Chapter 29
Chapter twenty-nine
The key sat warm in my pocket. I kept finding it. Closing my fingers around it. Letting go. Finding it again.
I knew Ellis’ window from down here without looking.
The fire escape with the rust spot shaped like a wishbone.
I knew which floorboard creaked outside the bathroom, which cabinet door wouldn’t latch unless you lifted it just so when you closed it.
I knew the apartment the way you only know a place after you’ve loved someone in it.
I wasn’t going in.
A neighbor walked her dachshund past the building.
She looked at me sitting there, didn’t quite manage to smile.
Her expression caught somewhere between recognition and something softer I didn’t want to name.
She’d brought us banana bread once. Called me Ellis’ boy, which had embarrassed Ellis and pleased me in a way I hadn’t admitted out loud.
She kept walking.
Good.
Across the street, a man argued into a phone in two languages at once. Somewhere a garbage truck reversed. The block sounded the same. That was the betrayal. Nothing should sound the same.
My phone lay face down on my thigh. The Chaos Coven had been texting all morning.
I answered when I could. What I avoided was sitting on the screen, because every glance was the same ache.
Nothing from Ellis. Ellis had asked for space, and Ellis was the kind of person who meant what he said.
That was one of the things. That was a lot of the things, actually.
The front door of the building swung open. A kid in a delivery vest jogged out. The lock clicked back into place behind him.
I had the key in my pocket. I could go up. Inside, into the smell of him. I could stand in the middle of his living room and let it crash over me. I could pretend for an hour that nothing had broken.
I could.
Old me would have walked the second Ellis said pause. Would have hit the club, taken someone home, slept in a bed that didn’t smell like anyone. Would have told myself the next morning that I’d never wanted this, anyway. Made the ache somebody else’s problem. Called it freedom.
My chest did the thing it had been doing since the pause started, a slow sinking pull behind my ribs that wasn’t quite pain and wasn’t quite anything else. I pressed the heel of my hand against it. Nothing helped, but I kept doing it.
A pigeon landed on the railing close enough to touch and looked at me with the contempt that pigeons reserved for people taking up space wrong.
“I know.” I tipped my chin at the bird.
The pigeon left.
I sat a while longer. Wasn’t sure why. Maybe to make the not-going-in count.
Maybe because going home meant doing something else, and there wasn’t anything else I wanted to do.
Light shifted on the buildings across the street, gold sliding toward orange.
Somewhere a window opened. A woman called a kid inside for dinner, twice, then a third time with feeling.
Eventually I stood. My legs ached from the concrete. I walked to the corner without looking up at the window. I didn’t trust myself to look up. I took the subway home. The key stayed in my pocket the whole ride.
My apartment was dark when I got back. I didn’t turn on the lights. I sat on the couch with the key still in my pocket and let the quiet press in.
That was 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 by trying to be smaller, by running faster, by willing yourself into someone’s arms through sheer force of need.
I’d done it today. Not gracefully. Not without aching for him through every stop. But I’d done it.
And tomorrow, I would have to do it again.