I Always Thought I Was Straight Until I Moved In With My Best Friend. Now Our Landlord Is Kicking Us Out And I Have To Decide. Should I Tell Him How I Feel Before We Lose Everything?
Silence and Pad Thai
The whole drive home is silent. Not comfortable silence either. The kind where you can feel everything that isn’t being said pressing down on both of you. Back at the apartment, I go straight to my room and open my laptop.
The next three hours disappear into video calls and fixing code and explaining to people what went wrong. I can hear him moving around in his room working on his own stuff. When I finally close my laptop, it’s almost 6:00.
My neck hurts from staring at the screen, and I’m starving. I come out of my room and find him in the kitchen looking at his phone. He glances up when I walk in and asks if I’m done with work.
I tell him, “Yeah, finally.”
He says he ordered Thai food, should be here in 20 minutes. We end up on the couch watching another Christmas movie while we wait for the food. Some old one with claymation that I’ve never seen before.
The food arrives, and we eat straight from the containers. Pad Thai for me, green curry for him. We’ve done this a hundred times. It should feel normal. But halfway through the movie, he shifts closer on the couch until our shoulders are touching.
Neither of us moves away. We just sit there pressed together watching animated reindeer on the screen. I can feel the warmth of him through both our shirts. My heart is doing that pounding thing again.
Another Retreat
I want to say something about earlier. About what he asked me in the park. But I can’t make the words come out. When the movie ends, he picks up our empty containers and takes them to the kitchen. I follow him because sitting alone on the couch feels wrong.
He’s rinsing the containers in the sink. When I finally work up enough courage, I tell him I’ve been thinking a lot about what he asked earlier. About whether I’ve noticed things feeling different.
He stops rinsing and turns off the water. Turns around to face me fully. I can see him holding his breath waiting for whatever I’m about to say. I start trying to explain how I’ve been feeling. How the past few months have been confusing and scary and exciting all at once.
But then I panic. Completely lose my nerve. I change the subject to something stupid about work instead. About the bug I spent all afternoon fixing. I watch disappointment flash across his face, even though he tries to hide it.
He dries his hands on a towel and says, “That’s good, I got it fixed.”
Then he says he’s tired and thinks he’ll go to bed early. I say good night, and he disappears into his room. I stand in the kitchen alone feeling like the biggest coward on the planet.
The Landlord’s News
The next morning, I wake up to my phone ringing. I answer without looking at who’s calling and hear my roommate’s landlord on the other end. Except he’s my landlord too now.
Guess he’s calling to tell us they’ve decided to sell the building. We need to be out by March. He apologizes for the short notice but says that’s just how it worked out. When I hang up, I lie there staring at the ceiling trying to process what just happened.
I get up and find my roommate already awake making coffee. I tell him about the call. His face goes pale. He says the landlord called him too. We both just stand there in the kitchen trying to figure out what this means.
Finding a new place in this city is hard. Finding something affordable is almost impossible. We spend the rest of the day looking at apartment listings online. Sitting next to each other on the couch with our laptops open.
Every place that looks decent is way too expensive. Everything in our price range looks like it should be condemned. The conversation keeps dancing around the real question. Whether we’re looking for a place together or separate places.
Neither of us wants to say it out loud. By evening, we’ve looked at probably 50 listings and haven’t found anything good. He closes his laptop and rubs his eyes. Then he just asks it directly.
