Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
We were at the loud espresso bar on Vanderbilt on a Saturday morning when it happened.
Not our usual spot. Ellis preferred the quieter café two blocks from his apartment, the one with the wobbly tables and the barista who already knew his order.
But they were closed for renovations, so we’d walked the extra ten minutes to a spot on Vanderbilt, which was louder, more crowded, and had the exposed-concrete aesthetic that made every twenty-something feel like they were starring in their own documentary.
I didn’t mind. The coffee was good and Ellis looked stupidly handsome in the morning light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows, reading something on his phone with his brow furrowed in that way that meant either a work email or a recipe he disagreed with.
“Stop staring at me.” He didn’t look up from his phone.
“I’m not staring. I’m admiring. There’s a difference.”
“The difference being?”
“Staring is creepy. Admiring is romantic.”
“It’s creepy when you do it, too.” But the corner of his mouth lifted, and he reached across the table and stole a piece of my croissant without asking, which I took as deep trust and emotional intimacy.
That’s when she walked in.
I didn’t notice her at first. Tall, blonde, athletic, the kind of woman who ran half-marathons and had opinions about protein powder. She was ordering at the counter when Ellis went rigid across from me.
Not the work-call rigid from a few weeks ago. Different. Deeper. His body clocking someone before his brain caught up.
“What?” I whispered.
“Nothing.”
“Ellis.”
He set his phone down. “My ex just walked in.”
I didn’t turn around. Wanted to, badly, with every nosy bone in my body screaming at me to look. But the flat, careful, bracing way he’d said it told me this wasn’t a moment for my usual theatrics.
“Which ex?”
“The closest thing to one. Hannah.”
The closest thing. Because Ellis hadn’t had a parade of them the way I had.
He hadn’t really had any. Just Hannah, a long stretch of months he’d never put a label on, dates that weren’t dates, sex that was supposed to be casual, sleepovers he’d told himself didn’t mean anything.
He’d ghosted her when she’d asked for more.
The way I would’ve. The way he’d watched me almost do that first week.
And then a stretch of nothing, and then me.
“Does she know about…”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“She’s coming over.”
I turned.
Hannah was walking toward us with a coffee in one hand and a smile that looked practiced but not fake. Pleasant. The smile of someone who’d spotted an ex in public and had three seconds to decide how to handle it.
“Ellis. Oh my God, hi.” She stopped at the edge of our table. Up close she was pretty in that effortless, catalogued way. Minimal makeup, hair pulled back, small gold studs in her ears. She looked like someone’s favorite coworker. “I haven’t seen you in, what, a year?”
“About that.” Ellis stood up, which I found both charming and slightly insane, like we were at a dinner party instead of a coffee shop. They did that awkward half-hug that people do when they’ve seen each other naked but now maintain a respectful three-inch gap. “You look good.”
“You, too. You’ve been working out more.” Her eyes flicked to me, then back to him, then to me again. Quick and assessing, but not hostile.
Ellis looked at me. Something moved across his face. A decision settling.
“Hannah, this is Jett.” He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t stammer. Didn’t use “friend” or “roommate” or any of the other euphemisms he’d been deploying at work for weeks. “My boyfriend.”
The word came out steady. Almost defiant.
Hannah blinked once. Then she smiled, wider this time, genuine, and extended her hand to me. “Hi, Jett. It’s really nice to meet you.”
I shook her hand. Her grip was firm. “You, too.”
“How long have you two been together?”
“Few months.” He said it without flinching, without checking my reaction, without any of the telltale anxiety that crept into his voice when Marcus called or his gym buddies asked questions. Just saying it. In public. To the one woman who’d known him as a straight man best.
“That’s great.” Hannah looked between us, and whatever she saw there made her expression soften into something that might have been relief. “I’m happy for you. Both of you.”
She wasn’t lying. I knew when someone was performing. Hannah wasn’t performing. She was a person who’d loved Ellis once and was glad he’d found something good.
I hated how much that threw me.
They talked for a few minutes. Surface stuff.
Her new job in product management, his project at work, mutual friends they’d lost track of.
She laughed at something he said, touching her collarbone the way women do when they’re being polite, and I sat there eating my croissant and watching the ghost of Ellis’ straight life stand in front of me in athleisure.
This was the woman he’d come closest to letting in.
The one he’d let stay over more than once, then more than twice, then enough that she’d started leaving things at his place.
She’d known an Ellis I’d never meet. The one who hadn’t questioned anything yet, who moved through the world on the path everyone expected, who never had to rehearse how to say “boyfriend” before letting it leave his mouth, because he’d never said it about anyone.
Hannah left after five minutes, waving goodbye with that easy smile, and Ellis sat back down across from me.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he said.
“She seems nice.”
“She is nice. She was always nice.”
I nodded. Picked at my croissant. The flaky layers had gone limp.
Ellis watched me. He was getting better at reading my silences the way I read his.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Jett.”
I looked up. “Do you miss it?”
“Miss what?”
“The easy version. The one where you’re with someone like her and everything just works. No coming out at the office. No gym buddies getting weird. No having to introduce your boyfriend to your ex and watch her do math in her head.”
His face went still. “She wasn’t doing math.”
“Everyone does math, Ellis. They see you with me and they recalculate. Every single person. Your coworkers will. Your gym buddies will. Your parents definitely will. And Hannah just did, even though she was cool about it. Megan did when you told her last month. She said all the right things, but you saw the recalculation happen behind her eyes.”
He was quiet for a long beat. The café noise filled the space between us. Espresso machines, someone’s laptop keyboard, a toddler shrieking about a muffin three tables over.
“Do you know why I said ‘boyfriend’ to her?” he asked.
“Because she’s not your team lead?”
“Because she mattered.” He leaned forward, both arms on the table.
“Because she’s the closest I ever came to admitting I wanted something with anyone.
And I never said the word to her. Not once.
She asked me, in plain English, what we were doing, and I deflected until she walked away from it.
If I can’t say ‘boyfriend’ to her now, about you, then nothing’s actually changed.
I’m still that guy. And I’m done being him. ”
My throat did something inconvenient. Tightened, I think. Some involuntary betrayal of the cool I was trying to maintain.
“And no,” he said. “I don’t miss the easy version. Whatever I had with Hannah wasn’t easy; it was just expected. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He reached across the table and took the mangled croissant out of my hands. Set it on the plate. Took my hands instead. His thumbs pressed into my palms, warm and deliberate. “Being with you isn’t a hard path, Jett. It’s just a real one.”
I looked down at our hands on the table. Brown and white, his fingers longer, mine broader. In the middle of a coffee shop, on a Saturday morning, where anyone could see.
“You called me your boyfriend.” The word still sat too large to hold.
“I did.”
“To your ex-girlfriend.”
“To anyone who was listening.”
“Without practicing first?”
He laughed, short and surprised. “I didn’t need to practice. Your name came out and the rest followed. Like it was the easiest thing I’d said all week.”
I looked at him across the table, and for a second, I saw it.
All of it. The version of us that could work.
Not because it was simple or expected or free of recalculation, but because this man had just stood up in a coffee shop and claimed me to the one person who represented everything he was leaving behind, and he’d done it like breathing.
“Buy me another croissant.” I pushed the empty plate toward him. “You owe me. I stress-ate that one.”
“You stress-ate a pastry in five minutes?”
“I’m Dominican. We process emotions through carbohydrates.”
He stood up, shaking his head, and went to the counter. I watched him go. Tall, broad, that sleeve tattoo visible below his pushed-up sleeves, moving through the crowd with the quiet confidence of a man who’d just done something brave and didn’t know it yet.
My boyfriend.
The word kept getting bigger every time someone else heard it.