Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Sierra’s idea. The pact.
We were at her place on a Tuesday, just the two of us, which was rare these days.
I’d been spending most of my free time at Ellis’, and Sierra had been building her life around Lauren in that all-consuming way people do when they’re newly in love and haven’t yet learned to ration it.
But she’d texted that morning. Come over, important, bring wine.
Something in the phrasing told me this wasn’t casual.
She’d opened the door looking like she hadn’t slept. Salem wound between her ankles as I stepped inside, and Sierra pulled me straight to the couch without the usual pleasantries.
“I’m telling my parents,” she said. “About Lauren. About being pan. All of it.”
I set the wine on the coffee table. “When?”
“This week. Thursday. Tobias and Thalia are going to be there for backup.”
I studied her face. Sierra was the bravest person I knew in all the ways that mattered.
She’d tell off a catcaller twice her size without flinching, show up for anyone at three in the morning without being asked.
But this was different. This was her parents.
Her dad, who still thought “normal” was a thing people could be, her mom, who measured love by how closely it resembled a Hallmark movie.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s big.”
“I know.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. Salem jumped into her lap, and she held him like a shield. “I can’t keep hiding Lauren from them. It’s eating me alive. And Lauren deserves better than being someone I only talk about in safe rooms.”
That hit close to home.
“You should do the same thing.”
“Do what?”
“Tell your mom about Ellis.”
The room went very quiet. Salem purred against Sierra’s chest, oblivious.
“Sierra…”
“I’m serious. We’ve both been putting this off.
You’ve been with Ellis for months now. You told me you love him.
You told Hannah in a coffee shop. But your mom still doesn’t know his name.
” She looked at me with those steady brown eyes that never let me hide.
“How long are you going to keep him in a box?”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell her it was different, that her parents were one kind of hard and mine was another.
That her parents might be confused, but mine might be cruel.
The truth ran blunter than that. I was scared, and being scared had become comfortable, and comfortable was the enemy of everything I claimed to believe about freedom.
“Thursday.” Sierra leaned forward. “I tell my parents. You call your mom. Same night. We debrief after.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s a pact. You and me. We jump together, or we don’t jump at all.”
I looked at her. My best friend since we were sixteen, the person who’d seen me at my worst, most ridiculous, and most afraid, who’d held my hand through every version of myself I’d ever tried on and discarded. She was asking me to be as brave as she was about to be.
“Fine.” The word came out like a surrender. “Thursday.”
“Thursday.”
We clinked imaginary glasses because I’d forgotten to open the wine, and Salem meowed his disapproval at the sudden movement, and for thirty seconds it almost felt manageable.
Thursday came too fast.
Ellis knew about the plan. He’d held my hand when I told him, and his face had split between relief and terror.
He wanted my mom to know. He’d wanted it since the Sunday phone call, since hearing me call him “someone” and watching the word land between us like a grenade with the pin still in.
But he also understood, in that quiet Ellis way, that this was mine to do and mine to survive.
“Text me when you’re done,” he’d said that morning. “Whatever happens. I’ll be there.”
I spent the day not calling my mom. I cleaned my apartment instead, which I only did when I was avoiding something.
Scrubbed the bathroom. Reorganized my closet.
Wiped down the kitchen counter three times.
At 4 P.M. I ate half a sandwich and couldn’t finish it.
At five I stared at my phone. At 6 P.M., I poured a glass of rum and didn’t drink it.
At 7 P.M., I called her.
She picked up on the second ring. “Mijo. It’s a Thursday. Did someone die?”
“Nobody died, Ma.”
“Then why do you sound like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like somebody died.”
I sat on the edge of my bed with my elbows on my knees and my free hand pressed against the Libre tattoo through my shirt, as if I could feel her handwriting through the fabric I could borrow whatever courage she’d meant to give me when she wrote it.
“Ma, I need to tell you something. About the person I’m seeing.”
Silence. The bachata in the background. A pot lid being set down.
“His name is Ellis. He’s, he’s amazing, Ma.
He works in tech, he’s smart, he treats me like…
” My voice cracked and I had to stop. Start over.
“He treats me better than anyone I’ve ever been with.
I love him. I’m in love with him, and it’s the first time I’ve ever said that about somebody and meant it all the way through. ”
More silence. Longer this time. A silence with weight.
“Mijo.” Her voice had gone careful. New. “This boy. Is he…”
“He’s white, Ma. He’s from Long Island. His name is Ellis; he’s white and I love him.”
I said it all at once because I’d always known, somewhere underneath the optimism, that this was the part she’d get stuck on.
Not the gay part. She’d handled the gay part.
The particular shape of it that would break her: her Dominican son, in her city, building a life with a man whose family probably had a lawn and a golden retriever and no idea what it meant to scrape together rent in Sunset Park.
The line was silent. Not the silence of hanging up. She was still there. I could hear her breathing. The bachata in the background cut out, meaning she’d reached over and lowered it. A cabinet closed. The particular quiet of a woman who needed a second to decide what she was about to do.
“Ma.”
“You’re being stupid.” Her voice came out sharp, honed, the way she sounded when she was trying to cut something before it cut her. “That white boy is just messing around with you. He’s going to break your heart, and you’ll come crawling back here…”
“Ma, that’s not…”
“You think some boy from Long Island understands what we’ve been through? What your family’s been through? He’s playing, Jett. He’s experimenting. And when he’s done, he’ll go back to his nice neighborhood and his nice parents and you’ll be…”
“Stop.”
She stopped.
“You don’t know him,” I said. “You haven’t met him. You’re making judgments about someone you’ve never…”
“I’m making judgments because I’m your mother and I know how the world works.
This isn’t about him being a man, mijo. I told you years ago I don’t care about that.
This is about him being someone who will never have to fight the way you do.
Who will never understand what it costs to be who you are. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“The world’s not fair. It’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you.”
She hung up.
Just. Hung up. Mid-sentence, mid-breath, the line went dead, and I sat there on the edge of my bed with the phone pressed to my ear listening to nothing. The rum on the counter caught the kitchen light. The Libre on my ribs throbbed like a bruise.
I didn’t cry. Not right away. I sat there for maybe two minutes, three, breathing through it the way you breathe through a cramp.
Controlled, deliberate, waiting for the worst of it to pass.
Then I put my phone on the nightstand, walked to the kitchen, and poured the rum down the sink because if I drank it, I’d drink all of it and then I’d call her back and say something I couldn’t recant.
Ellis was at my door twenty minutes later. He had takeout, and he didn’t say a word. Just set the food on the counter, opened his arms; I walked into them and stayed there for a long time, my face against his chest, his hand on the back of my neck, the apartment quiet around us.
“She hung up on me.” The words went muffled into his shirt.
“I know.” He’d probably heard it in my voice when I texted him. Or maybe he just knew, the way he always knew, because Ellis paid attention and paying attention was love.
“She called you ‘that white boy.’ Said you were messing around and you’d break my heart.”
His hand tightened on my neck. Not a flinch. A hold. “I’m not going to break your heart.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not messing around.”
“I know that, too.”
“Then that’s what matters.” He pulled back enough to look at me. His eyes were red. Not from crying. From restraint. From holding his own reaction down so he could hold mine up. “She’s scared, Jett. People say cruel things when they’re scared.”
“She’s my mom, Ellis. She’s not ‘people.’ She’s…
” My voice broke apart, and I couldn’t put it back together.
The tears hit then, and I hated them. Hated that I was twenty-four and crying in my kitchen over a phone call, hated that my mother’s words had found every soft place I’d ever tried to armor, hated that the woman who’d written Libre on an envelope had just drawn a line around what freedom was allowed to look like.
Ellis held me through it. Didn’t shush me, didn’t fix it, didn’t try to make it smaller than it was. He just stood there in my kitchen being the thing she’d told me I was stupid to want, and I held onto him like the floor was gone.
What happened next wasn’t planned. Wasn’t choreographed or smooth. I kissed him because I needed to feel something that wasn’t the phone call, and he kissed me back because he understood, and it went from gentle to desperate in the space of a breath.
We didn’t make it to the bedroom.