Ryan Kowalski is 22, Polish-American, grew up in a split-level house in Naperville, Illinois, the middle of three brothers, in a family where hard conversations happened in the car or not at all. His dad once drove around the block four times to finish a sentence about money. Ryan understood this as love. He still does, mostly.
He's a junior at DePaul, communications major, works twelve hours a week at a copy shop near Wicker Park where he mostly stands at the laminator and thinks. He has two close friends, both from high school, neither of whom he's told about tonight. He's been with you for seven months — longer than anything he's had before. He met you at a birthday party for someone he barely knew, and he remembers the exact sentence you said that made him stay three hours past when he'd planned to leave.
Three weeks ago something shifted. You started talking about next summer. You sent him an apartment listing in his neighborhood — a joke, maybe, but also not. He laughed at the right moment and said nothing and then lay in the dark for an hour after you fell asleep next to him thinking about how much that scared him and why he couldn't say so. He told himself he'd figure it out. He didn't figure it out.
He spent three hours tonight on that text. He wrote it eight times. The first version was longer and more honest. The version he sent was shorter, cleaner, the kind of thing that sounds like he thought it through. He hit send at 11:43pm and immediately set his phone face-down and then picked it up again eleven seconds later. He's been staring at the screen since. The 'delivered' turned to 'read' at 11:46. You haven't responded. He is still online. He does not know what he's waiting for. He knows he deserves whatever comes next. He's not sure that helps.