Chapter 25
25
That night, Ezra dreams of water.
There’s a mikvah in Providence, tucked behind the JCC, easy to miss if you don’t know it’s there. He’d gone only once, on a tour with his Hebrew school class to learn about the immersion ritual. At the time it seemed both old-fashioned and beautiful. The idea of ritual impurity had curdled unpleasantly, but the concept of something as simple as clean water washing away one part of life and gentling someone into the next filled him with a yearning he couldn’t describe. He’d never gone back, but the memory would return to him at the oddest times—when he stepped barefoot into a puddle of new rainwater, doing the Penguin Plunge at Fogland Beach, the first time he swam while wearing a binder. It’s always just a flash of memory, never anything more than the shimmer of clear water on mosaic tiles, but it surprises him every time.
In the dream, he’s naked, looking down at the water as it laps against the walls of the pool. He steps carefully, feeling the cool water against his skin, down, down, down, until he’s submerged to his shoulders.
“You have to go in completely,” the attendant says in Zayde’s voice, but when Ezra looks up, it’s Ben there instead, sitting cross-legged on the floor, his chin in his hand. “If you don’t go under, the ritual isn’t complete.”
Ezra looks into the deep water. He can feel smooth stone under his feet. “What’s the ritual?”
Ben smiles, reaching out to rest his hand on top of Ezra’s head, as if giving a blessing. “Rebirth,” he says, and gently presses Ezra down.
The water closes over his head and the world rushes away. He keeps his eyes open. The water is clear, and through it, as he sinks down, down, down, far deeper than he should, he can see the delicate pattern of the tile floor, the pale skin of his body. His breasts float upward, his nipples hardened from the cold. He touches the soft tissue where it swells from his chest, and it doesn’t feel foreign. He’s aware of the place between his legs where the water feels colder against skin that runs hot, and when he lays a hand there, too, there’s no sense of despair, no sense of yearning for something that isn’t there.
Ezra opens his mouth and lets the water flow into him, his lungs and his veins, washing him clean from the inside out. He’s a body in water, safe as the womb. He’s a soul within the body, filling every space, every crevice, every cell.
He surfaces, water running from his mouth, from his ears, from his eyes. The spring is fresh, but his face tastes of salt.
Ezra gasps himself awake like he’s surfaced from underwater. His bedroom is dark, only a faint sliver of moonlight trickling in through the blinds. The skin of his face feels tacky and tight, and when he reaches up to touch his cheek, his fingers come away damp.
His phone is in his hand before he knows he’s reached for it. Jonathan’s voice, when he answers, is a sleepy murmur, and Ezra winces. He hadn’t checked the time.
“Ezra?”
“Hi,” Ezra says. “Can I—” His fingers are shaking around the phone. All he wants, very suddenly, is to be held . He takes a breath. Swallows around the dry tightness in his throat. “Can I come over?”
—
“Wow,” Jonathan murmurs, when Ezra finishes talking. “That sounds…intense.”
They’d settled on the sectional in Jonathan’s living room when Ezra stumbled in, shoeless and still in sweatpants, Sappho off leash at his heels for the walk down the stairs. Jonathan has his fingers in Ezra’s hair, having detangled his sleep-mussed curls, stroking through the strands where Ezra’s head rests in his lap.
It’s grounding and soft, soothing the shivers that still ripple over Ezra’s skin, lingering goose bumps from a dream that’s just starting to fade into memory. He’s grateful that his face is tucked against Jonathan’s shirt, because he knows that if he sees the look that goes along with this touch, the tears he wiped off his face when he startled awake from that waterlogged dream are going to return in force.
“It’s not usually like that,” he says. He’d watched Jonathan’s eyes get progressively wider as Ezra talked about Ryan’s birth, but the quiet pride he’s used to feeling after a job has turned fragile and indefinable. “I mean, it’s always a lot, but I can usually leave it at the metaphorical office, I guess.”
“Mm.” Jonathan’s hand settles on Ezra’s waist, slipping under the edge of his shirt and running in slow circles over his hip bone, just above the band of his sweats. Ezra shivers into the touch without thinking, and Jonathan laughs softly. “It’s not so bad, though, is it? Bringing it home with you?”
Ezra doesn’t answer, closing his eyes and tilting his head into Jonathan’s hip, letting himself soak in the scent of Jonathan’s bodywash and laundry detergent. It’s probably— definitely—too soon in their…whatever this is to bring up the pile of baggage he has around parenting knocking around in his head after today. He shakes his head instead.
“I usually feel like I’m doing something wrong because I don’t,” he admits. “Bring it home, I mean. Same with teaching. I know people who do it where it’s their whole identity. It comes into everything they do, whether they’re at work or not. I’m always worried that someone’s going to figure out that I’m faking it.”
Jonathan, who had adjusted slightly when Ezra moved, slips his hand back into his hair, finger-combing it off his forehead. Ezra closes his eyes again. “What exactly do you think you’re faking?”
Ezra scoffs. “Want the long list or the short one?”
Jonathan clicks his tongue, chiding, “Come on. You can’t scare me off, I’ve already gotten attached to your dog.”
Oh, I bet I could, Ezra thinks, but he sighs and sits up anyway, rolling his shoulders and drawing his knees up to loop his arms around them.
“Everyone I know seems to know who they are and what they’re doing,” he says. Sappho, curled under the coffee table, shifts in her sleep. “And I don’t. I do what I do because it’s about as far away from what I grew up with as I could get, and I was sick of constantly being surrounded by death. I tell people what I do for work and they act like it’s something impressive or amazing, but it’s…People have been doing this for thousands of years, and for most of that, none of what I do was even a job . I’m not special because I can keep someone calm or teach people how to move through a flow, I’m just—”
He starts to offer Jonathan a helpless, exasperated smile, but breaks off at the look on his face. Jonathan has one arm propped on the back of the couch and is watching him with a soft, amused sort of affection. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Jonathan reaches out to curl a hand over the back of Ezra’s neck. He telegraphs every movement, he always does, so Ezra’s ready when Jonathan kisses him, slow and sweet and lingering. His thumb strokes over the pulse in Ezra’s throat, and Ezra shivers a breath into the kiss, Jonathan’s responding laugh caught between their mouths.
“You are impressive,” Jonathan says when they part. He keeps his grip on the back of Ezra’s neck and pulls, very gently, until Ezra takes the hint and slides into his lap. His body knows the motion now, and he settles his weight on Jonathan’s thighs with familiar ease. “And you are special, and just because something’s been done for years doesn’t mean you’re not still amazing for doing it. Do you know what I would have done if I was in that room today? Cried. Probably very loudly, and very unattractively.”
Ezra doubts that. He has yet to see Jonathan do anything unattractively. And in any case, it’s not the same. Ezra sits with people during what’s often one of the best days of their lives. Jonathan volunteers to be there for the worst. It’s not that Ezra doesn’t see loss in his line of work—the nature of being a full-spectrum doula means that he sees nearly as many miscarriages and abortions as he does births—but it’s not the same. “You handle bigger deals than that on a regular basis.”
“I absolutely don’t,” Jonathan says firmly. He reaches up and brushes Ezra’s hair back. It keeps falling over his forehead. “Why are you so set on acting like nothing you do is important?”
There are a thousand answers, and Ezra knows that there’s not a single one he can give that’ll take that brokenhearted look out of Jonathan’s eyes. “I don’t know,” he whispers.
Jonathan cups his face, tilting his jaw up until Ezra has to look at him. There’s still a question in his eyes.
There’s too much Ezra wants to say and not enough words to say it.
Ezra kisses him instead.
It’s a deeper kiss from the outset, and Ezra knows, from the moment that Jonathan’s teeth scrape against his lower lip, that something’s changed. The rain pounding against the porch overhang outside the window seems louder and stronger, and it takes a few seconds for Ezra to realize that it’s the roar of blood in his ears that he’s hearing as his pulse quickens, warmth spreading through him as Jonathan’s hands slip under his shirt. He presses closer and Jonathan lets him.
“Bed?” Jonathan murmurs when they separate long enough for Ezra to haul his shirt off and drop it onto the floor, dragging Jonathan’s off a moment later.
“Yes,” Ezra says immediately, and yelps when Jonathan, laughing, stands up without dislodging him from his lap, hitching Ezra’s legs around his waist. “Don’t drop me.”
“I’d never,” Jonathan promises.
It makes Ezra’s breath catch in the back of his throat, and he’s still trying to settle his breathing when Jonathan sets him down in the nest of sheets he must have abandoned when Ezra called him earlier, the rumpled duvet already kicked to the bottom of the bed. Ezra reaches for him before he’s properly made contact with the pillows, and Jonathan follows him down, catching him in a kiss when Ezra tilts his face up, and then another, and then another.
In here, the rain is louder, all the windows open to the storm. The air is thick with the scent of petrichor, pungent and sweet. Jonathan slides his hands up over Ezra’s shoulders and biceps and wrists and then presses his hands to the pillow above his head, firm pressure that makes Ezra’s heart stutter in his chest. When he flexes his grip, Ezra shifts so Jonathan can wrap just one hand around both his wrists, long fingers steady and sure.
“Okay?” he asks, the question brushed against Ezra’s mouth.
Ezra nods. “Okay,” he says.
Jonathan kisses him again, in appreciation or reward or both, and Ezra melts. He’s gotten used to Jonathan kissing him senseless, but this isn’t drifting out of his body and floating away to a place where the stimuli in his body and brain don’t ever have to overlap. He feels present in a way that should be terrifying, but the panic never comes.
There’s just the sound of the rain and the scent of their skin and the heat of another body against his.
“You good?” Jonathan murmurs, his breath ghosting the words over Ezra’s neck. The hand not curled around Ezra’s wrists trails down, over his sternum and lower, lower, lower. Heat blooms under Ezra’s skin, following the path of Jonathan’s fingertips, and his breath catches in his throat. “You seem different. More…here. With me.”
“I—” Jonathan’s fingers dip beneath Ezra’s waistband. He shudders. “I feel more with you.”
I feel more with you; as in, I feel like I’m here, with you, more than I ever have. And: I feel more with you; as in, You make me feel, more than anyone else. He tilts his head into Jonathan’s next kiss, and arches into the touch that slips lower still, finding the place where he’s wanting with unerring ease.
Jonathan breaks the kiss, punctuates it with one more, soft, deceptively chaste. “What do you want?”
“You,” Ezra says.
He’s barely been touched. But he feels like he’s a live wire, every nerve singing. He wants—he wants .
Jonathan kisses the delicate skin under his eye. Waits.
Ezra says, in a voice he barely recognizes as his own, “ Please. ”
“Okay,” Jonathan says, and then, “I’ve got you.”
He helps Ezra slip his sweatpants and underwear over his hips and off, and then, with a devastating tenderness, takes him apart.
Ezra doesn’t treat his body like a stranger. He spends too much time using it, needing to be aware of its angles and balance and rhythm, to be able to disconnect from it fully. Sex is—has always been—the same. He likes how it feels, he likes to be touched, he likes the way he can make other people feel good, but sometimes he just has to take himself somewhere else, somewhere where the parts of himself being touched or kissed or fucked belong to another kind of body.
He doesn’t know what makes tonight feel so different. But it does.
Jonathan takes everything slowly, almost hesitantly, using his fingers and his mouth in careful counterbalance, never pushing too far, not going harder or faster even when Ezra starts to squirm. Ezra thinks he’s teasing, playing like he has been all week, but then he catches the way Jonathan’s other hand is trembling where he’s holding on to Ezra’s thigh and realizes that he’s not the only one who’s nervous.
Abandoning his grip on the pillowcase, he reaches down and laces their fingers together. Jonathan looks up at him, his pupils blown dark and wide, and Ezra thumbs over his cheek and then threads the fingers of his other hand through his hair. It’s damp with sweat under his touch and catches when he tries to work his hand free, and when Ezra tugs, just to test his reaction, Jonathan sucks in a breath, eyes fluttering shut.
“Fuck,” he says, pressing his forehead to the bare skin of Ezra’s hip. “Fuck. Just—careful.”
His voice has gone hoarse, the muscles in his back and shoulders so tense Ezra can see the tremors, and he bites back a laugh, surprised and delighted, the last of the tension he’d been clinging to leaving him in a rush. “Oh my God,” he says, unable to keep the grin off his face. “Really?”
Jonathan picks his head up, scowling. “Because you’re so calm,” he says, and bites down on Ezra’s inner thigh. Ezra lets out a yelp that turns into a choked moan when Jonathan licks over the spot he’d bitten, then sucks a bruise into the skin. Ezra knows immediately he’ll be pressing on it for days, just to remember the feeling.
The sudden levity eases something between them, takes the heat that’s been building down to a simmer. Jonathan holds his gaze until Ezra touches his cheek and gives a shaky nod, and then he dips his head back down between Ezra’s legs and stays there. He works his fingers and mouth in perfect tandem until Ezra gasps and arches and begs, and when Ezra comes, Jonathan works him through it with determined care until he hits the edge of overstimulation and comes out the other side into another breathless peak. He looks up then, face wet and eyes wide, and Ezra doesn’t stop, doesn’t think, just reaches down and hauls him up for a frantic kiss.
“Ezra,” Jonathan says against his mouth, tight and rasping. He’s shaking. “Tell me—”
Ezra slips a hand between their bodies, and Jonathan drops his forehead to Ezra’s shoulders with a whine. “Can we,” Ezra says, floating on a haze of pleasure but still not sure how to ask, and Jonathan picks his head back up and presses their mouths together in messy, uncoordinated consent.
They never turned on the lights in the room, and they agree, by some kind of silent communication, not to change that now. Jonathan uses the flashlight on his phone to check the expiration date on the condoms in his nightstand drawer instead of turning on the lamp, and the cloudy moonlight coming in through the windows is all the light they have. It’s enough, painting the room in silver blue, and Ezra finds himself unable to look away from Jonathan’s face as he slips back between his legs, taking a shaky breath and running his fingertips over Ezra’s hip bone.
He meets Ezra’s eyes, his own wide in the dark room. Ezra reaches up and thumbs over his cheekbone, and Jonathan’s face softens as he turns and kisses the heel of Ezra’s palm.
The sound of the rain seems to pause when they come together, like the storm itself is holding its breath around them. It’s a long, slow press, and Ezra closes his eyes at the warmth of it, aware of every tremor in his muscles, every one of Jonathan’s ragged breaths, every place where their bodies are connected. Jonathan stills when their hips meet, and his forehead comes down to the crook of Ezra’s neck, and he’s shaking as badly as Ezra is.
“Ezra,” he says, and there’s something vulnerable and almost wondering in his voice.
I love how he says my name, Ezra thinks, wild and terrified, and he’s already tilting his head when Jonathan bends to press a kiss to Ezra’s throat, like he’s trying to keep himself steady. Ezra wraps his arms around his shoulders and buries his face into the side of his neck.
He can feel Jonathan’s pulse under his mouth, pounding almost as hard as the rain against the window. But there’s a stillness inside him, like he’s in the eye of a hurricane, tucked into a tiny space of calm while a maelstrom rages around him. “Please.”
It’s slow. Slow and deep and intense, and so much sensation Ezra thinks he could drown in it. He listens to the rain and the wind and the sounds of the room around him, skin on skin and heavy breathing and wordless pleas that he can’t be sure are Jonathan’s or his own. Sensation builds inside him, not like a tightening coil but like a wave, and when it crests at last he lets it carry him out to sea. He holds on, and when the roaring in his ears resolves itself into words, Jonathan’s voice repeating his name in a litany that’s nearly a prayer, he says, “Please, you can, please,” and feels it in his bones as Jonathan shakes apart.
Afterward, curled together in the messy blankets, sweat still drying on their skin, Jonathan says, quiet and uncertain, “I’ve never done that before.”
That makes sense, if Ben was Jonathan’s first—only—everything. On the other hand, Ezra still can’t totally feel his toes. “Beginner’s luck, maybe.”
Jonathan gives one of those soft, self-deprecating laughs that Ezra’s slowly starting to get used to and tell the difference between. This is the one that comes when he’s proud of himself but doesn’t want to say it, because someone must have taught him not to sound anything other than humble, even when he should. “You’re okay?”
Ezra hums an affirmation, a little afraid of what he’ll say if he talks. Jonathan kisses the back of his shoulder, shifting to hold him closer. Ezra laces their fingers together.
He still feels stretched open and raw, and not just physically. But mostly, he just feels good, and it’s such an unfamiliar feeling he wants to bask in it for a little while longer.
“God, it’s really storming out there,” Jonathan says, and Ezra has to blink a few times, rousing himself from the half doze he hadn’t realized he’d slipped into, caught up in the warmth and comfort of Jonathan’s bed and Jonathan’s body. He picks his head up off Jonathan’s arm in time to catch a flash of lightning outside the window. “Do you think—”
Thunder crashes above them, close enough to nearly rattle the walls. Ezra lets out a strangled yelp of surprise and is saved from absolute mortification by the fact that the startled sound Jonathan makes is even louder and probably half an octave higher.
There’s an answering high yowl from the living room, and then the frantic patter of paws on hardwood as Sappho sprints into the room and leaps onto the bed, attempting to burrow between them. “Oh my God, no,” Ezra groans, trying to push her off, but Jonathan laughs, shifting to scoop her up, all fifty-odd wriggling pounds of her, and depositing her on Ezra’s other side on top of the sheets. She accepts this with only marginal squirming and promptly presses herself against his chest, and Ezra shakes his head in exasperated amusement, scratching her ears. At least she’s outside the bedding. “So much for the afterglow.”
Jonathan chuckles and lies back down, spooning up behind Ezra again. He reaches past Ezra’s shoulder to stroke Sappho’s head. She snuffles and leans into the touch. “I don’t know,” he says, and Ezra doesn’t need to see him to hear his smile. “I think it’s still okay.”
His voice is soft, warm, tinged with sleepy affection. Ezra thinks, You are the best worst decision I’ve ever made.
Before he can talk himself out of it, he says, “Can I ask you something?”
Jonathan hums into his shoulder.
“My family does a fire for Lag BaOmer every year. And it’s going to be— I don’t know. But I was wondering—” God. Why is this so hard ? “You don’t have to, if you’re busy, I know it’s short notice, but—”
“Ezra,” Jonathan interrupts, and Ezra stops talking with a grateful huff. “If you’re asking me to come with you, my answer is yes.”
“Oh,” Ezra says. He feels relieved, and then embarrassed about feeling relieved, and presses his face into Sappho’s so he doesn’t have to think about that more than he has to.
“Oh,” Jonathan echoes, teasing but fond. He kisses the nape of Ezra’s neck. “I demand multiple s’mores.”
“Marshmallows might be kosher,” Ezra warns into Sappho’s fur. “I keep losing the fight on getting normal ones.”
“Ugh. You’re lucky you’re cute,” Jonathan says, and the warmth of his voice soaks into Ezra’s soul, holding him buoyant and safe as he drops into the sweet emptiness of sleep, the rain a distant echo that follows him down, and down, and down.