Pt. 2
Jordan

The room was small. Cramped, really. A narrow bed was shoved up against the wall, sheets uneven and kicked halfway off. Clothes lay in a messy pile on the floor, a half-zipped backpack slouched in the corner. The walls were plastered with posters, personality pinned wherever there was space. Nico sat at the computer, headphones cupped over his ears, completely absorbed, oblivious to the door creaking open. He was curled into the chair like a cat, one leg folded underneath him, the other perched on the seat, knee pulled tight to his chest. He leaned in so far it looked like his face might press into the screen, one hand on the mouse, the other hovering near his mouth, teeth worrying at a fingernail in deep concentration.

When Nico turned his head and his eyes flicked toward the door, he jumped so hard he nearly sent himself off the chair. His knee slipped, his other foot flailed, and in the scramble to steady himself, he jerked sideways, yanking his headphones with him. The cord popped clean out of the speakers. Instantly, music exploded through the room at full blast. 

“Nico!” his mom’s voice bellowed from the kitchen like the wrath of a god. “Turn that down! I can feel it in the floor!”

One earcup slipped off, hanging awkwardly against his cheek as Nico scrambled for the volume knob, cutting the music off with a sharp click. When he took off his headphones and risked a glance at Jordan again, he looked at him as if Jordan had materialized out of thin air. 

“Hi,” Jordan said.  

“What are you doing here?” 

Jordan stayed by the door, one hand still on the handle even after it shut behind him. “You haven’t been answering my texts.”

“Usually that means someone doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Jordan gave a shrug, aiming for casual. “I’m not used to being ghosted. Kind of humbling.” If he thought the joke would soften things, it didn’t. 

Nico shoved himself up from the chair, his movements abrupt, like sitting still another second might’ve made him explode. He dropped onto the bed instead, putting space between them. 

“Why haven’t you been answering my texts?” 

“I’m pretty sure you know why.” Nico’s voice hardened, a clear contrast to his usual light tone, tangled somewhere between disbelief and frustration. Angry, even, which was expected. He’d known this wouldn’t be a warm welcome. Nico looked at him like he couldn’t decide whether this was a joke or if Jordan was really that dense.

“No, I don’t.” he said anyway. 

“Are you serious?” 

“Yes, I’m serious.” Jordan took a step closer and sat down on the bed. He barely had the chance to settle before Nico was already pushing himself up again, crossing the room and dropping back into his desk chair like the bed had burned him. Jordan couldn’t help the quiet sigh that slipped out, not loud enough for Nico to catch, but there all the same. Overly dramatic. He kept the thought to himself. “What do you want from me?”

“An apology.”

The word landed heavier than Jordan anticipated. No hesitation, no dancing around it, just blunt, like Nico had been carrying it, waiting for the right moment to throw it at him. It took Jordan aback, more than he liked to admit. 

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. For Nico to be humbled by the fact that Jordan had shown up at his home, maybe. To fold a little, at least. 

“An apology for what?” 

“For making me feel like crap. For all of it.” 

“I can’t apologize for that,” Jordan said. “I didn’t know you were gonna show up.”

And it was true. Or at least the version of the truth he was willing to give. In all honesty, Jordan didn’t think he had anything to apologize for. Nico had walked into that situation. They hadn’t made promises. There were no rules here, no lines drawn in black and white. Nico was the one who blurred them, the one who decided to turn this into something it wasn’t. And if he’d built it up in his head, wrapped the whole thing in false hope, that wasn’t on Jordan.

Nico’s response was silent, a simple point toward the door. 

Jordan stayed seated on the bed, ignoring the unspoken demand. “What I meant to say,” he backtracked, “is that I’ve never lied to you. I can’t apologize for something I didn’t do.”

“You think I want you to apologize because I think you lied to me?” Nico asked. 

Wasn’t that what this was all about? The question hung there, and Jordan felt it settle right between them. He didn’t like it. Not the words themselves, but the shift they brought. The way the conversation had slipped from his grasp without warning. Nico wasn’t folding the way he usually did. He wasn’t hesitating or fumbling or watching Jordan’s face for permission. It felt like a challenge now, and Jordan didn’t know what to do with that.

“Don’t you get it?” Nico pressed. “Don’t you realize that you hurt me? Do you even care about that?” 

“I’m not responsible for your feelings, Nico.” Not knowing what to say, the words came out before he could stop them. He didn’t plan them, hadn’t measured the tone or weighed the impact the way he usually did. They just… slipped out. A last-minute shield thrown up before he could figure out what he was really trying to protect. Clinging to the one thing he knew how to do: hold his ground. Even if, this time, it didn’t feel like ground at all.

“Why did you even come here?” Nico asked, the fight gone from his voice. 

Jordan found himself wondering if he would’ve preferred Nico yell at him. Maybe throw something from the desk. He could’ve handled that better than the way his voice lost all its weight. It didn’t feel like winning. It didn’t feel like control. It felt worse. Nico didn’t look angry or defensive, just hurt. It hit differently than Jordan expected, stirring an urge to break the silence, to fix things, to explain something he didn’t fully understand himself. So he opened his mouth again, speaking without thinking, for the second time in less than a minute, which was already too much for someone like him.

“I didn’t handle it well,” he heard himself say. “I didn’t mean for you to end up in that situation. And I guess I should have called you earlier.” 

He kept his tone careful, like the words might collapse if he said them too fast. And somewhere in the back of his mind, in some skewed version of reality, Jordan thought maybe that would be enough. Not to make everything okay, he wasn’t that naive, but at least to shift things, to soften Nico’s expression. To earn a nod or a sigh or something close to forgiveness.

“I don’t wanna do this anymore,” Nico finally said. “I can’t.” 

Jordan understood what Nico was saying, what he meant, but his brain didn’t seem to know what to do with the words. They just sat there, rearranging the shape of the room. It unsettled him that Nico wanted to leave. That he could leave, that this could be over on Nico’s terms, and not on Jordan’s. 

“What would it take for you to stay?”

Nico met his eyes, clearly caught off balance by the question. He hesitated before eventually responding. “I don’t wanna do this if I’m just part of the rotation. I can’t be okay with you being with other people. It broke something in me, seeing that. If I’m not the only one then I’d rather not be one at all.” 

Out of everything Nico could’ve said, this was the worst. Simple words carrying a weight far heavier than Jordan knew he could carry. It was the kind of request that changed things, turning something temporary into something tangled. 

“You want to be exclusive?” Jordan didn’t need clarification, but part of him hoped he was wrong. That maybe he’d misunderstood, or Nico hadn’t meant it the way it sounded. 

“Yes.” 

“So you want a relationship.”

“That’s not what I said.” 

The words didn’t line up now. Being exclusive meant rules. Rules meant expectations. Expectations meant being in a relationship. There weren’t versions of this where people made demands like that and still called it nothing. Was Nico even aware of what he was asking for? 

“Being exclusive is being in a relationship.”

Nico dragged both hands down his face, frustration written all over him again. “No, Jordan. Being in a relationship is meeting each other’s family. Going on dates. Holding hands. Seeing each other when it’s not dark out. That’s a relationship.”

That wasn’t how it worked. Exclusivity wasn’t some neat, isolated thing. The second he agreed to that, it would snowball into obligations he never intended to take on. People wanted things. They always did. And Jordan didn’t know how to want those things back. Not in the way they wanted him to. Not in the way Nico deserved, probably.

With Nico, nothing about it looked right. Not on paper. Not in his head. A young boy with open eyes and no filter and too many feelings. Nothing about that fit the image Jordan had worked so carefully to protect. Jordan didn’t even know what to call what they were doing. What he did know was that what happened in the dark didn’t count. That being with a guy didn’t mean being with a guy. 

He’d always had women around, beautiful ones, easy to stand beside in photographs. No one asked questions when you showed up with a woman. It didn’t matter if the connection was shallow or if he lost interest halfway through dessert. What mattered was that it looked right. 

And yet, here he was, being asked to give it a name. To remove all the freedom Jordan had in the daylight. Nico wanted clarity, the kind of clarity that backed Jordan into corners. Because once you said it, once you admitted what you were doing and what it meant, there was no undoing it. 

Jordan had never liked the way some gay men carried it. It made him uncomfortable, the openness of it, the way they seemed so willing to be seen. There was something undignified about it, he used to think. He told himself he didn’t care what people did, but the truth was he’d always kept a wall up between himself and that world. 

That word. 

Gay. 

It felt too final, too exposed. He didn’t want to wear it, didn’t want to belong to it. What he had with Nico, whatever this was, he needed it to stay quiet. Without declarations or names, without exclusivity. Because the second he stepped into that space, let himself be seen that way, it would mean letting go of a version of himself he’d worked years to perfect. 

“I can’t give you that.” 

Nico exhaled, the sound shaky. “Okay. That’s fine.” 

It wasn’t fine. It was written all over him. 

“What does that mean?” 

“It means I understand.” 

Jordan should’ve left it there. What else was left to say? The words had done their damage, laid everything bare. 

Yet somehow, he found himself dragging out the moment, caught in a strange mix of regret and uncertainty. He stayed sitting on the bed, but the stillness didn’t hold the way it usually did. His hands drifted apart, fingers trailing along the blanket beneath him, smoothing out the fabric in short, distracted motions. It wasn’t like him to fidget. 

He finally stood, intending to leave the room and this uncomfortable situation altogether, but barely took one step before he stopped. 

“How would that play out?” he asked. “Theoretically, I mean. The… being exclusive part.”

Nico looked up at him, seemingly not understanding why Jordan hadn’t walked out already. “What do you mean?”

“I mean—what else?” Jordan clarified. “What comes after that? What more do you want?”

Nico shrugged, his shoulders tired. “Nothing. I just wanted to be with you.”

“And?” Jordan waited for the catch. 

“There’s no ‘and’.” 

No ‘and’. Just that. 

It sounded too clean, and too easy. No one wanted just to be with someone. That wasn’t how people worked. There was always something else beneath it, some hidden angle waiting to surface later. Jordan didn’t think Nico was deliberately lying, but people always thought they wanted simple things, until they didn’t. Until being wanted back wasn’t enough. Until the silence between texts got too long, or the attention shifted for a second, or something unspoken didn’t feel good enough anymore. Whatever Nico thought he felt, it wasn’t unconditional; it was transactional, dressed up to feel nicer. 

Still, the question lodged itself somewhere in the back of his mind, quiet and persistent: What would I really be giving up?

He hadn’t planned to think it. But once it was there, it started pulling at threads. What exactly was he holding onto so tightly? The women he dated out of convenience? Numbers he didn’t save? Forgettable nights with forgettable faces. There was nothing romantic about any of it. Nothing he missed. He just liked the control. The structure.

But standing here, facing someone who wasn’t asking to rearrange his life, just to be in it, Jordan found himself at the edge of a thought he didn’t know how to finish. 

He almost said something. Almost let the thought finish. But it caught on the verge of his instincts, old, practiced ones, and he pulled back before it could land. 

He shook his head slowly, barely a movement. “I can’t do that,” he said. “You deserve someone who doesn’t have to think this hard about it.” 

Nico didn’t look at him. He sat there, small in the desk chair, hands in his lap, eyes fixed on the floor like if he stayed still enough, the moment might pass without touching him. He didn’t flinch or cry. Just stayed quiet, like he’d already expected this.

Jordan crouched down in front of him, trying to meet a gaze that wouldn’t lift. He reached out and gently closed his hand around Nico’s. Nico didn’t pull away. He didn’t return the touch either.

“I’m sorry,” Jordan said softly, not sure if it was for what he’d said, or what he couldn’t say.

He let go and walked out.

It should’ve felt like relief. But somehow, all of it felt like losing.