“Then don’t.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is. Either you’re in this or you’re not. And I need you to decide. Not today, not right now. But soon. Because I can’t keep standing in the middle of your uncertainty. It’s killing me, Ellis. Slowly and specifically.”
He took my hand. Held it the way you hold something you’re afraid of dropping.
“I’ll decide,” he promised.
“Okay.”
“Just, give me a little more time.”
I looked at our hands. Intertwined, shaking, both of them. Mine brown, his white. The same hands that had held each other hundreds of times across kitchen tables and couch cushions.
“A little more.” I kept staring at our hands. “But not forever.”
He nodded.
I left and kissed him at the door. Brief, salty, tasting like tears and the end of something. Or maybe the beginning of the end, which is worse because it’s slower.
On the subway home, I sat in an empty car and pressed my foreheadagainst the cold window and watched Brooklyn go dark outside the glass, and I knew, with the same certainty I’d known when I first said, “I love you” over a pot of overcooked pasta, that we were running out of time.
Not because we didn’t love each other.
Because sometimes love isn’t enough to outrun everything that’s chasing it.
Chapter twenty-seven
He came to my apartment on a Sunday. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Sunday, my mom’s day, the day the phone didn’t ring. Now it was the day everything stopped.
Ellis stood in my doorway in his good jacket. The charcoal one he wore to work events, not the everyday one he threw on for groceries. He’d dressed for this. Prepared. The realization made my stomach drop before he said a word.
“Can I come in?”
“Since when do you ask?”
He didn’t smile.
I stepped aside. He walked in and sat on my couch. The same couch where he’d fallen asleep waiting for me after Neon Pulse, where he’d held me after the walk-in, where we’d tangled together on a hundred ordinary nights watching shows we’d never finish. He sat on the edge of it now, upright, both feet on the floor, hands clasped between his knees. The posture of someone delivering news.
I sat across from him in the armchair. Didn’t sit on the couch. Couldn’t.
“I’ve been seeing a therapist.”
“Since when?”
“Three weeks. Since our fight. I found someone who specializes in late-coming-out adults.” He looked at his hands. “She’s good. She’s helping me understand some things.”
“What things?”
“That I can’t figure out who I am while I’m terrified of losing you.”
The room contracted into silence. My clock ticked on the wall. I’d bought it at a flea market with Sierra, ages ago, and the second hand had always been slightly too loud. Now the sound hammered through me, deafening.
“What are you saying, Ellis?”
“I’m saying that I need space.” He looked up. His eyes were red, but he wasn’t crying. He’d already cried. He’d done that somewhere else. In his apartment, in his therapist’s office, on the subway ride here. This was the aftermath. The controlled demolition. “I need to figure out who I am outside of us. Not because us is wrong. Because I went from never questioning my identity to rebuilding it from the ground up, and I did all of that while falling in love with you, and I can’t separate what’s me from what’s you.”
