by Amy Lane
Ethan shifted, at a loss for something to say. “What we did was special,” Ethan told him at last, his voice gentle. “With you, I think it will always be special.”
Jonah shook his head. “You’re not hearing me,” he said after a minute, his voice thick. “I’m just saying—”
“Too much, and your heart’s too full, and you’re going to cry again.” Ethan walked up next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Look, see? Do you see Mrs. Quincy? She really fucking hates people. I’m telling you, I drop her fruit and shit in there and run like hell—I’m afraid I’m gonna get an iguana earring if I look too close.”
“She’s hissing,” Jonah said softly, apparently properly distracted.
“Toldya. Just like my mom. It’s uncanny. Anyway, here’s the turtles—”
Jonah turned toward the terrariums and gave a horrified squeak. “All those turtles? Oh my God! Ethan, they can’t keep them in there—these guys are gonna grow and they’re gonna break out and—”
“Yeah, yeah—see, if you look out in the backyard, there’s places marked out with stakes? Yeah. That’s where Dex and Kane are gonna dig pits. Dex had the workmen mark the places where there weren’t any water or power or sewage lines, and they’re going to make some turtle places in the shade, with brick sides and packed-earth bottoms and some concrete-lined basins for the summer. They’re not stupid—I mean, Kane might seem like a gorilla and all, but I swear he used the word ‘exoskeleton’ and ‘carapace’ in the same sentence. He’s having some trouble with ‘herpetology’ and ‘entomology,’ though—I think it’s because he doesn’t believe that there’s really jobs he can get by studying them.”
Jonah half laughed. “He’s going to study them?”
“Yeah—he and Dex, they’re going back to school this next semester. Dex already runs the back of the house, but Kane wants out of porn, I guess, so he’s gonna try for something different.”
Ethan didn’t have to look to see the hungry gaze Jonah fastened on him. “What would you study?” he asked quietly.
Ethan shrugged. “You know, Kane’s niece, Frances, was over last week, and I got to meet her for a minute, and I remembered—my sister’s baby, I really fucking loved her.” Suddenly Ethan had a horrible, chest-heaving panic. “Not in the bad way!” he burst out, terrified—horrified—that Jonah would think the same thing about him that his mother had. “I just… I mean, babies like hugs, right? And not sexy ones, it’s just that they just like… they like to be held, and, you know, that’s a good thing. They should like that—thirteen years at the shrink told me that there are good touches, and they’re consensual and both parties benefit and they can be totally platonic and neutral and—”
“Yeah—Ethan, hey. It’s okay. You want to work with children so they can hug you. You want to be able to love unconditionally—I think that’s awesome. My dad hugged me all the fucking time when I was a kid. It wasn’t a big thing. My mom too. It’s okay. Hugs are good! Naked with kids is bad, but I’m damned certain that’s not where you’re going with this!”
Ethan shuddered. “No,” he said hoarsely. “But it’s not like anyone’s going to give me a chance to prove that—and why should they? I’m… I’m a risk. Everyone knows that.”
“Because of the porn?”
“And the abuse and the porn and the gay and the… you know. I wouldn’t hire me either.”
Jonah leaned into him. “That’s too bad, because you’re the gentlest, least likely person to be a sex offender on the planet.”
Ethan smiled, and even though the ugly words were out there, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t cringe like they were forged in the brain just for him. “After I got kicked out of my mom’s house… God. I just… you know. It was like I was everybody’s worst nightmare. Including my own. And it’s so scary. Kane’s niece just sat in my lap and fell asleep, and all I could think was about how to protect her from people like Lawrence Gerard—”
“Who’s that?” Jonah asked, clearly lost, and Ethan stopped.
“Uhm, the guy. The bad guy. The one who, you know—”
“Molested you?”
Suddenly the pizza smell in the house made him more sick to his stomach than hungry. “Yeah. That’s the guy—”
“You’ve never said his name before.”
“I don’t like him to be real. Man, he fucked up my life—I don’t want people like him to be able to fuck up other kids’ lives. Here—you want to go eat? The pizza’s ready—”
“Ethan,” Jonah began, but Ethan kept his back turned and started to lead the way out of the reptile room.
“I mean, it’s been ready, but I’m starving, because, well, I’m always starving, because I work out to bulk up, right? But I made the salad to be healthy—”
“Ethan… Evan!” Jonah snapped, and look, he was being all strong again, which was great, because now Ethan’s voice was wobbling.
“What?” Ethan turned to him, not sure where to look.
“I meant it. All of you. I mean, I know you worked really hard to make your body perfect, but I know the parts of you that aren’t, and that’s okay.”
He felt like a bobblehead doll, he was nodding so much. “You want to go check out that pizza?”
Ethan heard Jonah sigh, but he didn’t know how to respond either. Some stuff just didn’t need to be said again.
They ate the pizza, though, and that was good. In the middle of dinner, Ethan’s phone started going insane on the charger on the counter, and he checked it, looking surprised. “Hey—Kelsey got to her mom’s—that’s good!”
“Why’d she tell you?” Jonah asked with his mouth full. That was Ethan’s boy.
“’Cause we want to make sure she’s safe. Anyway, so she’s at home, but Dex and Kane are coming home—”
“Right now?”
“Naw—they don’t think they’ll be here until Christmas Day or later.” He texted for a minute and then frowned at the text back. “Oh.”
“Oh what?” Jonah looked at him with those lit-from-within gray eyes, and Ethan didn’t want to tell him.
“Dex’s dad—Kane said he found out about them and freaked. It was ugly.” He sighed and texted something quickly back, then looked behind him at the tiny Christmas tree he’d bought that day after Jonah had gone to visit his sister. “Well, I won’t be alone for Christmas,” he said with resignation.
“I was gonna—”
Ethan shook his head and set the phone down. “Naw. Jonah, if your parents ever need you more than they’re going to need you Christmas, I don’t want to think of why.” He went to sit next to Jonah and Jonah leaned his head on his shoulder in a gesture of kindness. Ethan dropped a kiss in his amazing hair and then turned back to his pizza. “Eat,” he ordered, and Jonah nuzzled his bare shoulder before turning back to the meal.
They washed up together before sitting on the couch to watch some television. “Oh, hey—The Fifth Element is on again!” Because who didn’t like that movie?
“Oh God—thank you! Something besides Christmas shows!” Jonah snuggled right into the V of his thighs, and Ethan thought he must have a blueprint of how to look like a happy couple in his head. Ethan couldn’t remember ever seeing anybody do this outside of the movies, but as he kicked back on Dex’s very comfortable corduroy furniture with Jonah in his arms, he thought Jonah’s blueprint must’ve been accurate, because this just felt right.
They lost themselves in the movie, murmuring quotes and comments—because who hadn’t seen this movie until they knew it by heart, right? And then, near the end, when Bruce Willis and Chris Tucker and the Fifth Element were all at the temple, Jonah’s body jerked, and he put his hand to his pocket.
Ethan tightened his arms around Jonah’s shoulders. “Wait,” he murmured. “For five more minutes, our lives are golden, and you don’t have to worry about shit.”
Jonah relaxed against him then, and Ethan kept him tucked and enfolded against his body, thinking all those hours of bodybuilding had bee
n worth it if they kept Jonah safe for just another heartbeat.
The movie had to end, though, and when Jonah wiggled, Ethan let go. Jonah reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, and for a moment, Ethan was supporting the sag of exhaustion.
“She’s dying,” Jonah murmured. “She might not make it through the night.”
Ethan swallowed, thinking about the funny, quirky girl who had loved Ponyo and still hadn’t finished A Game of Thrones. “Do you want me there?” he asked.
Jonah thought about it. “Yes,” he choked, “but no. She’s… you know. Ours. Mom, Dad, mine. We’ve got other family, but she’s—”
“Yours,” Ethan murmured. “I hear you. Let me know when you do need me, okay? I’ll be there. Day, night, Christmas, anything—”
Jonah turned in his arms and took Ethan’s soul with a kiss. “I promise,” he said.
He put on his shoes and then slipped his sweatshirt on over Ethan’s Mickey Mouse football jersey, and Ethan didn’t think he could ever wear it again after that.
Ethan pulled him into a hug before he walked out the door, burying his face into Jonah’s neck and breathing him in. “We didn’t shower,” he murmured.
“Do I smell bad?” There was laughter in Jonah’s voice, but he didn’t sound like he cared.
“You smell like me. Think of it like that, okay? Like I’m all over you. I’ll take care of you.”
Jonah nodded, and he didn’t look troubled, or like he doubted. Ethan kissed him, long, long and desperate, their teeth clashing, Jonah’s tongue vying for space. When they pulled apart, Ethan was half-hard, and he thought Jonah was close, but they both knew that wasn’t what they were supposed to be doing right then.
“I’ll call,” Jonah promised. Then, seriously: “I love you. Remember that, okay?”
Ethan took Jonah’s slender hand in his and raised it to his lips, then kissed the knuckles like a knight in shining armor. “I can’t forget. Love you too.”
And then he took off, and Ethan was left shirtless and alone in Dex’s driveway. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked for another text from Kane—he’d said they’d be home sometime after Christmas Day, which on the one hand was good because the workers still had some work to do on the reptile enclosures from the outside, and on the other hand….
Christmas. Alone. Waiting for a text.
He went back into the house and put the leftover pizza in the refrigerator, and then put the salad in a Tupperware container too, and went back to watch some television before he turned in. He slept naked in Dex’s bed, without changing the sheets, and dreamed that Jonah was right there beside him.
Step 5—delaying tactics
SO WHEN was a person dead? Was it between heartbeats? Between breaths? Was it as soon as the morphine kicked in and they would never be conscious again?
The text from his parents had simply said Come say good-bye, so here he was.
They all sat in the damned little white room with the damned oxygen tank and watched the person who used to be Jonah’s sister labor with one breath after another—and willed those painful, torturous breaths to stop.
Suddenly his father started to talk. “So we knew she’d have CF before she was born. You know that, right?”
Jonah blinked the sleep out of his eyes, awash in the certainty that his parents must know he’d gone and had sex because he could still smell the sex and Ethan all around his skin, and tried to focus on what his dad was babbling about in Amelia’s final hour. “I did,” he said with a yawn. “I looked it up. We did the chromosomal chart thing in high school. They use it as an example.”
“Yeah.” Seth reached over and grabbed Laura’s hand, and she leaned her head on his shoulder. It was like she’d ceded the control, the reins she’d held so tightly this past year, all over the last couple of weeks. Jonah had a sudden moment of compassion for his father. Maybe that was why he’d left—because holding those reins was exhausting, and he’d done it for the twenty-seven years before that. “So they have screening, and we knew it was a possibility, but you came out clear, and so we tried again. And this time, we saw the CF was positive, and we talked about it. And we saw that life expectancy was increased and that there were things you could do at home and….” His breath caught, and he ran his hands through his curly gray hair. Jonah leaned close enough for their shoulders to touch, and Seth wrapped his arm around Jonah like he was a little kid at the movies. The whole time, none of them stopped watching Amelia’s shriveled, pale form, or listening to the wet wheeze of her lungs struggling to pump.
“And you decided to have her,” Jonah said, because, well, fuck. Here they were, right?
Seth nodded and kissed Jonah’s head, and the gesture was so natural that Jonah would remember it later, and remember that Ethan hadn’t had this in too long a time.
“See,” Seth said, his voice choked, “it all comes down to pain. She was a real person in our minds then, and we didn’t want to lose her—that would hurt. So we… we decided to have her so we didn’t have to live with that pain. But here we are, and we’re losing her anyway, only now it hurts worse. But… but I don’t know if I could go back and trade pain, you know? Because there’s seventeen years in the middle, seventeen years where we had happiness and this person we loved in our lives, and… maybe if we’d done it then, I wouldn’t have known any different, but it happened now and I do….”
Jonah nodded, feeling Dad’s hands in his hair. “I’m glad we got to know her,” he said quietly, and then he dashed tears out of his eyes and looked back at the bed.
Amelia’s chest had stopped moving, and the flat heartbeat whined faintly in the background.
HE WAITED until the morning to text Ethan, because it took that long for him and his parents to make it out of the hospital. His mom and dad had called relatives and old friends in the meantime. They went home and fell into bed, exhausted, and by the time they woke up, they were inundated with visitors carrying food.
Jonah thought about Ethan making him homemade pizza and salad, and wanted to cry. He wanted that moment back, stranger’s kitchen or no, and he wanted Ethan there. He checked his phone when there was a break between awkward company in the little apartment.
I’m sorry. Do you want me over?
God—no. It’s all relatives. They’re flustered and well meaning.
Yeah. No place for me.
You’d do great—I just don’t want to subject you to this bullshit.
How are you doing with it?
I’m exhausted and I want you.
When’s the funeral?
December 28th, that place on Greenback with the fountain in Orangevale.
That’s a real nice place. What time?
2 p.m.
I’ll be there.
Really?
I swear.
Thank you.
Love you.
Love you too.
Jonah signed off and sat for a minute, looking at his phone. His dad dropped next to him, eating something that actually smelled good from a little plate. His dad’s cousin had dropped it off, which had been nice of her, but she’d talked nonstop for two hours, which was one of the reasons he didn’t want Ethan over. Ethan had enough of the downside of family.
“Talking to your boyfriend?” his dad asked quietly.
Jonah looked at the phone. “Yeah.”
“Did you finally decide what to do about him?”
“Remember that thing you said about putting off pain?”
His father aged right there between bites of chicken, potatoes, and broccoli cheese. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely.
“That you know, sometimes, even if you’re just putting the pain off, you at least get to know the person while you’re waiting for them to go away?”
“I was there, Jonah, it was last night!” Seth’s voice got sharp, but Jonah ignored that because seriously, who wouldn’t get pissed?
“Yeah.” Jonah looked his father in the eyes and said this with full knowledge that
Ethan’s job was going to come out, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. “He’s worth knowing, Dad. Even if there’s pain later, he’s worth the knowing for now.”
Seth sighed and closed bloodshot eyes before taking another bite of amazing-smelling, totally fattening, relative-strings-attached casserole.
“Well, I guess I should have seen that coming,” he said quietly, and then he smiled a little, and it was the first time Jonah had seen anything like a smile on his face since he first walked into the hospital after he left Ethan’s. “Think he’ll come by for pizza and beer again?”
Jonah nodded, thinking his parents were pretty awesome. “You should ask him at the funeral.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that. Maybe he can stay the night then—you’ll need someone.”
Jonah leaned over and kissed his dad’s cheek. “Dad?”
Seth looked at him, mouth full, every wrinkle in his face twice as deep as it had been a month ago. “Yeah?”
“Ethan didn’t have family like you. He missed out on a lot.” Jonah didn’t feel like any more words, so he went and got some casserole and a beer for himself. Beer. Lots and lots of beer. He brought one back for his dad. His mom came out of the bathroom from a shower (God, yes, Jonah should shower) and grabbed a beer of her own. She hadn’t eaten yet, so it only took her one, but then, it wasn’t like they were going to go dancing on tables or anything. Instead, they got quietly drunk together before they stumbled to bed and passed out. When they woke up, there were more relatives, because, of course, it was Christmas Day.
Merry Christmas, Ethan.
Merry Christmas. Dex and Kane got here last night.
Early?
Surprised the hell out of all of us. I could have been whacking off!
Jonah’s shoulders shook, and he realized his face felt stretched from the smile.
I, uh, think they’ve seen it before!
Well yeah—it wouldn’t have been THAT big a surprise.
Jonah twitched restlessly on the couch. His ass still ached a little, two days later.