Quite the Pair

‘No.’

It’s a word I’ve heard more times in my life than I ever could’ve anticipated.

No, you didn’t get the job.

No, we don’t see you as a leading man.

No, we don’t see you as that, either.

No is an everyday thing for an actor. It’s expected. Inevitable. Boring, even. You put yourself out there, time and time again, praying to whoever the hell might be listening that someone will utter the three-letter word with the power to literally change the course of your life. The word that means you’ll be able to pay your rent on time this month and eat something other than Cheerios, three meals a day. The word that will preserve your very last shred of self-worth.

When a yes comes, it’s pure ecstasy. It’s a shot of adrenaline mixed with liquid joy. You ride that high for as long as you possibly can, rationing out the happiness, because you know there are a thousand more no’s lurking around the corner. They hide in the shadows, biding their time, and then, when your life is finally starting to feel like one big glorious ball of yes, they pounce. An all-out, no-holds-barred ambush. The no’s tear you to pieces and flee the scene, leaving you with nothing.

Then you do it all over again.

And again. And again.

Because, for some reason, you still love this thing you do more than anything in the world.

After a lifetime of no’s, I’m never shocked to receive one. Not even mildly surprised. But in this moment—down on one knee, an open ring box in my hands, candles flickering all around us—‘no’ is the very last word I expected to hear.

‘What?’ I say, because how else could I possibly respond?

Tyler stares down at me, his brown eyes cold. ‘No.’

‘What do you mean, no?’

He huffs. Shakes his head. Glances around our apartment like he doesn’t know how he got here, or like he’s looking for something. My dignity, maybe.

‘Do you mean not now?’ I ask, still on one knee, because my limbs don’t seem to work anymore. ‘Like, you’re not ready, or . . .’

‘No, Austin. I mean, no, I will not marry you. Period.’

‘But—’ The apartment sways and I place a hand on the oak coffee table to steady myself.

‘Will you get up, please? And put that ring away. You’re making me uncomfortable.’

He blows out the carefully arranged cluster of candles beside me, then makes his way around the living room systematically extinguishing the rest of the ninety-six candles I lit while he was at the gym. Each of his staccato puffs feels like a punch to the gut.

Slowly, warily, I push myself up to standing, my brain and body reeling. I can’t feel my feet.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘This—’‘What do you not understand?’ he says, his back to me now. He walks into the open kitchen and turns, leaning his hands on the granite counter. He stares at me, waiting for me to respond, and my mind flickers with a cruel parallel of that night in Hell’s Kitchen, three years ago. Tyler was in a tight white tank top and black jeans, leaning on the end of the crowded bar. Our eyes locked. He held my gaze for a second then looked away. But I didn’t look away. I couldn’t. There was something about his jet black hair, his sleek brows, the line of his jaw. The way his triceps flexed as he gently rocked back and forth on the bar.

A friend said in my ear, ‘Tyler Yoon. He goes to my gym. Used to date Michael Montano. So hot.’

I can’t remember which friend it was. I can’t remember what I said in reply, or if I replied at all. Only two people existed in that moment. Standing in bright white spotlights at opposite ends of the bar. Right then, as if cued by cosmic stage directions, Tyler turned and locked eyes with me again. And smiled.

‘What do you not understand?’ he repeats now. He’s looking at me like I’m a complete stranger, some psycho who broke into his picture-perfect West Village walk-up and lit eight dozen candles in his living room.

‘Everything is great,’ I say, my voice weak. Heat builds behind my eyes. ‘Right? I mean, we’re happy. Aren’t we?’

‘We’re . . . Things are fine.’

‘But my party on Saturday. You threw me a surprise party. You invited everyone we know. You bought me a watch.’

‘I know, but—’

‘But what?’

Tyler scoffs and pushes off the counter. Folds his arms. ‘This isn’t what I want.’

‘Marriage? Or . . .?’ I can’t even bring myself to say it.

‘I thought we were on the same page.’

‘Well, I just proposed to you and you said no, so I think we might have been reading entirely different books, Tyler.’

He chews his bottom lip, gently shaking his head.

I lift my brow. ‘What page were you on?’

‘Come on. Do I really have to spell it out?’

‘I mean, yeah. I think maybe you do.’

His face twitches, like he’s making some kind of mental calculation. Then, ‘I don’t love you.’

My legs buckle and I lower myself onto the edge of the antique coffee table.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But I don’t.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Stop saying that.’ There’s a sharpness in his eyes I’ve never seen before. ‘You sound—’

I shiver before he even says the word.

‘—pathetic.’

I drop my gaze to the rug. It’s a coarse, ugly grey thing Tyler bought for a small fortune from some ultra-bougie store in Chelsea. ‘I fucking hate this rug.’

‘What?’ He scowls at me from across the room.

Keeping my eyes down, I ask, ‘How can you not love me?’

‘Austin, I’m not doing this.’

‘Doing what?’ I look up.

He opens the stainless-steel fridge and pulls out a little bottle of San Pellegrino. It fizzes gently as he unscrews the tin lid.

‘I’m not letting you make me out to be the asshole here, just because I don’t want to marry you. It’s not fair.’

‘Not fair?’ My eyes bulge. ‘Tyler, what about this is fair for me?’

‘See?’ He jabs a finger at me through the air. ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Making me out to be the bad guy. I mean, yes, we’ve been dating for a while, but—’

‘For over three years.’

‘—that doesn’t mean I automatically have to want to marry you.’ He takes a sip of sparkling water. ‘It’s not fair to put me in this position. Down on one knee with a fucking ring box and six hundred candles? Like, what am I supposed to do? Say yes because I feel bad for you? Get married to someone I don’t love just because he asked the question? How is that fair on either of us?’

I glance down at the ring box in my left hand. It’s still open. I guess ring boxes aren’t supposed to be closed until the ring has made its way onto someone’s finger. Tyler’s finger. We should be crying happy tears right now. We should be tearing each other’s clothes off and fucking like we did that first night in Hell’s Kitchen. We should be calling everyone we know to tell them the news, posting a photo on Instagram with a tacky, unoriginal caption like, ‘He asked and I said yes!’

But here we are: me sitting on the coffee table with distinctly unhappy tears starting to slide down my cheeks; Tyler sipping San Pellegrino in the kitchen in his gym gear like this is just another Monday night. He feels distant. Closed off. It’s like the kitchen counter is a thirty-foot brick wall that he’s built between us.

I say, ‘Did you ever love me?’ then immediately regret asking.

‘Yes,’ he replies, his stony exterior cracking ever so slightly. ‘At the beginning. Things were . . . But then . . .’

I wipe my cheeks. ‘But then . . .?’

‘Then the whole fucking world was suddenly falling apart, and you moved in with me because—’

‘Because we wanted to live together.’

Tyler places the glass bottle on the counter. ‘Because your show got cancelled and you had no job and nowhere to live and it made sense for us not to be locked inside our apartments all alone for like, months on end.’

‘So you asked me to move in with you, what, out of pity? As a last resort?’

‘It wasn’t a last resort,’ he says, with the exact same tone he used for I’m not letting you make me out to be the asshole here. ‘I wanted it. I wanted you. But then everything went back to normal and . . . at some point—I don’t even know when—it was like I realised I’d been wearing a blindfold the whole time.

And when I took it off, I could suddenly see how different we were, how we wanted different things, how our lives didn’t . . . fit. And then . . .’

But this time I don’t need to ask the question. It’s unbelievably obvious. The kind of obvious that feels like a hammer to the sternum. Because the only way you could have missed the truth of the situation is that yes, you really are just as pathetic as your boyfriend—ex-boyfriend?—thinks you are.

‘Who is it?’ As I say the words, I hear my mother’s voice echoing through the years.

Tyler glances at his feet. ‘You don’t know him.’

‘What’s his name?’

His head snaps back up, defensive. ‘Does it matter?’

And no, it doesn’t matter. My relationship is over, regardless of whether his name is Tom or Kyle or David.

‘I need to take a shower,’ Tyler says, already halfway to the bathroom. ‘You should pack.’

I could argue. I could fight. I could throw things. But there’s no point.My left hand, out of my conscious control, closes around the ring box and it shuts with a deafening clack. The sound is a full stop, a period signalling the end of this conversation. The end of us.

Tyler starts the shower and I stay where I am on the coffee table, listening as he pulls back the squeaky shower curtain, steps under the water and pulls the curtain closed with another metal on-metal screech. The ring box feels like a hunk of lead in my hand. I manage to loosen my grip just enough that it falls onto the ugly grey rug at my feet.

I pull my phone out of my pocket in a daze and call Sydney. It rings and rings. No answer. I hang up and stare around the room. How did I never realise there was no evidence whatsoever that I existed here? The furniture is Tyler’s, the paintings of naked men on the walls are Tyler’s, the photos on the TV console of Tyler and his family at his cousin’s wedding in South Korea are Tyler’s. There are a handful of my books on the floating shelves, a candle Sydney gave me last week for my thirtieth, a couple of plants on the windowsill that came with me when I moved in, but all of that could be anyone’s. It’s not like a half-read copy of The Song of Achilles, a tobacco and leather-scented candle and a potted monstera scream ‘Austin Miller lives here’ any more than they scream ‘Literally any gay man in New York City lives here.’

I’m practically erased from Tyler’s life already.

I try to call Sydney again—no answer—then drag myself to the bedroom.

There, on my nightstand, I find the one irrefutable piece of evidence that this was my home, too: a framed photo of Tyler and me from a week in Fire Island last year. We’re both in Speedos—my body pink from the sun, Tyler’s tan skin glowing—our arms around each other, heads pressed together, mid-laugh.

I stand in the middle of the room and cry. I don’t sob or wail or moan. I let the tears spill down my cheeks in silence, my breaths shallow and uneven.

A small part of my brain is yelling, This can’t be true! This isn’t real! This is some kind of nightmare! But the other part—the slightly more rational part—knows that this is very, very real. If anything, the past three years were the dream and I’ve just woken up to my sad, painful reality.

At some point I must pick up the photo frame from my nightstand and perch on the edge of the bed with it, because that’s where Tyler finds me.

‘Jesus Christ, Austin,’ he says, like he’s never seen a sorrier sight. He has a white towel slung low across his waist, his hair still dripping from the shower. He tosses his sweaty gym gear on the bed beside me. ‘I thought you were going to pack? I need you to leave. Like, now.’

I can’t find a reply.

He sighs, then grabs some clothes from the closet, drops his towel to the floor and turns away from me, like I’m no longer entitled to see his dick. Like that honour is reserved for someone else now. Tom or Kyle or David.

I watch, listless, as he pulls on a pair of white Calvins, blue jeans and an oversized black T-shirt, wondering if this is the last time I’ll ever see him.

‘I’m going out.’ He doesn’t say where. Or who with. I guess he doesn’t owe me that information anymore.

‘I’ll be home around nine,’ he says, before adding, ‘And you will be gone. Are we clear?’

‘Yes.’ The word slips out before I have a chance to stop it. ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘It’s what I want,’ he says. ‘And look. I’m sorry, Austin. I really am. But it’s better this way. Trust me.’

I put the frame back on the nightstand. Wipe my cheeks. Take a breath. ‘Sure. Of course.’

‘Goodbye, Austin.’ He forces a smile, then leaves me alone in the bedroom. His bedroom.

When I finally hear the front door close, I unclasp my new silver watch and slip it off. I place it by the photo on the nightstand, then pull out my phone and type a message to Sydney.

I need you