"Like I'm homeless and hiding it from my boyfriend. Which is what's happening. That's exactly what's happening." His voice cracks, just barely. "I didn't — I was going to tell you. After the apartment. When it was done and I had the keys and I could say 'this thing happened but look, I made it anyway.' I was going to make it a funny story. The time I slept in a laundromat and then got my own apartment. Like a triumph narrative."
"Instead of telling me while it was happening."
"Because telling you while it's happening means it's real. It means I failed. It means the plan —"
"You didn't fail."
"I got kicked out of a shelter, Silas. The lowest rung. The safety net under the safety net. And I couldn't even keep that."
"You got kicked out for protecting someone."
"Doesn't matter why. Matters that I'm here." He gestures at the laundromat. The machines, the fluorescents, the plastic chairs. "This is where I am. This is who I am. A person who sits in laundromats because he doesn't have anywhere else."
"You have somewhere else."
"I have your room because you feel sorry for me."
"That's not —"
"It IS, though. Don't tell me it isn't. Thursday night I was your boyfriend who happened to live at a shelter. Tonight I'm your boyfriend who's homeless. Those are different things. The first one is a story. The second one is a problem."
"You're not a problem."
"I'm sitting in a laundromat at eight PM on a Monday. I have a bruise on my face and a backpack and a couple weeks until an apartment I can barely afford. That's a problem, Silas. I'm a problem."
"You're a person I love who's having a hard time. That's not a problem. That's a Tuesday."
He blinks. "You —"
"I love you." It comes out the way truth does. Not planned, not performed. Just there, between us, in a laundromat on Fifth Street that smells like bleach and static. "I love you and I don't care if you live in a shelter or a laundromat or a palace. I love you and you're not a problem and you're coming home with me right now."
"Silas —"
"Not as a rescue. Not as charity. As my boyfriend who I love and who has a drawer in my room and a mug at the bar and a stool that's been empty all evening because you were HERE instead of THERE."
"I can't just —"
"Stay with me until the apartment's ready. Then you sign your lease and you move in and it's yours. Everything you built. Everything you earned. Nobody takes that from you."
"But the gap —"
"The gap is just a gap, Dev. It's not a failure. It's not proof that you can't do it. It's the space between a shelter that kicked you out for doing the right thing and an apartment you paid for with your own money. That's not a gap. That's a bridge. And I'm asking you to let me be part of it."
He stares at me. The fluorescent light, the hum of dryers, the elderly woman folding towels ten feet away like two people aren't having the most important conversation of their lives in a laundromat.
"You said you love me," Devin says.
"Yeah."
"In a laundromat."
"Apparently."
"That's not how it's supposed to go. There's supposed to be — I don't know. Candles. A nice dinner. A moment."
"This is the moment. The moment where you're sitting in a plastic chair trying to figure out where to sleep and I'm telling you I love you and asking you to come home. That's the moment. It doesn't need candles."
"It could use better lighting."