Ethan in Gold

by Amy Lane

  Jonah shrugged and swallowed his bite. “She’s gotten better at not fighting us. I think she hopes that if she straightens up enough, Dad’ll come home. Sometimes I think so too.”

  “And then what happens?”

  Jonah shrugged and took a bite of his fajita to hide a wistful smile. It didn’t mask the shininess of his eyes. He swallowed and launched into a speech that sounded like he’d rehearsed it in his head. “And then we have a little more money, and I can get a car, and go to college, and not worry about my mom, or my dad, who looks older every day, and Melly will….” He paused and took a drink of his soda. “Well, Melly doesn’t really get better. It’s a genetic thing, and eventually she’s going to need a lung transplant, and her kidneys are going to want to shut down, and….”

  Ethan felt his heart break a little. It was clear—very clear—that Jonah’s little sister had become his whole world, and the entire world for his family as well.

  He couldn’t help it. He reached out and covered Jonah’s hand and told himself that he’d do it for anyone—and he would. Dex, Tommy, Chase, Kane, Digger. But he’d slept with them, and his body knew theirs for comfort, even on the porn set, and touching Jonah like this was…

  Different.

  He sucked in his stomach and clenched his thighs, trying to suppress the sudden violent curling of desire there. This was not the place, or the time, or the person—

  Jonah smiled at him, a clear and whole smile with no shadows or secrets in his eyes. “I mean, I’ve got my entire life, right? But for Amelia, that might not be that long.”

  Ethan squeezed his hand and released it, then sat up to his fajitas, carefully not looking at that incorruptible smile. “You got a real nice family,” he said, eating steadily and keeping his eyes on his plate. “You got nothing to be ashamed about, being that dedicated.”

  “Ethan?”

  Ethan shook his head and filled another fajita.

  “Just, you know. Like you said. Take advantage of your time with people who love you like that. I mean, you’ve got a deadline, right? But not everyone thinks about that, that you don’t have all the time with your family to make it right.”

  Jonah didn’t put his hand on Ethan’s hand, because Ethan was very carefully keeping his hands busy with his food.

  He put it on Ethan’s knee instead, and Ethan rabbited a look at him. His entire body started screaming touch/sex/come and his mind was immersed in the misery of knowing that of anyone, he was not the person who should want these things from Jonah.

  “Do you have some place to go for Thanksgiving?” Jonah asked.

  Ethan swallowed because he could field this question. “Well, Chase is coming home in a few days, and Tommy says if he does good with his welcome-home party, then we can have Thanksgiving there. It’s a nice place, and pretty big. And I’m pretty sure if we don’t do it there, we’ll do it at Dex’s, because he’s had New Year’s parties there—nothing big, just some beers, some board games, watching the ball drop. But one of them will pick it up, so I’m covered.”

  “Oh.” Jonah’s face fell. “I was going to ask you to come to ours, you know. So, you know, you didn’t have to go it alone.”

  Ethan thought of how easy it was with his work friends: they all knew what they did for a living. They were over it. They could crack all the dirty jokes they wanted, and everyone would know it for shoptalk. They could hang on each other’s necks or shoulders, and if someone was uncomfortable, they’d say, “Get off me, you moron!” but nobody gave a shit if you were gay or if they were straight—they just fucking touched. And there was no judgment, and no fear of judgment. If a guy brought his girlfriend, she knew what he did for a living.

  And he thought of a meal like this one, or Thanksgiving with Jonah’s parents, and of all the things he couldn’t say riding the surface of his brain.

  “That’s nice of you,” he said, smiling so Jonah would know it was sincere. “But I’m not the kind of guy you want your parents to meet. I… I feel guilty just talking to your little sister, like I’m gonna make her dirty somehow. Maybe, you know, just comic-book stores and talking when I’m hanging out with Tommy.”

  Jonah grimaced, but he didn’t take his hand off Ethan’s knee immediately. “Okay, so you keep talking about what a manwhore you are,” he said. He gave Ethan’s knee a little pat then and went back to his fajitas. “But you never give me a number. I mean, how many blowjobs equal a manwhore? How many guys do you have to bang? I mean, is a hand job a handshake, does that count? Seriously—what makes you more of a manwhore than the kid I knew in the tenth grade who pulled trains in the bathroom?”

  He didn’t do it for money.

  “Look, let’s just drop it,” Ethan said, remembering that taste of self-hatred he’d had after Curtis had tried to kill himself. “Did I tell you about Chase’s surprise party? We picked turtles, right, as a theme, because Tommy brought the turtle home, and he said the thought of it cheered Chase up. Anyway, so there’s a thousand things you got to remember—like we got a cake with a turtle and cups with turtles—I never threw parties for anyone. Man, I don’t know how those moms at places like Chuck E. Cheese do it! There’s a thousand stupid details and you’re all worried about food or no food and—”

  “Didn’t your mom ever throw you a birthday party like that?” Jonah asked, laughing. “I mean, even after Melly, my parents made sure I got a party that was all me. We’d go all sorts of places—that was my day.”

  “Uhm, not since I was five. After that, we had a quiet party in the house, family only.” A small ice-cream cake, one or two gifts Mom had approved of. Vaguely, he remembered his fifth birthday party with his entire class, but that had been once, before the bad thing, and he hated remembering that time because it just made him angrier at himself that he ever mentioned the stupid fucking school employee and his molesting penis.

  “Why?” Jonah asked, finishing off his second fajita. “What happened when you were five?”

  “Are you done? I’m done. I really want something sweet—hey, they’ve got a fudge factory down by that comic-book place in Old Town. Want to go there for dessert?”

  Jonah’s eyebrows shot up, his eyes widened, and his mouth—a soft, pink little bow of a mouth, not full but ripe—compressed into a bow. “Uhm, I’ve got another fajita to go.”

  Ethan nodded and shoved half of his last fajita in his mouth in one bite. “Olkay, affer dat,” he said through his full mouth, not even grimacing when he crunched into a hot pepper.

  Jonah nodded and compressed that sweet pink mouth. “Yeah,” he said before taking another slow, deliberate bite of his fajita. “Sure. We can go there when we’re done at the comic-book store, Ethan. Nothing’s set in stone.”

  Ethan smiled and nodded and finished the other three swallows needed to get that bite down. His next bite was smaller but just as quick, and he wondered how fast he’d have to talk when he was done to avoid any questions like that.

  “You’re not fooling anyone, you know,” Jonah said calmly before he took a sip of his soda.

  Ethan paused after swallowing. God, this was a good fajita—spicy and wine flavored. He hated having to shotgun it like this. “About what?” he asked and shoved the rest of the thing in his mouth. He wiped his face while he was still chewing and got ready to get up and bolt to the bathroom, all the better to have an excuse to change the motherfucking cocksucking come-whoring subject.

  “You, trying to scare me off with what a slut you are and how you’re all okay about your family. It’s not rocket science, Ethan. Just because I wear my own family on my sleeve, that doesn’t mean I can’t see that you’re trying to hide big parts of yourself under fajita.”

  Oh God. “Yeah, why start hiding yourself now when the whole fucking world has already seen it,” he muttered. He stood up and wiped his fingers on the napkin, then pulled out his card and set it on the table. “Hey, could you give this to the guy when he comes back? I’ve got to hit the head.”

  Jonah didn’t lo
ok any of the things he should have. He didn’t look resigned or upset or put off. He just sort of narrowed his eyes like Ethan was a challenge and he wasn’t used to taking someone up on challenges.

  Ethan couldn’t be a challenge. He got to the bathroom and rinsed off his face, trying to remember what he was doing here. He wanted a friend. A friend who liked comic books and anime. That was his goal. His mission. He had all the fuck buddies, all of the sex he could possibly want. He had a nice, tight little circle of people who would touch him whenever he needed them to—

  But no one who smiled at him like Jonah.

  God. He was such an asshole. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’d be outing Tommy at work, he’d go in there right now and tell Jonah God’s honest truth, and maybe sign a flier for him and everything. But it was one thing to out yourself to scare a kid away—it was something else entirely to out the kid’s boss, and it would be a really shitty way to repay Tommy for all of the nights Ethan had spent on his couch. And a shitty thing to do to Chase too, because Chase was counting on Tommy having a grown-up job and proving they could do it.

  So this was going to have to be it. He’d finish this day—and make it a good one, because God, if anyone deserved a grand day out, it was Jonah—and then he’d just forget the kid’s number.

  He came back out and made a determined effort to talk about anything else—Spider-Man, Superman, the Hulk, hell, anything else—while he signed the credit slip and took one last harried drink of his soda.

  And knocked it over into his lap.

  “Fuck,” he said numbly, looking at the spreading wetness all over his jeans.

  Jonah had his palm up to his mouth and was staring at Ethan in shock. “Damn.”

  The waiter hustled out with about five cloths to wipe Ethan down and, well, feel him up, which was working until Jonah snapped, “Here, give me that!” and took the cloths away from him.

  They both watched as the waiter—tall and stringy, but with curly brown hair and smirky, long-faced good looks—grinned unrepentantly and took a step back to let Jonah take over.

  Suddenly Jonah was right there in Ethan’s space, and that thing—that wood-in-the-pants thing—that had been sort of happening with the waiter’s slow, seductive strokes up and down Ethan’s legs, was definitely happening with Jonah’s short no-nonsense dabs.

  “Here,” Ethan said, his throat dry. “I’ll get it. We’re gonna have to go by my place and change. It’s on the way. It won’t take long.”

  He stood up, and before he could get to it, he felt Jonah behind him, mopping up some of the soda on his ass. His breath caught, and he tried not to be too brusque grabbing the towel. He turned a green look to the waiter and said, “We’ll just take these. I hope that’s okay?”

  The waiter nodded enthusiastically. “Just promise to come back while I’m working, Ethan—and by all means wear those pants!”

  Ethan felt it, heat sweeping up from his chest to his cheeks, and he gave a weak smile. “Uhm, I’ll do my best,” he muttered and then got the hell out of the restaurant.

  Jonah trotted after him, casting looks behind them. “Do, uhm, we know that guy?”

  Ethan shrugged and looked straight ahead, spotting his car in the parking lot and heading for it like a laser beam. “No—he must have seen my credit slip.” God, that came out good. For a second, as they hopped into the car, he thought about writing a long involved thank-you note to Chase and Tommy—to Tommy, for trying to warn him about how awful this would be, and to Chase for not going for the other wrist after living like this for a year with his girlfriend. Ethan couldn’t have made it. After watching Curtis’s two attempts, he knew all the ins and outs—they wouldn’t have been able to sew his veins back together with a quilting machine and half a bale of raw silk. He had never in his life wanted out of a conversation or a moment or a personal connection so badly, and at the same time, all he wanted to do was crush Jonah in his arms and beg him not to leave.

  He was shifting in a misery of uncomfortable silence and wet pants on the way back to his apartment when Jonah said, “Is it true that the Hulk is your favorite?”

  Ethan grunted. “Did I say that? Yeah, I must have said that, so I guess, yeah. He’s my favorite.”

  “Hunh,” Jonah said, musing, and Ethan risked a glance at him. Jonah was facing straight ahead, but he pursed his lips like he was thinking and his eyes slid sideways toward Ethan.

  “Hunh what?”

  “Hunh, my old English teacher had a thing with superheroes. She used to say that there were heroic archetypes everywhere—on television, in the movies, video games, and especially in comic-book superheroes. She had… well, she called it the Superhero Pantheon of Heroic Archetypes, and each superhero was a specific type of hero.”

  Some of the discomfort slipped away as the subject flowed over Ethan’s body like warm water. “That’s sort of cool. So which type was the Hulk?”

  “Well, the Hulk was the tragic superhero. See, because tragic superheroes—anyway, there’s a bunch of stuff. They’re born with all these gifts, but they’ve got a tragic flaw. And they know what their flaw is, but they can’t change themselves to fix it, right?”

  Ethan thought about that, gnawing his lower lip. “Yeah, I know. So, like, you know, Shakespeare’s heroes—”

  “Yeah!” And Jonah sounded really excited that he would remember that, but seriously, Shakespeare’s plays were the next best things to comic books, right? And apparently there is a reason for that, which is cool. “So, like, Hamlet, or Macbeth or King Lear—”

  “God, I hope it’s more Hamlet,” Ethan said with feeling. “Because Macbeth, that guy was a real fucker!”

  Jonah nodded. “Yeah, I’d rather have Hamlet’s flaw too—but if you look at the Hulk, he’s got a flaw—”

  “His actual physical weakness—”

  “Right! And he obsesses over that, and he fixes it, but now he’s got a whole new flaw to worry about—”

  “His temper!”

  “Right! See, you get this! And his temper lets loose his big scary tragic flaw, and it rampages over the city and does lots of property damage, but he can’t fix it, even though he knows what it is—”

  “It’s like he’s fated to have this flaw!”

  “See?” Jonah’s excitement washed over Ethan’s skin instead of discomfort, and Ethan wanted to roll around in it like a puppy. “So that flaw is going to bring him down. Now, in The Avengers, he manages to master his flaw—he recognizes this flaw in himself and becomes a whole other kind of hero, but in his original form, he was—”

  “He was Hamlet, who couldn’t act, and then when Hamlet did act, it all went horribly fucking wrong! Wow! That’s amazing!” And suddenly Ethan rode that high, right with Jonah, and the wave of guilt and of loss he felt from dropping his English class came crashing right on top of his head. “I loved English,” he said, almost to himself. “It sort of sucked dropping it.”

  And the uncomfortable silence dropped again with all the shit he couldn’t say.

  “So, uhm, why the Hulk?” Jonah asked after a minute. “What appeals to you?”

  Ethan took a breath and tried to think about the shit that wouldn’t hurt. “’Cause he’s always trying to do better, but even when he’s lost it and he can’t do better at all, he doesn’t hurt anyone he loves.”

  “Oh,” Jonah said, his voice throbbing with something Ethan didn’t want to hear. “That’s nice, Ethan—that says really good things about you.”

  Ethan swallowed, because the compliment meant something to him. “Thanks. Who’s your favorite superhero?”

  Jonah shrugged. “I’m Spider-Man. Classic romantic hero—a heroic agenda and a personal one. I want to save the world and save Aunt May and my boyfriend. That’s sort of common.”

  Ethan snorted. “That’s damned noble. I need to get out of your life so you can have a boyfriend.”

  Jonah sighed and looked out the window. “Yeah, Ethan. I’m the one who’s noble. Is this your apartment c
omplex?” Because Ethan was pulling up to a rare space on the street in front of the complex near his apartment, instead of in the back where the parking lot was.

  “Yeah. It’s, uhm….” Crap. He could make Jonah sit out front, but, well, it wasn’t a great neighborhood. “Yeah. Come in real quick. It’s a dump. We won’t stay long.”

  He was supremely conscious of the tattered grass and ragged bushes that made up the grounds, and of the sounds of screaming babies—he counted three—who were either going down for their nap or who hadn’t been changed after their afternoon crap. Yeah, Jonah’s house was in the same kind of neighborhood, but his parents had medical bills and a family. He just had this shitty apartment while he did a major reorg on his life and tried to figure out where he really wanted to live.

  He had to wrestle with the warped door because of the fog, and finally just shoved his shoulder against it to get it to give. He stumbled into his apartment with Jonah on his heels, and the first thing he saw was the stack of Johnnies fliers in the corner by his bedroom. With a grunt, he took off his jacket so he could drop it casually on top of them as he stalked to his bedroom.

  And then he had a dilemma. Because he could close the door and let Jonah wander around the apartment and pick up his jacket and there he was, stuck in a sitcom, or he could leave his door open and reinforce the damned intimacy that no amount of awkward moments had dissipated. Fuck. This was such a bad idea.

  “If you close the door, I’ll know you have something to hide,” Jonah said mildly, and Ethan eyed him and rubbed the sour place in his abdomen where the fajita was mocking him.

  “Between you and the waiter, you probably already know I’m circumcised,” he muttered.

  Jonah’s face went slack and hungry. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve got something to dream about now. You can change, and that’ll be the capper on my day.”

  Ethan laughed a little, reassured that he wasn’t the only one who thought the situation was absurd. The porn star, afraid of getting naked. With a sigh, he rifled through the drawers—which he’d lined the day before—and pulled out new clothes. The jeans were old, worn, soft, and he loved them because he could rub his fingers over the knees and feel the fraying denim, almost fiber by fiber.