Damage control
1472 Words
(Reese)
Ethan picked up on the second ring.
"I need you to come over," I said.
There was a pause. Not a long one, just enough for him to read the tone of my voice and understand that this was not a casual request.
"Give me twenty minutes," he said, and hung up.
I put the phone down on the kitchen counter and stood there with my coffee going cold in my hand and looked at the wall. The apartment was quiet. The boxes I hadn't gotten through yesterday were still stacked in the corner of the living room. My new life, still unpacked, still waiting to be arranged into something that made sense.
I had slept with Noah on my first night in this apartment.
I said it to myself plainly because dressing it up would not change what it was. I had let him in, I had kissed him back and I had spent the night with a man I had spent five years getting over. And then I had stood in my bedroom this morning and told him it meant nothing while wearing last night's dress with the zip still warm from his hands.
I put the coffee down and went to change before Ethan arrived.
By the time he knocked I had showered, put on clean clothes and done enough with my face to look like a person who had her life together. It was the least I could do. Ethan knew me well enough to see past most of it but showing up to this conversation looking like what I felt would not help anything.
I opened the door and he looked at me for exactly one second before he walked past me into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
"Sit down," he said.
"I'm fine standing."
"Reese." He turned and looked at me. "Sit down."
I sat down at the kitchen table.
He made tea, which I did not ask for and did not want, and set it in front of me and sat across from me with his own cup and waited. That was the thing about Ethan. He never rushed toward information. He let you find your own way to it at your own pace and he sat with you in the silence until you got there.
"I slept with Noah last night," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he set his cup down carefully.
"Noah," he said. "The neighbor."
"Yes."
"Your ex."
"Yes."
"The one you introduced me to as your fiancé yesterday."
"Ethan."
"I'm not judging you," he said. "I just want to make sure I have the full picture."
I wrapped both hands around the cup of tea I did not want and looked at the table. "I saw him in the hallway when I was moving in. It caught me off guard and I said the first thing I could think of to put distance between us. I didn't plan it. I just said it."
"And then you slept with him."
"He knocked on the door after you left. I let him in. We argued and then we didn't argue and then it was morning."
Ethan was quiet again. I could feel him choosing his words carefully the way he always did, like someone who understood that the wrong thing said at the wrong moment could not be unsaid.
"Are you alright?" he said.
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
I looked up at him. He was watching me with that expression he had, the one that meant he was not going to accept the easy answer and we both knew it.
"I don't know," I said. "I told him it was a mistake. He left. I called you."
"And now?"
"And now I'm sitting in my kitchen trying to figure out how I let that happen on day one." I picked up the cup and put it down again without drinking from it. "He lives across the hall, Ethan. I'm going to see him every single day."
"I know."
"I called you his fiancé to create a boundary and I crossed that boundary before the sun came up."
Ethan leaned back in his chair and looked at me. "Does he know it isn't real?"
"No. I don't think so."
"And you want to keep it that way."
"Yes," I said. "I need that buffer. I need him to believe there is something between me and you because without it I don't trust myself to keep a clear head around him." I hated saying it out loud. It was too honest and too close to something I was not ready to look at directly. "Last night proved that."
Ethan nodded slowly. He picked up his cup and held it in both hands and looked at the table the way he did when he was thinking through something that mattered.
"There's a problem," he said.
I waited.
"Marcus is getting pressure from his family." He said it carefully, like he was placing something fragile on a surface and was not sure it would hold. "His parents have been asking questions. His mother called him twice last week wanting to know why he isn't seeing anyone and his father made a comment at dinner that Marcus said felt like a warning."
"What kind of warning?"
"The kind that comes before an ultimatum," Ethan said. "Marcus's family is traditional. Very traditional. If they find out about us before he's ready to tell them himself it won't go the way either of us wants it to go." He looked at me. "I know you said this yesterday without planning it. I know it was a split second decision in a hallway. But I need this to keep going a little longer, Reese. Just until things settle on his end and he figures out the right time."
I sat with that for a moment.
What I had done yesterday in that hallway had been impulsive. A reaction to seeing Noah's face and needing something between us fast. I had grabbed the first thing available and used it without thinking past the moment. I had not thought about Ethan standing beside me holding my bag and going along with something he did not understand yet. I had not thought about Marcus or about how far one word said in a hallway could travel.
"How much longer?" I said.
"A few months. Maybe less. I don't know exactly." He looked at me with something in his eyes that was equal parts guilt and gratitude. "I know this is more complicated now. I know what happened last night makes this harder. But I need you on this a little while longer."
I thought about Noah in my hallway this morning, his jacket in his hand and that look on his face. The one that said he knew exactly what last night was and had no intention of pretending otherwise. He had told me he was right across the hall. He had said it like a fact and not a threat and that was somehow worse than if he had been angry.
I thought about what it was going to feel like to walk past his door every day and pretend that nothing had happened and that nothing was happening and that everything I felt was filed neatly away where it belonged.
Then I thought about Ethan across this table, and Marcus, and what it cost both of them every single day to keep something this real hidden from the people they were supposed to trust most.
"Okay," I said.
Ethan looked at me. "Okay?"
"We keep going." I picked up the tea and finally drank some of it. It had gone lukewarm but I drank it anyway. "Just tell Marcus to be careful. If Noah finds out about him and you before we're ready to explain any of this it makes everything more complicated than it already is."
"I'll tell him," Ethan said.
We sat there for a while after that without saying much. He refilled my cup without asking and I let him and the morning moved around us outside the window, the city already loud and running, indifferent as always to whatever was happening on the fourth floor.
When he left I stood at the door and watched him go to the elevator and thought about how I had agreed to keep pretending, which was the right thing to do for someone I cared about.
I also thought about how keeping that pretense meant walking back into a situation I already had no control over.
I closed the door and leaned against it and looked at my apartment, still half unpacked, still waiting.
Across the hall it was quiet.
I pushed off the door and went to unpack the next box.
- Writer
