"Okay."
He stays with me. He leans his forearms back on the railing and he waits, the way he waits for everything, the way he has waited for me since the day I moved into his guest room and didn't call my realtor. The sun is almost down. The ocean is going gray at the edges.
"I have to start over."
"Luca," he says quietly.
"I have three months. I need to find an apartment. I need to learn the city, the facility, the roster. I need to figure out how to do all of it from scratch."
"You're not doing it from scratch."
"I am doing it from scratch, Wes. I am going to a city where I don't know anyone, to play for a team that doesn't exist yet, and I am going to be in a hotel room by myself figuring out where the grocery store is."
"We'll figure it out together."
"You keep saying that but you won’t be there." I can feel it building. "You’ll be here. In this apartment. With Kevin and Austin and Grant. With the restaurant on Galiano and the gelato place and the water you photograph every morning. You are going to wake up here and I am going to wake up in Atlanta."
He steps toward me.
"Don't." I hold my hand up. "If you hold me right now I will not be able to do this."
"Do what?"
"Leave."
The word is on the balcony between us. The ocean is underneath and neither of us is listening to it.
"You don't have to do this tonight," he says.
"I know I don't have to do it tonight. But tonight is when it happened and tomorrow I am going to wake up in this apartment and start packing and I need to be ready for that."
"Luca, this doesn't change what we are."
"It changeswherewe are. And where we are is everything. Where we are is the balcony and the couch and the kitchen and the bedroom. Where we are is how we work. Take that away and tell me what's left."
"Us, Luca," he says. "What's left is us."
I look at him. He is standing in the doorway of the balcony with the apartment behind him, the kitchen, the counter where we filled in the spreadsheet, the couch where we kissed, all of it framed behind his shoulders in the low light. He is saying what's left is us and I want to believe him but I don’t think I can.
We go inside. We do not talk about it again that night. We sit on the couch and the laptop is closed and the spreadsheet is not open and his hand is on my knee and my head is against his shoulder and the apartment is quiet around us the way it is quiet every night except tonight the quiet holds a different weight.
I pack over the next two months. Not all at once. A shelf, a drawer, a closet. The suitcase from Seattle goes on the guest room bed.
The spreadsheet has not been updated since the night Kyle called. The last entry is a taco place in Wynwood. Seven-three for the carnitas, six-eight for the salsa verde. My column and his column. The weighted average sitting in the formula bar where it has sat since the night we built it on this couch.
The morning I leave, I stand on the balcony. The light is early. The water is doing the thing Wes photographs every morning, the color shift half a mile out where the green ends and the blue begins. I hold up my phone and take the picture. The railing, the ocean, the palms. The view I have been waking up to for twoyears from the apartment where I learned to cook and argued about bread and fell in love with a man who remembered my gelato order.
I set it as my wallpaper.
Wes drives me to the airport. His hand is on the wheel and my bag is in the back seat and neither of us speaks until the terminal appears through the windshield.
"Call me when you land," he says.
"Yeah."
"Every night, Luca. We’ll talk every night."
"Every night."
