Ethan in Gold

by Amy Lane

  “Me too?”

  Ethan heard the surprise in his voice and smiled a little. His hair had been water combed back, but like his father’s hair as he’d left, Jonah’s curls were starting to break out.

  “Don’t you want to be… I don’t know, anything else?” he asked. “I mean, you’d probably still work at PetSmart or that little vet place there, but you could manage the entire store or do the books in the back. Something you could say you did.”

  Jonah’s mouth quirked. And then his chin wobbled, and Ethan scooted his chair closer, knocking it against the table, so he could put his arm around Jonah’s shoulders.

  “I’ll have time now,” Jonah rasped. “Goddammit… I’ll have….”

  “Sh….” Ethan hated that they were in this restaurant, and people were probably gawking at the faggots necking, but Ethan was starting to realize the benefits of more than two years of porn. He just didn’t care. “Sh,” he breathed against Jonah’s temple. “Yeah. You’ll have time. And it’s gonna suck. But I’ll be there, okay? You and me, we’re gonna fill the time. And we’re gonna start a plan, and a life together, and we’re going to pretend that we can make it, because if we can’t, neither of us wants to know that now.”

  Jonah leaned his head on Ethan’s shoulder for a minute. “So we’re going to put off the pain and enjoy each other now,” he said, like he’d known this before Ethan had even said it.

  “Pretty much.”

  The waitress arrived then and, using discretion Ethan vowed to tip her for, set a ginormous fudge brownie sundae in front of them, complete with two spoons, and then vanished without a word.

  “So,” Ethan said, straightening up and handing Jonah a spoon, “it’s sort of like this carb fest. We’re going to enjoy it now, and work it off tomorrow, and try not to resent the extra work.”

  Jonah took the spoon and smiled. “You know, Ethan, for a guy who had to work hard to strategize pizza, that’s really sort of a good plan.”

  Ethan grinned and took a really big bite, then closed his eyes because you never knew how much you needed chocolate until it was filling you with melty gooey goodness. “It’s the suit,” he said with his eyes still closed. “It gives me grown-up powers.”

  Jonah laughed then, and Ethan looked up to see him taking a bite of his own, and grinned. They didn’t say much after that, but bite by bite, they finished the sundae.

  By the time Ethan dropped Jonah off at his parents’ house in the evening, they had plans to get together the next day to work that shit off.

  And while Ethan still had the motor running but had put the car into park, Jonah leaned forward and kissed him, fudge brownie sundae and all.

  “Thank you, Evan,” he said quietly. The use of Ethan’s real name was deliberate, Ethan could tell. “I knew I loved you, but today you were a real stand-up guy.”

  Ethan closed his eyes and kissed him again, just to feel how soft Jonah’s shell-pink lips were and to taste the lingering of chocolate and ice cream. And so he wouldn’t see Jonah’s luminous gray eyes still yearning for that one last something that neither of them were saying anything about.

  “Well,” Ethan said when the kiss was done, “you deserve a stand-up guy. You deserve the best I got, and better.”

  Jonah’s hand found his cheek in the dark, and Ethan savored the touch. “Tell Tommy I’ll be back in a week,” Jonah said softly. “If you’re not doing anything, you can drive me to work.”

  Ethan opened his eyes and grinned. “See? Little bites. Just like eating the sundae.”

  “I’d rather eat you,” Jonah said frankly. “Any idea when we can have sex again, since we’re going to do this thing as a couple?”

  Ethan kissed his palm. “We’re gonna have to play that by ear,” he said reluctantly. “I’ll let you know when Dex and Kane are gonna be out, okay?”

  Jonah looked at him, lips pursed, eyebrows knitted. “You know, we could have sex in my room when my parents aren’t there.”

  Ethan felt a sudden grip of panic in his stomach, and he shook his head. “Man, and I thought we were doing so well!”

  Jonah laughed softly, ruefully, and rubbed Ethan’s lips with his thumb. “Maybe someday. But this is a start. Let me know about classes for ARC—I’ll make that trip.”

  Ethan’s panic eased up, and after another kiss, Jonah was running up the stairs and gone.

  Ethan watched him go, thinking the same thing he’d thought when the sundae had arrived—hell, when he’d opened his mouth to sing, for that matter: Ry was right. He was smart, and so was Jonah. They could do this.

  They could do this.

  “I CAN’T do this,” Ethan panted, burying his face next to Jonah’s on Jonah’s pillow.

  Jonah’s room was small, an eight-by-ten paean to the childhood he’d left behind in the house he’d been born in, complete with striped sheets, old posters of race cars on the walls, and even a little shelf of soccer trophies sitting right next to a stuffed lion from a long ago Kings game.

  “What’s wrong?” Jonah asked, thrusting his hard-on against Ethan through his jeans.

  “Jonah… your parents are everywhere in this room!” Ethan complained. “Oh my God—the lion in the pink with pom-poms!” He’d just seen it. “So’s your sister!” Which seemed really cruel to say now that she had passed away, and he tried to correct himself. “I mean, you know, it’s your family, and….” He turned an agonized face to Jonah. “Jonah, I swear to God, for the first time in my entire life, my boner’s gone!”

  Jonah’s jaw dropped, and he scrambled to sit up in his twin-size bed. “Evan… Evan, for the first time in a month, we’re not doing this in a car, and your boner’s gone?”

  “I’m sorry!” Ethan wasn’t sure if he was ready for this sort of mortification. At least when he was doing a scene, the whole world knew he had an erection! “It’s just… Jonah, this is a little kid’s room! I feel like….” And he couldn’t say it, because he knew that for some people it would just be a harmless kink, but not for him. For him it was the difference between power and no power, between being a grown-up fucking and being a monster doing bad things, and he just couldn’t. He looked at Jonah pleadingly. “Dex and Kane are at school today—they’re gonna be at cooking class tonight—can we go do it in my room?”

  Jonah grimaced in frustration and threw himself back on the bed. “So, uhm, we’re going to leave a perfectly fine empty house and drive across town to where the lizard can watch us have sex?”

  Ethan rolled over miserably to his side. “Yeah,” he muttered, closing his eyes to block out what looked like a soccer photo taken when Jonah was in middle school. “Man, if I ever want to fuck again, I’ve got to get out of this room.”

  Jonah’s breath on his neck was tender, and so was the kiss he placed there, above Ethan’s collar, in a spot of bare skin. “Yeah, sure,” he said quietly. “C’mon. We’ll take your car. You can drop me off in the morning.”

  Ethan rolled over a little, searching his eyes for mockery or irritation and finding none. “Your parents won’t….”

  “Won’t know I’m sleeping with you? Ev, we’ve been making out in front of the apartment for a month. I think they’ve figured it out.”

  Ethan covered his face with his hands and groaned. “A month. God. Has it really been a month?”

  And now Jonah’s voice expressed a little of the frustration he must be feeling.

  “A month since we did the whole ‘let’s fuck Jonah blind’ thing? Yes. Unless it’s porn sex, you’ve been living for a month on hand jobs and hummers, and I’ve got to admire your forbearance.”

  Ethan rolled over again and groaned into Jonah’s pillow. It smelled like him—like grown-up Jonah, and that was giving Ethan the heebie-jeebies in this little kid’s room.

  “I’m sorry about the porn sex,” he muttered for what must have been the hundredth time.

  “You should be,” Jonah said shortly, but not without humor. Yeah. Dex and Kane had been busy with class, Jonah had a day off
, and Ethan had thumbtacked a sheet in front of the critter cages. They were gonna have sex. And then, while Ethan was giving Jonah a blowjob—complete with stretchy finger in Jonah’s entrance—Ethan remembered what day it was.

  Two days before his next scene, when there was a mandatory window of three.

  Ethan upped the ante on the blowjob—and the finger-fuck—and after Jonah came all over his face and bare chest, while he was still dazzled and panting and in the middle of “What? Why did you? I thought we were gonna…?” Ethan managed to mumble something about having to work on Wednesday.

  Fortunately Ethan had driven, or Jonah would have been out of there before the jizz dried.

  As it was, by the time Ethan showered (alone—and cold) and dressed (also alone and cold!), Jonah had managed to raid the refrigerator and was loudly decrying the fact that Dex ate nothing that wasn’t healthy.

  “Jesus fucking humping Christ! He’s fucked a thousand guys, and nutrition is where he draws the line of virtue?”

  And suddenly Ethan was the one who was angry. He barreled out of the bathroom, barefoot, shirtless, and with his jeans half-buttoned, snarling, “If you can’t show respect to Dex, you need to get the hell out of his house!”

  “I’d love to get the hell out of his house!” Jonah snarled back, in the middle of pouring a glass of fat-free milk on Dex’s spotless white countertop. “But you drove!”

  And although his back was to Ethan, his voice suddenly wobbled, and Ethan watched him wipe the back of his hand under his eyes.

  “Aw, man,” he muttered, sitting down abruptly at the island. “Fuck. I’m sorry.” For a second his lower lip quivered. “I was going to buy cookies.”

  Jonah set the gallon of milk down and turned to Ethan with an open face, red eyes, tear tracks, and all. “Cookies?” he asked blankly.

  Ethan nodded, thinking about the plans he’d had when he’d gone to pick Jonah up. “Yeah. Before I got you from work, I was going to get cookies. You know. So we’d have something to eat after. But I….” He met Jonah’s eyes miserably, and Jonah wiped his face on the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  “You forgot,” Jonah finished for him.

  Ethan looked away. “Yeah,” he muttered, remembering that glorious moment right before he remembered, when Jonah’s hands were fisted in his hair and Jonah’s cock was pulsing in his mouth, and for just that moment it was the two of them and their bodies, and nothing else in the world. “I forgot.”

  Jonah sighed and left the milk on the counter, moving to stand right in front of Ethan. He played with Ethan’s hair as it dried, and dropped a kiss on the top of Ethan’s bowed head. Ethan took it as a sign and leaned his head against Jonah’s stomach, wrapping his arms around that slender, soft body, and smelling his skin and his sex all over again through the clean smell of fabric softener and PetSmart on his clothing.

  “I forgot too,” Jonah whispered.

  “I’m not….” Ethan looked up at him, not wanting to make him cry. “I’m not doing it because I want someone else.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jonah said, but his voice sounded hollow, like it was through an empty room. “You’re doing it because you’re afraid of being with no one, so you’re keeping your options with someone open.”

  Ethan shook his head, denying it. “I start to shake,” he said after a moment. “It’s like… like, have you ever had to take a poop and been really stopped up?”

  Jonah glared at him. “Not since my enema this morning!”

  Ethan grimaced. “Okay, but you know what I mean—like you can’t sit still and there’s something you have to do but you can’t figure out what it is and you’re shaking and your stomach is cramping and—”

  “Sh… sh….”

  Ethan calmed down, shivering and then chilled out in Jonah’s embrace. “That’s what it was like for me before Johnnies. And I’m… I don’t ever want to feel that way again and—”

  Jonah shushed him some more, and Ethan quieted. “Evan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why didn’t you go out on a date or something? Why’d you pick porn?”

  Ethan thought about it carefully. “’Cause I was pretty sure porn was a strength,” he said after a minute. “Man, I worked so hard being a good kid and getting all okay in my heart so my family could love me, and I was getting nothing. Sex with Ryane wasn’t… I don’t know, earth-shattering, but it was consistent. It was something that, if I worked hard and did a good job, I got rewarded. I figured that… you know….” He looked up at Jonah, pleading for understanding a little, but mostly pleading for it not to be over.

  Jonah nodded and grimaced, his eyes growing shiny again. “Ev?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That was one earth-shattering blowjob. Do you think that maybe, if we get a chance to do a few of those a week, that might be worth quitting the porn for?”

  Ethan nodded, keeping his face buried in Jonah’s midriff. “We’ll have to see,” he rasped. “I don’t….” He turned his face and rubbed his cheek against Jonah’s stomach, reluctant to say the thing that would really hurt.

  Jonah said it for him.

  “You’re afraid to trust it,” Jonah said softly. “I get it. It seems really obvious to me, you know? But no one ever turned their love off on me like a kitchen faucet.”

  And then Ethan’s tears spilled over and he lost his words, clutching Jonah to him like Jonah was going to fly out of his arms, leaving him alone and shaking until he got to shoot his next scene.

  Between that moment in Dex’s kitchen (which was followed by a trip to the bakery for pie, dammit, because they’d both earned it!) and this one in Jonah’s bedroom, the opportunity just hadn’t been there. They’d worked out together, which was killing Ethan slowly, because Jonah wore these oversize, hanging workout clothes that flapped around his thin body and left Ethan with an impression of slender lines, soft skin, and an innocently flopping cock under his basketball shorts. They’d gone out to eat together and made out together after Ethan picked Jonah up from work—but they hadn’t had another chance to make love. Ethan was starting to feel constipated again, even though, thanks to Dex and his well-stocked refrigerator, his digestive system was completely on track.

  And Jonah’s blue-striped room was stopping him up in a big way.

  Jonah started laughing and then rolled off the bed. “God, Evan—you would be an almost perfect boyfriend, if only you’d fuck me senseless once in a while.”

  Ethan was about ready to say, “I know! I know! I’m sorry!” when the front door to Jonah’s apartment banged open loudly.

  “Jonah?” Jonah’s mom called. “Honey? Are you home?”

  Jonah and Ethan met panicked eyes and Ethan rolled off the bed, grateful that neither one of them had gotten to the point of taking off clothes. “Yeah, Mom!” Jonah said, his voice cracking. “We were just leaving—I need to get some clothes for tomorrow.”

  Jonah’s door opened, and Laura Stevens stuck her head in. She looked tired and sad but sounded like she was going to be okay. “Oh, honey—are you sure? I bought some good beer and some pizza—you boys could stay here and we could play games.”

  Ethan shook his head regretfully—and part of that was real. “That’s nice of you to offer, Mrs. Stevens, but I promised Jonah some cherry pie over at Rick’s Café. I’d hate to break a promise.”

  Laura nodded sympathetically, her graying blonde hair sliding out of its clip, all traces of dye completely worn away. “Okay, guys, just as long as you know you’re welcome.” She smiled softly and then backed away, and Ethan and Jonah shared a completely sympathetic moment of total relief.

  “Evan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’d better not be fucking around about that pie!”

  They stopped at Rick’s on K Street, because it was close and awesome, and yeah, they bought enough bad carbs to fuel an army.

  And then Ethan thumbtacked the sheet in front of the animal cages again and turned to Jonah in the fading light of what was pr
omising to be a foggy evening.

  “We’re here alone?” Jonah asked, just to make sure.

  Ethan grinned. “I checked the calendar—they won’t get home until ten o’clock. They’re bringing cookies to Kane’s niece after cooking class.”

  “And your next scene isn’t until….”

  His grin turned bashful, and he studied the cream-colored area rug under the bed. When Ethan had his own house, he was going to have wall-to-wall carpeting, and it was going to be green or blue or rainbow or burgundy or something besides white. “Two weeks,” he said, thinking that in two weeks they’d have to face this problem again, but in the meantime, he had Jonah to himself.

  “Ethan?”

  Ethan looked up to see Jonah grinning at him, the refracted light from behind the sheet turning his hair into a halo of curls.

  “Yeah?”

  Jonah took two quick steps and hopped into Ethan’s arms, wrapping his legs around Ethan’s waist. “Fuck me blind!”

  Ethan grinned, held Jonah’s head in place with the hand not under his ass, and kissed him, hot, openmouthed, and unafraid.

  Slowly, because he worked out just so he could do it slowly, he lowered Jonah to the bed and the colorful comforter he’d saved from his first voyage out of the house. Jonah went willingly, continuously kissing, and insinuated his hands under Ethan’s sweatshirt to rub his chest while they were at it.

  Ethan shuddered because the touch was so intimate and so sweet, and he wanted it all over his skin. He straightened up and yanked his shirts over his head, unhooked his belt, shoved down his pants, kicked off his shoes, and bam! He was naked.

  Jonah stared at him from wide eyes that appeared mildly shocked.

  “What?” Ethan asked. His groin throbbed dully, and he wrapped his hand around his cock and stroked, enjoying the way the precome spurted out of his slit and made that stroke slide just a little bit more.

  Jonah shook himself and started to kick his pants down and pull off his own sweatshirt. “I have never seen a guy get undressed so fast,” he confessed.