Chapter 21
21
“You sound like a high schooler with a crush,” Nina says. “And I mean that in the absolute nicest way.”
Ezra had started this morning hoping to take advantage of one of his rare days off to spend several hours napping and then slip back downstairs and into Jonathan’s bed.
Instead, he’s in Stoughton, following Nina through IKEA. Ostensibly she’s only looking for a new dresser, but he’s seen her shop before. He made sure to wear good shoes. “I don’t sound that bad.”
Nina puts a vivid pink throw pillow back down on an equally vivid pink couch and cocks an eyebrow at him. “You just spent ten minutes waxing No one’s ever made me feel like this poetic,” she says, “and then clarified that you two are only doing—and I quote—‘hand stuff.’?”
Ezra crouches down to look at the price tag on an end table to hide the way he’s sure his cheeks are going red. “I mean,” he mumbles, “when you say it like that, sure.”
“Listen, I’m not saying I blame you. I’ve seen his Instagram. Those forearms? Yes please .”
Ezra’s face feels, if possible, even hotter. He’s seen those forearms at work firsthand. “He’s—” he begins, and then, knowing there’s absolutely nothing he can say here that won’t just bring that wicked glint of delight back onto her face, settles on finishing with “Yup.”
“Oh, honey,” Nina says, grinning. “You are screwed .”
He is .
So much so that even after Nina’s dropped him back at his own apartment and left him to flop face down onto his bed, face buried in a pillow that smells like his own conditioner and not at all like Jonathan’s aftershave, he’s still thinking about it. Over the past few days—and nights—he’s learned that Jonathan can be gentle but brutal, teasing and slow and delicate, careful in a way that isn’t about measuring what Ezra can handle or even what he needs, but like he knows exactly what to do to shatter Ezra to pieces, and intends to do exactly that with a quiet, devastating confidence.
Jonathan talks after sex, too, which is…new. Even with Ollie, who knows Ezra almost as well as Ezra knows himself, Ezra was usually too busy trying to pull himself back from whatever distant, tucked-away place his mind had gone to protect itself from the nagging curls of dysphoria and discomfort for pillow talk. But Jonathan doesn’t seem to mind the way Ezra can’t take himself all the way out of his head during sex, his tendency to need to squirm back into his binder or underwear halfway through, his inability to get completely naked with another person. He’s comfortable in his own skin, but doesn’t seem to care that Ezra isn’t, and when his fingertips skim too lightly across Ezra’s back or find a spot on his hips that makes Ezra jump, he never so much as frowns when Ezra twitches away. He just leans back and gives Ezra enough space to breathe himself back to something resembling calm, waiting, patiently, until Ezra reaches for him again.
“Sorry,” Ezra whispers, the second or fourth or tenth time it happens—he’s lost count, now, of how many times it’s been. He pulls his shirt back over his head with shaking hands. “It’s not you, I just—”
“Hey. It’s okay.” Jonathan shrugs into a zip-up hoodie as if in solidarity, though he leaves it open, his chest bare, and it’s easier than Ezra expects to shift closer and rest his head there to listen to the steady beat of his heart. “No agenda. Okay?”
Ezra huffs. “Okay.”
It’s strange. Different. But bundled under Jonathan’s soft sheets, the pressure of a warm body against his contrasting with the sweet, cool water Jonathan always coaxes into him as they wait for their heart rates to settle, listening to the quiet rumbling of Sappho’s snores drifting across the room…it feels easy, somehow, to let himself talk.
They start with the safe things, hobbies and friends and funny-in-hindsight mishaps. But the conversations drift, as Ezra should have expected they would, into the quiet spaces of love and loss and family, the jagged places with the most potential to cut and bleed.
He tells Jonathan about growing up at the Chapel, about the constant uncertainty of being both invisible and on display. He talks about not realizing that other people didn’t spend their days in close proximity to the dead and the mourning, that he owes most of his brutally dark sense of humor to the ever-present knowledge that death was as much a member of his family as his siblings or parents.
Jonathan seems more willing to talk about himself in the soft, dreamy darkness, and Ezra drinks in every piece of information like it’s water in the desert. He learns that Jonathan left a full-time job when Ben died because he couldn’t handle project management when his life was falling apart, that he started consulting so that he could make his own hours and spend more time coordinating the chevra. He learns that Jonathan is a trained and certified death doula—which Ezra hadn’t even known was a thing, and the irony isn’t lost on him—and that his hardest taharah cases are the clients he’d worked with before they died.
“My therapist hates it,” he admits. “She says I’m turning my life into something that’s obsessed with death. Like it’ll make up for not being there when Ben died.”
“Are you?” Ezra asks.
Jonathan’s faint, joyless smile is answer enough. Ezra drags him in for a hug, and Jonathan tucks his head into the crook of Ezra’s neck.
They don’t talk any more that night.
He learns that Jonathan has a younger sister he loves dearly and doesn’t speak to as often as he wishes he could since she moved to New Zealand for work two years ago, that his parents had the kind of brutal, vicious divorce that turned his middle school years into a miserable mess of custody battles and nearly made him swear off the idea of marriage for good. He learns that Ben’s family—his cheerful sisters, his ever-affectionate parents, his doting grandmother—had become Jonathan’s own before they were even married, that Judy had taken one look at him, seen something in him that activated some innate maternal urge, and all but adopted him, going so far as to tell him that if he and Ben ever split, he should still think of her as an extra mother.
And he learns that Jonathan has barely spoken to her since the night he learned about the affair.
It’s the first time he sees Jonathan interact with someone with anything other than an easy grin and a kind word. Ezra catches him at the end of a phone call when he steps back into the bedroom after a badly needed shower, Jonathan’s strong brows pulled together in the first scowl Ezra’s seen from him.
“—and I’m not talking about this anymore,” he’s saying, his knuckles white where he’s holding his phone. Ezra pauses at the door, uncertain, feeling too exposed in the towel he’s wrapped around his chest, but Jonathan doesn’t look at him. “Judy, I swear to God—” He breaks off, jaw going tight, and then snaps, “ No. I’m done. I told you, I’m done.”
He hangs up the phone and flings it away from himself as he slumps on the bed, dropping his head into his hands and breathing like he’s run a sprint. His phone bounces twice across the comforter and thumps to a dull stop against a rumpled pillow.
Ezra hesitates until he sees him start to shake. “Hey,” he says, crouching in front of him. “Are you okay?”
Jonathan nods without lifting his head, his fingers digging into his temples. “I’m fine.”
He’s absolutely not. Ezra reaches up to gently take him by the wrists and draw his hands away from his face. He knows all about avoidance, has turned not talking about his feelings into an art, but he’s never been able to watch it in someone else. “What did she say to you?”
Jonathan makes a sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. He pulls one hand out of Ezra’s grasp and swipes at his eyes. “She’s just— It doesn’t matter.” He swallows, then blinks down at Ezra. “Why are you naked?”
Ezra flushes. He hadn’t noticed his towel making a break for it, but somehow the usual feeling of overexposed anxiety doesn’t come. “Don’t change the subject.”
Jonathan shakes his head fondly, reaching down and wrapping the towel around Ezra’s shoulders like a cape. “It’s freezing in here. You should get dressed.”
“Still changing the subject,” Ezra says, but he lets go of Jonathan to better hold the towel in place as he gets to his feet.
“Imagine that,” Jonathan says, and gives him a nudge. He smiles, but it doesn’t meet his red-rimmed eyes. “Really, I’m fine.”
Half a dozen offers of comfort flash through Ezra’s head. It’s okay to miss her. I’m not talking to my mom, either, and it feels like shit. She doesn’t deserve your tears. You can talk to me.
You can talk to me.
Ezra’s never been good at pushing. He bends down, kisses the top of Jonathan’s head, and goes to find his clothes.
Despite all their conversations, tangled in bed or knocking their feet together at the breakfast nook in Jonathan’s kitchen or across the mess of Ezra’s desk at the Chapel, Ezra doesn’t tell him about the ghosts. For all of Jonathan’s seemingly ever-present patience and the apparently bottomless well of his heart, Ezra knows everyone has a breaking point. The snap in his voice and single burst of frustrated anger at Judy’s call had shown Ezra the cracks behind Jonathan’s easy smile. With a certainty that makes him half sick with guilt, he knows that learning Ezra’s been talking to the ghost of his husband will make those cracks worse. Maybe even to the point where they can’t be fixed.
He’ll have to tell him. Especially now, with Ben talking to him, becoming more and more a person and less and less a shadow. Ezra knows that. But he hasn’t been selfish for a long time, and maybe he can just have this. For a little while longer.
It’s too easy to let that little while stretch out into the horizon of possibility, especially now, curled on his side with his head on Jonathan’s pillow. He’s pulled his underwear back on and stolen— borrowed —one of Jonathan’s well-worn T-shirts, but he left his binder and the rest of his clothes scattered on the floor where they’d fallen, and the sheets are cool against his bare legs.
Lazily texting Nina and listening to the soft sounds of Jonathan moving around the kitchen, feeling sated and comfortable and safe, it’s too easy to imagine a future of this. Easy nights in the same bed, the steady warmth of Jonathan’s hands and smile.
He tries not to think about it. Tries harder not to want it.
He wishes he was better at it.
“Your roommates,” Jonathan announces, coming back to the room with two mugs held in one hand and his phone in the other, “are bullying me.”
Ezra bites back a smile, sitting up to take the mug Jonathan offers him. The steam is sweet and strong, scented with ginger and chamomile and lemon. Jonathan drinks coffee, but he defaults to tea in the evenings. Every time he makes it for them, Ezra wonders which blend is the one he used to bring Ben on those sleepless nights. “Yeah?”
“Yep.” Jonathan settles into bed next to him, holding out an arm, and Ezra’s body moves before he can think to question it, shifting to lean against his side. Jonathan hadn’t bothered with a shirt when he left the bed, and his bare skin is warm and soft.
“What are they doing now?”
Jonathan hands over his phone, already open to a photo of Sappho’s nose peeking out from under the edge of the coffee table in Jonathan’s living room. The caption reads simply, *jaws theme intensifies* , and Ezra can’t hold back a smile as he scrolls down to read the comments.
@lilypaddington why is my daughter out past curfew
@ollie_oop co-signed @lilypaddington this violates the dog custody agreement, @ezra_terrestrial what gives???
@maximum_energy wait are we coparenting now? @with_bells_jon where’s the child support you can’t just take the family dog with no consequences!
@ollie_oop @maximum_energy THANK YOU some people just have no respect
Ezra shakes his head, handing the phone back. “Sorry. They got attached to her pretty quickly.”
“I think the dog is a metaphor in this situation,” Jonathan says, but leans down and drops a kiss onto Ezra’s hair. “Especially since your Ollie basically accosted me the other day when I was taking out the trash to give me a shovel talk.”
“He’s not my Ollie,” Ezra says, refusing to think about what that shovel talk entailed. “I mean, anymore.” He tries not to look too closely at Jonathan’s face when he asks, “Does it bother you? That I basically live with my ex?”
“Not particularly.” Ezra looks up, raising his eyebrows at him, and Jonathan laughs softly. “No, really, I mean it.” He shifts his arm, still around Ezra’s back, until he can cup the nape of his neck, thumb stroking over the crook of where his shoulder meets his neck. Jonathan takes a breath—that particular sort of inhale that comes with wanting to say something and cutting it off at the last moment. His exhale, when it comes, is slow and quiet.
Ezra nudges him. “Hey,” he says. “What?”
Jonathan drums his fingers against the side of his mug, hums quietly, and says, “Why did you two break up?”
Ezra sits up, putting a little space between them.
Jonathan follows the movement. “I’m not jealous,” he says quickly. “But I guess I’m just— I can tell there’s nothing romantic going on between you, but it still seems like you really love each other, and I guess…” He gives a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I’ve never had an ex that I stayed friends with. Before Ben, I never had a relationship serious enough that there was an actual breakup. I think Ben and I…we could have stayed friends, maybe, if we’d broken up, but it would have taken…” He shakes his head. “Ollie told me you guys were just friends, right away. And I don’t get how you can break up with someone who you loved for so long and not need some kind of…adjustment period. I mean, I know it’s been a few months, I just…”
It’s rare for him to stumble over his words like this, and that, more than anything, keeps Ezra quiet. He shifts a little closer and reaches to take Jonathan’s hand, lacing their fingers together. It’s Jonathan’s left, and the metal of Jonathan’s wedding ring is cool against Ezra’s skin.
“I told you Ollie’s mostly ace, right?” Jonathan nods. “Sex is…complicated for him. And—” He tries to muster a smile, but it feels brittle. “You already know it’s complicated for me.”
Jonathan brings their joined hands up and drops a kiss onto Ezra’s knuckles. Easy, like it’s nothing. “You’re not complicated,” he says. “You’re great.”
He says it so sincerely that Ezra has to keep talking before he starts kissing him instead. “I can be both,” Ezra says, because casual dismissiveness is easier than accepting a genuine bit of kindness. “I contain multitudes.” Jonathan laughs, and it makes Ezra smile despite himself.
“I am, though. Kind of complicated. Or at least inconsistent. And with Ollie…When things were good, we were great together. But when we didn’t line up with what we wanted, or when we wanted, we just stressed each other out. He never really— If I was avoiding something, or I didn’t want to talk about it, he just kind of let me get away with it, and we ended up just pretending things were fine a lot of the time, even when they weren’t. There was this constant struggle to just be everything the other person needed even when it didn’t feel right, and we just finally got to a place where we…didn’t want to do that anymore.”
Jonathan nods, his face thoughtful. “You still love him?”
“Yes,” Ezra says, a little surprised at how little it hurts to say. “But I’m not in love with him. Not anymore.”
Jonathan is distant as he nods, toying with Ezra’s fingers. Ezra can see the wheels turning behind his eyes, but he waits, as patiently as he can manage.
“You should probably know that I’m still in love with Ben.”
Ezra catches Ben’s appearance out of the corner of his eye, as if the sound of his name summoned him from wherever he goes when Ezra can’t see him. He feels a prickle over his skin, a shift in the air’s pressure. “Okay,” he says.
Jonathan hesitates, then looks at him. “Does that bother you?”
Ezra opens his mouth to reply with an immediate no, but something makes him pause. Without thinking, he lets his eyes drift to where Ben has perched himself on the dresser.
Ben only has eyes for Jonathan. What is it like, to be so close to the man you love, able to see him but unable to be seen, to be touched, to be heard? Ezra wants to hold Jonathan’s hand, create a way for him to see what Ezra can see, to hear what Ezra can hear.
What kind of difference would it make if Jonathan could get that closure? If he could say goodbye?
Would it be enough to make him fall out of love?
Would Ezra want it to be?
Ezra breathes out, slow and steadying, like he can empty everything out of his lungs and leave only open space that maybe, if he’s worthy of it, he can try to fill with the kind of goodness that Jonathan deserves. He kisses Jonathan’s wedding ring and hears a sharp intake of breath. He doesn’t know if it came from Jonathan or Ben. Jonathan’s fingers tremble slightly in his, and then tighten, like he needs to hold on to something solid and real.
“I love how much you love him,” Ezra says, and means it. “Loving him is part of what makes you who you are.” He feels like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff, horribly close to tipping over. He can see the abyss opening up below him, a deep, dark sea of uncertainty.
He chooses his next words with care. “You can tell me if I’m wrong. But I don’t get the feeling that your heart only has enough room for Ben’s memory and nothing else.”
For a long moment, Jonathan’s quiet. Then he puts his cup down next to Ezra’s on the nightstand, turns toward him, and lays a hand on Ezra’s cheek. His palm is smooth and cool, and Ezra tilts his face into it on instinct and holds himself still as Jonathan leans in.
The kiss is feather soft, with miles of secrets stretching out behind him, miles more reaching out ahead. He curls a hand around Jonathan’s biceps and holds on, steadying himself against the rhythm of Jonathan’s pulse through warm, solid muscle.
It doesn’t go any further than that, chaste and light. All the same, it leaves Ezra shaking.
Jonathan pulls away. Ezra has to catch his breath before he trusts himself to open his eyes.
Ben is still on the dresser. Ezra braces himself, but there’s no malice in his expression, no possessiveness. When Ezra meets his eyes, he inclines his head, as if giving permission.
“Will you stay here again tonight?” Jonathan murmurs. “Just to sleep?”
It takes Ezra a moment to reply. He feels tingly, as if he’d been kissed into trembling silence, rather than given a simple brush of lips. He swallows hard and says, “I’ll stay.”
Jonathan smiles. Over his shoulder, so does Ben.