Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
The doubt started in December, when things were supposed to get better.
Ellis’ project stabilized. The client didn’t cancel.
The deployment went out on time. Marcus sent a company-wide email calling him a “rock star,” which Ellis hated because “I’m an engineer, not a guitarist.” My holiday season kicked in hard—three events in two weeks, money flowing again, the electric bill a distant memory.
His parents had invited him for Christmas, which felt like progress.
My mom had sent me a text on Thanksgiving that said “Happy Thanksgiving, mijo” with no follow-up, which I’d stared at for twenty minutes trying to decode.
On the surface, we were healing. Underneath, something was rotting.
It came in pieces. The way Ellis would catch himself mid-sentence, mid-laugh, like he’d hit an unfamiliar wall in his own mouth.
The way he’d been redoing things he’d already done.
Washing the same pan twice. Alphabetizing the spice rack a second time the night I’d alphabetized it the first. The way he kept opening his laptop and not opening anything on it. Restless. Static.
I wrote it off as work. Three months of project crunch ending all at once leaves you with energy you don’t know what to do with. That’s what I told myself, watching him pace the apartment looking for tasks that didn’t need doing. He’d decompress. Holiday season would help. We’d settle.
Then he went to brunch with Megan.
It started on a Sunday. Ellis had come back from brunch with a college friend. Megan, someone he’d known since freshman orientation, one of the few people from his pre-me life he’d told about us. He’d been excited about seeing her. Came home quiet.
He didn’t take off his coat. Came in. Closed the door. Stood in the entry like a man who’d brought something home he didn’t want to set down. I was at the kitchen counter, slicing a tomato.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“Brunch was good.”
The “good” had no weight behind it. “Good” was the word you used when “fine” would give too much away.
“Yeah?” I kept my voice neutral. Set the knife down. “How was Megan?”
“Fine.”
“That’s my line. You’re stealing my avoidance tactics.”
He sat down on the couch and stared at his hands. “She asked how I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I was gay. How I knew for sure.” He looked at me. “And I didn’t have an answer.”
Cold hit my chest. “What do you mean you didn’t have an answer?”
“I mean she asked, ‘How did you know?’ and I sat there with my mouth open because I don’t know, Jett.
I know I love you. I know I’m attracted to you.
I know being with you feels right in a way Hannah never did.
But if she’d asked me a year ago if I was gay, I would have said no. Confidently. Without hesitation.”
“A year ago you hadn’t met me.”
“Exactly. So what if this is…” He stopped. Picked up a throw pillow and held it against his chest like a shield. A move I’d seen Sierra make numerous times. He’d been spending too much time with my friends. “What if it’s not that I’m gay? What if it’s just you?”
“That’s still gay, Ellis.”
“Is it? Or is it just… specific?”
I wanted to be patient. I really did. I’d run through the mental list of what partners are supposed to do when their boyfriend questions himself out loud.
You affirm, you reassure, you remind him that doubt and certainty can coexist; you don’t take it personally.
I had the playbook. I’d read the same articles his mom was sending him.
And it was all noise the second the words landed.
Because hearing the man who’d told his parents, who’d said “boyfriend” to Hannah without flinching, who’d pinned me against a wall with a certainty that left no room for doubt.
Hearing that man question whether any of it was real made the floor tilt under me.
“What are you actually asking me right now?” My voice came out harder than I meant it to. “Are you asking if you’re using me as an experiment?”
He flinched. “That’s not…”
“Because that’s what it sounds like. ‘What if it’s just you’ is another way of saying ‘What if I’m not actually gay and you’re just a phase I’m going through.’”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
The apartment went quiet. The radiator ticked. December pressed against the window. Ellis held the throw pillow tighter.
And then she arrived. Not literally. Just her voice, showing up uninvited.
“He’s experimenting, mijo. When he’s done, he’ll go back to his nice neighborhood and his nice parents and you’ll be the lesson he tells the next girl over dinner.
” The voice came up under my ribs the way a bad memory comes up.
Uninvited, present-tense, more real than the room around me.
I’d spent four months keeping her out of my head.
Tonight, she’d walked right in through the door he’d just opened.
I sat across from him with my mother’s words ringing in me.
“My mom said this would happen.” The words tasted like poison.
“Don’t.”
“She said you were experimenting. That you’d break my heart. And now you’re sitting on your couch asking if you’re even gay.”
“I’m not questioning us, Jett. I’m questioning me.” His voice cracked. “There’s a difference.”
“Not from where I’m sitting.”
He put the pillow down. His face had gone blotchy the way it did when he was fighting tears.
“You know what my parents said? When I told them? My dad’s first instinct was silence.
My mom’s was, ‘Are you sure?’ And Megan, who’s supposed to be my friend, asked, ‘How do you know?’ Everyone wants me to be certain.
Everyone needs me to prove it. And I can’t, because I spent twenty-eight years thinking I was straight, and undoing that doesn’t come with a certificate. ”
My anger cracked down the middle, and something softer bled through.
“Ellis.”
“I’m not doubting you. I love you. But I’m allowed to be confused about myself while being certain about us. Those two things can coexist.”
They could. I knew they could. But my mom’s voice was so loud, and the fear was so old, and the version of me that had spent a decade keeping people at arm’s length was screaming that this was the beginning of the end.
“Do you even want this anymore?” I asked. Quiet. Almost a whisper.
“I don’t know.”
The words hit the air and just hung there. He looked horrified the second they left his mouth. Like he’d meant to say something else and the wrong thing had slipped out.
My body decided to move before my brain caught up.
The thing I’d been training my whole adult life, the body’s emergency exit, the muscle memory of leaving before it cost me anything, kicked in and stood me up off the couch in one motion.
There was a second where I could have sat back down.
Where Ellis’ horrified pre-correction look gave me a window.
I could have stayed in it. Asked him to try again. Made him say what he’d actually meant.
But my body had already chosen.
“I didn’t mean…”
“Yeah.” I kept my face flat. “You did.”
I grabbed my jacket and left. Not dramatically. No door-slamming, no shouted goodbye. I just put on my shoes and walked out and took the stairs instead of the elevator because I needed the physical act of descending to keep my body from flying apart.
On the street, the December cold hit my face, and I stood there for a full minute, breathing, watching my breath cloud and disappear. My phone buzzed. Ellis. I didn’t look at it.
I walked home. Forty-five minutes through Brooklyn in the dark.
Past the bodega on Atlantic where Mr. Chen used to give me piraguas.
Past the corner store that used to be a hardware store.
Past three Christmas trees already dragged to the curb and one apartment with a menorah in the window that someone had remembered to keep lit.
The December cold did the thing it does in Brooklyn.
Finds the gaps in your scarf, settles between your collar and your neck, and refuses to be ignored.
My breath came in short white puffs, and I watched them disappear ahead of me like the only argument I had left.
The Libre tattoo on my ribs ached. It always ached when I was hurting in a way my body couldn’t articulate. My mother’s handwriting, her gift to me at twenty-one, the word she’d given me to live by. Free.
Free was supposed to mean whole. Tonight it just meant being alone.
I thought about nothing. About the first time I’d put my mouth on Ellis’ piercing and felt something old in me come undone.
About the way he’d cried when he told his parents.
About Megan’s question, how did you know, and the absence of an answer Ellis had walked into my apartment carrying.
About the specific cruelty of loving someone who wasn’t sure they were built to love you back.
By the time I reached my building, my hands had gone numb. I sat on my front stoop for ten minutes before I could make myself go inside, watching my breath fog the streetlight, watching the city go on around me without my permission.
My phone buzzed once in my pocket. Ellis. I didn’t look.