Everything stops. Me. Time. Earth, probably. “What?” I whisper, flattened.
“I’m in love with you,” he repeats, calmer now.
For a flash we’re back to the night he told me he loved me for the first time, a week after my birthday. We’re at the grocery store, delirious from studying, and I’m blearily arguing with myself over whether Smucker’s or Welch’s has the more accurate grape flavor for the PB&J I plan to annihilate. I look over to find Eli watching me, the softest, most happy smile on his face. His paper-rings smile. In that moment, I say “What?” and he says, “I’m in love with you.” That easy, like he’s said it a hundred times before. It takes me a second to realize this is the first.
But it’s now, not then. I get out a strangled, “Again?”
He’s not smiling, but his mouth is soft, his eyes are soft, this word is soft: “Still.”
A circle. Time bending.
“Oh my god, Eli.” My voice shakes. “What does ‘still’ mean?” He inhales, but my imagination has spiraled. “Are you talking this week? A few months? Were you in love with me when you flew the woman you were dating across the country to go to Nick and Miriam’s wedding?”
The hurt in my voice is clear; that she was there at all, and that he made so much effort because he wanted her there that much. He can hear it, and I have no right to feel it. I was bringing Julian, though those logistics were lazy, and then moot once he dicked down his ex. But this is what happens when I get messy—it’s unfair and illogical and ugly.
Eli stares at me for a long stretch. Not like he’s warring with whether he wants to answer; like he’s preparing before he untethers it.
“She was Cole’s girlfriend at the time,” he says finally. “Well, as close to a girlfriend as Cole is capable of.”
My jaw drops. “What the hell, Eli? You were dating Cole’s girlfriend?”
“No,” he says, a flash of tender amusement lighting his eyes. “Remember how Cole said that he’d been in New York a few times over the past eighteen months?”
I nod on instinct; my brain is busy trying to put all the puzzle pieces together.
Eli lets out a breath. “The first time he visited—to go to that conference, but also to see Emma—we met up. I got very drunk, and he asked how you were and I just…unleashed. I’d never talked about us, Georgia. I couldn’t with Adam, and obviously I couldn’t with you, and Cole was there.” One corner of his mouth quirks up. “He is actually a really good listener, by the way.”
I can only get out a squeak.
Eli runs a hand through his wrecked hair. “That’s why he’s been so weird all week. He knows how I feel about you and has been encouraging me to come clean. And by encouraging, I mean being fucking nonstop about it.”
I think back to Cole telling me to be careful. To him asking if I was messing with Eli, and how he transformed when he saw the truth on my face.
Eli moves to stand just in front of me. I can’t help the way I sway toward him.
His eyes bounce between mine, searching. “I wasn’t sure if there was a point, because before this week you made it clear you wanted to keep me at a distance. And then, when things changed, I didn’t—well, don’t know how you feel or what it would do to this new dynamic between us. But then I realized that the point is being honest, Georgia. You get to do whatever you want with that information, but at least you have it.”
I have no idea what to do with it. I can’t even keep it in my hands long enough to inspect it; it keeps slipping away, silver-quick.
“Anyway,” Eli continues, “when he came back to see Emma right before Nick and Miriam’s wedding, I told him that you were going to be there with someone. I didn’t want to miss the wedding, but the thought of going alone
and seeing you with someone else, someone you’d been dating for months
—”
He inhales sharply, like it hurts to even say it, and that pain radiates into me. We both dated so infrequently; I’m not sure Eli ever had a relationship, and I never wanted it confirmed. Nick and Miriam’s wedding was the first time I knew he was seeing someone, and likely vice versa.
Even seeing him with someone for a few hours made me spiral. I spent all night imagining him touching her like he used to touch me. Needing her in any way when my need for him still had claws.
It doesn’t matter that I dated Julian because I was tired of being stuck and lonely, and that in the end it only made me lonelier. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t give him any meaningful piece of me. Eli can’t see my heart, and it’s for the better because he’d see his name everywhere in it. But it’s for the worse because he doesn’t see that his name is everywhere in it, and that hurts him.
I hate that we’re hurting each other again. Still. “I don’t think we should
—”
“I didn’t want to go alone but I also didn’t have anyone to go with,” he interrupts. “My dating life was pretty much nonexistent because I didn’t want anyone but you, so it’s not like I had options. Emma ended up offering to be my date. Said she’d make a long weekend of it, go see Cole after the wedding.”
I’m frozen, his I didn’t want anyone but you banging around in my chest.
“But then I showed up.” Eli’s gaze holds me in place. “You were alone, Georgia, and somehow that was so much fucking worse, because it was someone else who’d let you down, and I had to see that on your face. I had to remember all the times I’d done that to you and the way you faked the same smile you did that night.” His voice breaks as he searches my face. “I couldn’t watch it again. I said I had food poisoning so I could leave.”
He blurs until I can’t see him. I spent that whole night so miserable thinking he wanted her, thinking he’d moved on when I couldn’t, even if it looked like it from the outside. I spent the months after trying to shake it
off, trying to pull myself back into the space where that old list kept me safe. But maybe it was dead even before he stepped off the plane last week.
“When I say I’m still in love with you,” he says quietly, “I mean today and yesterday and this entire week. I mean at Nick and Miriam’s wedding and I mean for the past five years.” If possible, he gets even quieter, but now he’s closer so I get every word. “When I say I’m still in love with you, I mean the first time I saw you and right now. I mean every second in between.”
“No,” I manage, even though it’s true for me.
“Yes,” Eli says. “That’s why it matters. Because I’m so in love with you that I feel like I can’t breathe. I think it every time I look at you, every time you let me in or you laugh or you look at me like I mean something to you. I know it’s fucking messy, and I know you hate that, but it’s also true.”
I feel like I’m being pulled apart string by string, like everything that I’ve kept inside is being unraveled by him. I’m being methodically disassembled, all my tender parts exposed.
“I can’t do this,” I breathe.
His expression collapses. “Why?”
“Because I want to keep you!”
It bursts out of me before I can catch it and we both reel back, rocked from the shockwaves. Emotions play over his face—surprise and confusion and understanding and then, of course, a brand-new heartbreak—and suddenly I’m crying.
The truth is startling for me, too, but that’s what it is. I’ve only ever wanted to keep him. All my lists are used for keeping things and people, because I’m so bad at it when I’m not holding myself in place. My Eli Mora lists are the most concentrated versions of that, even the one we used for five years. Especially that one.
His eyes glitter in the near darkness. “Georgia.”
I back away, pressing up against the kitchenette island. “I lost you once, and I don’t want to lose you again. You don’t want to hear that I was so fucking miserable with you and without you. That I was so lonely in New York and after.”
“I do,” he says hoarsely, but I shake my head, pleading.
“I want to keep you because when we broke up, the first person I wanted to call to make it hurt less was you, my best friend, and it killed me to realize I didn’t even have that anymore.”
His eyes flutter shut.
“I needed you too much back then, and I still need you.” I’m not sure I’ve ever said that out loud, and it cracks something down the middle of me. To admit it. To see him stand there and absorb it. “This week has shown me we can still have that, but if we keep doing this, I’m going to think about how you’re in love with me and you’ve been in love with me this whole time—through everything—and yet you let me leave you without a fight. I’m going to think about how you quit your job now and how you’re going to therapy now and how I wasn’t enough for any of that five years ago.”
Oh god, I didn’t mean to say that. The silence is so absolute it’s a sound.
Eli stares at me, his face ashen.
“Is that what you think?” he asks finally. “That you weren’t enough?” I shake my head, panicked.
“Is that what you think?” he presses.
I grip the edge of the counter. “I think you chose keeping your job over keeping me.”
It’s the truth, plain and ugly, right there between us.
“No,” he says, his eyes wet. “I didn’t choose my job. I chose you, the same way you were choosing yourself. I chose to respect your decision to walk away from the misery we were both stuck in. I couldn’t pull myself out of it, but you did. And I’m not saying I loved the way you did it, or the way I did it. If we’d just talked, if I’d pushed you…” He trails off, searches my face. “You said you needed me too much back then, but all I saw and heard from you was that you didn’t at all.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference if I told you,” I say. “You were—” I stop, and he presses, “What?”
“You were shut away in your own expectations and anxiety. I wouldn’t have been able to get to you anyway.”
“You didn’t trust me enough to ever say it, though,” he says. “And you didn’t trust yourself enough to let it out.”
He’s right. I don’t say it, but I doubt it hurts less when you already know the answer.
The room settles into silence except for the hard beat of my heart echoing in my ears. I want to be done. Want to run, but I can’t move. All I can do is watch Eli while he gazes out the window, his expression far away, somewhere years ago, maybe.
Finally, he looks back at me. “I wish I had said all this a long time ago, but I wasn’t okay when we broke up—before that, too, obviously—and I was very aware that I had no fucking clue how to be. Part of me wanted to beg you to stay. The amount of times I picked up the phone to call you, Georgia—” His voice cracks on my name. “But how would it have been fair to ask you to give me another chance when I couldn’t give you what you deserved? I couldn’t even give that to myself.”
I close my eyes, imagining him in New York staring at his phone while I stared at mine in San Francisco, missing him so much my stomach was hollowed out.
“I’m not saying I’m fully okay now,” he says quietly, and when I open my eyes, he’s a looming, blurred shape before me. “But being in therapy this past year has helped me understand that things in my life have to change, that I want them to—with my job, with Adam…” He dips his chin, holding me in the crosshairs of his gaze. “And with you. You were always enough for me. I wasn’t enough for myself. I had to get there, and I’m so fucking sorry I hurt you along the way.”
My throat goes tight at his apology, even as something loosens in my chest. “I hurt you, too, and I’m sorry for that.”
He nods, absorbing the moment. My words. Finally, he says, “I know you have very little evidence that I’m not the person you walked away from five years ago, but it’s true. We were twenty-three, and I was a fucking mess who didn’t know how to say it out loud or ask for help. Now I do. I’d like to believe there’s a reason we’re here like this again.”
Or still, I think. That tendril of belonging tightens around my chest. Time is cruel and a miracle all in one swoop. It shows you what you had, and sometimes brings it back to you, but it’s always different.
“Some of our twenty-three-year-old stuff is still there.”
I think of his flight to LA tomorrow, the job he’ll likely take. The anxiety that lingers. I recognize the ways he’s changed, but I only know him in practice as the man who did choose his career, no matter what lens he wants to look at it through. My heart won’t survive it a second time.
“It wouldn’t be like before,” he says.
I don’t know that. I still don’t know exactly why he quit his job and I’m too exhausted for this conversation to go on for another hour in order to find out.
And it doesn’t matter. He’s going back to it. Differently, yes, but our lives are about to be a thousand miles apart.
“Talk to me,” he says quietly. “I can take it.” “It’s too messy.”
“I told you I want that.” He moves closer and I see everything on his face: hunger and frustration and love, messiness of his own. He wants us to trust that.
But I can’t. Not if it means there’s even a one percent chance it changes things for the worse. I just got him back.
“You asked me if I’d ever tell you what I needed, if I’d ask for it,” I say, swallowing hard. “This is me telling you: I need your friendship. I need that to be enough for us, at least for now.”
For a long moment he just stares at me. His pulse works in his neck, a quick, hard beat, and it dawns on me that he might not want that with me. That I might lose him anyway.
“I miss you,” I rush on. “And I’m tired of missing you. I don’t want to try something and have it ruined again and end up with crumbs. This week has been a fantasy. I fell in love with you here before, and I let myself do that again, but reality is different. The first two years of our relationship and even the first couple months in New York proved that we’re really good at loving each other when it’s easy, but nothing about our current situation is
easy. We have history and you’re going to LA and I’m going to Seattle. It makes it messy in a way that’s terrifying for me.”
“It’s terrifying for me, too,” he says, eyes flashing. “And it doesn’t have to be LA.”
“But it is,” I say. “And maybe it doesn’t have to be, but you need to figure that out for yourself, Eli. It has to be a choice you make, not just because of your anxiety or because of me or anything else.”
I won’t trust it otherwise. I don’t voice this, but maybe he senses it. His shoulders relax, and the furrow in his brow smooths out.
“Please,” I urge. “Let’s leave this week with something we know we can hold onto.”
Slowly, he closes the distance between us, cradling my jaw in his hands and lifting my chin. He gazes down at me, his thumbs brushing over my cheeks, and I see the pain and love reflected in his eyes—everything I feel.
“Is that not what you need?” I ask. “Or want?”
“Of course I want it,” he replies, his focus tracing the path of his touch. I can practically see the gears turning in his mind, contemplating thoughts I can’t even imagine. When our eyes finally meet again, he looks resolute. “I want you in any way I can have you. I want you every way I can have you. I just want it to be honest.”
I nod, fear still tightening in my chest. “It is.” Almost completely.
His lashes brush against his skin as he leans in, pressing a lingering kiss to my forehead. It’s sweet but not nearly enough. I need his body over mine, pushing deep inside me. I need him to fall apart, to plead, to leave marks on my skin so I can remember that we were here, that this was real. All of it.
I can’t ask him for that, though. It’s almost enough that he pulls me into his arms, pressing his body against mine.
“Okay,” he whispers.
I nearly collapse with relief, gripping his damp shirt. “Okay.”
“Are you going back to the party?” he asks against my hair. “Or the hotel, I guess, since it’s two in the morning.”
I shake my head. “I think I’m going to stay here. I’m not ready for it to be over.”
It’s a subtle invitation I don’t expect him to accept. We’ve never stuck around after the hard parts.
But instead he runs a hand down the length of my back. My dress pulls taut at the waist before he exhales shakily. “I’m not either. But I can’t be with you.” His mouth skims over my ear. My cheek. Stops just shy of my mouth. I stay frozen, trapped under his touch. “Sex, I mean. I won’t be able to let you go.”
“I know,” I whisper, aching. “Just lie with me.”
In the bedroom, he unbuttons his shirt and hands it to me so I don’t have to sleep in my dress. We turn our backs to each other while we undress, but the sounds and the memories in this room and others fill in the blanks for me. I get to keep him, in part, but I’ll still miss him—the wide spread of his shoulders, the solid taper of his torso and the beautiful curve of his thighs. The shape of his mouth and how it broadcasts his emotions, the way his fingers trace every known path and new ones, too. The swift pound of his heart and its slower, calmer beat. The way I got to have all of him this week. It was a fantasy, but it was real, too.
When I slip his shirt on, it’s still warm from his skin.
We crawl into bed. Lie down. Face each other. We touch, but only at the knees and where his fingers twine with mine.
“I’m proud of you,” he says. “For taking the promotion in Seattle. You deserve all of that, and I know how much you love your job.”
“You do?”
He lifts a shoulder. “It’s easy to tell when you talk about it. Your eyes get all wide and happy.”
I laugh softly. “That makes me sound feral.”
“We’ve already established you are.” In the darkness, his teeth flash. “A little bit.”
I press my knee against his, both in admonishment and also because I like feeling his skin. “I do love it.” My next thought catches in my throat, but I force the words out. “I’m scared, though.”
“I know,” he says, and I wonder if he knows I mean about all of this. “But you’re doing it anyway. Sometimes I think it means more when you’re scared. You know the risks, but trusting yourself ranks above all that.”
“Is that how you felt when you quit your job?”
He shifts, his gaze moving to some point over my shoulder. The familiar sound of his skin sliding against the sheets is such a strange comfort. “Yeah, I was scared. Terrified, actually, and I still am, but I know I made the right decision.” His eyes find mine, lock into place. “Now more than ever.”
“I’m proud of you, too, you know. For quitting. I hope Luce fucking choked on your resignation.” Eli’s laugh is sharp and surprised before mellowing into something quiet, like gratitude. “I’m proud of you for going to therapy, too. I see the difference.”
His eyes search mine. “Do you?”
Wordlessly, I nod. He brings my hand up to his mouth, presses his parted lips there, exhaling against my skin.
“What time are you leaving tomorrow?” I whisper.
“Ten. Cole’s driving me to the airport. He has to go to San Francisco anyway.” He pauses. “It would be too hard if you did it, I think. Plus, you got me on the way up.”
It’s the right call, but I hate it. “Yeah, one time’s free of charge but twice is pushing it.”
He grins, sweet and beautiful and sad.
In the darkness, my heart aching, I say, “If you wake up before me tomorrow, don’t wake me up.”
“Okay,” Eli murmurs, tucking a hand under his cheek, eyes locked with mine.
He’ll wake up before me and go, and we won’t have to add this moment to the other times we said goodbye. Maybe it’ll hurt less.
I don’t know who falls asleep first, but when I wake up to brilliant mid- morning sunshine, his side of the bed is empty.
The only sign of him is a paper ring, placed carefully on my nightstand.
