Chapter 42 What Do You Want
Elias POV
Ivy asks me on a Wednesday afternoon, which is unremarkable except that she does it the way she does most important things, without warning, in the middle of doing something else entirely.
We are making tea in the small kitchen at the end of our dorm corridor. She is waiting for the kettle and scrolling through something on her phone and I am leaning against the counter thinking about the essay I have not started yet when she says, without looking up:
"What do you actually want? Not from Noah. For yourself."
I look at her. She is still looking at her phone.
"Where did that come from?"
"I've been thinking about it for a few days." She puts the phone down and looks up at me. "You've been so focused on him. On reading him, on what he needs, on whether he's okay, on whether the team situation is going to affect him. And I just realized I haven't heard you talk about you in a while."
The kettle starts to rumble.
"I'm fine," I say.
"That's not what I asked."
"Ivy."
"Elias."
She says my name the way she always does when she is not going to be moved, which is very like a door closing politely but completely. I look at the kettle. I look at the ceiling. I look back at her.
"I don't know," I say finally.
She nods like this is exactly what she expected and hands me a mug.
The question does not leave.
That is the thing about Ivy. She does not push once she has planted something. She just lets it sit in you and trusts that it will work itself out if you are honest enough to let it. Which is infuriating, because she is usually right.
I carry it through the rest of the afternoon. Through my three o'clock seminar on literary theory that I genuinely love and cannot focus on today. Through the walk back across campus in the early evening when the light goes gold and everything looks softer than it is. Through dinner, through the shower, through the hour I spend reading without reading.
What do you want.
For yourself.
The question sounds simple. It is not. Because when I try to answer it the first thing that comes up is Noah, which is not an accident, which is in fact the problem Ivy was pointing at. I have been so deep inside the project of being visible for him, of existing as a constant in his landscape, of being patient and present and unbreakable, that I have not stopped to ask what I need the story to look like for me.
Not for him. For me.
I want to be loved out loud.
That is the first honest answer that comes when I stop trying to manage what comes up.
Not secretly. Not in kitchens at parties and late nights with the door closed and moments that belong to the two of us and no one else. Not as a thing that exists in the margins of someone else's life while the main text stays carefully separate.
I want to be the person someone chooses in broad daylight. In front of the team, the campus, the donors and the board and the people who use the word fixable about something that is not broken.
I have always known that about myself.
The difference now is that there is a specific person on the other side of that wanting. And he is standing at the edge of it, one foot in and one foot still measuring the distance.
I also want other things. Things that have nothing to do with Noah.
I want to write. Not just for seminars. Not just the careful academic prose I hand in with my name at the top. Something real, something that has my actual voice in it, something that does not soften or translate the way I think and feel into something more acceptable.
I want to finish my degree in a way that means something. Not just the certificate at the end, not just the grade. The thing itself. The years of reading and thinking and building a version of myself that can hold ideas with both hands without dropping the ones that complicate easy answers.
I want Ivy to be okay. I want her own life to open up the way she deserves, with someone who looks at her the way she looks at the pieces she makes, with that quiet total absorption.
I want mornings that are not braced for impact.
Ivy is reading when I come back to the room. She looks up when I sit on my bed and she reads my face the way she always does, quickly and accurately.
"And?" she says.
"I want to be loved out loud," I say. "And I want to write something real. And I want mornings that are not braced for impact."
She smiles. It is not a big smile. It is the small kind that means something.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay?"
"Yeah. That's a good list. Is Noah on it?"
"Yes."
"Is he the whole list?"
"No," I say.
"Good," she says, and goes back to her book.
I lie back on my bed and look at the ceiling.
The question has an answer now. It is not complete and it is not tidy and it is going to keep changing as I do.
But it is mine. That is the part that matters. It belongs to me, separate from Noah and separate from the campus and separate from every person who has ever made an opinion about the boy in the red skirt.
Just mine.
I hold it carefully, like something I am still learning the weight of.