn’t touch her—it did, very much so. She just hadn’t expected this drawn, steadier Ange, this Ange that feels almost secret, here in the shelled privacy of her apartment, to be so practiced. It scrapes at her sternum.
A ceramic bowl clinks. Cheese rasps against a grater.
To ward off the wave of emotion that will surely be shored up the minute she gets something more filling than cucumber spears in her, Arasha pulls out her phone. She has a few texts from her mom, from Fabian, even one from her brother, which is not about her neighborhood power outage, her car’s dead battery, or the relationship between the two (had to charge her phone; left the light on; woke up screwed) but rather is a screenshot from the extended family Whatsapp. She leaves them all unread and opens Instagram. She scrolls.
“Do you wanna change?” Angela asks, a couple minutes later, hand on an emptying box as spaghetti patters into the pot. “I need sweats. I have extra.”
“You have something that’ll fit?”
“We’ll see.” She shrugs. She prods the noodles with a wooden spoon so they bend into the water, then lays the spoon on the counter with the head on the upturned pot lid. She makes her way to the bedroom, fingers trailing the wall.
Arasha glances to the oven. 8:21 glows in small red letters.
Some rummaging later, Angela emerges in sweats and a faded, ratty crewneck frayed at the sleeve from chewing. She’s run a makeup remover wipe over her face; she looks younger and blotchier and more tired. In her hands she has a folded bundle of clothes that she passes to Arasha, who levers herself off the couch, careful not to jostle Spork, who has finally left his privates alone. His tongue sticks out of his mouth even in sleep. God, she thinks fondly, he’s an ugly dog.
Angela reaches her hands up to her shoulders and turns her towards the bathroom. Warmth cascades down Arasha’s back at the touch. She takes the direction and shuts herself in the small room, flicking on the fan and the light. The brightness makes her blink. She stares at her exhausted reflection in the mirror. She notices the décor more than she had in the main room—there’s a patterned shower curtain and thick plush bath mats, some goofy photos taped to the medicine cabinet, and a painting of a cow in a bathtub over the toilet. Here, instead of makeup remover wipes, micellar water and a sleeve of cotton pads sit beside the toothbrush. Arasha sets the pile of clothes, which she can now discern as sweats, an overlarge tee, and a baggy but new sweatshirt, on the free space on the other side of the sink.
She pees, because she’s had to pee for a while now but hadn’t had the energy to stand, washes her hands, washes her face, wipes her face, borrows some of Angela’s moisturizer, and changes into the clothes, peeling off her bra. The pants are a few inches short, baring her ankles, but the rest hangs off her, loose and comfy. She feels a thousand times more human.
“Whoops. D’you remember when I put the pasta on?” Angela calls.
“Eight twenty-one!” she calls back. She gathers her clothes in her hands and pushes back out into the living room.
“Thanks. I don’t know why I asked, I’m gonna try it anyway.” Angela loops a strand of pasta around the fork and holds it in the air. She blows on it until she can put it in her mouth. “Yup,” she says, chewing. She flicks the dial, picks the pot up with a dishtowel, strains it in the sink, and replaces it on the dark burner. She cuts off thick squares of butter and drops them in, stirring. The bowl of cheese next to her gets dumped in next. She cranks the salt and pepper grinders over the pot. Giving it a final stir, she shuffles to the high cabinets and pulls out two bowls. “Wah-lah.”
“Wah-lah?”
Angela does her small, closed-mouthed giggle. “That’s wrong. Whatever.”
Affection creases Arasha’s cheeks. She takes the proffered bowl and deals herself out a full helping. She passes the tongs back to Angela.
“Extra cheese,” Angela offers, gesturing with her elbow.
Arasha takes extra cheese.
“Sit. Eat. Stupid TV.”
“Stupid TV,” Arasha agrees. She curls back up on her spot of the couch, reintegrating beneath the blankets. Her stack of clothes piles on the armrest. She twirls her fork in her bowl, swaddling the tines, and lifts it to her mouth. Her eyes shut as she chews. “Thank you,” she says again, through her bite.
“Hey, you’re helping me,” Angela returns. She grabs a cucumber slice from the coffee table and sits down on the middle cushion, refusing to displace Spork. Flicking on the TV, she scrolls through some reality options, landing on something perfectly mind-numbing. She hits play.
As she eats, Arasha’s body gets heavier and heavier. When she realizes she’s listing towards Angela, she straightens, blinking hard. “Sorry.”
Angela makes a noise at the back of her throat. Grabbing a throw pillow, careful not to jostle Spork, who has shifted to her side, head on her thigh, she places it on her side. She pats it.
Arasha looks at her, brow creased, checking.
Angela nods.
Arasha rests her head on the pillow. Drowsiness pulls her under.
She doesn’t know how long goes by before Angela’s shaking her lightly.
“Hey,” she whispers.
Arasha opens her eyes.
“It’s 9:30.”
“Oh, shit.” Biting her lip to gain her bearings, she eases herself upright. She can feel the weave the throw pillow has left pressed into her cheek.
“Would you wanna stay here?” Angela’s voice is gravelly, low and gentle. “I’ll make up the couch. We can swing by your place in the morning, pick up your stuff.”
Arasha imagines getting a ride home now instead. Rocking up to her dark, cold house, where even if the power’s back on all her appliance clocks will be flashing, and getting into her cold bed. This couch is warm. It would be so easy to lie flat, let her eyes droop again. “Is that okay?”
“Duh. I’d give you the bed but I feel like that would make it weird–”
“Yeah, I’m not taking your bed from you.”
“–Me saying it maybe made it weird. Sorry. But no, duh. We can use the carpool lane in the morning, it’ll be great.”
The carpool lane does sound great.
“I don’t need sheets,” she manages. “Just a real pillow would be amazing.” She glances down at Spork, whose eyes blink slowly. “Will Spork mind, or?”
“Oh, he’ll sleep with me. I’m gonna take him down for a piss in a second. Let’s get you cozy first.”
She shifts Spork and stands, disappearing into the bedroom and reappearing with a spare pillow tucked under her arm. “Never used,” she promises. “It’s my pillow that sits behind my other pillows that I always move to my chair because somehow I ended up with a stupid amount of pillows.” She stops by the linen closet and pulls out another blanket. “Just in case, I don’t know.”
She kneels down by Arasha and slides the pillow between her and the armrest. The blanket she rests on the coffee table. Looking up into Arasha’s eyes, she asks, “All good?”
It's almost cuteness aggression that has Arasha reaching out a hand to cup Angela’s cheek. “You’re the best.”
She can feel Angela’s grin against her palm. She pretends to bite it playfully.
Arasha pulls her hand away, snorting, pulling her lips in against her front teeth and puffing her cheeks. “You’re nuts.”
Angela snickers. She points a finger and draws out, “Pine cone.”
“Pine cone,” Arasha choruses.
Angela beams at her. She pushes herself back up to her feet. “Alright, anything in the house is yours, wake me if you need anything. I’ll be downstairs with the boy and then back up but I’ll try and keep it down." In the same forthright way, one last item on her list, she adds, "I love you.”
Arasha smiles. Quieter, she echoes, “Love you.”
Angela picks up Spork one-handed. Her voice gets goofier. “Sleep good.”
“You too.” Arasha extends herself out properly on the couch, kicking the blanket out so it covers her, setting her head on the pillow, letting the heaviness of her body sink her deep into the couch cushions. She feels a warm, strong hand lay a second blanket on top of her legs and pat them. For the final time that evening, she lets her eyelids slide closed. “Night,” she mumbles. “Night, Spork.”