Chapter 14
14
Ezra must have done something horrendous in a past life, because when Jonathan steps through the door, his smile uncertain but hopeful, he looks just as home-soft and comfortable as Ezra was worried he’d be outside of the Chapel. Ezra’s gotten used to him in button-downs and sweaters. Seeing him in cuffed jeans and a too-large hoodie with a faded Brandeis University logo hits like a physical blow.
Ollie gives him a pointed nudge. “Shut your mouth before something flies into it.”
Sappho breaks the awkwardness by greeting Jonathan with her usual enthusiasm, all but tackling him back against the door. Ezra gets to his feet to make sure she doesn’t fully bowl him over, but Jonathan’s grinning, the hesitancy disappearing from his face as he crouches to rub her ears. He looks up when Ezra reaches them, easy amusement deepening the laugh lines by his eyes, and Ezra wonders if it’s too late to change his name and move to another state—anything to avoid the humiliating flutter that lights up his chest.
“Hey,” Jonathan says, giving Sappho’s chin one last scratch and rising to his feet. “Thanks for inviting me over. This was really nice of you.”
“It was my idea,” Ollie says, tossing an arm around Ezra’s shoulders and grinning at Jonathan as he gives Ezra a playful shake. “You’ve met our Ezra, so you know how shy he is.”
Ezra makes a mental note to steal one of every pair of Ollie’s socks the next time he’s up in unit 3, as he attempts to plaster on an expression that hopefully doesn’t radiate This is my ex, please ignore every word that comes out of his horrible face, but Jonathan is already smiling.
“Oh, I don’t know that I get shy from him,” he says, and Ezra has to be imagining the hint of a spark in his eyes as they meet Ezra’s. “I think he’s just a little slow to warm up.”
“I’m also right here, ” Ezra says, intimately aware of how hot his face is and how red it looks. The last thing he needs right now is Ollie and Jonathan teaming up, though, so he shrugs Ollie’s arm off his shoulders and gestures back toward the living room. “You missed dinner, but we’re apparently at the drinking-on-a-school-night part of the evening. Wine? Beer?”
“Wine’s great,” Jonathan says.
“Red or white?”
Jonathan tilts his head to one side, considering, and the weight of his eyes is far too heavy to just be thinking about wine. “Whatever you’re having.”
Whatever Ezra’s having ends up being a glass of merlot and a lapful of Sappho, who sprawls out across both of them when Ollie—giving Ezra a pointed wag of his eyebrows, because he’s the least subtle person on the planet —gestures for the two of them to take the couch, while he stretches out on the floor. There’s enough room for them to share without touching, but Ezra finds himself tilting toward Jonathan anyway, their shoulders barely brushing.
If it bothers Jonathan to have him so close, he doesn’t let on. He looks like he belongs there, leaning easily into the conversation that starts up around them again as if it never paused, responding to Max and Lily’s energetic—though tactful, Ezra notes, avoiding any dead-husband questions— interrogation about what he’s been up to since the last time they talked.
It warms something in Ezra’s belly to see Jonathan so comfortable here, in Ezra’s living room, with Ezra’s friends, and he realizes with a jolt that this is the first time he’s thought of this place, these people, as his. It’s like having Jonathan in this room was the puzzle piece he needed to make it feel right, to connect Ezra to it and make him feel real, and that’s—that’s—
No. Absolutely not. He gets up to pour himself a generous glass of water, steadfastly ignoring the look Ollie shoots him from the floor, and scoots himself to the far edge of the couch when he sits back down, chugging half of it in one go. Jonathan cocks a brow at him but doesn’t comment, and Ezra’s grateful for it.
He’s even more grateful for the way Jonathan seems to sense that Ezra is none too subtly trying to keep from being pulled into the full group’s conversation and smoothly pivots to asking Noah about his kombucha brewing instead. Ezra doesn’t know how to feel about the way Jonathan seems to just— get him, to look at him and see him in a way that even Ollie never has. And he does it like it’s nothing, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, and Ezra doesn’t know what to do with that, because no one has ever, in his whole life, made him feel easy to love.
Ezra looks at the wineglass he’d abandoned on the coffee table, still half full, and downs the rest of his water instead. If those are the kinds of thoughts floating through his head like they belong there, it’s probably time to stop drinking.
Jonathan’s eyes flicker toward him when Ezra settles back in his seat, empty-handed now, and he gives him another one of those looks, both thoughtful and knowing. He smiles, a quirk of his lips, a smile Ezra’s seen from him more than once before, but this time—like it’s the first time he’s let himself look, even without meaning to—Ezra sees the invitation in it. Not something pointed or sultry, just…open, like an extended hand.
Like an offer.
Ezra bites the inside of his cheek. Tries to remember all the reasons he told himself this was a bad idea.
Instead, he remembers, like a shock of cold water, that the ghost he’s spent the last several weeks trying to puzzle out is the guy Jonathan planned to spend the rest of his life with. The guy he lost too soon because the world is a horrible, brutal place where kind men lose their husbands for no good reason.
Ben must have been someone wonderful for Jonathan to still be wearing his wedding ring a year after his death, to still be close with his parents, to haunt the halls of the funeral home where Ben used to spend so much of his time. And Ezra’s not—he’s not a bad person, or at least he tries not to be, but he can’t imagine anyone ever staying for him like that. You have to be willing to show your whole self to someone to get that kind of devotion, and Ezra’s never been willing to risk it.
Ollie had known, he thinks sometimes, that Ezra was holding back. Maybe things would have been different, if he hadn’t been so determined to keep his secrets so close to his chest, if he hadn’t brushed off too many bad dreams and startles and poorly covered attempts to pretend he hadn’t been staring too intently at something no one else could see. If in those too-rare, far-between moments when Ollie tried to push him to tell him what was really going on, Ezra had let him in instead of pushing him away.
Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered at all.
But Jonathan’s an adult, right? That’s what everyone keeps reminding him. He’s a grown-up who can make his own choices, who can decide for himself what he wants, and if that’s a reluctant psychic with anxiety, well—
Well.
“Hey,” Jonathan says, barely loud enough to be heard over the waves of conversation happening around them, and when Ezra turns to meet his eyes, Jonathan’s smile goes soft around the edges. But there’s hesitance in it, too, and Ezra feels the recognition like a blow, the understanding that Jonathan is as off-kilter as Ezra is. “Do you want to go somewhere a little quieter?”
He should say no. The right thing to do is to say no.
He doesn’t.