Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Iwent to his apartment on Thursday.
The plan: talk. Have the conversation Sierra told me to have, the one I’d been avoiding for a week by working myself into the ground and texting in monosyllables. I’d rehearsed on the subway. I’m hurt, you hurt me, but I want to understand. Tell me what you’re feeling. Calm. Measured. Adult.
Four minutes later, the plan dissolved.
Ellis opened the door, and he looked bad.
Not tired-bad, the way he’d looked during the work crisis.
Worse. Hollowed out, like someone had scooped the stuffing from him and left the shape.
His eyes were red-rimmed. Jack was in the living room now.
He’d moved the fern from the bathroom, which in Ellis’ language meant something had fundamentally shifted in his domestic order, and that scared me more than anything he could have said.
“Hi.” The word filled the space between us.
“Hi.”
His doorway became a border. Six months of sleeping in each other’s beds, and we couldn’t figure out how to enter the same room.
I stepped inside. He closed the door. We sat on opposite ends of the couch. A full cushion of distance between us, which might as well have been the East River.
“I need to say something,” I started.
“Me first.” He was gripping his own knees, knuckles white. “I owe you an apology. What I said last week, the ‘I don’t know’ that wasn’t fair to you. I was spiraling, and I took you down with me.”
“You were being honest.”
“I was being careless with your feelings. There’s a difference.” He looked at me. “I know I’m gay, Jett. I know I love you. What I don’t know is whether I’m strong enough to keep being this version of myself when everyone around me, my parents, friends, my own brain, keeps asking me to prove it.”
“You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”
“Maybe not. But I have to prove it to myself. And right now, I can’t.”
The words sat between us like broken glass.
“So what does that mean?” I asked. “For us.”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop saying that.” The calm I’d rehearsed cracked, and the thing underneath surged up. “Stop saying ‘I don’t know’ like it’s an answer! It’s not an answer, Ellis. It’s a stall. It’s you standing at the edge of something and refusing to jump or walk away.”
“That’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair! I told my mother about you, and she hung up on me. I’ve spent months without her voice on the other end of a phone because I chose you.
I walked through Nathan on a sidewalk and Darius at a bar and the entire catalog of who I used to be, and I did it because I chose you.
And now you’re sitting there telling me you don’t know if you’re strong enough to keep choosing me back? ”
“I didn’t say I’m not choosing you.”
“You said ‘I don’t know’! That’s the opposite of choosing!”
I was standing now. Didn’t remember getting up. The couch cushion between us had become the whole room, the whole city, every impossible distance we’d been trying to cross since the first time he followed me out of a gym.
Ellis stood, too. His face was flushed, his jaw tight, his body angled toward me, not aggressive, not backing down.
“Maybe my parents are right.” His voice was thick. “Maybe this is too hard.”
The room went airless.
“So you’re giving up,” I said. “Just like that.”
“I’m not giving up. I’m protecting you.”
“I don’t need protecting. I need you.”
“And what if being with me keeps costing you everything? Your mom, your peace.”
“You don’t get to decide what I’m willing to lose!” My voice broke on the last word. Not cracked. Broke. Split down the middle like a log under an axe. “You don’t get to look at my life and decide it’s too expensive. That’s my call. Mine.”
He was crying. I was crying. We were standing four feet apart in his living room with Jack between us, Diane dripping onto the counter, and the whole careful, beautiful thing we’d built threatening to come apart at the seams.
“I love you.” He was sobbing now, both hands wiping his face. “I love you and I’m ruining you.”
“You’re not ruining me. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But you’re standing here telling me you can’t be sure about us, and I can’t keep being the only one who’s sure.”
“I am sure about us.”
“Then act like it!”
The shout echoed off the walls. Ellis sank back onto the couch. Put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook.
I stood there, chest heaving, the anger draining out of me and leaving something worse behind. Exhaustion that felt geological. The kind of tiredness that lives in your bones and doesn’t respond to sleep.
I sat down. Not on the opposite end. Next to him. Close enough that our knees touched.
We stayed like that for a long time. Both crying. Neither speaking. The apartment ticking, dripping, and humming around us, indifferent to the fact that two people were in the middle of deciding whether they could survive each other.
When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“Then don’t.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is. Either you’re in this or you’re not. And I need you to decide. Not today, not right now. But soon. Because I can’t keep standing in the middle of your uncertainty. It’s killing me, Ellis. Slowly and specifically.”
He took my hand. Held it the way you hold something you’re afraid of dropping.
“I’ll decide,” he promised.
“Okay.”
“Just, give me a little more time.”
I looked at our hands. Intertwined, shaking, both of them. Mine brown, his white. The same hands that had held each other hundreds of times across kitchen tables and couch cushions.
“A little more.” I kept staring at our hands. “But not forever.”
He nodded.
I left and kissed him at the door. Brief, salty, tasting like tears and the end of something. Or maybe the beginning of the end, which is worse because it’s slower.
On the subway home, I sat in an empty car and pressed my forehead against the cold window and watched Brooklyn go dark outside the glass, and I knew, with the same certainty I’d known when I first said, “I love you” over a pot of overcooked pasta, that we were running out of time.
Not because we didn’t love each other.
Because sometimes love isn’t enough to outrun everything that’s chasing it.