Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
The week between the test and the results felt longer than it had any right to. Ellis texted me Friday morning before I’d had coffee.
Ellis: Got my test results. Came back clear. You?
I refreshed the patient portal in the bodega line, the bag of nothing in particular under my arm, and the green checkmarks loaded one after the other.
Jett: Clear, too. Come over tonight?
Ellis: Yes, and I’m bringing dinner.
I tucked the phone into my pocket and walked the long way home through the cold October sun, smiling like an idiot at strangers and a small terrier in a sweater.
Three weeks of boyfriend and I still hadn’t stopped grinning about it.
Not in an obvious way. I wasn’t walking around with hearts in my eyes like a cartoon character. But Sierra caught me smiling at my phone during movie night, twice, and Calliope made a gagging noise both times. Raven just watched me with that quiet look she does when she’s filing something away.
Ellis and I had settled into a rhythm. Tuesdays and Thursdays at Foundation Fitness, where we’d spot each other, and I’d make increasingly terrible innuendos about his squat depth until he threatened to drop a plate on my foot.
Wednesday nights at his place. He’d cook something ambitious from whatever recipe he’d bookmarked that week: pasta with hand-pulled noodles, banh mi that took two days of pickling, risotto when he wanted to suffer.
I’d sit on his kitchen counter eating raw vegetables from the cutting board while he swatted my hand away.
Weekends were ours. No plan, no structure, just two people who couldn’t stop finding excuses to be in the same room.
He’d told his college friend Megan about us in the first week. They’d done a video call. He came off it quieter than he went in, but said she’d handled it. I’d filed her name away as a safe one.
I’d never paid much attention to someone else’s apartment before.
Not the place itself, standard Brooklyn one-bedroom with exposed brick that was probably load-bearing ambition, but what he’d done with it.
Plants everywhere. Not the sad succulents that every guy our age kept on a windowsill like proof of basic competence.
Real plants. A fiddle-leaf fig that nearly brushed the ceiling, trailing pothos cascading from a shelf above his desk, some fern situation in the bathroom that he misted every morning like it was a ritual.
He had a watering schedule on the fridge. Color-coded.
“You know these are alive, right?” I’d said one of those early nights, three weeks back, when his plants still felt like a personality test. “Dependent on you for survival.”
“That’s the point.” He adjusted a leaf that wasn’t even crooked. “Something that needs you to show up.”
I’d filed that away. Thought about it more than I wanted to admit.
But the plant-whisperer version of Ellis, relaxed and barefoot, sleeves pushed up past the tattoo, lived behind a locked door. The Ellis who left for work every morning buttoned up past the throat. Different guy. Not entirely, but enough.
Small things triggered the shift.
One Thursday after the gym, we’d grabbed smoothies and were walking back toward his block when his phone rang. He glanced at the screen, and his whole posture shifted. Shoulders squared, jaw set, like someone had yanked a string up through his spine.
“Hey, Marcus. Yeah, I can talk.” He mouthed work at me and stepped a few feet away.
I sipped my smoothie and waited. Watched him pace, one hand in his pocket, his voice dropping into that careful, flattened voice I’d started recognizing. Professional Ellis. Controlled Ellis. The one who measured every sentence before releasing it.
“Dinner Friday? Can’t, I’ve got plans. Yeah. No, not that kind of plans.” He laughed, but it was thin. Performative. “Just busy. Tell Derek I’ll review the sprint notes tonight.”
He hung up and came back to me with a smile that didn’t quite land.
“What kind of plans can’t you have?” I asked.
“What?”
“You said, ‘Not that kind of plans.’ What were they assuming?”
His jaw worked. “Marcus was just asking about Friday’s happy hour. Beer and wings.”
“So go. I’ll survive a Friday without you.”
He exhaled through his nose. “They’d start asking questions about what I’ve been doing and who I’m doing it with.”
The conversation tilted. The way a picture goes slightly crooked on a wall. You can’t stop staring at it even though it’s barely off.
“Then tell them. You’ve been hanging out with your boyfriend.”
Ellis looked at me the way he looked at receipts he didn’t want to itemize. Pained, briefly, before smoothing it over. “I’m getting there.”
“Getting where?”
“Jett.” He said my name. One syllable with a full paragraph packed behind it.
I raised my hands. “Your pace.”
We walked the rest of the block without talking, which for us was unusual. I filled silence the way Ellis filled his apartment with plants, compulsively, because the emptiness made me twitchy. But something about the shape of his quiet told me not to push.
At his door, he turned to me and said, “It’s not about you.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. It’s not shame. It’s…”
“Self-preservation.” And I did understand, mostly.
I’d been out since sixteen. Being queer was the least interesting thing about me—I’d had years to sand down the sharp edges until it was another fact, like being Dominican, left-handed, or obscenely good-looking.
But Ellis had lived an entire adult life as a straight man.
Colleagues, gym buddies, his whole professional identity—all built on an assumption he’d never corrected because it had never been wrong before.
Until me.
“My gym crew keeps asking who I’m training with.” He was unlocking his door. “I told them a friend.”
“A friend.”
“What was I supposed to say?” He pushed the door open. Held it for me. “’Hey guys, I’m dating a man now?’”
“Yeah. That’s exactly what you say.”
He stared at me.
“What? It’s not complicated. ‘Hey guys, I’m dating someone. His name’s Jett. He’s absurdly handsome and has impeccable taste in music. Next topic.’”
“Your version leaves out the part where they get weird and stop inviting me to things.”
“If they get weird, they were never your people.”
Ellis shut the door behind us and leaned against it, arms crossed. The geometric shapes on his forearm stood out sharper under the hallway light, the sleeve’s organic edges curling toward his wrist like they were reaching for something.
“That’s easy to say when you’ve always had people.” His voice was quiet. Not angry. Tired. “Your people, they loved you before you came out, and they loved you after. Not everyone gets that, Jett.”
That landed harder than I expected.
Because he was right. I’d walked into queerness with a safety net already strung.
Sierra, Raven, and Calliope had caught me before I ever had a chance to fall.
The worst I’d gotten from my mom was initial surprise that faded into acceptance.
At least, it had been acceptance then. I’d never had to rebuild a whole identity in front of people who remembered the old one.
“Come here.”
He didn’t move right away. He stood at the door as if he was deciding whether closeness was safe right now.
Then he pushed off the frame, crossed the room, and I pulled him into me. He was taller. I had to tilt my chin up slightly, which I’d never admit bothered me. He settled against my chest the way he always did, heavy and deliberate, like he was testing whether I could hold the weight.
I could.
“I’m not rushing you,” I said into his shoulder. “But I’m also not going to pretend it doesn’t sting when you call me a friend.”
He pulled back. “I called you a friend once.”
“And you told Marcus you were ‘busy’ on Friday.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Because Marcus is my team lead, and I haven’t figured out how to be gay at work yet.”
The word gay dropped out of him like he’d accidentally knocked it off a shelf. He blinked at it, surprised, the way he always looked when the truth came out before his filter could catch it.
“You don’t have to figure it out all at once.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not going anywhere while you do.”
“I know that, too.” He kissed me—quick, firm, like punctuation at the end of an argument. “Just give me time. I’m not hiding you. I’m figuring out how to be this version of myself around people who only know the old one.”
Instead of pushing, I said, “Fine. But the second you’re ready, I’m making you a coming-out PowerPoint. With transitions. Clip art.”
He laughed—the real one, the one that broke open his whole face and made the tired thing behind his eyes disappear. “You wouldn’t.”
“I absolutely would. Slide one: ‘Attention, colleagues.’ Slide two: a photo you have to provide. Don’t make me regret leaving that placeholder. Slide three: ‘Questions? Direct them to my boyfriend, who will be outside in the parking lot looking incredible.’”
“We don’t have a parking lot. We work in Midtown.”
“I’ll stand on Sixth Avenue. Even better.”
He was still laughing when he kissed me again, slower this time, his hands finding my waist. And for a minute the weird tightness in my chest dissolved, because this. His mouth, his hands, the sound of him. This was the thing that was real. Everything else was noise.
But later, after he fell asleep, and I lay there watching shadows crawl across his ceiling through the plant leaves, the tightness came back. Different shape. Quieter. A slow leak, like air leaving a tire so gradually you don’t notice until you’re riding the rim.
He wasn’t ashamed of me. I believed that. He was scared of what being with me meant for every other part of his life. The parts I didn’t touch. The rooms I wasn’t allowed in yet.
I understood it.
That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.