Chapter 28 #2
“You are. You’re trying to control the one thing you have left that responds to a checklist. Jett, he put your hoodie in his bed. He’s sleeping with your clothes. He’s miserable.”
The floor tilted slightly. “How do you know that?”
“Because I have eyes and I’ve been talking to him.”
I stood up, which was a mistake because now I was pacing and there was nowhere to go in this apartment without stepping on evidence of my breakdown.
“He’s the one who asked for a pause. He’s the one who decided we were moving too fast, that he needed to figure out who he is without me in the picture.
He gets to make that choice, and I get to be here buying napkins. ”
“You get to call him back.”
“And say what, Sierra? ‘I’ve organized cocktail supplies, please love me again’?”
She watched me cycle through the living room: past the coffee table where my phone sat dark and patient, past the cardboard bins of catering linens stacked higher than my dignity, past the window where Brooklyn sprawled out indifferent to my suffering.
“Running from this isn’t brave.” Her voice didn’t rise.
I didn’t answer her because she was right and because answering meant admitting that I’d spent the last seventy-two hours running at full speed toward the only thing that didn’t fight back: work.
Napkins. The Harringtons' terrible lighting situation. Problems I could actually solve, unlike the central problem of my life, which was that he needed space and now the space was too big and I didn’t know how to close it without looking desperate.
She stayed for another twenty minutes, didn’t push it further, sat on my napkins and drank the coffee I made her. She knew I couldn’t accept help in the form of advice, so she gave me help in the form of presence. Before she left, she squeezed my shoulder.
“He’s waiting,” she said.
I didn’t ask how she knew that.
Calliope texting at 9 PM: “The Basement. Now. You’re becoming a Victorian ghost.”
I was not a Victorian ghost. I was a man who was fine and who would prove it by putting on a shirt that didn’t have coffee residue and going to a club where the lights were dark enough that nobody had to look too closely at anyone else’s face.
The Basement lived up to its name, a subterranean place that smelled like a layered cologne project gone wrong and cost twelve dollars for a cocktail that tasted like someone dissolved a candy and then added regret.
Calliope was already three drinks in, her red hair bright under the strobing lights, and Raven was doing the thing where she leaned against the wall and watched everyone with the expression of someone analyzing tarot cards.
“The prodigal bitch returns!” Calliope kissed my cheek. “I’m so proud. Also, your pain is showing in your left eye, and it’s tragic.”
I ordered a whiskey. Then another. The lighting here was specifically designed to make bad decisions look like normal ones.
A man materialized, tall, white, attractive in a very narrow bandwidth. His eyes were blue, like that was a personality trait. He ordered a whiskey for me without asking, slid it across the bar with a smile which said he knew exactly what he was doing.
“You look like you’re thinking too much,” he said.
In the old version of my life, the before Ellis version, this was the part where I accepted the drink and the invitation implied in the angle of his body.
His apartment would be very white. His bed would be a bed.
He would kiss with technical competence.
My chest wouldn’t feel full. The whole thing would take the edge off tonight the way painkillers take the edge off a broken arm: not a solution, a dulling.
I could see the whole night from there. The walk to his place. The sex that didn’t mean anything but felt like it should. The way I’d leave while he was still asleep and feel worse than when I arrived.
I pushed the whiskey back toward him.
“I can’t,” I said.
He looked offended, which was fair. His beauty had historically been very persuasive.
“Is it someone?” he asked, because attractive men default to romantic drama as an explanation for romantic rejection.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s someone.”
I left The Basement before Calliope noticed I was gone. I knew she’d noticed. I also knew she’d forgive me because that was what best friends did. They forgave you for leaving in the middle of your own breakdown.
The subway was empty, fluorescent, lonely, and full of people no one was looking for. Somebody’s forgotten MetroCard slid across the floor with every lurch.
When I got back to the apartment, I stood in the middle of the kitchen with my phone in my hand. The draft text I’d been writing all night was still open. I read it. I read it again. I closed it.
I put my phone face down on the coffee table and didn’t reach for it.
That’s the thing nobody told you about heartbreak.
The bravest thing wasn’t the grand gesture.
It was the very small choice not to undo the other person’s choice by trying to be smaller, by running faster, by willing yourself into someone’s arms through sheer force of need.
I left my phone there and sat in the dark.