The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2) - Rosie Danan Page 0,17
his way to an empty seat in the second row.
Naomi bit the inside of her cheek. It took a lot to rattle her, usually. Through the combination of years of therapy and sheer force of will, she prided herself on her ability to not engage with negative thoughts. Mind over matter.
Public speaking didn’t make her nervous. It was just another kind of performance. But baring her soul had always cost her more than baring her body. She wanted this too badly—to be taken seriously as an authority figure instead of just an object of desire. It was one thing to court lust. Respect was a lot harder to earn.
It didn’t help that the walls of their room at the JCC were covered floor to ceiling in children’s artwork from the daycare. There was no neutral place to lay her gaze. Everything was glitter and googly eyes. Very disorienting.
The force of attention from the audience was palpable, shot like tequila straight into her veins until her tongue felt dangerously loose in her mouth.
Clara had made her print out notes, just in case. Naomi was supposed to open with a personal anecdote, something to put the audience at ease, to make herself seem relatable, approachable, human. Her notes read, Open: story about ferryboat.
The audience seemed to devour her silence, restless and ready for her to fail. From the back of the room, a muscle-bound guy in a baseball cap yelled, “Yo, are you gonna teach us about blow jobs, or what?”
“Of course not,” Naomi said without thinking. “You have to enter your credit card number online for that.”
The caller, who had been elbowing his buddy a moment ago, fell back into his seat.
She crumpled the paper in her fist. Since when did she start anything slow and easy? Her strategy, the only one she’d ever trusted, was to throw everything she had at a problem. To run so fast and so far that she couldn’t remember where she’d been. These people had seen Naomi Grant on the door. No one here had signed up for toothless anecdotes.
“How many of you are single?” The question shot naked across the room. No preamble. No polite warm-up. Begin as you mean to go on.
For a moment, no one did anything. Naomi became very aware of her own heartbeat.
Then, almost every hand in the room was raised.
That was something, at least. Common ground for their discussion.
Cassidy had once told her, in her thick Texas drawl, “The audience doesn’t get to read the script; as long as you sell it, you can go off book and no one will ever know.”
Her notes were already toast. She could hardly smooth out the sheet and start again. Naomi didn’t want to talk at these people, she realized. Shameless fulfilled her desire to send a one-way message. The reason she’d pursued a classroom was that she wanted a dialogue. To understand individual experiences, to create connections, to be able to adapt her curriculum based on the needs of her students.
“How many of you are currently dating?”
About half as many hands went up.
“Okay, so why not?”
After a beat of heavy silence and empty air, Ethan raised his hand. “Occupational hazard.”
The room tittered, and Naomi rolled her shoulders away from her ears, a little lighter. Even if it was a reminder about why he was off-limits, it was also a reminder she wasn’t in this alone.
Naomi locked eyes with a pretty blonde wearing a denim jacket, the collar tagged with an enamel pin that read Feminist Killjoy. “How about you?”
The girl looked mildly harassed. “Men are pigs?”
The woman next to her offered a commiserating nod, and afterward the blonde sat a little straighter in her chair.
“Not just men, unfortunately.” Naomi had earned her share of disappointment from across the gender spectrum. “What else?”
A hand went up toward the back. “Dating apps suck. Everyone’s constantly swiping for upgrades.”
“Ah yes, it’s easy to gorge yourself at the digital dating buffet. We’ve gamified our mating rituals.” She scanned the room. “Good. Who’s next?”
Slowly, and then all at once, more and more people volunteered answers, until the conference room was littered with the woes of modern dating. Los Angeles was vapid. All the good ones were taken. Dating was expensive. Dating was exhausting. Half the people on the market only wanted to hook up. And the sex was terrible. She made a mental note to hand that last woman a Shameless business card. The list went on and on. Together they were exorcising dating demons, and