Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Sunday was the longest day of my life.
I got to Ellis’ apartment at ten, letting myself in with the key he’d given me, an actual copy he’d had made at the hardware store. He’d handed it to me two weeks ago without ceremony. “In case you need to water the plants,” he’d said, like I’d believe that was the reason.
I had nothing to do but wait.
I watered Jack. Misted Diane. Checked the soil on the fiddle-leaf fig and adjusted the blinds to give the herbs better light.
Ellis had a system. The plants were fine.
Everything in his apartment was fine because Ellis kept everything fine through sheer organizational will, and the only thing that wasn’t fine was somewhere on the LIRR watching Long Island flatten out through the window.
By noon I’d cleaned his kitchen. By one I’d reorganized his bookshelf by color, which he was going to hate because he organized by genre. By two I’d undone the whole thing and was sitting on his couch staring at my phone like it owed me money.
He hadn’t texted. I’d told myself I wouldn’t text first. He’d said he’d call after. After could mean a lot of things.
I thought about calling Sierra. Didn’t. She’d tell me to breathe and trust the process, and I didn’t want to do either.
I wanted to be on the LIRR sitting next to him, holding his hand across the armrest, being the person his parents had to look at when they decided what their son’s happiness was worth.
But he’d asked to do it alone, and I’d said yes, and saying yes to things that terrified me was apparently the theme of this entire relationship.
At 3:17 PM, my phone buzzed.
Ellis: On the subway back.
Just words. No emoji, no context, no indication of whether the world had ended or shifted. I typed six different responses and deleted all of them. Landed on:
Jett: Food is on its way. I’m here.
The dots appeared. Then:
Ellis: Thank you.
Two words that told me almost nothing. Thank you wasn’t “it went great.” Thank you was what you said when you were too tired or too broken to explain, but needed someone to know you were coming home to them.
I ordered Korean food, fried chicken, and BBQ, because I didn’t know what kind of hungry he’d be. The stress kind where you eat everything, or the grief kind where you stare at food like it personally offended you. I set them on the counter and sat on the couch and waited.
The door opened at 4:40 PM.
Ellis stepped inside, closed it behind him, and stood in his own entryway as if he wasn’t sure he lived there anymore.
His jacket was on, but unzipped. His hair was windblown from walking from the subway.
He always walked the last six blocks instead of transferring.
Said it helped him decompress. He was holding his keys in his right hand, gripping them hard enough that the metal must have been biting into his palm.
He looked at me on the couch. His face was somewhere between wrecked and relieved. Like a house after a storm, where the structure held but a few windows blew out.
“Hey.”
He set his keys on the table by the door. Took off his jacket. Hung it on the hook he always used. Second from the left. Ellis had a hook for everything. Then he walked to the couch and sat down next to me and put his head in his hands.
I put my arm around him. Waited.
“My mom cried,” his hands were still over his face, “before I even finished the sentence. I said, ‘Mom, Dad, I need to tell you something,’ and she started crying because she already knew. She said she’d known for a while. She didn’t say how long, but, a while.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she loved me. And then she said, ‘But we wanted grandchildren. We wanted you to have a family.’ Like being gay meant I’d given something back. Like I’d returned a future she’d already bought and wrapped.”
“And your dad?”
Ellis lifted his head. His eyes were dry—he’d done his crying somewhere else, maybe on the subway, maybe in his parents’ bathroom, probably the moment he decided to do this thing that couldn’t be undone.
“My dad didn’t say anything. Not for a long time.
He just sat there looking at his plate. My mom was talking, asking questions, trying to understand, doing the thing she does where she processes out loud, and my dad just sat there. ”
“How long?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe. Mom asked if I was seeing someone. I said yes. She asked his name. I said Jett. She asked what you do. I told her. And the whole time, Dad’s just sitting there with his hands flat on the table, not eating, not talking, like he’d turned into furniture.”
I pulled him closer. He let me.
“Then, right when I was about to leave, I’d already put my jacket on, I was standing at the front door, he came up to me in the hallway. Again, didn’t say anything. Just looked at me a long time.” Ellis’ voice dropped to almost a whisper. “And then he hugged me.”
I stopped breathing.
“He didn’t say it was okay. Didn’t say he was proud or that he understood or any of the things you see in movies.
He hugged me hard, the way he used to after Little League games when I struck out.
My nose was against his shoulder, his hand was on the back of my head, and for a second, I was twelve years old and I’d swung and missed, and the only thing that mattered was that he was holding me. ”
“Ellis.”
“And then he said, ‘I need time. But you’re my son.’ And that was it. He went back to the kitchen.”
We sat there for a while. The food was getting cold on the counter.
The fridge clicked into a new cycle. The late afternoon light came through the window and hit the fiddle-leaf fig at an angle that cast leaf-shaped shadows across the whole living room.
For a second, the apartment looked like it was underwater.
“Not hellfire.” His voice was small. “But not what I wanted either.”
“What did you want?”
“I don’t know. Something that didn’t feel like loss.
” He leaned his head against my shoulder.
“My mom’s going to be okay. She’ll research, she’ll read books, she’ll join some kind of group.
That’s how she processes. But my dad, he lost something today.
Some version of me he’d been carrying around.
I watched it happen, and I couldn’t stop it. ”
“You didn’t take anything from him, Ellis. You gave him the truth.”
“The truth broke something.”
“The truth broke something that was already cracked. He didn’t know it yet.”
He was quiet for a long time. I held him and listened to his breathing slow from the ragged, post-crisis rhythm to something steadier. The apartment settled around us. I didn’t move.
“’You’re my son’,” he said after a long beat, repeating his dad’s words, testing their weight. “He said that. ‘You’re my son.’ Present tense.”
“Present tense is everything.”
“Yeah.” He lifted his head. Looked at me.
His face had lost that blown-out-window quality—it was still tired, still marked by whatever the last six hours had cost him, but his eyes were quieter now.
A foundation that held. “Can we eat now? I haven’t eaten since breakfast and I think I might be dying. ”
“It’s on the counter. I didn’t know what mood you’d be in, so I got Korean fried chicken and BBQ.”
“Who gets this much food for two people?”
“Someone who loves you.”
He almost smiled. Not quite. His face wasn’t ready for it yet. But the muscles tried, and the trying was enough.
We ate on the couch with the takeout containers open between us and our shoulders touching.
He finished two plates of both, which told me he was stress-hungry and not grief-hungry, which was the better of the two options.
I ate the rest because I was also stress-hungry and because watching the man you love slowly put himself back together beside you is, against all odds, one of the holiest meals there is.
He fell asleep with his head on my lap at seven. I sat there in the dark with the TV on mute, the heater clicking through its cycle, and Ellis breathing slow and deep against my thigh. I thought about his dad, standing in the hallway, unable to speak, reaching out anyway.
You’re my son.
Not “I understand.” Not “I’m proud.” Not “it’s okay.”—you’re my son. The simplest sentence. The hardest one.
I hoped it was enough. For Ellis, for his dad, for whatever came next.
I stayed until he woke up. Didn’t go anywhere.