THIRTY-SIX

I miss the elevator, so I take the stairs and book it down all fourteen flights. It’s a miracle I don’t trip over my own two feet and that Levi is still in the process of retrieving his ID and switching out his glasses for those goddamn Wayfarers when I emerge from the staircase, breathless and unreasonably sweaty. I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand before I say his name. When I do, Levi looks up, but I can’t see his eyes, just the wrinkle between his eyebrows.

“Can we plantscapade?”

He hesitates.

Then says, “Okay.”

So I follow him to the 1, my train, our train, ignoring the hesitation in his voice. The platform smells like stale urine so when we board a half-empty car, I exhale the breath I was very much holding. I shiver when the back of my arms brush the cool metal and notice my soft pink tape measure is still around my neck. I remove it and roll it up as I ask who we’re rescuing and learn about a fiddle leaf fig named Sid. Levi shows me a photo. Sid has lost most of their leaves. But Levi is on his way and he will make Sid better. He makes everything better.

“We’re on the same train,” Levi says.

“Yeah. Downtown 1.”

“No. Literally. You were sitting there.” Levi points to the empty seats across from us. FUCK IT is written in thick block print across the top of one of them. “I hid behind Eloise and debated what to say, if I should say anything at all. I almost didn’t. But then the person next to you stood and left and you started rubbing that peach hand sanitizer all over yourself. And just like that, I was seven years old, and you were chasing me around the Dallas Zoo with it anytime we touched anything.”

I remember that.

“Salmonella was and continues to be one of my greatest fears.”

Levi laughs. “That and a literal ‘Fuck it’ sign felt like, I don’t know…”

“Cosmic shit,” I finish.

I picture the image of myself that Levi first saw all those weeks ago, the girl who smelled like antiseptic peaches and muttered “No photos” to a boy she should’ve recognized, even behind a ficus. But Levi saw me. On crowded rush hour trains, in a fountain, at synagogue, during paint night. All my not-finest moments.

At seven.

At seventeen.

He has always seen me.

An abrupt jam on the brakes sends me sliding into him, my shoulder slamming into his before the train stops between stations. Minutes pass with nothing said but Fuck the MTA by a grandma with a thick Long Island accent and a knockoff Birkin bag. A static announcement that follows says nothing at all. Sorry for the inconvenience. We should be moving shortly. But the engine cuts off, the lights flicker, and we’re not moving shortly. Levi and I sit together in this darkness and I want it to make me brave again, like the night of the storm.

But Levi beats me to it.

“Soph and I broke up.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“You told her about the kiss.”

“No. We broke up after the storm.”

Wait.

“But that was weeks ago.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“You’re seriously asking me that?”

Holy shit.

He continues, “Soph was the first person I met when I moved to New York and I thought, this is it. I found my person. We’ve gone through so much together. Her mom got really sick sophomore year. Then my mom filed for divorce. But through all the awful, we were Levi and Soph. And then with the break, well, I wasn’t just going to give up when it got hard, like my dad… and I’m rambling but I guess what I’m trying to say is that night I realized maybe the break should’ve always been a breakup. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. But it felt selfish to admit that my feelings have changed, when you and Dani—”

“Are over too,” I confirm to Levi. “We’ve been over since before the kiss. But I’m leaving soon and I didn’t want whatever happened on the roof and my feelings to mess up things for you. I thought our plan could still work for at least one of us.”

“Well. Fuck the plan.”

“Fuck it,” I agree.

Then I press my lips against his in the darkness.

It’s more than a kiss. It’s an unspoken, undeniable declaration.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

“And to think we’re supposed to post about our amicable breakup today,” I joke against his lips.

Levi pulls away as the lights flicker. “Is that seriously what you’re thinking about right now?”

His furrowed brow wipes the stupid smile off my face. But I don’t want to post that anymore. Obviously. “Berkowitz—”

“Maybe we should still post it,” Levi says.

“What?”

“I mean. You’re leaving. So…” He shrugs, his voice trailing off. “Maybe it’s better to just call it.”

“Seriously?”

I hate the panic that is evident in my voice, how terrified I am that Levi doesn’t just mean the relationship… he means all of it. He’s running away and leaving me because it’s still apparently too hard to be a part of my life if I’m not right here. I can’t believe him. We’re not ten anymore. But already I feel his absence, hear it in his voice even if we’re on a stalled subway with nowhere to run.

“You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“Leaving me.”

“Technically, you’re the one leaving—”

“You know what I mean.”

Levi looks away and removes his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. “It’s not because you’re leaving. It’s because being around you is such a mindfuck.”

I flinch. “Ouch.”

“I don’t know what’s real anymore. I…” He pauses, considering his words, like he always does. “All that pretending we did? It stopped feeling fake so fast for me. But I could never tell what you were thinking, until that night up on the roof. I thought we were finally on the same page—”

“Were?”

“—so seeing screenshots that said we’re ‘one thousand percent just friends’? It sucked.”

“I promise it did not suck as much as the guilt of kissing someone I thought had a somewhat-maybe-girlfriend.”

“I know! Okay? But I didn’t know how to tell you when you still seemed so all in on Dani. So it was easier to keep pretending. Until it became actually impossible. But when I stopped, you doubled down and told Soph before I could even say anything. It made me question if I misread all of it.”

“That’s not fair,” I mutter. “You can’t expect me to assume or be on your timeline when I didn’t have all the information.”

Levi shrugs. “It’s not. But you haven’t been entirely honest either.”

Before I can say another word, the engine buzzes below us and we are in slow motion, crawling ahead to the next station. I unclench my palms to find nail marks so deep I’m lucky that I didn’t break skin. I spent so much time pushing away my feelings for Levi Berkowitz in the name of preserving our friendship only to feel him slipping away right in front of my face, and I don’t even understand why because I think we finally want the same thing? I don’t know. We’re talking in circles around the truth. Again.

So I say, “You want honest? Bumping into you on this train was the best thing that’s happened to me since strawberry-lavender jam. I don’t want to lose you again.”

I reach for his hand but he pulls back, doesn’t let our fingers twine together, and my stomach is on the subway floor. We’re inching along at a glacial pace, nowhere near the station, but Levi stands.

It’s one thing to know that you always fuck up a good thing, but it’s another to feel it in your bones that it’s happening and not even understand why.

“I want to call it. I don’t want to be a rebound, or your Insta boyfriend. I don’t want to always be second-guessing if you’re more into our picture-perfect story than you are into me.”

I—

My heart is now on the floor with my stomach. “What does that mean?”

“Come on, Fitz. We built an entire relationship on childhood nostalgia and real memories and it was so believable that I started to forget it was fake… until you would pull out your phone and reduce an amazing day we had to a post. With you, everything is reduced to a post.”

“Seriously?”

“Part of me gets it. I mean, you’re a content creator—”

“Levi—”

“—but I’m not content.”

I’m hot, with fists curled at my sides. For the first time, I feel like I’m talking to a stranger and I hate it. I wipe sweat from my upper lip. It’s too hot in here. I’m going to be sick.

Where is this coming from?

Levi’s expression softens. “Please don’t cry.”

I wipe my eyes. “That’s a messed-up thing to say. That I reduce everything to a post.”

“It’s how Dani felt too, isn’t it?”

My phone slips out of my hand and the screen splinters into further disarray. I reach for it, wordless and just as broken. I confided that to him about our breakup. What Dani said. How it made me feel. The whole reason for my hiatus. Why I got invested in social media in the first place and how complicated that got. He said he understood. For him to throw it back at me cuts so deep and I’m so done. Just as we arrive at the next station. Finally.

Levi scratches the back of his neck. “I just mean. You said…”

His voice trails off as the doors open and I exit this hell train without looking back. Levi doesn’t follow me and I hate how much I wanted him to. How stupid am I to believe that Levi Berkowitz was the one person who could accept every part of me? I am too much. I am never enough. Always have been. Always will be.

It’s a forty-five-minute walk back to Union Square but there’s no way I’m setting foot on another subway right now.

So I walk.

And sweat.

And cry.

And feel.

And as awful as this moment and these feelings are, I’m comforted by the city streets and the people who just let me be—who don’t ask if I’m okay, or look at me funny, or look at me at all. Everyone here minds their business and lets me unapologetically weep and tearstain these blocks. I hate that I have to leave a place that feels like a custom pair of jeans. A city where I fit just right. Maybe I’m too much for the people in my life. But nothing is too much for New York, where millions of people can be alone together.