“I mean”—Ethan began to course-correct—“obviously you have unique expertise. Besides,” he rushed to add, “you want to teach, and you deserve a classroom.”
Her mouth kicked to the side. “Did you memorize that speech too?”
“No.” He wiped his thumb across his lips. “But I would have put something together,” he said, “if I’d known you were going to show up here tonight.”
Ethan hadn’t been able to get Naomi Grant out of his head. There was something refreshing about her.Gritwasn’t the right word. Everything about her outward appearance was polished to a high shine. She just seemed... tough.
Naomi was what his synagogue needed. He hadn’t exactly planned on offering prospective congregants a lecture series about sex and love before he’d heard that she was an educator without an audience, but in hindsight, the curriculum felt perfect. A modern intimacy seminar to spark Beth Elohim’s rebirth.
“It probably won’t work, you know,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “Your hopeful vision, I mean. People are afraid of porn.”
“Yeah. Well, people are afraid of religion too.” Life had been easier when he was just Ethan Cohen, absentminded physics teacher.
“Are you suggesting,” Naomi said, “that makes us a double negative?”
He mustered a smile in the face of her stoicism. “I can work within the odds of probable failure if you can.”
She chewed her bottom lip for a moment. Ethan envied her teeth.
“Those are the only odds I’ve ever known.”
In the beat that passed between them, something absurdly hopeful built in his chest.
As if sensing this, Naomi narrowed her eyes at him. “If you start waxing poetic about divine intervention, I will clobber you.”
“I’ve never been clobbered,” he supplied cheerfully.
“It shows.” Her eyes gleamed in the darkness.
Ethan could tell he was close to winning her over. At least for tonight.
She crossed her legs, back to being impatient. “Why modern intimacy?”
Ethan wondered if some people found battling her demanding instead of exhilarating. He’d always loved pop quizzes.
“Intimacy is the least common denominator between the popular zeitgeist and the kind of community I want to build here. It’s the most accessible entry point I can think of for young single people.”
“Because young people are all horny?”
“Because,” he said, avoiding that conversation like the plague, “we’ve left the communal village of our ancestors and migrated to big cities, and now we’re suffering.”
“Speak for yourself,” Naomi muttered under her breath.
“As soon as I met you,” Ethan kept going, “I thought, what does today’s version of connection, today’s love, look like relative to Jewish faith? If we can answer that, if we can even scratch the surface of the answer, it’s revolutionary.”
“Does the phrase ‘too big for his britches’ mean anything to you?”
“Yes. Believe it or not, even rabbis understand dick jokes,” he deadpanned before breaking into a grin at the flash of surprise that washed across her face.
He had to school himself to stop smiling at her. She was going to think there was something wrong with his mouth that meant he couldn’t keep it closed.
“The content of the seminars is relatively flexible.” He tried to shift back into business mode. “I trust you to develop the right series of lectures, given the audience and what we’re trying to accomplish.”
“And what we’re trying to accomplish is... for young people to find religion?” She said it like his mission was a lost cause.
The statement was true, but it wasn’t the whole story. Correcting her was probably a bad idea, but he knew that in order to really get her on board, he’d have to at least try to get Naomi to understand. His job was full of deceptively small words likefaiththat had infinitely complicated definitions. Luckily, Ethan was pragmatic by nature and realistic by virtue of experience.
“It’s simpler than that. I want to give people a reason to believe. In themselves, each other, and something more.”