He stared at me.
“What? It’s not complicated. ‘Hey guys, I’m dating someone. His name’s Jett. He’s absurdly handsome and has impeccable taste in music. Next topic.’”
“Your version leaves out the part where they get weird and stop inviting me to things.”
“If they get weird, they were never your people.”
Ellis shut the door behind us and leaned against it, arms crossed. The geometric shapes on his forearm stood out sharper under the hallway light,the sleeve’s organic edges curling toward his wrist like they were reaching for something.
“That’s easy to say when you’ve always had people.” His voice was quiet. Not angry. Tired. “Your people, they loved you before you came out, and they loved you after. Not everyone gets that, Jett.”
That landed harder than I expected.
Because he was right. I’d walked into queerness with a safety net already strung. Sierra, Raven, and Calliope had caught me before I ever had a chance to fall. The worst I’d gotten from my mom was initial surprise that faded into acceptance. At least, it had been acceptance then. I’d never had to rebuild a whole identity in front of people who remembered the old one.
“Come here.”
He didn’t move right away. He stood at the door as if he was deciding whether closeness was safe right now.
Then he pushed off the frame, crossed the room, and I pulled him into me. He was taller. I had to tilt my chin up slightly, which I’d never admit bothered me. He settled against my chest the way he always did, heavy and deliberate, like he was testing whether I could hold the weight.
I could.
“I’m not rushing you,” I said into his shoulder. “But I’m also not going to pretend it doesn’t sting when you call me a friend.”
He pulled back. “I called you a friend once.”
“And you told Marcus you were ‘busy’ on Friday.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Because Marcus is my team lead, and I haven’t figured out how to be gay at work yet.”
The word gay dropped out of him like he’d accidentally knocked it off a shelf. He blinked at it, surprised, the way he always looked when the truth came out before his filter could catch it.
“You don’t have to figure it out all at once.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not going anywhere while you do.”
“I know that, too.” He kissed me—quick, firm, like punctuation at the end of an argument. “Just give me time. I’m not hiding you. I’m figuring out how to be this version of myself around people who only know the old one.”
Instead of pushing, I said, “Fine. But the second you’re ready, I’m making you a coming-out PowerPoint. With transitions. Clip art.”
He laughed—the real one, the one that broke open his whole face and made the tired thing behind his eyes disappear. “You wouldn’t.”
“I absolutely would. Slide one: ‘Attention, colleagues.’ Slide two: a photo you have to provide. Don’t make me regret leaving that placeholder. Slide three: ‘Questions? Direct them to my boyfriend, who will be outside in the parking lot looking incredible.’”
“We don’t have a parking lot. We work in Midtown.”
“I’ll stand on Sixth Avenue. Even better.”
He was still laughing when he kissed me again, slower this time, his hands finding my waist. And for a minute the weird tightness in my chest dissolved, because this. His mouth, his hands, the sound of him. This was the thing that was real. Everything else was noise.
But later, after he fell asleep, and I lay there watching shadows crawl across his ceiling through the plant leaves, the tightness came back. Different shape. Quieter. A slow leak, like air leaving a tire so gradually you don’t notice until you’re riding the rim.
