“Then we’re doing this.”
“We’re doing this.”
The gym kept grinding around us. Nobody clapped. No music swelled. A guy dropped a dumbbell three feet away and cursed. The ventilationsystem droned on.
But something settled inside me, quiet and final.
Ellis stood up from the bench, crossed the three feet between us, and kissed me. Right there in Foundation Fitness, surrounded by sweat and chalk dust and the clang of iron, with his hand on the back of my neck the way he always held me.
I kissed him back.
When we pulled apart, an older guy on the cable machine gave us a look. Not hostile. Noticing.
“Problem?” I kept my arm around Ellis’ shoulders.
The guy shrugged and went back to his set.
Ellis leaned into me. “Subtle.”
“I don’t do subtle, babe. You should know that by now.” I pressed my mouth to his temple. “Boyfriend.”
“Stop saying it like you’re testing whether it explodes.”
“Give me a minute. It’s new.”
He pulled back enough to look at me. That careful smile was gone, replaced by something steadier. Certain. “It’s not new. We’ve been this for weeks. You just gave it a name.”
He was right. The name didn’t change anything. Didn’t tighten around me the way I’d feared. Didn’t lock doors or close windows or shrink the world down to something suffocating.
If anything, it opened something up.
“Come on.” I grabbed my gym bag. “Let’s get out of here. I owe you dinner.”
“You owe me?”
“I owe you.”
Ellis laughed, that big unguarded sound that echoed off the gym walls, and I grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the exit.
Boyfriend.
The word bounced around in my skull the whole walk home, and everytime it landed, it didn’t sting. It didn’t burn. It didn’t send me reaching for an escape route.
It fit.
Like something I’d been missing without knowing I’d lost it.
Saturday afternoon at Bittersweet, the espresso place a block from Foundation Fitness, I put my cortado down before I drank from it.
“Can I bring something up that isn’t sexy?”
Ellis tipped his chair back. The window beside us was fogged from the radiator, the smell of espresso and warm milk thick in the small room. “Sure.”
I turned my mug in a circle on the saucer. A new tic borrowed from him. “We should both get tested.”
He set his chair down.
I kept my eyes on the mug. “I want it on paper. For both of us. Because we’re… past the careful-strangers part.”
