“What are you actually asking me right now?” My voice came out harder than I meant it to. “Are you asking if you’re using me as an experiment?”
He flinched. “That’s not…”
“Because that’s what it sounds like. ‘What if it’s just you’is another way of saying‘What if I’m not actually gay and you’re just a phase I’m going through.’”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
The apartment went quiet. The radiator ticked. December pressed against the window. Ellis held the throw pillow tighter.
And then she arrived. Not literally. Just her voice, showing up uninvited. “He’s experimenting, mijo. When he’s done, he’ll go back to his nice neighborhood and his nice parents and you’ll be the lesson he tells the next girl over dinner.” The voice came up under my ribs the way a bad memorycomes up. Uninvited, present-tense, more real than the room around me. I’d spent four months keeping her out of my head. Tonight, she’d walked right in through the door he’d just opened.
I sat across from him with my mother’s words ringing in me.
“My mom said this would happen.” The words tasted like poison.
“Don’t.”
“She said you were experimenting. That you’d break my heart. And now you’re sitting on your couch asking if you’re even gay.”
“I’m not questioning us, Jett. I’m questioning me.” His voice cracked. “There’s a difference.”
“Not from where I’m sitting.”
He put the pillow down. His face had gone blotchy the way it did when he was fighting tears. “You know what my parents said? When I told them? My dad’s first instinct was silence. My mom’s was, ‘Are you sure?’ And Megan, who’s supposed to be my friend, asked, ‘How do you know?’ Everyone wants me to be certain. Everyone needs me to prove it. And I can’t, because I spent twenty-eight years thinking I was straight, and undoing that doesn’t come with a certificate.”
My anger cracked down the middle, and something softer bled through.
“Ellis.”
“I’m not doubting you. I love you. But I’m allowed to be confused about myself while being certain about us. Those two things can coexist.”
They could. I knew they could. But my mom’s voice was so loud, and the fear was so old, and the version of me that had spent a decade keeping people at arm’s length was screaming that this was the beginning of the end.
“Do you even want this anymore?” I asked. Quiet. Almost a whisper.
“I don’t know.”
The words hit the air and just hung there. He looked horrified the second they left his mouth. Like he’d meant to say something else and the wrong thing had slipped out.
My body decided to move before my brain caught up. The thing I’d been training my whole adult life, the body’s emergency exit, the muscle memory of leaving before it cost me anything, kicked in and stood me up off the couch in one motion. There was a second where I could have sat back down. Where Ellis’ horrified pre-correction look gave me a window. I could have stayed in it. Asked him to try again. Made him say what he’d actually meant.
But my body had already chosen.
“I didn’t mean…”
“Yeah.” I kept my face flat. “You did.”
I grabbed my jacket and left. Not dramatically. No door-slamming, no shouted goodbye. I just put on my shoes and walked out and took the stairs instead of the elevator because I needed the physical act of descending to keep my body from flying apart.
On the street, the December cold hit my face, and I stood there for a full minute, breathing, watching my breath cloud and disappear. My phone buzzed. Ellis. I didn’t look at it.
I walked home. Forty-five minutes through Brooklyn in the dark.
Past the bodega on Atlantic where Mr. Chen used to give me piraguas. Past the corner store that used to be a hardware store. Past three Christmas trees already dragged to the curb and one apartment with a menorah in the window that someone had remembered to keep lit. The December cold did the thing it does in Brooklyn. Finds the gaps in your scarf, settles between your collar and your neck, and refuses to be ignored. My breath came in short white puffs, and I watched them disappear ahead of me like the only argument I had left.
The Libre tattoo on my ribs ached. It always ached when I was hurting in a way my body couldn’t articulate. My mother’s handwriting, her gift to me at twenty-one, the word she’d given me to live by. Free.
