Chapter 22
22
Another night, Ezra brings it up first.
“You don’t really talk about him.”
They’re sprawled together across Jonathan’s bed, the covers a twisted mess somewhere around their ankles, neither of them particularly clothed, up far too late considering how early Sappho will wake them up in the morning. Ezra’s binder is still on, and somehow Jonathan’s underwear hadn’t fully come off when they tumbled into bed after dinner, both of them flushed with wine and none too graceful. The orgasms had taken the edge off any tipsiness, but Ezra’s still loose-limbed and sated enough to be half-drowsing against Jonathan’s shoulder, torn between trying to keep his eyes open and trying not to creep on Jonathan’s phone.
He blames too many consecutive nights without enough sleep for the words that slip out when Jonathan pauses to type a comment on one of Ben’s sisters’ posts, and Jonathan picks his head up, looking at Ezra curiously under the loose sweep of dark hair currently refusing to stay pushed back off his face. He doesn’t bother pretending that he doesn’t know what Ezra’s talking about, and Ezra isn’t sure if he’s grateful or not. “ShouldI?”
“Yes? No. I don’t know.” Ezra shifts slightly, propping himself up on one elbow. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“Very decisive,” Jonathan says, but there’s new tension tightening the skin around his eyes that Ezra hasn’t seen before.
“I’m sorry,” he says, already trying to figure out a way to walk it back. “Forget I said—”
“No, it’s okay.” Jonathan sits up, easing his arm out from under Ezra’s belly. He puts his phone on his nightstand and puts his glasses back on, drawing his knees up and resting his elbows on them.
Ezra still feels dizzy whenever he remembers that Jonathan spent a year alone and chose him, of all people, to be the person who brought him back into the world.
“I don’t know how to talk about him,” Jonathan says at last. “Not really. Not without feeling like I’m lying about him.”
Of all the things Ezra expected Jonathan to say, that wasn’t one of them.
He feels, suddenly, very conscious of how much he isn’t wearing. Jonathan’s voice is omen heavy, and he knows without asking that whatever is coming next will be something that won’t feel right to hear like this, sprawled across Jonathan’s bed with damp thighs and kiss-bruised lips. He sits up, pulling the duvet up to cover his lap and mirroring Jonathan’s posture.
It’s not as good as wearing pants like an actual adult, but it’s something. “Okay,” he says. Not prompting, but offering. Inviting.
“I told you we got together in college, right?” Ezra nods. “He was—I don’t know. Hard to describe. Brilliant. Funny. An asshole, but in the endearing way, which sounds horrible but was unfortunately true.” He twists his wedding ring around his finger, that absent-minded tic that never fails to make Ezra feel an unpleasant twist of rejection and shame. “He proposed to me the same day he got into med school. Told me that he was pretty sure my extended family would get past me being gay if they knew I was marrying a doctor.” He smiles, wry and a little wistful. “He was right.”
Ezra tears his eyes away from the ring, the metal still gleaming despite the tiny scratches along its surface. If he doesn’t look at it, maybe it won’t hurt. “How long were you married?”
“Three years.” Jonathan’s smile fades again. “The first two years were great. The third one…wasn’t. He was doing his residency, I was just finishing my MPH, we never really saw each other…It was a lot. We fought in college, but I always kind of put that down to us being literal babies who didn’t know any better. When we were thirty, it wasn’t as easy to make excuses.”
Ezra chooses his words carefully. “What did you do?”
Jonathan shrugs. “We tried therapy. I was going on my own anyway. He was—” His mouth twists into what Ezra thinks might be an attempt at a smile. “They say doctors make the worst patients, and he was kind of proof of concept. He wasn’t anti-therapy or anything, he just…I don’t know. At first I thought we were just drifting, that maybe we just wanted different things, but the way he was acting, toward the end, I just— I knew something was wrong, something he wasn’t telling me. He swore he wasn’t cheating, that he was just working through something and didn’t know how to tell me, and maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but I don’t…I don’t know.”
He breaks off, lapsing into silence. Ezra wants to touch him, but he knows, with every cell in his body, that it would be the wrong thing to do.
“We were talking about separating, when he died,” Jonathan says at last. “That night…” He swallows. “Judy called him and asked him to bring something over to the Chapel for his dad, and I went out to get dinner with friends. When I left the apartment, I had a husband, even if I was constantly frustrated with him and wasn’t sure I’d be married to him much longer. When I got home, I…I didn’t.”
“I’m so sorry.” It feels as useless a thing to say as it was the first time, weeks ago, but there aren’t any other words for it.
“It was a car accident. They told me he died at the scene. I asked if it was on impact, if he felt it, and they…they didn’t answer. But I had to identify him, and”—Jonathan’s voice catches, and he takes a trembling breath—“I just remember looking at his face, like I could find some kind of sign that he didn’t suffer, that he wasn’t in pain, but—”
Ezra reaches out before he can stop himself, stopping just short of touching him, but Jonathan catches his hand and tangles their fingers together, his grip so tight it’s almost bruising. Ezra squeezes back hard, then moves across the bed to press their sides together. Jonathan leans against him, taking long, shuddering breaths, and Ezra intentionally deepens his own breathing, the way he would if he was teaching a class or talking someone through a contraction.
This is a labor, too.
It takes a long time for Jonathan’s breathing to slow enough to match his.
“He didn’t deserve to die in pain,” he whispers, his voice thick around the edges with grief and unshed tears. “No one deserves to die in pain, not really, but he didn’t— Whatever was going on between us, it fucking broke my heart, that I didn’t know . And it was horrible, mourning him, because our relationship was so miserable by that point—I felt like a fraud for grieving, like I didn’t really lose a husband. People kept trying to send me to these support groups for widows, and I had to try not to just say, like, no, it’s not the same, those people lost the person they were going to spend the rest of their lives with, and I…didn’t feel like I could even say that, because what if we weren’t? What if he was going to come home and tell me he didn’t want me at all, that whatever we had at that point just wasn’t worth trying to keep, and…how was I supposed to sit in a room of people who lost their partners when they were so happy, and act like we were the same?”
“I don’t…I don’t think that’s how it works,” Ezra says. “It’s not—it’s not a competition.”
“That’s what my therapist said.” He runs his thumb over the back of Ezra’s hand.
They sit quietly, Jonathan’s breath slowly, slowly gentling to match Ezra’s once more, until they’re inhaling and exhaling in tandem. Ezra can’t stop thinking about the first time they sat like this, on the floor of the taharah room, each of them haunted in their own way. “How…” He hesitates. “How did you start at the Chapel? With all of that?”
Jonathan’s mouth quirks up at one corner. “Ben started volunteering with the chevra a few times a month when he was in high school. When we got married, Isaac asked me if I’d consider doing the training, just because they can always use more people. And I knew it was important to Ben, so”—he shrugs one shoulder—“I helped out a few times, but I took about three months’ leave after Ben died. When I went back, I was pretty sure that I could just go back into it, especially because— Well, I’d had this experience, right? I thought it would teach me empathy, and I’d be so much more compassionate and able to just lean into it, you know?”
“Vaguely,” Ezra says. “Though from your setup, I’m guessing that’s not what happened?”
Jonathan snorts. “I got through my first taharah, and then as soon as I left the room, I threw up on the floor, had a panic attack, and cried for three hours straight.” Ezra opens his mouth on instinct, not even sure what he could say, but Jonathan squeezes his hand. “It was like this well just opened up and poured out of me, not just of grief but of—shame, I guess. Because I was there with this stranger, bathing them and cleaning them and wrapping them for burial, and I didn’t know who had done that for Ben. If he’d had that. I don’t remember if I even agreed to a taharah for him for his funeral. His mom planned most of it, I was so out of it. But he deserved that.” He looks at Ezra then, eyes too bright, even in the dim room. “I know he didn’t get a gentle death, but did someone treat him like that afterwards? No one ever told me, and I couldn’t ask. I was too scared the answer might be no.”
“Oh, love,” Ezra says, hoarse.
The endearment slips out, but Jonathan doesn’t even seem to notice. He sniffs, pushes his glasses up to perch on top of his head, and scrapes the back of his hand over his eyes again, more intentionally now. “The guys I was with that day were great, actually. They stayed with me the whole time, talking about their worst times. Everyone knew, obviously, what was going on, but”—he shakes his head—“they told me that there was—that doing the work is…it’s ritual, and continuity, and all of that, but that from what they saw, the people who really resonate with it, there’s a— It heals something. Even if you don’t really know what the wound is. And grief is…it never goes away, not really. There’s always another part of you that needs to be treated gently.”
He sighs, tilting his head to rest it against Ezra’s. “Sorry,” he says, and he sounds bone-tired, wearier than Ezra’s ever heard him. “That was a lot. And probably not what you were looking for when you asked why I don’t talk about Ben. I should have just told you I was worried it might be weird for you to hear about it.”
“No, it’s—” Ezra swallows. There’s an epic’s worth of weird in his feelings about Ben, but nothing Jonathan’s just told him has made it any worse than it was. If anything, it almost…
No. Not the time. He shifts their joined hands so he can put an arm over Jonathan’s shoulders. “I’m glad you weren’t alone,” he says, and means it. “That there was someone there to talk you through that. That they gave that to you.”
“So am I,” Jonathan says. His thumb resumes its circles over Ezra’s knuckles, a mirror of the motion he used on his own ring. “I don’t know if we’d be sitting here like this now, if they hadn’t.”
Ezra thinks about trying to have handled the past few weeks without Jonathan’s quiet, steady presence, feels a little sick. “I’m grateful, then.”
Jonathan doesn’t answer, just makes a small, almost sleepy sound, leaning more of his weight against Ezra’s side. He’s heavier than usual, and that seems wrong. Ezra wishes he felt lighter, some kind of proof that everything he just said was a burden lifted, not just resettled with all the same weight.
It takes him too long to realize that he’s probably just falling asleep. Gently, Ezra disentangles them enough to maneuver them both under the sheets. He slides Jonathan’s glasses off his unresisting face, folding them carefully and setting them on the nightstand, then puts his own next to them and turns off the light. He wriggles out of his binder, dropping it to the floor, and then curls himself around Jonathan’s back. Immediately, Jonathan catches his hand again, tucking it against his own heart. Ezra matches his breathing to the rise and fall of Jonathan’s back against his chest.
Ezra’s just on the verge of slipping out of consciousness when Jonathan mumbles, “Thank you.”
“Mm?” Ezra says.
“For listening.”
Ezra closes his eyes. He thinks of all the reasons he shouldn’t be here, all the things he should be doing to help Ben and fix things with Mom and keep the Chapel afloat and, more than anything, all the reasons he doesn’t deserve this, the quiet trust Jonathan keeps putting in him, like Ezra can keep it safe.
Ezra swallows, exhales, and tucks his forehead between Jonathan’s shoulder blades. “Always,” he says, and maybe, if he’s good enough, it won’t have to be a lie.