Chapter 25
Chapter twenty-five
Everything was piling up, and I couldn’t find the bottom.
My mom’s silence. Ellis’ doubt. The financial stress I’d barely survived. Nathan’s face on a sidewalk in Park Slope, Darius’ cologne on my shoulder. Every pressure that had been building for months stacked inside my chest like Jenga blocks, and one more bump was going to bring the whole thing down.
The week after Ellis’ “I don’t know” was the worst of my adult life.
He’d texted. I’d eventually responded. Short, functional. Messages designed to keep someone from panicking without giving them anything to hold on to. ‘I’m fine. Just need a minute. We’ll talk soon.’ The conversational equivalent of a “closed for maintenance” sign.
I threw myself into work. Three events in five days.
A holiday cocktail party for a law firm, a nonprofit gala at a venue in SoHo, a brand launch for a skincare company that wanted “instagrammable moments” at every turn.
I worked eighteen-hour days. Slept in three-hour stretches.
Ate whatever the catering staff had leftover.
My body was a machine, and I was redlining it because the alternative was sitting still, and sitting still meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling, and feeling was something I’d decided I couldn’t afford.
Crisis mode. I recognized it even as it was happening. The frantic forward motion. The compulsive pursuit of stimulation. The way my brain kept serving up escape routes like a GPS recalculating around a wreck. Go out. Stay busy. Don’t sit with it. Don’t let it catch you.
Sierra saw through it first.
She’d shown up at my apartment uninvited on a Wednesday. A Sierra move, the friendship equivalent of a wellness check. I was standing in my kitchen in yesterday’s clothes, packing supply bins for the brand launch. “You’re spiraling.”
“I’m working.”
“You’ve been ‘working’ for six days straight. Have you talked to Ellis?”
“We’re talking.”
“Texting one-word answers isn’t talking.”
“Sierra.”
She leaned against my counter. The same spot Ellis always leaned. The parallel made my throat tight. “Talk to me. What happened?”
I told her. The Megan brunch. The “what if it’s just you.
” The “I don’t know.” The forty-five-minute walk home in the dark.
I told her everything, and somewhere in the middle of it my hands stopped packing bins and I stood there in my kitchen holding a stack of cocktail napkins with a logo I didn’t care about and felt the whole weight of the last six months land on my shoulders at once.
“He said he doesn’t know if he wants this,” I said. “After everything. After telling his parents, after the walk-in, after the fight about Nathan, after all of it. He doesn’t know.”
“That’s not what he said. He said he doesn’t know if he’s gay. Those are different things.”
“Are they? Because from where I’m standing, ‘I don’t know if I want this’ is the thing that comes right before ‘I don’t’.”
Sierra moved. Crossed the kitchen, took the napkins out of my hands, set them on the counter, and pulled me into a hug. I didn’t cry. The tears were there, stacked up behind my eyes, but they wouldn’t come. My body had decided that crying was an indulgence I hadn’t earned yet.
“You need to talk to him.” Her arms were still around me, voice muffled into my shoulder. “Not text. Talk. In person.”
“I know.”
“And you need to eat something that isn’t leftover canapés.”
“I eat other things.”
“Name one thing you’ve eaten today.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
“Exactly.” She pulled back and looked at me with those steady brown eyes that had been seeing through me since we were sixteen. “Jett, I love you. You’re the bravest person I know. But running from this isn’t brave. It’s just fast.”
That landed somewhere deep. Deeper than the tears, deeper than the Jenga stack. In the place where the truth lived before my mouth and my legs and my instinct could intercept it and turn it into motion.
“I’ll call him,” I said.
“Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
She stayed for an hour. Made me eat a sandwich. Helped me pack the rest of the bins. Didn’t mention Ellis again because she’d said what needed saying and Sierra never repeated a point that had already landed.
Before she left, Sierra paused at the door.
“Lauren and I are talking again. Not back together. Talking. I don’t know what that is yet either.
” She looked at me. “I’m not saying it to compare.
I’m saying it because you should know I’m not okay either, but I’m still showing up. Which means you can show up for him.”
After she left, I sat on my bed with my phone and stared at Ellis’ name. The last message in our thread was from two days ago: his “I love you” and my “I know.”
I know. Like I was Han Solo. Like brevity could substitute for vulnerability.
I sent him a text.
Jett: Can we talk? Tomorrow? Your place?
He responded immediately.
Ellis: Yes. Please.
Please. That word cracked something loose in me.
Ellis saying please. Ellis, who asked for things so rarely that each request carried the weight of a confession.
He was scared and waiting, too. He was sitting in his apartment with Jack and Diane, drowning in the same silence I was drowning in, wondering whether the distance I’d put between us was a pause or an ending.
I put the phone on my nightstand. Lay back on my bed. Stared at the ceiling.
The Jenga stack was still there. Every block still balanced. But Sierra’s voice had shifted something at the base, and maybe, maybe, the whole thing didn’t have to fall.
Or maybe it did, and the only thing left to decide was whether I’d be standing next to Ellis when the pieces hit the floor.