Chapter 23
23
The next time Ben appears, phasing into being on the window seat of Ezra’s living room with all the warning of a hypnic jerk, Ezra speaks before he has a chance to open his mouth.
“You didn’t tell me you were separating.”
If Ben’s surprised at this verbal pounce, he doesn’t show it. He leans back against the window like a sweater-clad panther, all long limbs and easy grace. His boring clothing hides a figure Ezra knows from the photos in Jonathan’s apartment is—was?—corded with lean muscle, honed from years of martial arts and morning runs.
Ben was tall and broad and toned and gorgeous. Ezra hits five-six on a good day, if he’s purposeful about his posture, and his body still follows the map of his mother’s and grandmother’s, even after a year of testosterone redistributing his body fat.
After someone like Ben, what the hell is Jonathan doing with him?
Ben inclines his head, looking at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then he shrugs. “Does it matter?”
Ezra sits up on his yoga mat, abandoning the flow he’d barely started, narrowing his eyes. “Doesn’t it?”
Ben skims the middle finger of his right hand over his wedding ring. Finally, he says, “I wasn’t cheating on him.”
“He thinks you were.”
“I know.” Ben sighs and looks away. He looks very alive, suddenly, solid and tired and real, shadows smudging the skin under his eyes and his shoulders slumping. The fading light of sunset paints him in shades of pink and gold, highlighting the strong line of his jaw, the flecks of green in his eyes. Ezra has seen the face of his death only once, that first moment of sight, when the afterimage of blood and viscera superimposed itself over Ben’s handsome face, but he wonders if this is how he looked in the moments before the accident that killed him: world-weary and resigned.
He’s silent for a long time. Ezra finds himself wondering if that was something he and Jonathan liked about each other: the ability to sit in silence, to gather their thoughts.
He’s never been able to. Background silence is one thing—the hum of a city morning, rushing traffic and the distant barking of dogs, the natural silence that sinks into an empty room, the settling of an old roof and the echoing creak of floorboards or faint clanging of pipes; all of those are soothing and ambient, easy to relax into without care. This conversational quiet, the absence of sound as thoughts are gathered and Ezra’s mind zeroes in on every possible place where he could be hurt, is something else.
At last, Ben sighs. Emotion and sound, without any actual breath. It’s been years since Ezra has let himself wonder at the psychic physics of it, but now it seems impossible not to. How real is he? How much of him is an echo, and how much is something more?
“I knew about the affair,” he says. “My mom and yours. That was the secret I was keeping. I knew, and I didn’t know what to do about it.”
“So you weren’t cheating on him.”
“No. God no.” Ben rubs a hand over his face, long fingers scraping over the dark stubble on his cheeks. “I wouldn’t have— No. I know he didn’t believe me. I just didn’t know how to tell him—” He breaks off. When he looks back at Ezra, his eyes are conspiratorial. “He’s such a romantic, you know? He wants so badly to believe that everyone loves like he does, and I’ve never met anyone else who loves like that. It’s not just his heart, it’s—it’s a full-body experience with him. Heart and body and soul.”
Ezra thinks of the way Jonathan looks at him like he’s something precious, the way he can be simultaneously tender and devastating in the way he touches, the way he smiles.
He nods. It doesn’t feel right to say I know .
“His parents are…” Ben’s mouth twists. “They love Jon and his sister, but from what Jon told me, growing up with them was like living in a war zone. I think he kind of convinced himself that everyone grew up like that. I still remember the look he gave me the first time I mentioned that my parents did pub trivia together, like he was stunned at the idea that people would want to hang out with their spouse. And they loved him, like, from day one. My mom—” He huffs a laugh. “My mom took me aside before we’d even finished one meal and told me that if I didn’t marry him, she’d never forgive me.”
Ezra laughs, not quite sure if it’s nostalgia or regret that makes him think of his own mother shooting significant glances at Ollie across the dinner table, not even bothering with subtlety. “Cute.”
“Yeah. He loved it. Loved them. They were the marriage role models he didn’t have growing up, y’know?” Ben’s smile is a weary, unhappy thing. “When I found out about my mom— our moms, I guess—I just…”
“You couldn’t tell him.”
Ben looks at him. “It would’ve broken his heart.”
Ezra thinks about Jonathan, white-knuckled and red-eyed, throwing his phone across the bed and folding in on himself after another argument with Judy, shaking like a leaf in the wind. What difference did timing make, if it was always going to break his heart in the end? Ezra draws one knee up, wrapping his arms around it. He plays it off as a stretch, not like he’s shielding his own chest from impact. “But not yours?”
“Not the same way.” Ben’s chest rises and falls, another ghost of a sigh. “I was always more of a realist, I guess.”
“So that’s why you kept it from him?” It doesn’t seem like enough, somehow, and he hears the skepticism in his own voice. “So he wouldn’t be sad?”
“Residency was hard,” Ben says, and the words have the edge of a confession. “I was miserable all the time, and I was taking it out on him, and I know he was frustrated with me, but we knew it was temporary, so we were— There was an end point, I guess. But when I found out about my mom…” He shakes his head. “I know I changed. But he looked up to my parents, and he knew that the years my dad was in grad school were the worst for their marriage, and he’d keep saying that we just had to look at them for an example, and we’d get through it like they did.”
It’s not hard to connect the dots. “You really think he’d have given up on you just because your parents’ marriage wasn’t as perfect as he thought it was?”
“I wasn’t doing my best thinking at the time.” Ben huffs out a short, humorless laugh. “I wasn’t doing my best anything at the time. I shut down. Shut him out. It wasn’t his fault. I just…I knew it’d just open the floodgates if I said anything. And he tried so fucking hard, and I knew he’d snap eventually, and then we were fighting all the time because he’s not stupid, he knew I was keeping something from him, and—”
He clenches and unclenches his hands, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
The person in front of him is an unexplainable echo, but an echo nonetheless.
Ezra takes a breath, steeling himself. His lungs ache, as if he’s been failing to inhale the entire time they’ve been talking, like his body has seen Ben’s chest moving without air and wants to do the same.
“I don’t understand what you want from me,” he says. “You’re everywhere, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what to do to help you.”
It’s the question that’s been digging at him since the first time Ben appeared as a shade without a name.
He must want something.
Fix it, he’d said, the first time he spoke, but fix what ? Between Jonathan and their mothers and, hell, even Ezra himself, that could be anything.
Ben doesn’t answer at first.
“I don’t want him to give up on love,” he says so quietly Ezra barely hears it. “I don’t want him to think that what we had, what my parents had, what my mom broke, what”—he laughs, low and bitter—“what I broke—I don’t want him to think that’s all there is.”
Ezra swallows. There’s a bird trapped in the space between his sternum and his lungs. “Every relationship I’ve ever been in has crashed and burned,” he says. “And it’s almost always been my fault, because I couldn’t give them what they needed, or because I was trying too hard, or I was just too much for them to deal with because I was always running off to go deal with something at home or take care of my sister or—”
He digs his fingers into his palms until they sting. “If you want someone to be a good enough person that they can make him believe in love again, you should have chosen someone else. I’m not that person.”
The smile Ben offers him is a small, crooked thing.
“Maybe,” he says. “But you’re the only person I have.”