I Choose You, Julian

There was one last place I wanted to visit before I let the past settle.

It was a little Italian restaurant near campus where Adrian and I had gone on our first proper date. For years, I had remembered the candlelight, the nervous excitement, the way he'd reached for my hand under the table. I wanted to know whether those memories belonged to me or to a version of myself I no longer recognized.

Adrian agreed to meet there. When I arrived, he was sitting at our old table with two untouched glasses of water.

"I thought you'd never come back here," he said.

"I almost didn't."

He looked at my hands. "You aren't wearing the watch."

"I returned it."

"I know."

For a while, we talked about ordinary things. Work. The weather. A mutual friend's new baby. It was almost peaceful, and that somehow made the ending feel more real.

Then Adrian slid a small envelope across the table. Inside was an invitation to the Sterling Foundation's winter gala. My name was printed beside his as a guest of honor.

"I told the board," he said. "About us. About what we were. I want everyone to know I was wrong."

I put the invitation down. "You didn't have to do that."

"I should have done it years ago. I can give you everything you ever wanted now."

He sounded so sincere that for an instant I saw the future I'd once imagined: the grand rooms, his hand in mine, the pride of finally being acknowledged.

But another image followed it. Julian in a grocery store, kissing me beside the oranges without wondering who might see.

"You can't give me back the seven years I spent begging you to love me," I said.

Adrian's shoulders dropped.

"I never meant to make you beg."

"I know. I think that was part of the problem. You didn't pay enough attention to notice."

He looked at me for a long time. Then he folded the invitation and put it away.

"Do you love him?" he asked.

"Yes."

"More than you loved me?"

I shook my head. "It's not a competition. With you, I kept trying to earn a place beside you. With Julian, I know I already have one."

He gave a short, defeated laugh. "I thought you'd always come back."

"I know."

"I was wrong."

"Yes."

When we stood, Adrian didn't try to touch me. We said goodbye by the door, two people who had known each other for years and, in some ways, had never understood each other at all.

I walked through the city toward the river. The wind was cold enough to sting my cheeks. I stopped beneath the lights of a small pedestrian bridge and called Julian.

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Home. Why?"

"Can you come get me?"

"Of course."

Twenty minutes later, his car pulled up. He got out before I'd reached the curb. I crossed the distance and threw my arms around him.

"Everything all right?" he murmured against my hair.

"I don't want to be anyone's second choice again."

He drew back just enough to see my face.

"Elliot, you were always my first."

I kissed him there on the sidewalk, with taxis passing and strangers walking by. He held me close. When we finally separated, he was smiling in that slightly stunned way he always did when I surprised him.

"I choose you, Julian," I said. "Not because I'm running from him. Because I want you."

"Good," he whispered. "Because I want the whole ordinary, messy, wonderful rest of your life."

"Even when I steal your side of the bed?"

"Especially then."

He opened the car door for me, and we drove home together.