The silence stretches.
It fills the waterfront, swallows the gulls, eats the sound of the city waking up behind us. I stand there, hands shaking in my pockets, terrified, waiting for him to say something, anything.
Ash stares at me, mouth open, the book clutched in his hand so tight his knuckles have gone white.
He doesn't speak.
Neither do I.
The fog burns off. The sun cuts through. And I have never been more afraid in my life.
THE PACT
It takes me a full five seconds to realize he’s not going to laugh.
That this isn’t a setup for some savage locker room chirp or a weird endurance contest or a side bet between friends, “let’s see who can be the more awkward homo in public before one of us melts.”
He just stands there, in the thinning fog and the ruined morning, book still clutched in his hand, looking at me like he just confessed to a murder and is waiting to find out if I’m a cop.
The sun is up now, or at least the suggestion of it.
I can see every bead of sweat on his hairline, the tight set of his jaw, the way his chest heaves just a little too fast for a guy who’s been running since he was twelve.
My own heart’s thudding like a blender full of rocks, which would be a great metaphor if my head could process metaphors right now.
There are exactly three thoughts in my skull, and they all crash into each other at the intersection like a demolition derby.
The first one is so obvious I blurt it before I can stop myself: “What about Nia?”
My voice is hoarse. It doesn’t sound like me. Maybe it never did.
He blinks, and his whole face changes, like the question hadn’t occurred to him and now it’s the only thing he can think about.
The silence lasts for two, three, maybe six years. Then he sets the book down on the wet concrete, like it’s something holy he can’t risk ruining, and says, “I broke up with her.”
There’s no wind on the waterfront but the world lurches sideways anyway. “When?”
“Two days ago. She… She knew before I did, I think. Or at least she wasn’t surprised.” He grimaces, the way you do when you bite down on a tooth you already know is cracked. “We were just… surviving. She said I needed to figure myself out. That I needed to stop lying.”
It lands. It lands like a goddamn train.
He broke up with her for this. For me.
The wall in my head, the one built out of “He’s straight, he has Nia, this is just a post-shooting freakout, nothing is going to happen, you need to shut this down,” crumbles in a heartbeat.
Every memory I have of the last month, the gym, the steam room, the car rides, the way he’d hold my stare just a millisecond too long, the way he always waited for me at the exit, rewrites itself in real time, every time I edited out the subtext, every time I convinced myself I was crazy.
I want to puke. I want to kiss him. I want to go back in time and shake myself by the throat.
The second thought, Tinder. The apps. Every match sitting on my phone right now, a graveyard of “just friends” and “not really my type” and “let’s be chill and see what happens,” all of them instantly eclipsed by this moment, like they were just shuffling paper while the bomb was ticking under the desk the whole time.
There’s a nurse from Harborview who sent a selfie with a thumbs-up.
There’s a bartender with a beard that looks like it could sand wood.
There’s a marine biologist who literally offered to show me the otter enclosure after hours, and I ghosted her because, what, I was scared? No. I was waiting.
I was waiting for this.
