Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Igave him space. Almost killed me, but I did it.
Saturday morning I woke up to nothing. No texts.
No missed calls. No Ellis. I made coffee and drank it standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down felt too much like waiting, and I couldn’t handle waiting.
I checked my phone eleven times before noon.
I know because I counted, and I was absolutely obsessing.
At one o’clock, I texted.
Jett: I think I messed everything up.
She replied immediately.
Sierra: What happened?
Jett: Someone from before showed up. In front of Ellis. It was bad.
Sierra: How bad?
Jett: He went home alone.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Sierra: Give him today. Show up tomorrow. Bring food.
That was the plan then. Food. The universal language of “I know I screwed up and I don’t have the words yet, but I’m here.”
Sunday afternoon I stood outside Ellis’ door with two bags from the Thai place on Graham, the one my tía Rosa swore had roaches, and tried to remember how to breathe.
I’d rehearsed a speech on the subway. Something about growth, accountability, and how the person Nathan described wasn’t who I was anymore.
It had sounded good between stations. Standing in his hallway, it sounded like a TED talk, and Ellis would see right through it.
I knocked.
Footsteps. A pause. The door opened.
He looked tired. Not the attractive kind of tired that people in movies have.
Actually tired. The kind where your skin goes pale and your eyes sit deeper and the bones of your face show more than usual.
He was wearing a T-shirt I’d left at his place weeks ago, which either meant he missed me or he’d run out of clean laundry. Possibly both.
“Pad thai.” I held up the bags. “And those spring rolls you like. The crispy ones.”
He looked at the bags. Then at me. Then back at the bags.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat anyway. You look like you haven’t eaten since Friday.”
“I had cereal.”
“Ellis.”
He stepped aside and let me in. The apartment looked the same.
Plants thriving, because of course they were, Ellis would water his plants during a nuclear apocalypse.
But the couch had a blanket bunched up on it, his tablet was on the floor instead of the coffee table, and there were two mugs in the sink instead of his usual zero, which for Ellis was the equivalent of total domestic collapse.
I unpacked the food on his kitchen table without being asked. He sat down across from me. Neither of us reached for anything.
“I owe you an explanation.”
“You don’t owe me anything. You had a life before me. I knew that.”
“You knew it in theory. Now you’ve met it in person and it looked you in the eye and wished you good luck.” I pushed the spring rolls toward him. “Eat something. Please.”
He took one. Held it without biting into it. “Nathan.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about him.”
So I did. The rooftop. The nervousness. The sister’s wedding story. The way he’d asked at the door if he could see me again. The way I’d said sure, knowing I wouldn’t mean it past the sentence. The three texts I’d never answered.
“Why?” Ellis asked. The spring roll was still untouched. “Why didn’t you answer?”
“Because answering meant continuing. And continuing meant it might become something. And something meant someone could get close enough to…” I stopped.
The rehearsed speech was trying to take over; the clean version with the right words in the right order.
I scrapped it. Started again from somewhere less polished.
“My mom was the first person who told me I could be free. You know that; the tattoo, the whole thing. And I took it and ran with it. But somewhere along the way, free stopped meaning ‘free to be myself’ and started meaning ‘free from anyone who could hurt me.’ If nobody stayed, nobody could leave. If nobody mattered, nobody could take anything with them when they went.”
Ellis set the spring roll down. His eyes were on me, steady, the focused attention he gave to things that required precision.
“Every hookup, every one-night thing, every guy I walked out the door, I told myself I was being honest. No promises, no expectations, no mess. But Nathan was right. Telling someone you’ll see them again and then ghosting them isn’t honest. It’s just cruelty with good boundaries.”
Ellis went very still.
“Was I different?”
The question hit differently than anything I’d prepared for. Not Nathan-and-me, not the pattern in general, just that. Four words. His voice steady, not accusing.
I sat with it. Had to.
“Yeah.” My hands were shaking. I flattened them on the table.
“You were different from the beginning; I knew it, and kept trying to make you fit the same box, anyway. Because the box was safer.” I pressed on.
“I was protecting myself. Every person I didn’t call back, every morning I cut short, every number I deleted, I built a wall so high that nobody could climb it.
And it worked. For years. Nobody got in, nobody got hurt, and I got to walk around calling it freedom. ”
“And I was the one who got in.”
“I let you through. Or you climbed it. I still don’t know the difference.
” The kitchen was quiet. Jack dripped in the bathroom.
The radiator clicked on. “That’s why Nathan scares me.
Not because he confronted me. Because he showed you the version of me that existed before I knew how to let someone stay.
And I can’t undo that guy. He’s in my history.
Distributed across Brooklyn. You’re going to run into him again and again, and every time it happens you’re going to have to decide whether you believe I’m different now. ”
“I do believe you’re different.”
“But?”
“But I needed to hear you say it.” He reached across the table.
His hand found mine, my fingers still shaking, his steady, the contrast so perfectly us that I almost laughed.
“I didn’t leave Friday because I thought you were still that person.
I left because I needed to figure out whether I could love someone who used to be. ”
“And?”
“And I spent two days watering my plants and overthinking, which is basically my version of a spiritual retreat.” The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but the precursor to one. “I can love someone who used to be that. I already do.”
I exhaled. The shaking slowed but didn’t stop.
Ellis continued. “I need you to know something. When Nathan said ‘good luck,’ I didn’t hear a warning. I heard a guy who was hurt, and I felt sorry for him, and then I felt angry at you. In that order, but underneath all of it, what I actually felt was scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“That I’m not enough to make you want to be different. That the wall is still there and I can’t see it anymore. That one morning you’ll wake up and realize I’m another person in your kitchen making eggs, and you’ll lie about having somewhere to be.”
“Ellis.” I tightened my hand around his. “I rearranged my entire life around your watering schedule. I named your fern. You’re not the eggs guy.”
“You named my fern?”
“Jack. The pothos is Diane.”
He stared at me. “Since when?”
“Weeks. I was waiting for the right moment.”
The smile broke through. Small, reluctant, like it was annoyed at itself for showing up during a serious conversation. “You named my plants without telling me.”
“I name everything. It’s a character flaw.”
“It’s not a flaw.” He pulled my hand toward him, pressed his mouth against my knuckles. Held it there. His breath was warm and uneven. “I love you. I’m still scared. Both things are true.”
“Both things are always going to be true. For both of us.”
“I can live with that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He let go of my hand. Picked up the spring roll. Bit into it. “These are good.”
“Tía Rosa says that place has roaches.”
“Your tía Rosa says everywhere has roaches.”
“Because everywhere does. This is New York.”
We ate. Not in the loaded, emotional way of the last half hour, just ate, like two people who’d been hungry for longer than either of us would admit.
The pad thai was good. The spring rolls were better.
Ellis opened a beer, gave me one, and we sat at his tiny kitchen table with our knees touching underneath and didn’t talk about Nathan or ghosts or the wall I’d built or the one he was still learning to see around.
After dinner, he washed and I dried. Jack got misted. Diane got wiped down with a damp cloth, which I hadn’t known was a thing until Ellis showed me, and I filed under “reasons this man is insane and I love him.”
We ended up on his couch for a while, the TV on mute, some nature documentary neither of us was watching. He was tucked into my side, my arm around his shoulders, my other hand running through his hair. We sat there like that for an hour, maybe longer. Quiet. Together.
Then, without either of us saying anything, he stood, took my hand, and led me to the bathroom.
“Wash the day off,” he said, quiet. “Both of us.”
“Yeah.”
He turned on the tap. Steam started rising before the water was hot.
The bathroom was small, and the steam built fast, fogging the mirror, fogging the small framed photo of Jack his sister had taken last Christmas as a joke.
The smell of his soap, basil and bergamot, wafted out of the bottle as he uncapped it and set it on the lip of the tub.
We undressed each other slowly. No buckles to fight tonight, sweatpants and t-shirts, the soft laundered cotton he kept on Sundays.
He pulled my t-shirt up over my head and stayed close and pressed his mouth to the Libre tattoo before he stepped back.
I peeled his shirt off. The barbells caught the bathroom light.
I touched them, no mouth tonight, just my fingertips, the steel cool under the pads.
His sweatpants slid down his hips and his cock came free, already half-hard, the curve of it heavy against his thigh.
Mine came free a beat later. The PA brushed his stomach as we stepped close. He shivered.