Chapter 433

Mosche went up first.

To be fair, the crowd inside the main area near the stage gave him about as much applause as they gave any other comic. You went and stood at the edge of the bar area, under the dimmed-but-not-blacked-out lights, and clapped for him just in case he could see you at the back. He didn’t seem to notice you, but maybe he was just being professional.

The issue for him was that, pretty much as soon as he mounted the stage, you could tell he was even more nervous than usual. It had to be because Iris was in the crowd, maybe seeing his act for the first time. When he was dating Tasha he had someone who understood that a bad set, or even a full-on bombing, was part of the process. Having a bad night didn’t mean you were bad.

You had no fucking clue about Iris’s knowledge of stand-up comedy, and unless she’d been willing to sit through Mosche’s various rants and monologues about the art form ... Well, it was entirely possible that a bad performance would cast a shade over their burgeoning relationship.

The good news was that Mosche opened his act with a couple of his stronger jokes, which got some chuckles from the crowd if not full-bellied laughter. You took that opportunity to back off back to the bar, rejoining Gemma and Sabrina. Tasha had slipped back around to the Comics hangout area since part of the whole thing was seeing and being seen by the comics that were doing better. Comedy was, after a certain minimum bar for skill and execution, about contacts. Experienced comics giving younger comics not just advice, but potentially even jobs whether it was opening for them on tour, following them into writer’s rooms for television, or even writing jokes for them.

“Can I be honest?” Sabrina asked you quietly as you re-joined your girlfriends.

“Always, obviously,” you said, sliding an arm around her as she sat on the bar stool.

“I don’t hate Mosche,” Sabrina said. “And I’m not, like, asking you to abandon him to the wolves or whatever. But ... he went from being your weird-but-likeable roommate to giving me the major Ick really fast. Like, I don’t want to want to be mean to him, but after being so fucking destructive to Tasha through his social incompetence and insecurities...”

“You feel bad for disliking him so hard, after trying to be friends with him,” Gemma filled in.

“Yes,” Sabrina sighed. “Exactly.”

“I know,” you said. “On the one hand, I know everything that happened with Tasha is bad. But on the other hand, up to that point, I’d always thought he was sort of a funny chapter in my life that I’d be telling stories about down the road. I didn’t think we’d stay in contact, but I also thought if I ever ran into him sometime, or if he really did get famous and went on tour or something, I would want to grab a beer with him. And he’s still that guy, but with his body weight in baggage.”