Free was supposed to mean whole. Tonight it just meant being alone.
I thought about nothing. About the first time I’d put my mouth onEllis’ piercing and felt something old in me come undone. About the way he’d cried when he told his parents. About Megan’s question, how did you know, and the absence of an answer Ellis had walked into my apartment carrying. About the specific cruelty of loving someone who wasn’t sure they were built to love you back.
By the time I reached my building, my hands had gone numb. I sat on my front stoop for ten minutes before I could make myself go inside, watching my breath fog the streetlight, watching the city go on around me without my permission.
My phone buzzed once in my pocket. Ellis. I didn’t look.
Chapter twenty-five
Everything was piling up, and I couldn’t find the bottom.
My mom’s silence. Ellis’ doubt. The financial stress I’d barely survived. Nathan’s face on a sidewalk in Park Slope, Darius’ cologne on my shoulder. Every pressure that had been building for months stacked inside my chest like Jenga blocks, and one more bump was going to bring the whole thing down.
The week after Ellis’ “I don’t know” was the worst of my adult life.
He’d texted. I’d eventually responded. Short, functional. Messages designed to keep someone from panicking without giving them anything to hold on to. ‘I’m fine. Just need a minute. We’ll talk soon.’The conversational equivalent of a “closed for maintenance” sign.
I threw myself into work. Three events in five days. A holiday cocktail party for a law firm, a nonprofit gala at a venue in SoHo, a brand launch for a skincare company that wanted “instagrammable moments” at every turn. I worked eighteen-hour days. Slept in three-hour stretches. Ate whatever the catering staff had leftover. My body was a machine, and I was redlining it because the alternative was sitting still, and sitting still meant thinking,and thinking meant feeling, and feeling was something I’d decided I couldn’t afford.
Crisis mode. I recognized it even as it was happening. The frantic forward motion. The compulsive pursuit of stimulation. The way my brain kept serving up escape routes like a GPS recalculating around a wreck. Go out. Stay busy. Don’t sit with it. Don’t let it catch you.
Sierra saw through it first.
She’d shown up at my apartment uninvited on a Wednesday. A Sierra move, the friendship equivalent of a wellness check. I was standing in my kitchen in yesterday’s clothes, packing supply bins for the brand launch. “You’re spiraling.”
“I’m working.”
“You’ve been ‘working’ for six days straight. Have you talked to Ellis?”
“We’re talking.”
“Texting one-word answers isn’t talking.”
“Sierra.”
She leaned against my counter. The same spot Ellis always leaned. The parallel made my throat tight. “Talk to me. What happened?”
I told her. The Megan brunch. The “what if it’s just you.” The “I don’t know.” The forty-five-minute walk home in the dark. I told her everything, and somewhere in the middle of it my hands stopped packing bins and I stood there in my kitchen holding a stack of cocktail napkins with a logo I didn’t care about and felt the whole weight of the last six months land on my shoulders at once.
“He said he doesn’t know if he wants this,” I said. “After everything. After telling his parents, after the walk-in, after the fight about Nathan, after all of it. He doesn’t know.”
“That’s not what he said. He said he doesn’t know if he’s gay. Those are different things.”
“Are they? Because from where I’m standing, ‘I don’t know if I want this’ is the thing that comes right before ‘Idon’t’.”
Sierra moved. Crossed the kitchen, took the napkins out of my hands, set them on the counter, and pulled me into a hug. I didn’t cry. The tears were there, stacked up behind my eyes, but they wouldn’t come. My body had decided that crying was an indulgence I hadn’t earned yet.
“You need to talk to him.” Her arms were still around me, voice muffled into my shoulder. “Not text. Talk. In person.”
“I know.”
“And you need to eat something that isn’t leftover canapés.”
“I eat other things.”
“Name one thing you’ve eaten today.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
