Chapter 27
Chapter twenty-seven
He came to my apartment on a Sunday. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Sunday, my mom’s day, the day the phone didn’t ring. Now it was the day everything stopped.
Ellis stood in my doorway in his good jacket. The charcoal one he wore to work events, not the everyday one he threw on for groceries. He’d dressed for this. Prepared. The realization made my stomach drop before he said a word.
“Can I come in?”
“Since when do you ask?”
He didn’t smile.
I stepped aside. He walked in and sat on my couch.
The same couch where he’d fallen asleep waiting for me after Neon Pulse, where he’d held me after the walk-in, where we’d tangled together on a hundred ordinary nights watching shows we’d never finish.
He sat on the edge of it now, upright, both feet on the floor, hands clasped between his knees. The posture of someone delivering news.
I sat across from him in the armchair. Didn’t sit on the couch. Couldn’t.
“I’ve been seeing a therapist.”
“Since when?”
“Three weeks. Since our fight. I found someone who specializes in late-coming-out adults.” He looked at his hands. “She’s good. She’s helping me understand some things.”
“What things?”
“That I can’t figure out who I am while I’m terrified of losing you.”
The room contracted into silence. My clock ticked on the wall. I’d bought it at a flea market with Sierra, ages ago, and the second hand had always been slightly too loud. Now the sound hammered through me, deafening.
“What are you saying, Ellis?”
“I’m saying that I need space.” He looked up.
His eyes were red, but he wasn’t crying.
He’d already cried. He’d done that somewhere else.
In his apartment, in his therapist’s office, on the subway ride here.
This was the aftermath. The controlled demolition.
“I need to figure out who I am outside of us. Not because us is wrong. Because I went from never questioning my identity to rebuilding it from the ground up, and I did all of that while falling in love with you, and I can’t separate what’s me from what’s you. ”
“That’s the whole point of a relationship, Ellis. You’re not supposed to separate it.”
“I need to. For a while. I need to sit with being gay without it being about being your boyfriend. I need to learn how to exist in this identity without you as the reference point, because right now you’re holding up the whole structure, and if anything ever happened to us, I’d collapse. That’s not fair to either of us.”
I stared at him. Tried to find the crack in his logic, the flaw in the argument, the place where I could wedge a rebuttal and pry the whole thing apart. Couldn’t. Because he was right, and we both knew it, and the rightness of it was the cruelest part.
“This isn’t a breakup.” His voice wavered. “I need you to know that. This is not me leaving you.”
“What is it then?”
“A pause.” He swallowed hard. “I hope.”
I hope. Two words. He’d dropped them on my living room floor like stones.
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t…”
“I don’t know, Jett. Weeks. Maybe more. However long it takes to stop feeling like I’m standing on someone else’s foundation.”
I wanted to fight. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to argue. To persuade. To be charming enough, compelling enough to make him stay.
But I looked at his face and I saw what it was costing him to be here.
The discipline of it. The care. He wasn’t running.
Ellis didn’t run. He was doing the hardest, most considered thing he’d ever done, because some therapist on the Upper West Side had helped him see that loving me and losing himself weren’t sustainable.
And under that, sharper, uglier, I heard my mother’s voice.
The quiet after I told her. The empty sound of her hanging up the phone.
The Sundays when I sat by the window waiting for her to call back, for her to say she was sorry, for her to say anything, and the phone stayed dark.
That silence had taught me what abandonment sounded like.
It came wrapped in love and delivered by people who couldn’t figure out how to hold both things at once.
Ellis was trying. Ellis wasn’t running the way she had. But he was leaving, anyway.
“I need to stop watching you torture yourself.”
His face crumpled. “Jett.”
“I’m not being cruel. I mean it. Watching you doubt yourself, doubt us, doubt everything, it’s been killing me.
You’re right that you need to figure this out.
I just hate that you have to do it without me.
” My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated that, too, the transparency of it, the way my body was betraying the controlled thing I was trying to do here.
The thing he needed me to do. “I hate that the only way you can become the person you’re trying to be is if I’m not in the room while it happens. ”
“I also hate it.”
We sat there in the late afternoon light, two people on opposite pieces of furniture in an apartment that smelled like coffee and the cologne I’d put on that morning because it was the one he liked, and the distance between the couch and the armchair was the distance between everything we’d been and whatever came next.
I thought about my mother. About how she’d also needed space, needed a clean break from the thing that scared her, which was me, which was my existence in a configuration she didn’t recognize.
I wondered if she’d known then that space turned into years.
If she’d understood that a pause was a choice that kept getting renewed.
His lips trembled. The smile trying to break through was fighting the tears trying to break through, and the result was something I’d never seen on his face before, grief and gratitude at war, neither winning.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. And I’m going to be here when you’re ready. Annoyingly. Insufferably. Without conditions.”
He stood. I stood. We met in the middle of my living room and he pulled me into his chest, and I held on, hard, trying to bank enough warmth to survive whatever came next.
He smelled of cedar. Like his apartment. Like every Wednesday night I’d ever spent breathing him in.
“Goodbye, Jett.”
“It’s not goodbye. It’s a pause. You said so.”
“Right. A pause.”
He left.
The door closed. His footsteps faded down the hallway, and then the building was quiet, and then the street was quiet, and then the world was quiet in the way it only gets when someone who’s been filling up every corner of your life walks out and takes the sound with them.
I stood in my living room for a long time. The clock ticked. The coffee went cold on the counter. The Libre tattoo on my ribs ached like a bruise. It always did when I was hurting in ways my body couldn’t articulate.
Then I sat on the couch, his spot, the warm spot, the dent where his body had been five minutes ago, and I pressed my face into the cushion that still smelled like him, and I let the sound come back.
It came back as a sound I’d been holding in for weeks.
I cried until I couldn’t. Then I sat in the quiet.
Alone.
My phone sat on the coffee table. I knew my mother wouldn’t call.
She hadn’t called in months, since the beginning, since I’d told her and she’d decided that telling her meant I was choosing it over her, that being with Ellis was a betrayal she couldn’t forgive.
And now Ellis was choosing something, too, even if his something was different.
Even if his leaving came with the promise of coming back.
I didn’t know if that promise would hold. I didn’t know if the pause would ever end, or if it would just stretch out like my mother’s silence, a pause that became permanent, a maybe that became never.
I picked up my phone. Set it down. The apartment was too quiet. Sierra had texted twice that day. Calliope once. I hadn’t answered any of them. At least there were people still waiting for me to come back.