by Amy Lane
Jonah shook his head, all of his irritation showered out. “Nope. I’m afraid not.” He thought of blunt-fingered hands toying with a braided dog toy. “Or a frayed knot,” he said, smiling to himself.
Amelia might not have known what he was grinning about, but she did know him. “Maybe there’ll be some cute doctors or nurses you can ogle,” she said, accepting his help to her feet.
He grinned. “Why not? We just hired a god today at PetSmart—he brought a friend!”
Her return smile was sweet. “Don’t forget your book, Jo—you get bored.”
Jonah was way ahead of her, and he grabbed Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job from the shelf against the wall before they headed out the door. “Got it,” he said.
Laura was still outside as he opened the door, and Jonah watched as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and then turned around to give them both a good face. He squeezed her shoulder and went in for a quick peck on the cheek. “Bye, Mom. See you in the morning.”
“Let me know if there’s any complications,” she said, although that was obvious.
Jonah nodded and paused so she could kiss Amelia on the cheek, and then they went down the stairs.
“How pissed is she?” Amelia asked.
Jonah shrugged. “She doesn’t get mad at you. She saves it all for me.”
“I’m—”
“Yeah, Melly. I know. Sorry. Don’t sweat it.” Jonah thought of Ethan again, and that proud, vulnerable look on his face. Hedonist. Yeah. That’s what he wanted to do with his life. Forget the business degree he wasn’t going to get, forget the boyfriend who wasn’t going to pick him up from under piles of dog food bags, just throw all that shit over his shoulder and off the bridge.
He was going to be a hedonist.
Just as soon as he got his sister home and did the dishes and dusted and vacuumed and did his laundry and fell into bed, dreaming of blowjobs from young Italian gods.
Step 2—learning things about camels, straws, and breaking backs
HE SHOULD have known.
He wasn’t a virgin, unschooled in sex. It wasn’t like he didn’t have any past history with mental illness and breakdowns. He should have known where Chase Summers was heading the minute “Chance” fell apart during a porn shoot, shaking so bad with orgasm, with honest-to-Christ skin hunger, that he couldn’t even say his own name.
Ethan should have warned somebody.
But Chase (everyone knew his real name—Tango was pretty damned free throwing it around, and Dex, who should have known better, was almost worse) seemed so cocky, so together. And that time in bed…. God, he’d been on fire. Ethan had treasured that time, because Chase had been so aggressive, so handsy, for once he’d felt like he’d been taken care of and not the other way around. And that last shoot, he’d been bottoming for Ethan and sucking Kane’s cock, and he’d been responsive, screaming with lust. It hadn’t been until the last, when Dex shut down the camera and Kane simply held him as he convulsed on the bed, that Ethan had known anything was wrong.
And even then, he’d never guessed in a million years….
Curtis had given him signs—he knew that now. Unmistakable signs. If Chase had given him the same signs—
But Chase hadn’t, had he? He hadn’t given anyone those signs, not even Tango, not even Dex, hell, not even Donnie, who had been called out of bed to come take him to the hospital because he didn’t want an ambulance. Or maybe he had given those signs, but Donnie and Tango and Dex had been lost, as lost as Ethan had been with Curtis, as lost as any friend would be when confronted with the worst thing a person could do to himself.
So Ethan had been worried, but he hadn’t been worried enough. Tango had been worried enough, but he hadn’t known what he’d been worried about. And Dex worried about them all, Ethan included, so Dex didn’t count.
And still, Ethan thought about that body—lovely, long-limbed, gorgeous and powerful—and how helpless Chase had been lying on the bed, his head in Kane’s lap as Dex had called Tango and begged him to come help their friend.
It hurt, that picture in his head. Chase had been as naked as any human being, ever, and all they’d been able to do was cover him with a blanket and hold him until he told them to stop.
Ethan wanted to be able to do more than that. Dammit, after two years in porn, being fearless, taking what he wanted from the world and giving a fair price back, shouldn’t he be strong enough to take better action?
So he stayed at Tango’s house and slept on the couch, and when he figured out that those suspicious sounds in Tango’s bedroom were sobs, he actually sacced up for once and went into the bedroom and lay down next to him.
“No sex,” Tango mumbled, and Ethan pulled him next to his chest.
“I couldn’t spring a boner right now if you gave me a blue pill,” he said truthfully, filling his arms with a very limp, very sad Tango. “I’m keeping you safe for Chase.”
It was a sign of how devastated he was that Tango didn’t get back in his face about that. He was one of the most self-sufficient people Ethan had ever known.
And lover or not, it was wonderful to wake up with Tango warm and snuggly in his arms, even if he did smell like the cigarettes he’d snuck before he’d come inside for bed. What wasn’t so wonderful was that he was waking up to his mom’s ringtone on his phone—the time-honored ballad of the Wicked Witch of the West.
He extricated himself from Tango’s bed and trotted to where he’d left his jeans in the living room, thinking that if he was going to be gay, he wanted the decorator part of that, because Tango had it going on. The whole bedroom in maroon and gold look liked a designer’s wet dream. Ethan still decorated with those free posters you got inside the manga books when you bought them rather than checking them out of the library. He hadn’t noticed that the night before, sitting on Tango’s couch and eating his pizza, but he noticed it now. It was, he realized, the first time he’d ever actually spent the night at someone’s house. Too bad he hadn’t been having sex, but being able to comfort a friend had almost been better.
Which didn’t mean he knew what to say to his mother.
“’Llo?”
“Evan? Evan, where the hell are you?”
“At a friend’s, Mom. He needed a buddy last night.”
“Don’t you have class—?”
“Yeah. I’ll borrow some of his shit.” What was today’s travesty? Oh yeah, English Comp and Trig—two more offerings from Folsom Lake College because he couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted to fucking be.
“Don’t swear, Evan. You couldn’t have come home?”
“Mom, I said he needed a friend, okay? Jesus, when did it become illegal to offer a shoulder to fucking cry on!”
Man, two years. He had enough money, he did. He had a car—a nice one—and he could take classes anywhere he wanted. Sac City, ARC—there were a thousand reasons to move the hell out of his mother’s house, and only one to stay.
But he couldn’t remember why that reason mattered anymore.
“Evan! You take that back! And what kind of boy cries on his friend’s shoulder? You tell me that!”
“A guy whose boyfriend almost killed himself,” Ethan hissed into the phone. “Now you show some goddamned respect, okay? These guys are friends of mine!”
And with that, he figured his duty of informing his family of his whereabouts had been discharged. He sighed and put the phone back in the pocket of his jeans, and looked up to see Tango rubbing his eyes groggily with one hand while he scooped up an ancient brown cat with the other.
“Who was that? Jesus, Ethan, I’ve never heard you talk that way to anybody.”
Ethan sighed, feeling like a heel. “Yeah, well, that’s ’cause you never met my mother.”
Tango’s bright-brown eyes grew really large. “That was your mother?”
Ethan dropped his jeans on the couch. Fuck it. He was pretty sure Tango didn’t give a shit about him in his boxers, just like he wasn’t gonna get wood around T
ango outside of work.
“Yeah, that was her.” He sighed and scrubbed his hands through his hair, feeling the product he used to keep it all styled and pretty flaking and turning to goo. “She’s not a nice person.”
Tango grunted. “How ’bout your dad?”
Ethan shrugged. “He stopped trying to talk to me when I graduated from high school. They split up when I was a kid—it got ugly. I would have come with him if he’d asked, but he didn’t, and finally I just wanted the fuck out of it.”
Tango shook his head and wandered to the kitchen, where he poured some food for the cat into a bowl on the floor. Ethan had seen it the night before. It had its own little place mat and everything.
“Yeah? You know, it’s the damnedest thing. When I was a kid, I used to think having a dad would be, I don’t know. Fucking awesome, I guess. But….” He shook his head. “Chase’s dad shoulda been gelded.”
Ethan sucked in air through his teeth. “Naw,” he said a little numbly. “My dad’s not that bad. He’s… it’s just….” And fuck it, right? Chase was in the hospital because he let his demons get the better of him. Ethan wasn’t going out the same way.
“See, when I was a kid, I got… you know, molested. Some asshole took me behind the bleachers and spooged on me, and I told on him, and you know what? My life fell to shit. My mom started to think that anyone touching me was a bad touch and everything my dad said was a secret plot to let the fuckers get me. And if anything, she’s gotten more crazy about it. My sisters can’t get married, can’t go out, can’t date—any man they pick is going to take advantage of them and rape their babies.”
“Man, that’s gross!” Tango looked horrified, and Ethan didn’t blame him. He’d kept this part of the story from that sweet kid at PetSmart. What was the kid’s name? Jonah? Sweet kid. Curly hair, like sand. Anyway, that kid’s big gray eyes had just screamed innocence, and Ethan hadn’t wanted to crap all over that. He’d looked at Ethan and Tommy like they were gods. Why the hell not? What was the worst thing that could happen—he got a little crush? It wasn’t like Ethan was going to take him up on the implicit offer in the kid’s look of hero worship. Tango certainly wasn’t.
“Yeah,” Ethan agreed with him. “It broke up my older sister’s marriage, and it sucked. Anyway, you know… it’s just fucked. If I move out, she’ll make everyone’s life miserable, and if I come out, she won’t let me talk to my sisters or see my niece, and that would suck too.”
He really loved Allie’s baby, and not in the creepy way his mom was afraid of. He just liked how simple it was to hold her, let the baby settle into the crook of his elbow, and just look at her. Someday, she might grow up and be bitter and demented like her grandma, but right now, she just burrowed in and provided heat and warmth and entertainment. He could hug her and she would hug him back, no insecurities, no fears, and the thought that he would take advantage of that made him ill.
No lie, Felicia was a reason to go back home.
Tommy was looking at him like he’d sprouted another head. “Man, Ethan—that’s… that’s fucking twisted!”
Ethan shrugged because, well, he’d been figuring that out for much of his life. “Yeah. But….” He shrugged again.
“But she’s your mother?”
“Yeah, except it’s not even about her anymore. It’s like… like my sisters and me, we’re all, I don’t know, prisoners of war. We don’t want just one of us to get out. We all want to get out. We cover for each other—if one of us is going out, we don’t call Mom. We call each other. And that sounds like it’s all okay, but my youngest sister—the one like two years older’n me? She was supposed to go away to college, but Mom pulled her funding at the last minute. So she spent four years working her ass off, right? And then she’s going to Folsom Lake Community, and….” He shook his head. Danni looked a lot like Belladonna these days, except with more eye makeup, more guys per night, and more drugs. Ethan knew the signs, but every time he tried to talk to her about it, about Brittany and about help, she sneered in his face and shut him down. “And now she’s going off the deep end.”
Tango started pulling milk and, to Ethan’s surprise, pancake mix and strawberries out of the refrigerator. Full launch breakfast—go, Tango!
“Man, that sucks. My mom….” His voice dropped, and Ethan remembered that his mom had passed away the year before. “You know, I don’t know what she would have done with the gay thing. I mean, I know what she would have done with the porn thing—”
“What’s that?” Ethan asked, really curious.
“She would have smacked me on the back of the head with a spoon and said, ‘Jesus save you, boy-o, the good Lord didn’t make you pretty for that shit!’” He grinned at Ethan, only a little sadness in a smile that was mostly pointy teeth. “She said that every time she caught me having sex with girls, and there’s more times than I want to count. But—” He swallowed convulsively and turned his back while he worked, although his words were surprisingly clear. “But Chase helped me pack up all her stuff last year. Pictures and newspaper clippings—that woman saved every Christmas card and postcard I ever sent her from California, and I sent like two a month—and he said he couldn’t imagine that someone who spent all that time loving me when I was a kid would just give it up because of the gay thing. He was only in the room with her a couple of times before she died, but he was absolutely positive about that, and you know? I’m gonna believe him. He knows what it feels like not to be loved—I’m gonna just take that as God’s gimme that I was.”
Ethan’s throat suddenly tightened. He swallowed hard against it. “I’ll believe that too,” he said. “Man, one of us should know real unconditional love, right?”
Tommy turned and looked at him quizzically. “You really think your mom would stop loving you if she knew?”
Ethan thought about it, thought about the complete control, the constant fear that Ethan would turn into a child molester, turn into one of “those people,” turn into the person that, his mom felt, had ruined her perfect little life.
“I think she’d be glad,” he said seriously. “I think she’d be grateful she didn’t have to love me anymore. She’d take any excuse to stop loving me. She could stop blaming herself for fucking up. It would all be my fault.”
Very carefully Tommy set the basket of strawberries in the sink and dried his hands. “Yeah, Ethan. You going to shower?”
“Yeah.”
“C’mere first.”
Ethan knew where this was heading, and on the heels of that confession, he was almost raw and weeping for it.
He stepped into Tommy’s hug like a traveler in the rain steps into a bus station. It wasn’t home, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t grateful to be out of the cold.
THAT hug—and one strawberry pancake—got him through his day. He was pulling Bs in his classes, because that was what you got when you weren’t really trying, and after fueling up with an extra latte between classes, he was good for his workout afterward. On a normal day, he would have driven to Sacramento to use the gym the other Johnnies models used—he liked it when they worked out together—but Chase and Tommy wouldn’t be there, and he was pretty sure it would take at least a week before that felt normal again.
And normal or not, Ethan was on schedule the next day for a shoot. He stopped by the Rx on the way home and bought a four-pack of the little disposable enemas—he’d need them after the coffee, that was for sure. The tricky part was getting up early so he could take care of that shit (ha!) in one of the two house bathrooms before his sisters woke up.
The only privacy he had was his little Lincoln MKZ Hybrid, which he’d tricked out, red paint job with black pin striping et al. Yeah, he knew that the hybrid made it a geekmobile, but he didn’t care. It was an expensive geekmobile, and it would last him beyond porn, he hoped.
He kept the enemas—and the condoms and the stroke magazines—in the trunk of his car. He’d done the stupid CSI trick with the hair taped on the doorway right after his first
interview with Dex, and sure enough, his mom had broken into his room. He’d triple password protected his computer after that and, after his first two checks, had bought the car. He kept everything he didn’t want his mom to know about in the car, and Dex had the extra key.
So he got home, starving but having to pass on dinner. The garage was open, which meant he couldn’t block the driveway, which meant he had to park across the street in front of the neighbor’s house, but that was okay. He did that a lot.
Allie stood in front of the stove with the baby over her shoulder. She was trying to cook spaghetti and broccoli casserole at the same time.
Ethan stepped over to her as soon as he walked through the door. “Here, let me have her.”
Felicia, who, at nine months, could sit up and ride his hip like a pro, laughed and made bubbly noises as soon as he got her. She had his sister’s dark hair and big brown eyes and Devon’s delicate features, and basically Ethan thought she was the most beautiful baby on the planet.
He told her so while blowing bubbles on her tummy, just to hear her squeal.
“Thanks, Ev,” Allie breathed in relief. “Danni’s gonna be….” They met eyes. “Danni isn’t coming, but we’re telling Mom she’s asleep in her room. Donna and Mina will be here—they’re shopping with Mom.”
Ethan grunted. “Yeah. Well, it’s a perk.”
Allie shook her head and looked down at her cooking. “It… you know, Devon left a message for me today. I didn’t hear all of it because Mom deleted it before I could walk down the stairs.”
“Has he been trying to get you on your cell?” For a moment, Ethan had a flash of hope.
“Mom had me get another number, remember?”
“Yeah, why was that? Never mind.” His sister looked so sad. “You know, if you snuck away and went to see him, I wouldn’t tell.”
“I’m thirty fucking—freaking years old, Evan! Dammit—why can’t I just tell her to go to hell?” Allie pushed her palm up her cheek. She hadn’t worn makeup in a month, and her complexion was horrible.
