Chapter Thirteen
Shay
I didn't sleep.
This was not unusual, lately. What was unusual was the quality of the not,sleeping , not the restless, managing kind, the kind where you lay in the dark and ran the accounting and arrived at fine and adjusted your position and tried again.
This was different. This was the flat, clear, wide,awake stillness of a man who had stopped pretending he was going to sleep and was just lying in the dark being honest with himself for the first time in a long time.
I had kissed Kieran.
I had stood in a cold parking lot and said that was nothing twice and meant it both times and watched Felix not say the thing and get in his car and drive away.
I had walked back into the party and said I'm good to Kieran and great night to Reeves and text me to Mivo and I had gotten a car home and I had sat on my couch with the throw blanket still on the floor and I had looked at the ceiling and I had thought:
Enough.
Not angry. Not even sad, quite. Just , done. The specific, structural done of a person who has reached the end of a resource and found it empty and has to now decide what to do about empty.
I lay in the dark until four.
Then I got up.
I made coffee. I drank it standing at my kitchen counter looking at the dead plant on the windowsill.
The dead plant had been dead since August. I had been optimistic about it in September and realistic about it in October and in denial about it from November onward, and somewhere in the last week I had stopped looking at it entirely, which was its own kind of information.
I poured the second cup.
I thought about what I was going to say.
Not the performance version. Not the version where I was funny and light and handed him an exit and protected him from the cost. The real version.
The one that had been true for two years and that I had been dressing in other clothes because the real version was exposed and specific and cost something to say out loud.
I was going to say it.
I got dressed.
I drove to Felix's apartment.
He answered the door on the second knock.
He was dressed , not just awake, dressed, which meant he had also not slept or had slept and gotten up early and either way had been up long enough to run through the system's morning protocol, which included being dressed before seven because Felix believed that being dressed was a form of readiness and readiness was non,negotiable.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He looked like a man who had been somewhere difficult and come back from it and not fully arrived yet. There were edges underneath his eyes that weren't usually there. His jaw had the set it got when he was holding something at controlled distance and the distance had gotten very short.
He stepped back from the door.
I came in.
His apartment was the system made physical , clean lines, everything in its place, the coffee already made and the mug on the counter at the precise location where it lived when not in use.
The crack in the ceiling plaster near the light fixture, the one I knew, branching left.
I had been in this apartment enough times to know where everything was.
I had been in this apartment enough times that I stopped noticing I was always here.
I stood in the middle of his living room.
He stood near the kitchen. Not defensive , just positioned, the way Felix positioned himself in a room, with the unconscious spatial awareness of someone who always knew where the exits were.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
Outside, the city was doing its early Saturday morning thing , quiet but not silent, the specific low frequency of a city that had been up late and was easing back into itself.
"Shay," he started.
"No," I said.
He stopped.
"I need to go first," I said. "And I need you to let me finish."
He looked at me. Something moved in his expression , the architecture shifting, the controlled face making room for something he hadn't decided what to do with yet. He nodded. Once.
I took a breath.
And then I stopped performing.
"I have wanted you for two years."
The words came out even. Clear. I had prepared them and they arrived the way prepared things did , correctly structured, in the right order, landing where I aimed them.
But underneath the preparation was the thing itself, unmediated, and I could feel it , the specific exposure of saying a true thing out loud to the person it was true about, in their apartment, in the morning, with nowhere to put it once it was said.
"Two years of being your best friend and pretending I didn't notice every single thing about you.
" I kept my voice level. I was not going to do this loudly.
"I know your coffee order. I know which skate you unlace first. I know the crack in your ceiling and the spreadsheet that doesn't exist and the way your mouth does the thing when something is actually funny to you and you don't want anyone to know.
" A beat. "I know all of it. I have known all of it and I have been pretending, for two years, that it was just , friendship.
That it was just how you paid attention to people you cared about. That it meant nothing specific."
Felix was very still.
"And then you kissed me back." My voice stayed even.
I was proud of it. "In a hotel room in October.
Both hands, Felix. And then again on a Tuesday on my couch.
And you are still , you are still standing there and calling it something you can't do.
Something that can't become a thing." I looked at him directly.
"So I need you to do one thing for me. I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you feel nothing.
Say it and mean it." A pause. "And I'll stop. "
The apartment was very quiet.
Felix looked at me.
The morning light came through his windows , the specific flat grey of early Saturday, the light that didn't perform anything, just arrived and was honest about what it was.
It caught the line of his face, the careful architecture of him, and everything underneath it that he had been carrying in no column for two years.
He said nothing.
I waited.
He opened his mouth.
He closed it.
His jaw worked in the way it had in the parking lot, the way it had in the hotel room, the way it did when the real words were right there and the system was failing to contain them and he was failing to contain the system.
He did not say it.
He said: "The team is under a microscope."
Something cold moved through my chest.
"Shay,"
"Don't."
"You know what it was like for Charlie and Henry. The photographs, the speculation, management pulling Charlie in for a,"
"Don't." The word came out harder than I intended. I brought it back. Kept my voice level. "Don't use Charlie and Henry against me."
"I'm not using them against you, I'm telling you what the reality,"
"They are fine, Felix." I looked at him.
"You can see them. Every week. At dinner, at practice, wherever , you can see them being fine.
You can see what it looks like when two people on this team are together and it is fine.
So don't stand there and use them as a reason when the reason you're using them for doesn't exist anymore. "
His jaw tightened. "It was harder than it looked,"
"I know it was hard! I know the photographs and the speculation and the management conversations , I know all of it, I watched Charlie go through it.
And he went through it because Henry was worth it.
" My voice stayed level. It cost me something to keep it level.
"That's the point. He decided Henry was worth the hard.
And they are fine. They are better than fine.
So if you're going to tell me no, I need you to find a different reason, because that one doesn't hold. "
Felix looked at the window.
"Management watches everything right now," he said. "My contract is up in,"
"I know when your contract is up."
"If there's any perception that the line chemistry is personal, that we're,"
"The line chemistry is personal. It has always been personal.
You and I have been personal since the first week you were on this team and everyone knows it and no one has said a word because it looks like , it looks like what it is, which is two people who know each other.
" I stopped. Started again. "The contract argument doesn't hold either, Felix.
And you know it doesn't. You know what our numbers look like together.
Management is not pulling that line apart. "
He was quiet.
I had said the true things. I had prepared them and they had been accurate and I had delivered them clearly and none of it had moved him and I could feel the space between us , three feet, the same three feet as the parking lot, the same three feet as every room we had been in since October , doing the same thing it always did, which was hold.
"Then what is it?" I asked.
Quiet. Low. The real question underneath all the other questions.
"What is the actual reason, Felix. Not the team. Not the contract. Not Charlie and Henry. What is the actual, specific, real reason that you kissed me back twice and are still standing on the other side of this room."
He looked at his window.
He looked at his hands.
He looked at the crack in the ceiling , his ceiling, his crack, the one he knew, branching left , and I watched him look at it and I thought about all the nights he had been awake looking at that crack and what he had been thinking when he looked at it and I was so tired of being on the other side of his distance.
"I don't know how to do this," he said. Very quiet. The same words from the balcony, from a different man than he'd been then, from a man who had been further along in the knowing for months now.
"I know you don't," I said. "I know it's hard.
I know the fear is real." I kept my voice even.
"But, Felix , I have been waiting. I have been so careful and so patient and I have handed you every exit and I have said it's okay every time and I have managed my own feelings with both hands for two years because I didn't want to make it harder for you.
" My voice stayed level. The levelness was costing me something I was going to feel later.
"And I am asking you, right now, as honestly as I know how to be , is there a version of this where you choose it?
Is there a version where the fear stops being bigger than the thing you're afraid of losing? "
He was quiet for a long time.
The city moved outside. The light stayed flat and honest.
"I don't know," he said.
"That's not,"
"I don't know, Shay." Something in his voice, finally , not the controlled register, not the even delivery, something underneath that, something that had pressure in it. "I don't know how to , I've been trying to," He stopped. "The system,"
"I know about the system." I looked at him.
"I have always known about the system. I have watched you run it for four years and I have respected it and I have worked around it and I have been , I have tried to be easy, Felix.
I tried to be the version of myself that didn't make it harder.
I stopped being loud for you. Do you understand that?
I quieted myself. I stopped taking up space because I thought if I was smaller, if I was careful enough, if I made it easy enough," I stopped.
My voice had done something. I brought it back.
"It didn't work," I said. "Being small didn't work. Being careful didn't work. Being easy didn't work. And I don't know what else I have."
Felix looked at me.
For the first time in the conversation, he looked at me with the look , not the controlled face, not the architecture, but the thing underneath it, cracked open, almost relief, almost terror, the specific expression of a man who was hearing something true and finding it devastating.
"Shay," he said. Like an apology. Like something more.
"Don't," I said. Quiet. Final. "Don't say my name like that if you're not going to say the thing after it."
He stopped.
The apartment was very still.
I looked at him for a long moment. At the man I had wanted for two years, who had kissed me back twice, who had touched my face without thinking, who had sat in a parking lot with because I, unfinished and gotten in his car.
Who had been in this apartment with me a hundred times and known where everything was and made the pasta and known the pepper and sat in forty percent of every couch we'd shared and said we can't like a prayer he was trying to believe.
I loved him.
I knew that. I had known it for longer than two years, probably, if I was being honest, which I was being, which was the whole point of today.
I loved him and he could not say it and I had nothing left.
"Okay," I said.
Not the okay from the couch. Not the one with no bottom. This one was different , smaller, flatter, the sound of a door closing from the inside.
I picked up my jacket from where I'd set it on the chair by the door.
I walked to the door.
Felix said: "Shay,"
I turned the handle.
"Shay, wait,"
I opened the door.
I walked through it.
I pulled it closed behind me.
Quietly.
Not a slam , not the anger version, not the dramatic version, not the version that said I want you to know how much this cost. Just the quiet click of a latch catching, a door settling into its frame, the ordinary sound of a thing closing.
I stood in his hallway.
The door was closed.
On the other side of it: Felix, in his apartment, in the morning light, with his coffee on the counter and the crack in the ceiling and the system that wasn't working and the word he couldn't say.
I stood there for three seconds.
Then I walked down the hallway.
I took the elevator. I crossed the lobby. I walked out into the flat grey morning and I stood on the pavement outside Felix's building and I breathed the cold air and I thought:
I did everything I could.
Not performance. Not managing. Not the load,bearing fine. Just the plain, quiet, flat fact of it.
I did everything I could.
I walked to my car.
I drove home.
I did not cry until I was inside my apartment with the door closed, and then I sat on the floor with my back against the couch , not on the couch, on the floor, because the couch was where he sat and the floor was mine , and I let it be what it was.
The throw blanket was still on the floor.
I pulled it over my knees.
Outside, the city did what it always did.
I sat with it for a long time.