“Pad thai.” I held up the bags. “And those spring rolls you like. The crispy ones.”
He looked at the bags. Then at me. Then back at the bags.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat anyway. You look like you haven’t eaten since Friday.”
“I had cereal.”
“Ellis.”
He stepped aside and let me in. The apartment looked the same. Plants thriving, because of course they were, Ellis would water his plants during a nuclear apocalypse. But the couch had a blanket bunched up on it, his tablet was on the floor instead of the coffee table, and there were two mugs in the sink instead of his usual zero, which for Ellis was the equivalent of total domestic collapse.
I unpacked the food on his kitchen table without being asked. He sat down across from me. Neither of us reached for anything.
“I owe you an explanation.”
“You don’t owe me anything. You had a life before me. I knew that.”
“You knew it in theory. Now you’ve met it in person and it looked you in the eye and wished you good luck.” I pushed the spring rolls toward him. “Eat something. Please.”
He took one. Held it without biting into it. “Nathan.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about him.”
So I did. The rooftop. The nervousness. The sister’s wedding story. The way he’d asked at the door if he could see me again. The way I’d said sure, knowing I wouldn’t mean it past the sentence. The three texts I’d never answered.
“Why?” Ellis asked. The spring roll was still untouched. “Why didn’t you answer?”
“Because answering meant continuing. And continuing meant it might become something. And something meant someone could get close enough to…” I stopped. The rehearsed speech was trying to take over; the clean version with the right words in the right order. I scrapped it. Started again from somewhere less polished.
“My mom was the first person who told me I could be free. You know that; the tattoo, the whole thing. And I took it and ran with it. But somewhere along the way, free stopped meaning ‘free to be myself’ and started meaning ‘free from anyone who could hurt me.’ If nobody stayed, nobody could leave. If nobody mattered, nobody could take anything with them when they went.”
Ellis set the spring roll down. His eyes were on me, steady, the focused attention he gave to things that required precision.
“Every hookup, every one-night thing, every guy I walked out the door, I told myself I was being honest. No promises, no expectations, no mess. But Nathan was right. Telling someone you’ll see them again and then ghosting them isn’t honest. It’s just cruelty with good boundaries.”
Ellis went very still.
“Was I different?”
The question hit differently than anything I’d prepared for. Not Nathan-and-me, not the pattern in general, just that. Four words. His voice steady, not accusing.
I sat with it. Had to.
“Yeah.” My hands were shaking. I flattened them on the table. “You were different from the beginning; I knew it, and kept trying to make you fit the same box, anyway. Because the box was safer.” I pressed on. “I was protecting myself. Every person I didn’t call back, every morning I cut short, every number I deleted, I built a wall so high that nobody could climb it. And it worked. For years. Nobody got in, nobody got hurt, and I got to walk around calling it freedom.”
“And I was the one who got in.”
“I let you through. Or you climbed it. I still don’t know the difference.” The kitchen was quiet. Jack dripped in the bathroom. The radiator clicked on. “That’s why Nathan scares me. Not because he confronted me. Because he showed you the version of me that existed before I knew how to let someone stay. And I can’t undo that guy. He’s in my history. Distributed across Brooklyn. You’re going to run into him again and again, and every time it happens you’re going to have to decide whether you believe I’m different now.”
“I do believe you’re different.”
“But?”
“But I needed to hear you say it.” He reached across the table. His hand found mine, my fingers still shaking, his steady, the contrast so perfectly us that I almost laughed. “I didn’t leave Friday because I thought you were still that person. I left because I needed to figure out whether I could love someone who used to be.”
