“Look.” I took a breath. “I’m sorry about that. I should have texted youback. That was shitty of me.”
“Shitty of you.” Nathan laughed, and there was nothing funny in it. “You said you’d see me again. I texted you three times. Three. You let me think it meant something. And then, nothing. Not a ‘hey, I changed my mind.’ Not a ‘sorry, not interested.’ Just silence. Like I was a takeout container you were done with.”
The comparison punched me hard, because it was accurate.
Ellis shifted beside me. I could feel him recalculating, not the scene in front of us, but me. The version of me this stranger was describing. The one who let people cook breakfast and then threw away their number. The one who treated intimacy like a transaction that ended when the other person left the apartment.
“You’re right.” I kept my voice steady. “I handled it badly. I should have been upfront with you.”
“You shouldn’t have said you’d call if you weren’t going to.” Nathan’s eyes moved to Ellis. Took in the shoulder-to-shoulder lean, the proximity, the obvious togetherness. “Is this your, are you two together?”
“Yeah.” Ellis stepped forward. “We are.”
Nathan looked at me, then at Ellis, then back at me. Something in his face shifted; the anger didn’t leave, but it made room for something else. Pity, maybe. Or a warning.
“Good luck.” He said it directly to Ellis. Not sarcastically. Sincerely, which was worse. “One night, three texts, and nothing back. I thought we had something. I actually thought…” He stopped himself. Shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Have a good night.”
He walked away. Didn’t look back.
The sidewalk was quiet. The muffled thump of the bar bled through the brick wall behind us. A cab honked somewhere on Fifth Avenue. Ellis stood beside me, not touching me anymore, his shoulder half an inch from mine, the same distance as before, but it had a different temperature.
“Jett.”
“I know.”
“Were you always like that?”
There it was. The question I’d been bracing for since Darius and the cologne on my shoulder.
“Like what?” I knew what he meant. I asked anyway because I needed to hear him say it.
“Using people.” He said it without venom—flat, the way he delivered facts at work. “Letting them think it mattered and then vanishing.”
“I never promised anyone anything.”
“Doesn’t make it okay.”
No, it didn’t.
We stood there. Inside the bar, someone was toasting Derek’s birthday, the muffled cheers came through the wall. Out here the streetlights hummed and the truth of who I’d been before Ellis stood on the sidewalk like a third person in the conversation.
“I want to go home.”
“Okay. Let me get our…”
“Alone.” He looked at me, and for the first time since I’d known him, I couldn’t read his face. Closed. Not angry, not yet, maybe not ever, but shut the way a door closes when someone needs to think in private. “I need to think.”
“Ellis, come on. Let me explain.”
“Explain what? How you used to ghost people? I already knew that. I’m not an idiot.” He pushed off the wall. His hands went into his pockets. “I knew you had a past. You told me about the hookups. The numbers. I was fine with it because it was before me. But watching someone stand on a sidewalk and tell me they texted you three times and got nothing back…” He stopped. Breathed. His jaw was tight enough that I could see the muscle working. “That’s different from knowing it in the abstract. That’s a real person you hurt.”
“I know.”
“I need to go home and sit with that. Because right now I’m looking at you and I’m trying really hard not to wonder if I’m the one who got lucky enough to stay.”
That one cut me open.
“You’re not…”
