“And do you feel them?” I asked as bolts of heat exploded in my chest and tapered into streams of sparks down my arms.

“I feel mine and I feel yours too,” he promised. “What changed?”

“Nothing,” I answered. It was a surface response that was anything but. Nothing changing had changed everything.

“You’ll love it here,” Cal assured me, as if it mattered.

“I’ll love you there, and that will be enough.”

“I’m worried you’ll change your mind,” he admitted, and I could hear the tightness in his tone.

“That’s not like you,” I teased. “You’re still optimistic, aren’t you? Who would you be without hope?”

“You,” Cal offered. I could hear his smirk through the receiver. “Maybe I’ve become more cautious with time.”

“Maybe I’ve become less cautious.”

“Then I’ll be less cautious too. But give me a date. Make it real,” he urged, “and I’ll be who I was before I became who I’m not.”

“Should I just pick a date out of thin air?”

“Or choose tomorrow,” Cal laughed. Fuck, I’d missed the sound. “Even then wouldn’t be soon enough.”

“One month from today. I have a lot of things to get in order. Maybe two,” I corrected. “Can you wait two?”

“That’s sixty opportunities for you to back out,” he tsked. “Sixty opportunities for me to get my hopes up only for them to be crushed like a stink bug.”

“You never smelled that bad,” I joked, relishing in another round of laughter. “Tell me your phone number and your address, just in case I can’t get a hold of you.”

He did, and I jotted it down, thinking it odd that I’d be living at that address in two months, in a place I’d never been, a place I’d never thought I would want to go.

“I love you,” Cal told me, “and I love that you’re finally loving you too.”

“I love you enough to try.” To try San Francisco, to try to love myself, to try to live my life at an address I barely knew, to try to travel worlds away from who I was and who I thought I would be.

It was August when I ventured to tell the Mikhailov men about my move in the most circumspect way. I didn’t want to make the conversation too specific, worried they would ask for more details if they thought I had a solid plan, so I’d attempted to keep it theoretical.

“I’m thinking of leaving Chicago,” I said as we sat on the balcony off Taros and Sally’s living room, a balcony that was mine before it became foreign and full of fake begonias.

“Leaving for a vacation?” Igor asked, raising an eyebrow skeptically. “The number game pays you that well?”