“Tell me,” he said.
Ezra took a deep breath.
“It was a car crash,” he said finally. “Head-on collision with a van. Dad and Josh were in the front, and me and Grace were in the back.”
“Oh, Christ,” Jesse whispered. “Oh, Ez.”
“That scar on my shoulder? My seatbelt,” Ezra said quietly.
Jesse had—wondered. He had always wondered about that scar. A thick run of ruined skin, pink in the winter and unfreckled in the summer, that crossed Ezra’s collarbone like a skid mark of damage. Ezra had never—as far as Jesse knew—been the kind of person to go in for rough sports or dangerous hobbies. He did yoga and running. He hated motorbikes. He made Jesse clean his upstairs windows because he refused to go up the ladder himself, and what was the point of a fireman boyfriend if one couldn’t make him go up ladders occasionally? So Jesse had wondered, but never asked—and now wished maybe he’d asked earlier.
“I broke my collarbone. Grace fractured some ribs. Dad—Dad died instantly, he just died, and Josh—Josh died in hospital later, but he was unconscious, so, you know, he never felt it. But it took—it took them three hours to get me and Grace out, and we were just trapped, and—we knew. We knew Dad was dead and I was fourteen and she was ten and—”
Jesse squeezed Ezra’s shoulders tight under his arm and kissed the top of his head, his heart clenching tightly in his chest. Fourteen years old, trapped in a car with a dead parent for three hours—God, no wonder Ezra was claustrophobic.
“Babe, I’m so sorry, I’m—”
“It’s okay,” Ezra squeezed his knee. “It was nearly eleven years ago. I miss them, but—life goes on. And it was quick. They never knew. Even Josh—he never woke up again. He didn’t feel it.”
Jesse pulled him close until Ezra dropped his head onto his shoulder. When he did, Jesse kissed his hair again. “Tell me about them.”
“Josh was a prick,” Ezra said unexpectedly, and Jesse felt his cheek crease in a smile against his T-shirt. “No, really, he was. He used to beat me up and call me names. He bullied me. We never got along, and if he was alive now, he’d probably have given my name and address to the BNP for being gay.”
“Oh. Er—”
“I don’t miss Josh,” Ezra said. “I really don’t. I mean, yeah, I was shocked and it was really weird not having to hide under the bed every time he came home from football practice and Mum and Dad were out, but—it was Dad I cried for. They had a joint funeral, and it was Dad I was crying about.”
Jesse rested his cheek against Ezra’s hair and half-smiled. “I get it. I don’t think I’d cry at my old man’s funeral. So what was your dad like?”
Ezra hesitated. “I’m—honestly?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m—kind of glad he’s dead. Now, I mean. Because—look, it was easy for you. You said so yourself. You figured out you were gay and that was kind of that. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was a sixteen-year-old Catholic schoolboy when I worked it out. Josh and Grace had been bullying me for it for years, but I was sixteen when I worked it out. And I was terrified and I hated myself and I thought it was sick and wrong and I was going to go to hell. And that was so tightly ingrained that even after I stopped believing in God, it still— I didn’t feel good, really. Not about myself. Liam taught me a lot about not being disgusted with myself. You might not like him, but you owe him a lot, because without him, I would never have been comfortable enough to go to a gay bar, or give a hot guy my number, or go out with said hot guy, or bring the hot guy home to meet my mother.”
Jesse didn’t trust himself to say anything and squeezed Ezra tightly instead. “So—”
“Dad would have disowned me,” Ezra said flatly. “And I loved my father, Jess. I thought the world of him. If he’d disowned me for being gay, it would have absolutely destroyed the both of us. He’d have blamed himself for the way I turned out, and I would— I—”
Jesse kissed the top of his head and murmured, “It’s okay.”
“I’m kind of glad. Now. I can keep the dad that just played football with me and encouraged me to hit my brother back when he was bullying me and took me out to feed the ducks when I was little and jealous of the new baby. I can keep that father and never have to know what he would have become or said to me if he knew.”
Jesse didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, he knew what Ezra meant. He’d never have told his father either, even if he’d suddenly reappeared and given Jesse the chance. But was he that convinced his father would have reacted badly that he was glad the man had died? How could he be that certain?
“Mum never got over it,” Ezra said, bending his knees and tucking his feet up into the crooks of his knees in the lotus position, though he never shrugged off Jesse’s arm. “She changed after Dad died. She used to proper bollock me and Grace for yelling at each other, she used to keep it all under control, much as she could, but after—she just gave up. We raised ourselves a little bit. Grace went wild, I disappeared into my room and it’s like—it’s like Dad and Josh haunt the spaces between us, you know? Nothing was enough for Mum after Dad died.”
The remnants of the Pryce family began to click into place in Jesse’s head, and he felt bitterly sad. Ezra had had all the ingredients for an amazing childhood. Both parents, at least one grandparent, siblings to play with, everything—and yet it had all been completely wrong, too.
“This is why you don’t like small spaces,” Jesse said finally. It was the only thing he could say.
“Mm,” Ezra hummed, and laughed. “Silly, isn’t it?”
Jesse snorted. Ezra had told him about being claustrophobic—though not the reason—early on, mostly because Jesse had jumped to the wrong conclusion and panicked. Jesse wasn’t much taller than Ezra, but he was pure muscle, and Ezra had always jokingly referred to him as a concrete block. He was heavy and outweighed Ezra by probably a good six stone. And the first few times they’d had sex or been messing around and he’d trapped Ezra with his weight, Ezra had just seized up and panicked—
Well, claustrophobia hadn’t been what Jesse had thought about first.
“No,” he said firmly. “I would be too.”
Ezra huffed.
“Come on, Ez. If it’s not silly that I have to call you in the middle of the night because I’ve had a nightmare about some of the things I’ve seen at work, then how is it silly you don’t like feeling confined after you spent three hours—?”
“All right, Jess, I get it,” Ezra said a little tightly, and Jesse bit his lip, rubbing his hand softly up and down Ezra’s arm.
“I’m impressed you ever got back in a car,” he admitted.
Ezra shrugged. “Still don’t like the backseat. Or when other people drive, really.”
“You lucked out with me, then,” Jesse said. He could drive but couldn’t comfortably afford to run a car on his salary and, given that he could walk to work, had never seen the need to bother buying one anyway. He drove Ezra’s Peugeot occasionally, but he wasn’t technically insured to do so.
“In more ways than one,” Ezra said, squeezing his thigh and frowning at the grave. “He’d be spinning down there if he could see us.”
“Well, he can’t,” Jesse said bluntly, and sighed. “Ez? Let’s go home.”
“Mm?”
“You’re miserable here,” Jesse said flatly. “You’re tense and upset all the time, and I hate it. You shouldn’t be that way, you should be all sarcastic and taking the piss out of me and gorgeous and shit.”
“How romantic.”
“Like that.” Jesse prodded him in the ribs, and Ezra squirmed in his arm with a scowl. “You’ve been, you’ve visited, we brought Nana a gift and said happy birthday, we’ve been introduced, now let’s go home.”
Ezra sighed and ground the heel of his hand into his face. “I—”
“Come on,” Jesse coaxed. “We still have a week and a half before you go back to work, and my appointment with th
e physio isn’t until the sixteenth. We can just go home, laze around your house, go out. Let me prove Flopsy hates me.”
“Paranoid.”
“It’s a cat. Of course I’m paranoid. They’re evil.”
Ezra huffed a little laugh and pressed his head onto Jesse’s shoulder again, still staring at the grave.
“All right,” he said finally. “I mean—I keep somehow expecting it’ll be better each time I visit, but it never is, so—okay. Let’s go home.”
* * * *
They pulled up in front of Ezra’s little house at half-eight in the evening. Dusk was only just hinting in the sky, and the cat flap rattled before Ezra had even opened the car door. The minute he did, Kitsa leapt up into his lap and immediately started purring.
“It’s nice when somebody misses you,” Ezra crooned, scratching her under the chin and picking her up as he got out. She dug her little claws into his shoulder and eyed Jesse speculatively as he rescued their bags from the boot.
“Don’t even think about it,” Jesse warned her, and she decided against the leap, butting her head against Ezra’s ear instead and meowing plaintively. “I swear your cats are more like your kids. Your loud, needy kids.”
Ezra laughed, and Jesse watched his face light up with it. He had made all the protestations and argued about losing their money on a hotel room they weren’t using, but Jesse had seen the way the pinch around his eyes had disappeared. By the time they’d left Norfolk, he had been relaxed. By the time they’d reached the outskirts of Brighton, he’d been himself again. And Jesse was startled to realise how much he’d missed him in those scant few days.
Flopsy was less than impressed to see them. While Ezra fussed over the cats and put down fresh food, Jesse dumped their bags in the hall and locked and bolted the front door, having no intention of going home tonight. He toed off his boots, set the post on the side table and padded back through to the kitchen to wrap his arms around Ezra’s waist from behind and mould himself against that slender back for a hug.
“Mm, hello.” Ezra scratched his scalp like he was a cat, too. “I recognise this.”
“This what?”
“This clingy, leech-like behaviour.”
Jesse peeled away the edge of Ezra’s T-shirt and left a deep bruise with his mouth at the base of his neck, soothing it with his tongue and kissing it lightly when Ezra grumbled in a vaguely incoherent manner and pulled his hair.
“I take it you’re staying the night?”
“Can’t trust you to cook.”
“Even I can stick a lasagne in the oven.”
“Yeah, that gross frozen stuff. I’ll make chicken salad?” Jesse offered, shamelessly using the favourite to butter Ezra up. A little buttering never hurt.
Ezra hummed. “You’re trying to soften me up.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said, worming his hands under the hem of Ezra’s T-shirt. His stomach was very warm, and Jesse curled his fingers pleasantly. Ezra squirmed. “Is it working?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t offered me a kiss or anything. I don’t feel very softened up.”
Jesse turned him around by the belt loops on his jeans and pressed him up against the fridge to kiss him, coaxing his mouth open and brushing his hands back up under the T-shirt when Ezra dug his hands into his hair.
“Mm.” Ezra smiled against his mouth. “And chicken salad?”
“With extra dressing.”
“Deal,” Ezra said, nosing at Jesse’s cheek.
It took another few minutes to peel himself away from Ezra’s mouth, and Jesse felt suddenly struck by how at home he felt in this kitchen that wasn’t his. It wasn’t just knowing where everything was, or being allowed to make something here without Ezra’s help—not that Ezra’s cooking skills constituted help, really—it was the sensation of it being natural to cook in Ezra’s kitchen. It was the feeling that, while it was nice that Ezra remained, sitting up on one of the counters, cross-legged like a child, he didn’t need to be there. It was the way it felt right to have Kitsa meowing at his feet as he diced the chicken, and the sound of the clock on the wall being harmonious instead of out of place.
They talked about inconsequential things—work, the fussing cats, Jesse’s appointment with occupational health next week, all the little things going on in their lives that didn’t involve Ezra’s awful sister and his not-quite-as-awful-but-still-pretty-bad childhood. In the warmth and easy atmosphere of his little kitchen, Jesse could look at the fair-haired man sitting up on the counter with his upturned feet in the lotus position that looked simultaneously easy and painful, and not see the solemn, unhappy child in the pictures.
“What are you staring at?” Ezra asked as he stole a tomato from the salad bowl and bit into it contentedly.
“You,” Jesse said honestly.
“Why? Have I got something on my face?”
“Freckles.”
“Ha bloody ha.”
Jesse shrugged. “You look nice.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Fine, you look pretty. Happy?”
“Don’t make me sing it,” Ezra threatened, and Jesse laughed, leaning up to kiss him and steal back the salad bowl. “Aw, no, give it back!”
“It’s not chicken salad without chicken, idiot,” Jesse told him, taking the pan off the heat.
Once he’d combined the two, however, Ezra just took the bowl back, and Jesse opted to stand at the counter and share the cobbled-together meal out of it. He never felt particularly hungry after travelling anyway and snatching bits of chicken from Ezra’s fingers with his teeth gained him several of those beautiful smiles and exasperated eye-rolls that said that Ezra was feeling better after the disaster of a visit.
“You’re impossible,” Ezra murmured, leaning forward to kiss him, and Jesse curled his fingers into the denim of Ezra’s jeans.
“You love me anyway, though, right?” he asked.
“Mm, usually,” Ezra smiled, taking the last salad leaf and brushing it over Jesse’s lips before eating it himself.
“Harsh, Pryce.”
“Man up.”
Jesse put the bowl aside and kissed him properly, wrapping a hand around the nape of his neck to pull him into it. After a moment, Ezra draped his arms around Jesse’s shoulders and melted into the touch, pushing past Jesse’s mouth like he was trying to memorise him. Jesse slid his hands from Ezra’s neck to his shoulders, down the curved run of his spine, and to the spread V of his legs, still crossed between them on the granite countertop.
“I want you,” he murmured lowly.
Ezra made a questioning noise.
“I want to take you upstairs and pour you back out of these jeans and lick that bit where your hip juts out at the front, the bit that makes you sigh.”
Ezra ran both hands through Jesse’s hair, gathering the dark blond strands into clumps and tugging on them in a way that sent tingles buzzing through his scalp.
“No teasing,” Ezra murmured. “Just you tonight. No games, no teasing. Just you.”
Jesse tapped his knees. Ezra unfolded and dropped his feet, but before he could slide off the counter, Jesse pushed his hands under those taut thighs and lifted, picking Ezra up almost effortlessly, and grinning when Ezra wrapped those long legs around his waist and clung, stealing every bit of air from his lungs with a hungry kiss.
Jesse managed to carry him all the way upstairs, one arm under his legs and the braced wrist against his back. Ezra didn’t weigh much—Jesse had definitely carried heavier under more dire circumstances—but the way he clung let Jesse feel his arousal stirring, and it was difficult to think about walking in a straight line when Ezra’s tongue was wrapped around his.
The bed was wide and inviting. The darkness of Ezra’s eyes when Jesse dropped him onto the sheets was nothing but sinful, and the way he rolled his hips up to let Jesse pull off his jeans was worthy of a high-class whore. Jesse palmed the erection freed by the jeans and was seized by the hair in another hungry kiss, forcing him to remove his o
wn jeans by feel alone, and step clumsily out of them onto the bed.
“Take your shirt off,” he breathed into Ezra’s mouth, nearly ripping the buttons on his own in an attempt to remove it quickly, the rush of colder air from the bedroom when he succeeded doing nothing to cool his blood. “Ez,” he persisted, when Ezra’s hands and mouth moved lower on his collarbone and chest. “Shit, Ez, take your fucking shirt off.”
“Busy,” Ezra whispered, and grazed a rough thumb over a nipple. Jesse swore at the bolt of lightning that shot over his ribs, up his spine and straight into the base of his skull before ricocheting back down towards his dick and taking most of his blood with it.
“Ez, take the shirt off, or I will.”
“So do it,” Ezra murmured, sucking him back into a kiss, shifting his hips until they lined up, and bracketed Jesse’s waist with those long, bendy legs.
Jesse took both sides of the T-shirt collar in his hands and tore.
Ezra jumped and laughed breathlessly, the rip of fabric loud in the otherwise quiet room, and the remnants of the shirt came away in Jesse’s hand. He threw them aside, dropping back into the kiss that Ezra insisted on and running a hand down the freshly-bared ribs to the jut of hip that was, frankly, the sexist sweet spot on Ezra’s entire body, naked or otherwise.
“I’ll kill you in the morning,” Ezra whispered.
“I’m sure you will.” Jesse grinned, kissing a path down the heaving ribs until he found that jut, the point of bone that only revealed itself when he pushed Ezra’s leg flat just so, and that when he rubbed his tongue broadly over it—
“Oh my God,” Ezra said, and his hips jerked in Jesse’s hands. “Oh fuck. Fuck.”
His hand was tight in Jesse’s hair, and Jesse laughed, biting at the jut before licking it again, running his tongue into the low, concave dip of Ezra’s abdomen, hauntingly close to the top of his still—barely—present boxers.
“Jess,” Ezra whined, head straining back on the pillow. “Don’t tease.”
“Okay, okay,” Jesse said, kissing the jut apologetically, and reached for the top drawer.
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