14. Ezra
14
EZRA
I found Jett standing in our living room, looking like he was trying to melt into the floor.
“Hey.” His eyes darted around nervously.
Something about seeing him in one of my old hoodies and a pair of Wes’s sweats made my stomach flip-flop.
“Hey.” I sank down on our worn sofa and pointed to the ancient easy chair across from me. “Make yourself comfortable.”
He crept over to the chair and gingerly perched on it. “This is a nice place. I was looking for something like this, an apartment in a house, but the only ones I could find in my price range were run down and gross.”
“It’s a tough market out there. We lucked out when we found this place.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Almost four years.”
A small smile tilted the corners of his mouth. “For some reason I pictured this place looking different.”
I chuckled. “What did you think it would look like?”
He smiled, a real one that reached his eyes. “Like River and Zane’s place. Have you been over there?”
I shook my head.
“Zane’s organized and River isn’t, so their apartment is half messy, half tidy, like they split each room down the middle. It reminds me of what my brothers and I used to do, only it’s their whole apartment.”
“Wes would one hundred percent be all over that if he saw it,” I said with a low laugh.
“I’d be all over what?” Wes asked from the doorway.
“Me.” I tossed a smirk at him.
He snickered. “No lies detected.”
Grinning, I stood and walked over to him so I could deliver a little smack to his ass. “Damn straight.”
He yelped and danced away from me.
“I’ll be out in a few,” I said, heading out of the living room as Wes went to sit in my vacated seat.
Once I was in the bathroom, I took a lightning-fast shower. The only thing I didn’t like about the apartment was that the water heater for our floor was tiny and took forever to refill. Three showers was pushing its limits, and I wasn’t in the mood to get blasted by freezing cold water. Especially now that I’d come and didn’t need to cool off.
When I was done, I pulled the door to the bathroom open and headed back to the living room where Wes and Jett were laughing about something, the mood in the room light and relaxed.
Jett stopped laughing as soon as he saw me.
I tried not to take it personally that he didn’t seem able to relax around me. Wes had a way about him that put people at ease. He was open and friendly and radiated kindness. I had resting bitch face and didn’t suffer fools well, as my parents would say, so I was far less approachable and tended to give off asshole vibes.
Not breaking stride, I sat next to Wes on the couch.
He pressed his leg against mine and rested his hand on my thigh. “I was just telling Jett about when we first moved in and didn’t have blinds or anything yet, and you gave the couple across the street an eyeful when you took a shower that night. And every night until we covered it up.”
“Yeah, that was my bad.” I smirked. “But in my defense, they were the ones who kept looking, so who’s really the weird one? The guy taking a shower in his own home, or the ones peeping in his window? And it’s not my fault they didn’t learn their lesson the first time and kept looking until they couldn’t.”
Jett snickered. “I had neighbors like that.”
“Oh yeah?” Wes asked.
He nodded. “Our back neighbors were the nosiest people on the planet. We had to keep our blinds and curtains closed as soon as the sun went down so they couldn’t take advantage of the fishbowl effect.”
“The fishbowl effect?” I asked.
“You know how people can see into your house when you have your curtains open and the lights on after dark? I call that the fishbowl effect because it’s the same as though you were living in a fishbowl, and everyone can just look inside.”
Wes and I chuckled. “I like that. I might steal it,” Wes said.
“Go for it.” He grinned.
“So your neighbors were nosy?” I prompted, wanting to hear more.
He nodded. “So nosy. Our next-door neighbors were just as bad. It got to the point where we couldn’t even open the windows because they liked to eavesdrop.” His grin went mischievous.
“I know that look,” Wes said. “You fucked with them.”
“Of course. I’d purposely leave the blinds and curtains open and walk around naked when I was home alone. It was always a laugh when they’d knock on my door and complain that I was being indecent in my own house.”
“I can’t with some people,” I said. “They’d really come to your house to complain about what they saw when they peeped in your windows?”
“At least once a month. If it wasn’t about getting an eyeful of peen, they complained about my music or playing movies too loud when the weather was nice, and everyone would open their windows. I swear they’d be out in their backyards just puttering around and trying to look busy any time we’d fight or argue about something.”
“Thank fuck we never had to deal with people like that.” Wes tossed me a quick grimace. “I wouldn’t be able to hold back if someone tried to scold me for existing how I want in my own house or backyard.”
Jett’s smirk intensified. “I used to play porn next to our back windows when they got on my nerves. I wouldn’t even watch it. I’d just pick something like a giant orgy or a gang bang compilation, crank the volume as loud as possible, and go do something else for a bit.”
“You’re devious and I love it.” Wes cackled.
“I got in so much trouble for that, but it was worth it.”
“How did you get in trouble for that?” I asked, not quite following. “The porn thing?”
He nodded, his smile falling. “And the naked thing.”
Wes and I exchanged a look. Why would he get in trouble for any of what he’d just told us? We knew he’d grown up out of state, but he only said he moved up the coast. Maybe the laws were different where he’d grown up?
“My neighbors were friends of my parents, of course. That’s one thing that sucks about living in a place where everyone knows you and your entire family. You can’t do anything without people tattling on you.”
“That sounds so invasive.” Wes absently rubbed my thigh.
“It is. But it came in handy a few times.” He smiled wryly and scrubbed his hand over his face.
I’d noticed he did that when he was feeling emotional distress. Would he keep talking, or was that as much as we were going to get?
“It did?” Wes asked, his tone light and his expression curious, but I could tell by the way he gripped my thigh that he was hoping Jett would tell us more.
“That’s how I found out my wife was cheating on me with my best friend.” He said it so matter of fact, all inflection gone from his voice.
Wes’s nails dug into my leg.
“She cheated on you?” I asked carefully, not wanting to push him so he clammed up again. “With your best friend?”
“Yup. And it went on for months before anyone told me.”
“Do you want to tell us about what happened?” Wes asked. “You don’t have to, but we’re good listeners.”
He looked away. “I know I don’t really talk about myself much, but it’s not because I’m trying to keep people away or that I don’t trust you. It’s more that I don’t like talking about it because I’m realizing just how messed up my life was.”
“You know we’d never judge you,” Wes assured.
He lifted his eyes and met our gazes. “I told you I grew up religious, right?”
We nodded.
“I didn’t really know much about the world outside the church or community growing up because we weren’t allowed to watch secular media or use the internet unless it was on a device with parental or school controls so they could filter what we saw or could access. We didn’t get outside news, and we didn’t even realize that was weird until we were teenagers and were able to sneak time on the internet or talk to other kids who didn’t live like us.”
He tapped his fingers against his leg. “Looking back, I can’t believe I just went along with everything for so long, but it was all I knew.” He made a sound that could have been a muffled chuckle. “I never questioned any of it because it was easier not to, but I was miserable.”
His fingers moved faster as he kept tapping on his leg. “We weren’t allowed to date, not really. It was normal for parents to arrange matches between their kids. And even then, we didn’t really date. We courted. We were never allowed to be alone together, weren’t allowed to have any sort of physical contact other than holding hands until marriage. Which is one reason so many of us got married young.” He smiled sardonically. “Nothing like the promise of getting laid to make you not care that you’re tying yourself to someone you might not be compatible with.”
“Did your parents match you with someone?” I asked carefully when he chewed on his lip.
“They did. My ex and I grew up together. Our families are close friends, and we were best friends. I was attracted to her, and I liked her, but I never felt any sort of romantic feelings for her. I told my mom that when she told me about the match, but she brushed me off and everyone just decided we’d start courting when we were sixteen. She was into it, and everyone kept pressuring me to go along with it, so I did.”
He crossed, then uncrossed his arms. “We courted for two years, and I kept waiting for the romantic feelings to develop, but they never did. Then I turned eighteen, and the pressure was on to get married.”
“Did you want to get married?” Wes asked when he paused again.
He shook his head. “But I did because it was easier to just go along with the plan. And it got me out of the house. That was a big reason why I went with it instead of trying to fight it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Moving out was my only chance to get away from having to raise my siblings. The only way I could move out was if I got married. I figured Naomi and I were so close we’d make it work, even if I never really felt for her what she felt for me.”
I winced. I could sense where this was heading.
“Things were fine for a while,” he continued. “But she wanted to have kids right away, and I wanted a break from raising kids. That caused a lot of fights between us.”
“Did you talk about that before you got married?” Wes asked, his tone hesitant.
Jett shook his head with a sardonic smile. “Nope. It never occurred to us to talk about the important things or worry about compatibility because we had no idea how normal relationships worked or how adults handle these kinds of situations.”
“Jesus. I’m guessing you didn’t get sex ed either?” I asked.
He snort-laughed. “Hell no. Our entire sex ed unit was our ninth-grade science teacher telling us that sex is for procreation and only permitted between a man and his wife, that impure thoughts and masturbation would turn us into perverts and sexual deviants, and that we’d be punished with STIs and eternal damnation if we weren’t completely pure on our wedding nights. Then he showed us a bunch of uncensored photos of STI infections. That was it. We never learned anything beyond how the reproductive system works, and even then, they didn’t really teach us about puberty or what to expect on our wedding nights. Just that sex makes babies, and it was our duty to have as many babies as God wanted us to have. Be fruitful and multiply, and all that jazz.”
“Jesus,” I repeated. “That’s so fucked up.”
He sighed. “It is. And it never occurred to me to question things until after I got married and my ex and I found out we weren’t exactly sexually compatible.”
Wes and I exchanged another look.
“We tried to make it work, but we could never find any sort of middle ground, so neither of us enjoyed sex. Between that, me not wanting to have kids right away, and me not reciprocating her feelings, we went from being best friends to resenting each other.
“After a year of everyone from our parents to randoms at church pressuring us to have kids, I gave in and we started trying.” He cut his eyes to the left and stared at the wall. “After a year of not getting pregnant, we went to a doctor to see what was going on. That’s when I learned that my little swimmers don’t swim. So having kids the old-fashioned way wasn’t going to happen.”
His eyes took on a faraway look. “That’s when I started questioning things and really thought about what I wanted my life to look like. I like kids, but I don’t want any of my own. Not after losing my childhood because I had to raise my siblings.
“I tried to talk to Naomi and our parents about how I was feeling, but no one would listen to me, and they all just decided we were going to start fertility treatments. That was the last straw, and I told them it wasn’t in God’s plan for me to have kids, and I wasn’t going to do it.”
“Oof.” Wes grimaced. “I imagine that didn’t go over well.”
He turned his attention back to us, a smirk on his full lips. “It did not. That’s when she started sleeping with Jacob, my other best friend. I don’t blame her for cheating, not really,” he said slowly. “We were both so young, and she was grieving the loss of the life she’d always wanted, so she was vulnerable. I blame him for using her pain to manipulate her. He always had a thing for Naomi, but I thought it was just a harmless crush. And he was engaged. It never occurred to me that he’d seduce my wife or have an affair with her when I was busting my ass working overtime to afford a lifestyle I didn’t even want. I never questioned them spending so much time together because I trusted them. I’m still not sure exactly how long it went on for, but everyone knew way before I did, and they all kept it quiet.”
“You mentioned that earlier,” Wes said. “Did your family know? How could no one tell you?”
“My parents knew. Hers too. I think they were hoping things would end before me or his fiancée found out and we’d just go on with our lives in ignorant bliss.” He sighed. “I feel so bad for Tessa. She adored Jacob, and she was as clueless as I was. And now she has to live with the stigma of her failed engagement and see her former fiancé parading around with his new family and everyone just accepting it like it wasn’t this huge scandal that destroyed our lives. At least I was able to leave and get away from all that crap.”
“How did you find out about them?” I asked. “You said it was because of your neighbors?”
“I overheard them and another set of neighbors talking shit about me and discussing how they could hear Naomi and Jacob fucking while I was at work.”
“They talked shit about you when you were the one who was cheated on?” Wes asked.
“Oh yeah.” He shot us a wry smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m the asshole who drove her into the arms of another man. The one with the broken dick who couldn’t give her what she needed. Did I mention that everyone, and I mean everyone , knew about my little swimmer issue? It’s super fun having your entire community know your private medical info and talking about your dick like they’re discussing the weather.”
“That’s beyond fucked up. You were the victim in every sense of the word,” I said.
He shrugged. “Not according to them. But whatever. I confronted Jacob after I heard about them, and he confessed everything. He wasn’t even sorry. He got what he wanted.”
“So you lost both of your best friends in the same moment?” Wes asked. “That’s horrible.”
“Yup,” he said sadly. “And my whole support system, my family, and the only community I’d ever known.”