Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
The weeks after I told my mom were strange. Not bad, exactly. Just hollow in places that used to be solid.
She didn’t call the following Sunday. Or the one after that. I picked up my phone a dozen times to dial her and put it back down every time, because I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t start the same fight, and the silence between us had calcified into something I was afraid to touch.
Ellis was careful with me during that stretch.
Not careful like fragile. He knew better than that.
But careful the way he was with his plants when they were stressed.
More water. More light. He’d show up at my apartment with food he’d cooked at home, packed in containers with actual labels, and he’d sit on my couch without asking how I was feeling, which was somehow exactly the right move.
He just existed near me, and most nights that was enough.
Sierra checked in daily. Quick texts, nothing heavy.
The Inner Circle closed ranks around me without anyone saying why—Calliope dragged me to a terrible improv show in the East Village, Raven invited me to help her repot some herbs on her fire escape, and nobody mentioned my mom or the phone call or the word “stupid” ringing in a kitchen in Sunset Park.
They just showed up. That’s what they did.
But underneath the careful kindness, something in me had shifted.
Not broken. Shifted. Like a bone that heals slightly crooked.
I was still me. Still loud, still charming, still the guy who made everyone laugh at movie night.
But there was a new frequency running underneath, a low hum of what if she’s right?
Not about Ellis being wrong for me. About me being stupid for believing love was simple enough to survive everything I was asking it to survive.
I kept that to myself. Filed it next to all the other things I didn’t say out loud.
Calliope demanded we go out. She’d been pushing for weeks.
“We haven’t been to Neon Pulse since forever, Jett.
You’re becoming a hermit; hermits don’t have your bone structure.
” I’d been deflecting until I ran out of excuses.
Ellis had a work dinner that Friday, some team-building thing Marcus had organized, so I had the night free and no good reason to say no.
“Fine,” I told Calliope on the phone. “One drink.”
“Nobody in the history of Neon Pulse has ever had one drink.”
“I’m setting a precedent.”
I met them at eleven. The four of us hadn’t been out together in weeks.
Me, Sierra, Calliope, Raven., and the energy was immediate.
Calliope had done something dramatic with eyeliner that made her look like a character from a graphic novel.
Raven wore all black, as always, but had added silver rings to every finger, which for her was practically a costume change.
Sierra was looser than I’d seen her in a while, laughing freely, her phone lighting up periodically with texts from Lauren that made her duck her head and smile.
The club was packed. Friday-night packed, a crowd where you had to turn sideways to reach the bar and the bass lived in your molars. I ordered a whiskey sour and posted up near the speakers with Sierra while Calliope pulled Raven onto the floor.
“You good?” Sierra leaned close to my ear.
“I’m great.”
“Liar. But you’re here, and that counts.”
I was on my second drink when Darius found me at the bar.
I’d gone to order another one, and he was there, tall, lean, brown skin a shade lighter than mine, hair buzzed short. Good-looking in a sharp, angular way. Smiling at me like he knew a joke I’d forgotten the punchline to.
“Jett.” He said my name like we had a history that mattered. “From, you know. Like, six months ago? Your place?”
Oh.
Oh no.
Darius. Right. A Thursday, maybe. Or a Saturday. He’d been at a friend’s party in Bushwick; I’d met him outside the bar, we’d gone back to mine, and it had been fine. Good, even. He’d wanted to stay for breakfast. I’d wanted him to leave. He’d left.
That had been my whole system. Efficient, clean, no loose threads. Except the threads were never actually clean, I’d just stopped looking at the other end.
“Darius, hey.” I manufactured warmth. “How are you?”
“I’m good. You look good.” His eyes moved over me, flattering and uncomfortable at once, appreciative and familiar, with something possessive underneath. Like he was remembering something specific. “I texted you after, you know. A couple times.”
“Yeah, I, sorry about that. Things got busy.”
“Busy.” He smiled, but it had an edge. Not angry, exactly. Disappointed. The kind of smile people wear when they’ve had six months to process being discarded. “Sure. Busy.”
The bartender set my drink down. I picked it up, hoping the gesture would signal an exit. It didn’t.
“Are you here with someone?” Darius asked. His hand landed on the bar next to mine.
“I’m here with friends.”
“Just friends?” The question leaned in.
“I’m with someone, actually. Boyfriend.”
Both his eyebrows went up. “Boyfriend? You?” He laughed, surprised, not mean about it. “No offense, but when I knew you, ‘boyfriend’ wasn’t in your vocabulary.”
“Things change.”
“Clearly.” He studied me for a second, and something in his expression softened. Shifted from flirtation to something more like recognition. “Good for you, man. I mean it. He must be something if he got Jett Reyes-Villanueva to commit.”
“He is.”
Darius nodded, gave my shoulder a squeeze that lasted a beat too long, and melted back into the crowd. The whole exchange took maybe two minutes. Barely a footnote in a night out.
But when I turned around with my drink, Raven was standing three feet behind me.
“Who was that?” she asked, her dark eyes missing absolutely nothing.
“Nobody.”
“Didn’t look like nobody. Looked like somebody who knew you pretty well.”
“From before. Someone from before. It doesn’t matter.”
She held my gaze for a second, then shrugged and took her drink from the bartender. Raven never pushed. She filed and waited.
The rest of the night was fine. Good, even.
We danced. Calliope did something inadvisable on a speaker.
Sierra laughed so hard at one point that her drink came out of her nose, and I almost collapsed.
For a few hours I was Jett again, not the Jett whose mom wasn’t speaking to him, not the Jett who kept a catalog of people he’d used and discarded like takeout containers.
Jett, with his people, in the place where he’d always felt most free.
I got home at two. Ellis was already in my apartment; he’d taken to letting himself in with the spare key we’d moved from the fake rock to a more dignified location inside the hallway light fixture.
He was asleep on the couch with his tablet on his chest and one of my blankets pulled up to his chin. He’d waited up and lost the fight.
I took the tablet off his chest and set it on the coffee table. He stirred.
“Hey.” His voice was gravel. “How was it?”
“Fun. Calliope almost got us banned from Neon Pulse again.”
He smiled without opening his eyes. “Again?”
“Long story. How was the work thing?”
“Fine. Marcus told a story about fishing in Montauk that lasted forty-five minutes.”
I kicked off my shoes and lay down beside him on the couch, which was too narrow for two people and forced us into a tangle that neither of us minded.
His arm went around me automatically. His breath smelled like toothpaste, and the apartment smelled like the candle he’d been burning, smoke and amber.
“Jett?”
“Yeah?”
“You smell like someone else’s cologne.”
I went still.
“It’s on your shoulder.” He wasn’t accusing, just observing, cataloging. “The left one.”
Darius’ hand. The squeeze that lasted a beat too long.
“Someone came up to me at the bar.” I shifted in his arms, looking directly at him so he could read my honesty. “A guy I used to know. Before you. He was being friendly. Put his hand on my shoulder for like one second.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it. I told him I have a boyfriend and he walked away.”
“Okay.” His arm didn’t tighten. His voice didn’t change. He said, “okay” the way he said most things when he was processing; flat, measured, the surface calm while something underneath did the math.
“Ellis.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s clearly not fine.”
“It’s fine, Jett. You went to a club, someone recognized you, you told them you’re taken. That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.” He pulled me closer, which contradicted everything his voice was doing. “Go to sleep.”
I didn’t push. Maybe I should have. But the night had been good, the first time I’d felt normal in weeks, and I didn’t want to crack it open looking for problems underneath.
I closed my eyes, let his arm hold me, and tried not to think about the way the ghost had looked at me.
Not with desire. With familiarity. With the casual intimacy of someone who’d been inside my apartment, inside my life for exactly one night, and then been escorted out before the coffee was ready.
I’d done that to a lot of people. I knew the number. Rough estimate, at least. And every single one of them was walking around Brooklyn with a version of me in their memory, a version Ellis would never meet but might keep running into.
My past wasn’t behind me. It was distributed across five boroughs, and eventually enough of it would surface that Ellis would have to decide what it meant.
I hoped he’d decide it didn’t mean anything.
I wasn’t sure that was true.