Chapter Eight - Elias
His friend Marcus called on a Sunday, mostly to complain about his own dating life, which was its own kind of ongoing disaster, and somewhere in the middle of it asked, offhand, "You seeing anyone?"
"No."
"You want to be?"
Elias took his time with that one. "Complicated."
"Complicated how. Complicated married, or complicated your weird foot thing?"
"It's not weird."
"I didn't say it was weird, you said it was weird, right now, out loud, unprompted." Marcus laughed, easy, the way he always did about this — Marcus had known for ten years and had exactly zero interest in making it a thing, which Elias appreciated more than he ever said. "You tell her yet?"
"Tell who?"
"Whoever's making your voice do that."
"My voice isn't doing anything."
"Your voice is doing a thing. It did the thing when you talked about the wedding you went to solo last spring, and it's doing the thing now, except more."
"You've clearly got too much time on your hands if you're cataloguing my voice."
"I'm cataloguing it because I love you and I want good things for you, which apparently requires paying closer attention to your voice than you do.
" Marcus said it lightly, but there was something real underneath the joke, the warmth of a friendship old enough to have earned the right to needle without it costing anything.
"Remember when you told me? First time, I mean. We were what, twenty-three?"
"Twenty-four. You'd just moved into that terrible apartment with the radiator that screamed."
"That radiator was a war crime. And you told me over beers like you were confessing to a felony, and I said 'okay, cool, want another beer,' and you looked so relieved I thought you were going to cry."
"I did not almost cry."
"You almost cried, Elias. It's fine. It was a formative bonding moment for both of us.
" Marcus's voice softened, just slightly.
"My point is, whoever this is, if she's making your voice do the thing — that's worth being brave about.
You were brave with me over cheap beer in a terrible apartment.
This can't be scarier than that radiator. "
He hadn't told Marcus about Nora. Hadn't told him there was a Nora, technically, and yet apparently his voice had gone and done it for him, which was mildly humiliating.
He didn't answer, and Marcus, mercifully, let it go, moved on to his own catastrophe with someone named Diane, and Elias sat with the phone against his ear not really listening, thinking instead about how easy this part had always been for him and how hard this version of it currently was.
Easy, historically. He'd told two ex-girlfriends outright, early, no hedging — this is a thing I want, take it or leave it — and one had left it and one had taken it, gladly, and for a while that had been genuinely good, better than good, a woman who liked being wanted exactly the way he wanted her and didn't need six months of therapy to get there.
It ended for other reasons. Not this reason.
This reason had never once been the reason anything ended, because he'd never let it be a secret long enough to rot.
That was the part that made this current situation so stupid. He knew how to do this. He'd done it. It wasn't the wanting that had him rattled, it was the who.
Nora wasn't a woman he'd met at a bar with the explicit, mutual understanding that they were both there to see what fit.
Nora was someone he worked twelve-hour days next to, someone whose trust he'd have to earn slow and boring and career-appropriate before any of the rest of it got to matter, someone twelve years younger than him who'd flinched, actual visible flinch, at being reminded out loud how young she was.
He wasn't going to be the guy who made that flinch mean something worse.
So: patience. He was good at patience. He'd built a whole life on the theory that wanting something badly didn't obligate you to chase it clumsily, and he intended to keep believing that theory right up until the moment it stopped being convenient.
Marcus was still talking about Diane.
"—and she just left, mid-sentence, like I'd said something insane, and I genuinely don't know what I said—"
"You probably said something insane."
"That's not supportive."
"I'm being extremely supportive. I'm listening to this instead of thinking about my own thing."
"Ha. So there IS a thing."
Elias didn't answer that either, and this time Marcus let the silence sit exactly as long as it needed to before moving on, which was, Elias thought, a decent model for how to handle most of this. Say the true thing. Don't say more than the true thing requires. Wait.
He was getting tired of waiting. That was new. He filed that away too, next to everything else.