“Okay.”
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He reached across the table and covered my hand with his. His pulse was steady. Mine was the one jumping. “I had my last full panel after the guy. Years ago. I’ve been with no one since.”
“Mine was four months back. Clean. But I haven’t been a saint between then and you.”
“I’d guessed.”
“I’m not saying it as a confession. I’m saying it because we’re doing this on paper, and that means I’m doing it right.”
He let out a breath that was halfway to a laugh, then turned his cortado in its own slow circle. “I already looked into it. The clinic on Court Street. Walk-in. I was going to ask you this week. Tuesday?”
“Tuesday.”
“Together,” I said.
“Results take about a week. So we’re… we’re holding off until then.”
“Yeah, we are.”
He let his thumb drag along the inside of my wrist. The radiator hissed. Someone at the next table laughed too loudly at something on a phone. The day went on around us in a perfectly normal Saturday way, and I sat there holding his hand across two espressos and thinking that careful felt like the opposite of what it used to feel like.
Used to mean stalling. Used to mean keeping people at the door.
Now it meant choosing him on paper.
“Bittersweet.” I tipped my chin at the chalkboard menu. “Appropriate.”
He laughed for real that time. The gym-loud laugh.
Chapter twelve
The week between the test and the results felt longer than it had any right to. Ellis texted me Friday morning before I’d had coffee.
Ellis:Got my test results. Came back clear. You?
I refreshed the patient portal in the bodega line, the bag of nothing in particular under my arm, and the green checkmarks loaded one after the other.
Jett:Clear, too. Come over tonight?
Ellis:Yes, and I’m bringing dinner.
I tucked the phone into my pocket and walked the long way home through the cold October sun, smiling like an idiot at strangers and a small terrier in a sweater.
Three weeks of boyfriend and I still hadn’t stopped grinning about it.
Not in an obvious way. I wasn’t walking around with hearts in my eyes like a cartoon character. But Sierra caught me smiling at my phone during movie night, twice, and Calliope made a gagging noise both times. Raven just watched me with that quiet look she does when she’s filing something away.
Ellis and I had settled into a rhythm. Tuesdays and Thursdays at Foundation Fitness, where we’d spot each other, and I’d make increasingly terrible innuendos about his squat depth until he threatened to drop a plate on my foot. Wednesday nights at his place. He’d cook something ambitious from whatever recipe he’d bookmarked that week: pasta with hand-pulled noodles, banh mi that took two days of pickling, risotto when he wanted to suffer. I’d sit on his kitchen counter eating raw vegetables from the cutting board while he swatted my hand away. Weekends were ours. No plan, no structure, just two people who couldn’t stop finding excuses to be in the same room.
He’d told his college friend Megan about us in the first week. They’d done a video call. He came off it quieter than he went in, but said she’d handled it. I’d filed her name away as a safe one.
I’d never paid much attention to someone else’s apartment before. Not the place itself, standard Brooklyn one-bedroom with exposed brick that was probably load-bearing ambition, but what he’d done with it. Plants everywhere. Not the sad succulents that every guy our age kept on a windowsill like proof of basic competence. Real plants. A fiddle-leaf fig that nearly brushed the ceiling, trailing pothos cascading from a shelf above his desk, some fern situation in the bathroom that he misted every morning like it was a ritual. He had a watering schedule on the fridge. Color-coded.
“You know these are alive, right?” I’d said one of those early nights, three weeks back, when his plants still felt like a personality test. “Dependent on you for survival.”
“That’s the point.” He adjusted a leaf that wasn’t even crooked. “Something that needs you to show up.”
