“Exactly.” She pulled back and looked at me with those steady brown eyes that had been seeing through me since we were sixteen. “Jett, I love you. You’re the bravest person I know. But running from this isn’t brave. It’s just fast.”
That landed somewhere deep. Deeper than the tears, deeper than the Jenga stack. In the place where the truth lived before my mouth and my legs and my instinct could intercept it and turn it into motion.
“I’ll call him,” I said.
“Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
She stayed for an hour. Made me eat a sandwich. Helped me pack the rest of the bins. Didn’t mention Ellis again because she’d said what needed saying and Sierra never repeated a point that had already landed.
Before she left, Sierra paused at the door. “Lauren and I are talking again. Not back together. Talking. I don’t know what that is yet either.” She looked at me. “I’m not saying it to compare. I’m saying it because you should know I’m not okay either, but I’m still showing up. Which means you can show up for him.”
After she left, I sat on my bed with my phone and stared at Ellis’ name. The last message in our thread was from two days ago: his “I love you” andmy “I know.”
I know.Like I was Han Solo. Like brevity could substitute for vulnerability.
I sent him a text.
Jett: Can we talk? Tomorrow? Your place?
He responded immediately.
Ellis:Yes. Please.
Please.That word cracked something loose in me. Ellis saying please. Ellis, who asked for things so rarely that each request carried the weight of a confession. He was scared and waiting, too. He was sitting in his apartment with Jack and Diane, drowning in the same silence I was drowning in, wondering whether the distance I’d put between us was a pause or an ending.
I put the phone on my nightstand. Lay back on my bed. Stared at the ceiling.
The Jenga stack was still there. Every block still balanced. But Sierra’s voice had shifted something at the base, and maybe, maybe, the whole thing didn’t have to fall.
Or maybe it did, and the only thing left to decide was whether I’d be standing next to Ellis when the pieces hit the floor.
Chapter twenty-six
Iwent to his apartment on Thursday.
The plan: talk. Have the conversation Sierra told me to have, the one I’d been avoiding for a week by working myself into the ground and texting in monosyllables. I’d rehearsed on the subway.I’m hurt, you hurt me, but I want to understand. Tell me what you’re feeling. Calm. Measured. Adult.
Four minutes later, the plan dissolved.
Ellis opened the door, and he looked bad. Not tired-bad, the way he’d looked during the work crisis. Worse. Hollowed out, like someone had scooped the stuffing from him and left the shape. His eyes were red-rimmed. Jack was in the living room now. He’d moved the fern from the bathroom, which in Ellis’ language meant something had fundamentally shifted in his domestic order, and that scared me more than anything he could have said.
“Hi.” The word filled the space between us.
“Hi.”
His doorway became a border. Six months of sleeping in each other’s beds, and we couldn’t figure out how to enter the same room.
I stepped inside. He closed the door. We sat on opposite ends of the couch. A full cushion of distance between us, which might as well have been the East River.
“I need to say something,” I started.
“Me first.” He was gripping his own knees, knuckles white. “I owe you an apology. What I said last week, the ‘I don’t know’ that wasn’t fair to you. I was spiraling, and I took you down with me.”
“You were being honest.”
“I was being careless with your feelings. There’s a difference.” He looked at me. “I know I’m gay, Jett. I know I love you. What I don’t know is whether I’m strong enough to keep being this version of myself when everyone around me, my parents, friends, my own brain, keeps asking me to prove it.”
