Chapter 34
Chapter thirty-four
The text stared back at me: “ Can we talk?”
Three words. I deleted them. Retyped them. Deleted again. Added “Please”—too desperate. Removed it. Add “I miss you”—too obvious. Delete that, too.
Just the three words. Simple. Honest.
My thumb hovered.
This was the moment, wasn’t it? The place where I committed to the vulnerability, or I backed out.
Where I sent this into the void and accepted that Ellis might not answer.
That he might have moved on, decided the pause was good enough, decided that the distance was easier than the closeness.
That he might be with someone else right now, or he might be alone but happy about it, unburdened by me.
Three weeks and two days since he walked out. I’d counted. I was a person who counted.
My thumb hovered for another second. Then I sent it.
Nothing.
The phone sat there, dark and alive with possibility. I set it on the counter. The seconds counted. Each one a chance for him to respond or to keep not responding, for the pause to either bend toward me or away from me entirely. I made tea. The tea got cold. I didn’t drink it.
Five minutes. Ten. My heart was doing the thing it did when I panicked about events. Sharp, urgent. The sense that everything important was happening outside my control. Except this time the event was my relationship, and the attendees were just me and the person I couldn’t stop loving.
My phone buzzed.
“Yes. When?”
Which meant he had been waiting. Which meant I wasn’t the only one sitting in the dark counting days. Which meant the pause was never about him not wanting this. The pause always hinged on whether I could handle it.
Sunday morning, ten-thirty, the coffee shop on Lorimer we’d discovered three months ago by accident. I arrived fifteen minutes early because I needed to establish spatial territory before the hard conversations began.
I ordered two cortados. Ellis’ drink. My hands remembered.
The coffee was hot, too hot, and I was holding the cup like it was the only thing keeping my hands from shaking when he walked in.
He looked devastated. Dark circles so pronounced he looked like he hadn’t slept since December.
The old jacket, the brown one he wore before me, like he had reverted to something familiar.
But his eyes went straight to me, and there was such relief in that moment that I almost lost it right there in the coffee shop.
He sat down. The table was small. Our knees almost touched.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
The coffee steamed between us. I wrapped my hands around my cup and tried not to shake them so badly that the liquid spilled.
Ellis reached for his cortado, my selection for him, still warm, and his hand stilled halfway there. He was waiting for permission. After weeks, he was still asking.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what to say,” I told him.
My voice was rough, like I hadn’t used it in weeks.
I probably hadn’t. “I wrote it down. I practiced it. And then everything I’d practiced went wrong because it was all trying to convince you of something.
All trying to make you feel a certain way about this. About me.”
“Jett.”
“Let me. Please.” I took a breath that tasted like coffee and the desperation of finally getting to speak.
“I don’t want space. I want you. I want the uncertainty.
I want the risk. I want all of it. I want to be the person you figure it out with, even if figuring it out is messy and scary and means you might realize you’ve made a mistake. ”
Ellis’ jaw tightened. He reached across the table and his hand hovered, asking permission, and I gave it by uncurling my fingers from the coffee cup. His grip was tight, almost desperate, as if he held hard enough, I wouldn’t disappear.
“I was trying to protect us by running from us,” he began.
“And that’s… that’s my shit, Jett. I’d spent thirty years certain about who I was.
Then I met you, and the certainty cracked.
” He paused, then started again. “I couldn’t tell if I was finally seeing myself or losing myself, and I was so scared of the second one I never let myself feel the first.”
His voice was steady, but his hand was shaking.
“I kept thinking about it in binary,” he continued.
“Either I’d always been this and never let myself see it, or I was reinventing myself in real time.
I don’t know which one was worse. I don’t even know if those are the only two options.
My therapist asked me…” his voice caught.
“She asked me what I’d do if I never figured out which one was true.
If I had to live the rest of my life not knowing.
I told her I couldn’t. Then she asked if I could live with you while not knowing.
That was the question that broke me open. ”
Tears spilled down my face. Silent. The kind where your eyes overflow and you didn’t even realize it was happening until someone said your name.
“The answer is yes, by the way.” He didn’t look up from his coffee.
“I can live with that. I can live with you and uncertainty. They’re not mutually exclusive.
I just spent weeks learning that certainty was the thing I was using as an excuse to leave you, because if I wasn’t sure, then leaving wasn’t my fault.
It was just me needing to figure myself out.
But the truth is I was scared.” He exhaled, slow.
“I’m still scared. I don’t know if I’ll ever be completely sure of anything.
But I’m sure of you. Even uncertain about the rest of it, about my job, about who I’m supposed to be, about all of it. I’m sure of you.”
“You came to get space,” I said, and my voice caught on the words. “You decided you needed to be alone.”
“I was running, and you let me. You could have fought for this, for us, and you let me go because I asked. You chose to let me choose. And I chose wrong. I spent weeks choosing wrong because I thought the space was going to clarify something, but it clarified that I don’t want to be separate from you.
The person I become without you isn’t better, it’s lonelier. ”
I was nodding as if I nodded hard enough, the reality of him being here would solidify. Like this was something that could still slip away if I didn’t hold it tight enough.
“The person I was before you,” I told him, and the words were still rough from non-use, “wasn’t free.
I was empty. I built my whole life around not needing anyone because I thought it was power.
But it was fear with good marketing, and I’d rather be terrified with you than safe without you.
I’d rather take the risk. I’d rather choose you, over and over, even knowing that you might need to leave again.
Even knowing people hurt you. People leave.
I’d rather take that risk than lose you. ”
Ellis’ eyes were wet, too. The coffee was cold now, forgotten.
“I love you. I love that you’re messy. I love that you scare easily, but you don’t run.
I love that you text me about plants, and how you remember the names of everyone we’ve met in the past six months, and you see the world like it’s a problem you can solve if you try hard enough. ”
“I ran. Last time, this time, I ran.”
“You came back,” he said. “You’re here. You came back.”
We sat like that for a long time, hands locked across a table in a coffee shop, the city moving around us, people coming and going, nobody paying attention to two men who’d finally stopped waiting for permission to choose each other.
His thumb moved in circles on the back of my hand, a gesture I remembered from early mornings, from lazy afternoons, from all the small moments when we were here together without trying to be anything else.
The cortado had gone cold, but I drank it because he’d picked it for me. Or because I’d picked it for him. Same thing. We’d always been able to anticipate each other’s needs, even when we couldn’t articulate our own.
When we left, the sun was high and clean.
He took my hand in the street, the most natural gesture in the world.
Like the weeks of silence were a pause between chapters, not the ending.
His fingers slotted between mine with that same practiced ease, and the weight of his hand, solid, warm, real, landed like a promise being remade.
We walked like that for a long time. Neither of us in a hurry to get anywhere. The pause was over. Now came everything else.