He stops. Breathing hard. He's never raised his voice at me. Not once. I don't think he's raised his voice in years. The sound of it fills my apartment and he looks as surprised by it as I am.
"From being what?" I ask quietly.
He doesn't answer for a while.
"I know it's different," I say. "I know what we are. That's not what this is about."
"Then what is it about?"
"It's about the fact that you want me to stop." I hold his gaze. "Maybe not today. Maybe not in those words. But somewhere underneath all of this, what you actually want is for me to stop doing the thing that brought us together in the first place. And you can't say that out loud because you know what it sounds like."
The room is very quiet.
"I'm saying you don't get to want me and also want me smaller." My voice cracks onsmallerand I hate it and I don't stop. "You don't get to want the version of me that built all of this and also be uncomfortable that I built it. Those aren't separate things, Declan. You don't get to have one without the other. That's the deal. It was always the deal."
"You're right," he says.
"I know I'm right," I say, and my eyes are burning and I am not going to cry in front of him during this argument, I amabsolutely not, but my voice is doing something I can't control and his face changes when he hears it.
He takes a step toward me.
"Don't," I say. "Don't come over here and be gentle about it. You don't get to start this fight and then comfort me through it."
He stops.
We stand there. Six feet apart in my living room. Both of us breathing harder than the conversation warrants. He looks wrecked. I probably look wrecked. We are two people who have been pretending this was manageable and it is not manageable, it is enormous, and we're standing in the middle of it and there's nowhere to go.
"You're right," he says again. Quieter this time. "I know."
Just that. No reroute. No qualifier. The most infuriating thing about Declan Maguire is that when he's wrong he just says so, and there's nothing to do with it except stand there and accept that he's agreed with you while your eyes are still burning and your hands are still shaking.
I pick up my laptop.
He picks up his jacket.
"I'm going to look into the account," he says at the door. "The one who messaged you." He says it the way he says things that are decided. "You don't have to do anything. Just let me look."
I think about arguing. It's not the argument I want to win.
"Fine."
He leaves.
I sit in silence for a few minutes.
Then I get up and I pull the ring light from the corner and I set it up in front of my gaming chair and I turn on my second monitor and I open the platform and I check my camera preview to make sure my filter is in place.
I could skip the slot. I could say I rescheduled and nobody would notice and Declan would never know, which feels like the path of least resistance after an argument about exactly this.
That's why I'm not doing it.
The counter-argument tosmalleris to be exactly this size. In exactly this space. The space I built before he was in the picture and that exists whether or not he's comfortable with it, because that was always the deal. Because I said so.
BrattyBaby comes online.
Chat floods in within thirty seconds. The familiar noise of it, four thousand people settling in, the world I made that is mine.
15
