Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Two weeks later, Ellis met one of my ghosts.
We were at a bar in Park Slope—not our usual territory, but Ellis’ coworker Derek was having a birthday thing, and Ellis had finally started saying yes to work events, which I took as progress.
He’d introduced me to three different colleagues as “my boyfriend, Jett” without stumbling, and Marcus had shaken my hand and said “So you’re the reason Ellis has been smiling at stand-ups” and Ellis had turned red from his collar to his hairline, which was the best thing I’d seen all week.
I was feeling good. Better than I’d felt since the phone call with my mom, actually.
Ellis loose and laughing with his work friends, me holding a beer and charming Derek’s girlfriend with a story about a corporate gala where the ice sculpture melted into the shrimp tower.
This was the version of us I wanted. Public and easy.
We’d stepped outside for air. The bar had that overheated, too-many-bodies thing happening, and Ellis wanted to cool down before he sweated through his shirt.
We were leaning against the brick wall, his shoulder against mine, sharing a quiet that only worked because we trusted each other not to ruin it.
“I like your work people.”
“They like you. Derek’s girlfriend already put us on the couples-only trivia list. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“I hope you said yes.”
“I said try and stop us.” He bumped his shoulder against mine.
I was about to kiss him right there on the sidewalk, in Park Slope, in front of God and the bodega across the street, when someone stopped on the sidewalk in front of us.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The voice was sharp. Familiar in a way I couldn’t immediately place, which was the problem with having a past the size of mine. Too many faces compressed into a blur of skin and exits.
I looked up.
He was maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. Shorter than me, stocky, dark hair that fell across his forehead.
Puerto Rican, if I remembered right. He was staring at me with an expression I’d seen before but never directed at me with this much heat.
The expression of someone who’d spent a long time being angry and had just been handed a target.
“Nathan.”
The name surfaced from somewhere deep. A night, eight months ago, maybe nine.
His friend’s rooftop in Bed-Stuy. He’d been funny and nervous, told me about his sister’s wedding.
We’d gone back to mine. I’d kicked him out before 2 A.M., the way I kicked everyone out, with some line about an early morning that wasn’t real but sounded believable.
He’d asked at the door if I’d want to do this again. I’d said sure. I’d lied.
He’d texted. Three times. I hadn’t responded.
“Nathan,” he repeated, mimicking me. “Just ‘Nathan,’ like we ran into each other at a grocery store. Like you didn’t ghost me.”
Ellis went very still beside me.
“Look.” I took a breath. “I’m sorry about that. I should have texted you back. That was shitty of me.”
“Shitty of you.” Nathan laughed, and there was nothing funny in it.
“You said you’d see me again. I texted you three times.
Three. You let me think it meant something.
And then, nothing. Not a ‘hey, I changed my mind.’ Not a ‘sorry, not interested.’ Just silence.
Like I was a takeout container you were done with. ”
The comparison punched me hard, because it was accurate.
Ellis shifted beside me. I could feel him recalculating, not the scene in front of us, but me.
The version of me this stranger was describing.
The one who let people cook breakfast and then threw away their number.
The one who treated intimacy like a transaction that ended when the other person left the apartment.
“You’re right.” I kept my voice steady. “I handled it badly. I should have been upfront with you.”
“You shouldn’t have said you’d call if you weren’t going to.” Nathan’s eyes moved to Ellis. Took in the shoulder-to-shoulder lean, the proximity, the obvious togetherness. “Is this your, are you two together?”
“Yeah.” Ellis stepped forward. “We are.”
Nathan looked at me, then at Ellis, then back at me. Something in his face shifted; the anger didn’t leave, but it made room for something else. Pity, maybe. Or a warning.
“Good luck.” He said it directly to Ellis. Not sarcastically. Sincerely, which was worse. “One night, three texts, and nothing back. I thought we had something. I actually thought…” He stopped himself. Shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Have a good night.”
He walked away. Didn’t look back.
The sidewalk was quiet. The muffled thump of the bar bled through the brick wall behind us. A cab honked somewhere on Fifth Avenue. Ellis stood beside me, not touching me anymore, his shoulder half an inch from mine, the same distance as before, but it had a different temperature.
“Jett.”
“I know.”
“Were you always like that?”
There it was. The question I’d been bracing for since Darius and the cologne on my shoulder.
“Like what?” I knew what he meant. I asked anyway because I needed to hear him say it.
“Using people.” He said it without venom—flat, the way he delivered facts at work. “Letting them think it mattered and then vanishing.”
“I never promised anyone anything.”
“Doesn’t make it okay.”
No, it didn’t.
We stood there. Inside the bar, someone was toasting Derek’s birthday, the muffled cheers came through the wall. Out here the streetlights hummed and the truth of who I’d been before Ellis stood on the sidewalk like a third person in the conversation.
“I want to go home.”
“Okay. Let me get our…”
“Alone.” He looked at me, and for the first time since I’d known him, I couldn’t read his face. Closed. Not angry, not yet, maybe not ever, but shut the way a door closes when someone needs to think in private. “I need to think.”
“Ellis, come on. Let me explain.”
“Explain what? How you used to ghost people? I already knew that. I’m not an idiot.
” He pushed off the wall. His hands went into his pockets.
“I knew you had a past. You told me about the hookups. The numbers. I was fine with it because it was before me. But watching someone stand on a sidewalk and tell me they texted you three times and got nothing back…” He stopped.
Breathed. His jaw was tight enough that I could see the muscle working.
“That’s different from knowing it in the abstract. That’s a real person you hurt.”
“I know.”
“I need to go home and sit with that. Because right now I’m looking at you and I’m trying really hard not to wonder if I’m the one who got lucky enough to stay.”
That one cut me open.
“You’re not…”
“I know I’m not. Logically, I know.” He looked at me, and his eyes were bright, hard, and scared underneath. The scared was worse than anything else, worse than anger, worse than disappointment. “But logic isn’t running the show right now. Give me tonight. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He went back inside, said goodbye to his coworkers, because Ellis didn’t leave without saying goodbye even when he was falling apart, and then he walked to the subway without me.
I watched him disappear down the stairs at the Fourth Avenue station, his shoulders slightly hunched, his pace deliberately steady, like he was holding himself together through sheer force of will.
I stood on the sidewalk with my hands at my sides, and the ghost of who I used to be standing exactly where Nathan had been, staring at me with the same expression.
“Good luck”, Nathan had said to Ellis.
I went back inside. Ordered another drink. Didn’t taste it.
Calliope would have told me to chase him.
Sierra would have told me to give him space.
Raven would have looked at me until I figured it out myself.
But none of them were here, and I was alone in a bar in Park Slope surrounded by people who were having a great time at Derek’s birthday, and the man I loved was on the train going back to his apartment where he’d water his plants and sit with the knowledge that the person he’d chosen used to be careless with people who didn’t deserve it.
I couldn’t argue with anything Nathan had said.
Couldn’t argue with anything Ellis had said either.
My past was exactly what it was. A long line of people I’d kept at arm’s length because closeness was dangerous and distance was safe, and I’d mistaken the absence of pain for the presence of freedom.
And now the one person I’d let in was on a subway going home without me, wondering whether my capacity for cruelty was a phase or a personality trait.
I finished the drink. Left cash on the bar. Walked home in the cold.
My apartment was dark and empty. No Ellis on the couch. No cedar candle.
I sat on my bed and stared at my phone and didn’t text him, because he’d asked for tonight and I owed him at least that.
But I didn’t sleep either.