“You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”
“Maybe not. But I have to prove it to myself. And right now, I can’t.”
The words sat between us like broken glass.
“So what does that mean?” I asked. “For us.”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop saying that.” The calm I’d rehearsed cracked, and the thing underneath surged up. “Stop saying ‘I don’t know’ like it’s an answer! It’s not an answer, Ellis. It’s a stall. It’s you standing at the edge of something and refusing to jump or walk away.”
“That’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair! I told my mother about you, and she hung up on me. I’ve spent months without her voice on the other end of a phone because I chose you. I walked through Nathan on a sidewalk and Darius at a bar and the entire catalog of who I used to be, and I did it because I chose you. And now you’re sitting there telling me you don’t know if you’re strong enough to keep choosing me back?”
“I didn’t say I’m not choosing you.”
“You said ‘I don’t know’! That’s theopposite of choosing!”
I was standing now. Didn’t remember getting up. The couch cushion between us had become the whole room, the whole city, every impossible distance we’d been trying to cross since the first time he followed me out of a gym.
Ellis stood, too. His face was flushed, his jaw tight, his body angled toward me, not aggressive, not backing down.
“Maybe my parents are right.” His voice was thick. “Maybe this is too hard.”
The room went airless.
“So you’re giving up,” I said. “Just like that.”
“I’m not giving up. I’m protecting you.”
“I don’t need protecting. I need you.”
“And what if being with me keeps costing you everything? Your mom, your peace.”
“You don’t get to decide what I’m willing to lose!” My voice broke on the last word. Not cracked. Broke. Split down the middle like a log under an axe. “You don’t get to look at my life and decide it’s too expensive. That’s my call. Mine.”
He was crying. I was crying. We were standing four feet apart in his living room with Jack between us, Diane dripping onto the counter, and the whole careful, beautiful thing we’d built threatening to come apart at the seams.
“I love you.” He was sobbing now, both hands wiping his face. “I love you and I’m ruining you.”
“You’re not ruining me. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But you’re standing here telling me you can’t be sure about us, and I can’t keep being the only one who’s sure.”
“I am sure about us.”
“Then act like it!”
The shout echoed off the walls. Ellis sank back onto the couch. Put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook.
I stood there, chest heaving, the anger draining out of me and leaving something worse behind. Exhaustion that felt geological. The kind of tiredness that lives in your bones and doesn’t respond to sleep.
I sat down. Not on the opposite end. Next to him. Close enough that our knees touched.
We stayed like that for a long time. Both crying. Neither speaking. The apartment ticking, dripping, and humming around us, indifferent to the fact that two people were in the middle of deciding whether they could survive each other.
When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.
“I don’t want to lose you.”
