The wall I’d spent years building was rubble. I was standing in the wreckage of it with no armor, no exit plan, and I’d never been more terrified in my life. But Ellis was here. His arm across my chest. His breath evening out toward sleep. The radiator hissing somewhere down the hall like the world wasn’t ending, like this was the most natural thing, waking up nextto someone who’d seen the worst version of you and decided to stay, anyway.
Freedom.
Not what I’d thought I wanted, the version built on isolation and walls.
Something better.
Chapter twenty
Ellis told me on a Wednesday. We were in his kitchen, our kitchen almost, given how many nights I spent there, and he was making risotto, which required his full attention and both hands and the focus he usually reserved for deployment deadlines. I was on the counter, as usual, stealing Parmesan.
“I’m going to tell my parents.”
The grater stopped moving. Not because he’d paused. Because I’d gone still enough that the air shifted, and Ellis tracked shifts in my breathing the way other people tracked weather.
“Tell them what?” I knew what. I asked anyway.
“About us. About me.” He resumed grating. The Parmesan came down in fine white curls. “I’m going out there on Sunday. I already texted my mom about coming to dinner.”
I set the piece of Parmesan I’d been eating back on the counter. “When did you decide this?”
“I’ve been thinking since your mom.”
Since my mom. Six weeks of silence from Sunset Park, six weeks ofme checking my phone every Sunday between noon and one and getting nothing, and Ellis had been sitting with that, absorbing it, letting it reshape something inside him that I hadn’t been able to see.
“You don’t have to do this because of me.”
“I’m not doing it because of you.” He looked up from the risotto. Those hazel eyes, steady and scared in equal measure. “I’m doing it because of me. Because I’ve been hiding from this for thirty years and watching you survive the worst version of it made me realize I can’t keep waiting for it to feel safe. It’s never going to feel safe.”
“Ellis…”
“I know what you’re going to say. ‘Take your time, your pace, no pressure.’ And I appreciate that. But my pace is apparently geological, and if I wait until I’m ready I’ll be forty and still calling you my ‘friend from the gym’ when my mom asks about my weekend.”
That landed with more force than he probably intended. The “friend from the gym” callback—months old now, from back when we’d first argued about his work closet. He’d been carrying it. Using it as fuel.
“What are you going to tell them?” I asked.
“The truth. That I’m gay. That I’ve been dating someone for months. That his name is Jett, and he’s…” He stirred the risotto twice, slowly. “I don’t know what comes after that. I’ve rewritten the speech in my head about fifty times, and it always falls apart around the part where I have to look at my dad.”
“Your dad’s the one you’re worried about?”
“My dad is the one who coached my Little League team and took me fishing on Shelter Island every summer and has a framed photo of me and Hannah at prom on his office bookshelf.” He turned the burner down. Set the spoon on the rest. Faced me with his arms crossed, leaning against the stove in that way he did when he was trying to hold himself together by holding himself still. “My mom will cry and then research support groups. She’ll read books, join a Facebook group, and eventually she’ll be fine. Butmy dad, he’s not going to know what to do with it. He doesn’t have a framework for this. His whole image of me is going to…”
He stopped.
“Going to what?”
“Break. His image of me is going to break, and then he’s going to try to put it back together, and the new version won’t look the way he wanted it to.”
I slid off the counter. Stood in front of him. He was taller, but the way he was curled into himself, arms crossed and shoulders drawn in and chin tucked, made him look smaller. Made him look like the kid in that prom photo, the one who’d been built in his dad’s image and was now about to tell him that wasn’t enough anymore.
“You want me to come with you?”
“No.” Immediate. No hesitation. “I need to do this alone. If you’re there, it becomes about you. About the specific person instead of the general truth. I need them to hear ‘I’m gay’ before they hear ‘here’s my boyfriend.’ Otherwise, they’ll fixate on you and avoid the actual thing.”
He was right. I hated that he was right.
“What if it goes bad?”
