I was going to say it.
I got dressed.
I drove to Felix's apartment.
He answered the door on the second knock.
He was dressed , not just awake,dressed, which meant he had also not slept or had slept and gotten up early and either way had been up long enough to run through the system's morning protocol, which included being dressed before seven because Felix believed that being dressed was a form of readiness and readiness was non,negotiable.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He looked like a man who had been somewhere difficult and come back from it and not fully arrived yet. There were edges underneath his eyes that weren't usually there. His jaw had the set it got when he was holding something at controlled distance and the distance had gotten very short.
He stepped back from the door.
I came in.
His apartment was the system made physical , clean lines, everything in its place, the coffee already made and the mug on the counter at the precise location where it lived when not in use. The crack in the ceiling plaster near the light fixture, the one I knew, branching left. I had been in this apartment enough times to know where everything was. I had been in this apartment enough times that I stopped noticing I was always here.
I stood in the middle of his living room.
He stood near the kitchen. Not defensive , just positioned, the way Felix positioned himself in a room, with the unconscious spatial awareness of someone who always knew where the exits were.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
Outside, the city was doing its early Saturday morning thing , quiet but not silent, the specific low frequency of a city that had been up late and was easing back into itself.
"Shay," he started.
"No," I said.
He stopped.
"I need to go first," I said. "And I need you to let me finish."
He looked at me. Something moved in his expression , the architecture shifting, the controlled face making room for something he hadn't decided what to do with yet. He nodded. Once.
I took a breath.
And then I stopped performing.
"I have wanted you for two years."
The words came out even. Clear. I had prepared them and they arrived the way prepared things did , correctly structured, in the right order, landing where I aimed them. But underneath the preparation was the thing itself, unmediated, and I could feel it , the specific exposure of saying a true thing out loud to the person it was true about, in their apartment, in the morning, with nowhere to put it once it was said.
"Two years of being your best friend and pretending I didn't notice every single thing about you." I kept my voice level. I was not going to do this loudly. "I know your coffee order. I know which skate you unlace first. I know the crack in your ceiling and the spreadsheet that doesn't exist and the way your mouth does the thing when something is actually funny to you and you don't want anyone to know." A beat. "I know all of it. I have known all of it and I have been pretending, for two years, that it was just , friendship. That it was just how you paid attention to people you cared about. That it meant nothing specific."
Felix was very still.
"And then you kissed me back." My voice stayed even. I was proud of it. "In a hotel room in October. Both hands, Felix. And then again on a Tuesday on my couch. And you are still , you arestillstanding there and calling it something you can't do. Something that can't become a thing." I looked at him directly. "So I need you to do one thing for me. I need you to look me inthe eye and tell me you feel nothing. Say it and mean it." A pause. "And I'll stop."
The apartment was very quiet.
Felix looked at me.
The morning light came through his windows , the specific flat grey of early Saturday, the light that didn't perform anything, just arrived and was honest about what it was. It caught the line of his face, the careful architecture of him, and everything underneath it that he had been carrying in no column for two years.
