“Jett?”
“Yeah?”
“The risotto is ruined.”
“I know.”
“Order pizza?”
“Already opening the app.”
Chapter twenty-one
Sunday was the longest day of my life.
I got to Ellis’ apartment at ten, letting myself in with the key he’d given me, an actual copy he’d had made at the hardware store. He’d handed it to me two weeks ago without ceremony. “In case you need to water the plants,” he’d said, like I’d believe that was the reason.
The 9:47 AM from Penn Station would get him to his parents’ stop by 11:15 AM . Dinner was at noon. His family ate early on Sundays, some holdover from his mom’s Catholic upbringing that had survived the transition from churchgoing to brunch-going. He’d be there by 11:30 AM. He’d tell them before dessert, he said. Before his nerve ran out.
I had nothing to do but wait.
I watered Jack. Misted Diane. Checked the soil on the fiddle-leaf fig and adjusted the blinds to give the herbs better light. Ellis had a system. The plants were fine. Everything in his apartment was fine because Ellis kept everything fine through sheer organizational will, and the only thing that wasn’t fine was somewhere on the LIRR watching Long Island flatten out through the window.
By noon I’d cleaned his kitchen. By one I’d reorganized his bookshelf by color, which he was going to hate because he organized by genre. By two I’d undone the whole thing and was sitting on his couch staring at my phone like it owed me money.
He hadn’t texted. I’d told myself I wouldn’t text first. He’d said he’d call after. After could mean a lot of things.
I thought about calling Sierra. Didn’t. She’d tell me to breathe and trust the process, and I didn’t want to do either. I wanted to be on the LIRR sitting next to him, holding his hand across the armrest, being the person his parents had to look at when they decided what their son’s happiness was worth.
But he’d asked to do it alone, and I’d said yes, and saying yes to things that terrified me was apparently the theme of this entire relationship.
At 3:17 PM, my phone buzzed.
Ellis:On the subway back.
Just words. No emoji, no context, no indication of whether the world had ended or shifted. I typed six different responses and deleted all of them. Landed on:
Jett:Food is on its way. I’m here.
The dots appeared. Then:
Ellis:Thank you.
Two words that told me almost nothing. Thank you wasn’t “it went great.” Thank you was what you said when you were too tired or too broken to explain, but needed someone to know you were coming home to them.
I ordered Korean food, fried chicken, and BBQ, because I didn’t know what kind of hungry he’d be. The stress kind where you eat everything, or the grief kind where you stare at food like it personally offended you. I set them on the counter and sat on the couch and waited.
The door opened at 4:40 PM.
Ellis stepped inside, closed it behind him, and stood in his own entrywayas if he wasn’t sure he lived there anymore. His jacket was on, but unzipped. His hair was windblown from walking from the subway. He always walked the last six blocks instead of transferring. Said it helped him decompress. He was holding his keys in his right hand, gripping them hard enough that the metal must have been biting into his palm.
He looked at me on the couch. His face was somewhere between wrecked and relieved. Like a house after a storm, where the structure held but a few windows blew out.
“Hey.”
He set his keys on the table by the door. Took off his jacket. Hung it on the hook he always used. Second from the left. Ellis had a hook for everything. Then he walked to the couch and sat down next to me and put his head in his hands.
I put my arm around him. Waited.
