𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐈𝐬 𝐀 𝐋𝐨𝐰. ⁽⁽⁽ᵐᵃᵗᵗʸ ʰᵉᵃˡʸ⁾⁾⁾

The Irregular Revellers

Tracklist:
Rhinestone Eyes, Gorillaz
Will He, Joji
Hurricane, Kanye West
Paradise Circus, Massive Attack
Numb, Portishead
Don't You Find, Jamie T

Early November, 2018

"I think it's a great idea."

Ray hides her wince by placing the bottoms of her palms against her closed eyes. Men with great ideas... she thinks as she rubs white spots onto the insides of her closed eyelids with her palms. Now available at work, on the street, and even in the comfort of your own fucking flat!

"It's not a bad idea, it's just..." She trails off, dropping her arms and opening her eyes. Ari leans against her breakfast bar, his eyes on the banana he's currently unpeeling. "I don't think I've had more than three people in this flat at one time. Ever."

There's room for more than three people in the flat - there's probably room for ten times that amount. That is, if you fancied throwing a party that makes people squeeze close and fog up the windows with condensation. And Ray has never been the kind of person to throw that party - she thinks, guiltily, of the party at Matty's home in North London and the way people had pressed against the concrete walls so that she had to politely elbow through them to reach her friends.

"Ah, well. It's only a little shoebox, how could you fit anybody else in?" He makes a silly show of looking around him.

She knows that to Ari, it seems like a nonsensical point of pride. A kind of hermetic lock on her own space, an almost mediaeval devotion to solitude. She's never bothered explaining it to anyone before - Lydia has always implicitly understood, Blaise too, and the others accepted it as a quirk of her friendship. And why should she have to? Why should she justify her privacy, when nobody else is ever asked to justify hospitality? Never having to explain has always seemed like a demonstration of understanding and affection. Now, she tries to find the words. I don't like people in my space because it's mine. Not theirs. It's that simple. It's out of my control. I understand my friends when we're in other places, but I don't understand them here. I don't know them here. They're my other-place friends. I don't have any here-friends.

It's all true. It's how she feels. But she glances, guiltily, to the bar cart and remembers the night with Lydia, George, and Matty. And, afterwards, the week that Matty stayed. She's given up her space before, and been glad to. She doesn't want to do it now, under obligation to Ari's suggestion of a party.

"If you don't want to do anything, that's fine, I get it. But it's your birthday and I want to know you had a great send-off before I leave." Ari is tall enough to cross the floor in a few steps, sliding into the seat at the dining table beside Ray. He watches as she swipes across her laptop trackpad, moving from Excel spreadsheets to her Google calendar. She's the kind of girl who schedules everything in her Google calendar - he remembers the first time he had an alert arrive in his inbox, Dinner at Via Carota @ 8.45pm RF , one of their early dates and the first time he can specifically remember feeling endeared to Ray.

They stare at her calendar, at the entry on Sunday marked: Ari NYC Flight 11:45pm Heathrow, Terminal TBC . Five words and a time-stamp, all they have to show for the unfinished conversation between them. Ari has pitched - as often as he can, when he's not pitching for her to host a birthday party - for Ray to come and join him for the last week of the month, to stay in his apartment and then take the scenic drive to stay with his parents for Thanksgiving. Ray briefly wonders why she hadn't expected this of him earlier; a Wall Street wunderkind is bound to be so very fond of high -pressure pitches. She knows the right answer, but she can't bring herself to say yes to Ari. It would feel like his. And not like hers. But that's pitching. If something that's yours doesn't become something that's theirs, they've failed. Ari's a closer - and that's starting to suck.