14. What Wasn’t Said
Fourteen
What Wasn’t Said
Elena
Julian and I fell into an easy habit of Sunday morning walks along the Hollis Bay waterfront, before the site opened for the day, before either of us had to be anyone’s architect or anyone’s designer — just two people who liked each other’s company, watching the light change over water neither of us had built anything on yet.
We’d been doing it for a month by the time the question I hadn’t let myself ask finally surfaced.
“Can I tell you something that might sound strange?” I asked, watching a container ship move slowly along the horizon.
“Always.”
“Sometimes I catch myself constructing a whole life with you,” I admitted, the words coming out slower than I intended, like I was testing whether saying them would make them more true or less.
“Not fantasy, exactly. Just — logistics. Where we’d live.
What weekends would look like. It’s strange, because I don’t think I’m imagining it because I want it.
I think I’m imagining it because it’s safe to imagine.
Because nothing about it has any real risk attached. ”
Julian was quiet for a moment, considering that with the same careful attention he gave everything. “That’s an honest thing to say to someone who’s told you he wants exactly that life with you.”
“I know. I’m sorry if it’s unfair to say out loud.”
“It’s not unfair,” he said. “I’d rather know what’s actually happening in your head than have you protect me from it. What would the risk be, with Damian? If you let yourself imagine that life instead?”
I thought about that honestly, turning the question over instead of reaching for the comfortable answer.
“That he goes back to who he was, eventually. That the version of him doing all this work is temporary, performed for an audience of one, and once I stop watching so carefully, the old patterns come back. That I give him everything again and end up right back where I started, except this time without even the dignity of not having seen it coming.”
“That’s not an unreasonable fear.”
“No,” I agreed. “But I don’t think it’s really about him anymore, if I’m honest. I think it’s about whether I trust myself to leave again, if I need to.
Whether choosing him this time means abandoning everything I’ve built if it goes wrong, or whether I’ve finally built something sturdy enough to survive being wrong about someone I love. ”
“And with me?”
“With you, there’s no history to be afraid of,” I said. “That’s not nothing, Julian. It’s actually a significant thing you’re offering me. But I don’t know if the absence of fear is the same thing as love, or just the absence of everything that makes love complicated enough to be worth choosing.”
He nodded slowly, and I watched him accept the answer without trying to argue me out of my own uncertainty, without using this moment to make his case more persuasively than he already had.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I think you already know what you’re going to choose. I think you’ve known for a while. I think you’re just being careful to make sure you’re choosing it for the right reasons, not because it’s the safer path or the more comfortable one.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It should, probably,” he said, with a small, rueful smile. “I find that it doesn’t, much. I’d rather you choose honestly, even if it isn’t me, than have you choose me because it was easier than doing the harder, more honest work of figuring out what you actually want.”
We finished the walk in comfortable silence, and I understood, watching the ship finally disappear over the horizon, that Julian had just given me something rare — the space to be genuinely uncertain, without either pressuring me toward him or performing hurt to make me feel guilty for taking the time I needed.
It was, I thought, exactly the kind of grace that made him worth grieving, whatever I eventually chose.