by Amy Lane
“Oh my God, the great Ethan—hey, what’s your last name?—anyway, Ethan, no last name, touched me! I may actually get sex!”
Yeah, Jonah knew he was being defensive and petty. No, he couldn’t seem to control it.
“Costa,” Ethan muttered. “Ethan Costa. And if you don’t want to hang out, I get it—”
“I didn’t say that.” God, Ethan had become a real bright spot. He was funny and warm, and he loved everything Jonah loved, and for the first time in his life, Jonah felt like those things didn’t make him an insufferable loser. If he didn’t keep trying to get Jonah to like musical theater, he would be the perfect friend, and even that made him perfect, because it meant he had knowledge Jonah didn’t, and Jonah lived the awareness that his entire world had narrowed down from all the places he’d dreamed of going as a kid to PetSmart, his mom’s apartment, and Sacramento, which was not a particularly big part of the world.
“Then what?”
Jonah suppressed a sigh. God. There was nothing he could say here. It was like doing the rumba through a minefield. “I just… I don’t know. I want to know what your friends have that I don’t? How do you get to be on that inner circle of Ethan’s friends that gets the big puppy hug? Because seriously, I want in on some of that!”
Ethan laughed then, and it was a bitter, hurt sound. “Yeah, you’re right. We all need us some of that. I’ll see what I can do.”
But he dropped Jonah off with hardly a handshake, and Jonah’s chest ached miserably for the next two days.
Step 6—staying away from
the dangerous stuff
ETHAN grimaced up at Dex apologetically. There was just no other way to say you were sorry for causing him hours of extra work because you wanted to feel the bumps on the phone.
He said it again. “Sorry.”
Dex pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath, then looked around the lobby of Johnnies at Tommy, Donnie, and Kane. They’d been screwing around in the lobby when Ethan had accidentally pressed the broadcast button on the phone—by all reports, their cries of “For fuck’s sake, turn that off!” had made it into two porn videos. Dex was going to have to edit it out.
Shit. Ethan didn’t even want to look at him. Dex grimaced around at the lot of them and snarled something about poo-throwing monkeys, and Kelsey put her hand on Ethan’s shoulder, and he got to look away.
“He won’t stay mad long,” Kelsey murmured. “He was having sort of a day, you know?”
Ethan looked up at Kelsey, their apple-cheeked, all-American girl receptionist. She’d been hired a few months after Ethan himself; although she tended to do things like lose her car keys in the office and fuck with the sound system when she wasn’t supposed to, she liked to apologize with cookies, and she always got the paychecks out on time.
And she never, ever, ever made any of the guys uncomfortable about the fact that they were going to be naked and having sex once they walked past the front office.
“You look like you were too,” Ethan said quietly, and she grimaced and made one of those careful wipes under her eyes that Belladonna did when she was trying not to smudge her makeup.
Which was funny because Kelsey didn’t wear any.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “It’s… God. You know, Ethan, sometimes life just throws you a curveball, right?” She stopped herself and changed the subject before he had time to answer. Half the time when he’d been asking Dex for a favor—more slots on the schedule, help finding an apartment, changing his emergency cards—Kelsey had been in the room. The day after he left home, he’d gone in to talk to Dex in the back office, and when he came out, Kelsey had run to the 7-Eleven across the street for cookies to make him feel better. “Of course you know,” she said quietly. She smiled then, tired but not defeated, and he stood up to give her the office chair back. He offered her a hug as he stood, and she took him up on it, and he kissed the top of her head and let her snuggle.
“Is this a perk?” he asked her. “You get to work with all the gay guys and you get free hugs in the meantime?”
“Mm…,” she murmured against his chest. “It should be—they should put it in the recruitment ad.”
Ethan pulled back and looked at her. “There’s a recruitment ad?”
Kelsey backed away and shrugged. “There will be if Dex ever needs to hire another one of me.”
Ethan frowned, because he didn’t like to think of the place without Kelsey, and then he saw that his guys were leaving without him. He passed Dex giving Kane what looked to be a friendly noogie, and then he waved bye to Kelsey as he followed Tommy out the door. They were off to go plan Chase’s welcome-home party. Hell, that was the whole reason they’d met at Johnnies in the first place.
“SO WHAT’S the deal?” Tommy said next to him.
Ethan scraped at the label on the pastel paper plates with his thumbnail. “The Hallmark store was better,” Ethan said critically. “Target’s just… I don’t know. Tackier.”
“Yeah—Hallmark had more class. We’ve got to sit down, have lunch, and make a game plan for food next—”
“Jesus, Tango, that was almost organized!”
Tango grimaced. Before Chase, he’d been more artistic than organized. Dex called people together to help Tommy paint his house, and when it turned out to be all those crazy colors, Tango figured out how they made sense.
“Yeah, well, I’m going to be living with Mr. Plan Your Life—it’s time.”
Ethan’s smile was gentle. Chase had seemed better the last time he’d visited, in a way that Curtis had never been. There was a serenity to him, a strength maybe, that came from knowing you could break and knowing not to let yourself do that again. Every time he’d visited Curtis in the past years, Curtis was always searching, looking out beyond the gates of the institution to the place that could set him free. Maybe Chase had found freedom with Tommy—that would be a really wondrous thing.
“Okay, so we sit down, eat, plan some more—”
“You totally dodged the question, you douche. What’s the deal between you and Jonah?”
“Me and Jonah?” He realized he was faking surprise. “Nothing. Nothing—we saw a movie and went to the comic-book store. He’s a nice kid—”
“He’s older than you are!”
“He’s a virgin,” Ethan said seriously, and right there in Target, Tommy smacked him on the back of the head.
“So are you, asshole!” And then he turned around and stalked off, muttering about finding Donnie and getting the fuck out of there before Kane started swinging from the light fixtures.
Ethan watched him go, smoothing his hair back into place and squinting in complete confusion. “What the hell did that mean?” he mumbled, and Kane came up next to him, his hands full of different-colored knitted yarn dolls with glued-on features made of felt. “And what in the holy hell are those?”
“I don’t know,” Kane said, and he gave one to Ethan. “But they’re hella soft. What did what mean?”
Ethan took one of the yarn dolls—an eyeball-blowing monstrosity in purple, black, and green—and started rubbing it between his fingers. It was soft. God, it was soft; it was colorful; he could feel the individual bumps of the felt on the yarn. “Here,” he said, “give me the rest of those. Follow me into bed linens, I need sheets and a comforter.”
Kane was like him—incurious about other people’s lives. He didn’t ask why Ethan needed these things, he just followed. But the thing that Tommy said—that he was going to worry at. “What did Tommy mean when he said what?”
“He said I was a virgin.”
Kane stopped dead in the middle of Target and started laughing.
Ethan turned around, alarmed at his red face and the way he didn’t seem to be able to catch his breath, but Kane waved him off, and Ethan stalked away in disgust. He finally found linens, and was mournfully considering the Star Wars sheets, which were cool looking but had a shitty thread count and lots of polyester so they felt like crap, when Kane came up next
to him.
“Yeah, they’re cool, but here.” He held a queen-size set with a black comforter and lots of bright, asymmetrical shapes in solid colors dancing across the top.
Ethan smiled appreciatively. “Pretty! Here, does it have—yes. Sheets, pillow cases, whole enchilada!” He unzipped the bag and fondled the thread count, smiling at the texture. “Awesome. Thanks, Kane. Here. I’m getting these too.” He thrust the handful of yarn dolls back at Kane and grabbed the comforter set. “We’ll go buy this now so Tommy doesn’t have to wait.”
“Yeah, guy’s got no patience at all. And that virgin thing….” Kane shook his head. “I mean, buddy, I’ve fucked you both and gotten it back in return. What the hell was he thinking?”
Ethan shrugged. He was still lost. “I’ve been hanging with this kid at the pet store. He—I mean he’s literally a virgin. And Tommy was asking me what’s doing, and I said he was a virgin, and Tommy said ‘So are you,’ and then you gave me yarn dolls. You know the story now.”
“Huh.” They got to the register and plumped Ethan’s stuff on the counter so the bored girl could run it through. Kane stroked a yarn doll shaped like a frog. “That’s weird. I wonder if he meant something else by it.”
“Like what?”
“Like, I don’t know. You’ve got people who never rode roller coasters, and they’re roller-coaster virgins, right?”
Ethan looked at him dubiously. “I’m pretty sure this kid’s ridden a roller coaster.”
“Yeah, but have you?”
“Yeah, I’ve ridden a roller coaster! Look, can we just drop it?”
“Drop what?” Donnie came up on Ethan’s left, his bright-blond hair so distracting that the girl actually looked up to see him. He was drinking a coffee, and Ethan looked over to the attached Starbucks and thought that was maybe where Donnie’d been hanging, waiting for them.
“Tommy thinks we can give Ethan back his V-card,” Kane said seriously, and Donnie spit out his coffee all over Ethan.
Ethan looked from Kane, who was cracking up, to Donnie, who had a napkin in his hand and was trying to mop him up, and said, “This is officially the dumbest conversation I’ve ever had. Let’s get the hell out of here and go get lunch.”
Kane had stopped laughing by the time they got to the Hard Rock for lunch, and for that matter, so had Tommy.
It wasn’t until they’d settled down and Ethan headed for the bathroom to try to get some of Donnie’s coffee off his leather jacket that Tommy excused himself too and he tried to explain.
“Here,” he muttered, wiping at the coffee stain with a wet tissue. “Jesus, you couldn’t have just waited to talk to me instead of trying to talk to the whole damned world?”
Ethan stood and toyed with the zipper on his jacket. “It was just sort of out of the blue, you know?”
Tommy grunted and stood back. “Look, have you ever had sex with someone you really cared about, in private?”
“Hey—that’s better than I thought!”
“Answer the question, Ethan.”
Ethan looked away from the slightly cleaner shoulder of his jacket and into Tommy’s bright dark eyes. “No,” he admitted, hoping Ryane would forgive him.
“Well then, that’s the one thing you haven’t done in bed, and it’s probably the most important one. So this kid, this virgin, that you think you’re just hanging out with—he thinks you’re a god, and you’re getting… I don’t know, attached. And what’s going to happen when he finds out you are a god, you’re a god of porn, and he’s all, ‘Ooh! God of porn, fuck me now!’ and you’re all, ‘But I’m Ethan and I like you!’”
Jonah’s painful self-conscious revelation for why he wouldn’t want to work out with Ethan and his friends still gnawed in Ethan’s chest.
“He doesn’t have that much self-esteem,” he said, his stomach churning sourly.
Tommy grunted. “I noticed that. I swear, for my first week, he thought I was going to bite him. Anyway, great. So what if things go well and he doesn’t save up his birthday money to get fucked by Ethan, god of porn—what’s your other option?”
Ethan straightened up and looked at Tommy helplessly. The bathroom was one of those little dark-paneled places with the trim painted sort of a maroon, and it gave the illusion of being smaller than it was. It felt like Tommy was the one person on the planet Ethan could cling to, and Tommy sighed and held out his arms and let Ethan do just that.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” he sighed as Ethan clung to his comfort. “Let’s hope I am, okay?”
Ethan nodded and hugged him tighter, and thought maybe he could go with some hope.
AFTER a few more stops, the intrepid party planners ended up at Dex’s house, to which Kane had a key. It was a nice place—lots of warm wood, comfortable furniture, a big television, and an area rug. Kane seemed to know his way around the place, and told them he’d crash there so he could give Dex back his key, which was nice of him.
There was something, though. As they all filed out—Donnie first, Ethan last—Ethan turned around and watched Kane put some of the pizza they’d ordered on a little plate and tidy up the kitchen, and Ethan thought he looked incredibly domestic. Since Kane was a muscle-bound psycho with a wicked smile and a soul patch, “domestic” should have been a stretch, but it wasn’t.
He heard Tommy telling him that unless he’d had sex with the person he wanted to, in private, then he was still a virgin, and it hit him:
Kane was a sexual dominator on the porn set, and a sweetheart and a goofball off of it. But here, in Dex’s kitchen, and earlier, when they’d all met at Johnnies before taking off, Kane looked… innocent. There had been a moment at Johnnies when Dex had reached out and ruffled Kane’s hair, and for that second it had almost been….
Almost been one of those sweet gestures you see in movies, where the much-older love interest touches the girl’s cheek with a knuckle.
Ethan caught his breath and closed the door and thought that maybe Dex and Kane, who between them had probably fucked an entire city full of guys, had gotten their V-cards back. And that maybe, with Jonah, Ethan could too.
It was a ridiculous notion.
Not Dex and Kane—they actually seemed like they fit. But that Jonah would be strong enough—or care about Ethan enough—to actually see a thing like that through.
Ethan was going to have to be content to go read comic books with the guy and leave the dreaming stuff for his sisters, who got to become whole new people.
He’d done that once. He didn’t think you got a second chance at second chances.
HE’D ridden with Tommy and left his car in the carport.
Tommy was, at the moment, the one person who knew where his new furnished apartment was, which was nice because it was sort of a dismal place.
They sat outside of the generic-looking apartment building in midtown, and Tommy shook his head. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Sure I do,” Ethan said evenly. “You and Donnie are going to meet back at your place after you visit Chase. Donnie needs to sleep on the couch.”
“I could clear out the weight room and get a bed,” Tommy said staunchly, but Ethan heard the reluctance in his voice. Yeah. After a year of being in a relationship while Chase was living with his girlfriend, he wanted Chase all to himself.
“No,” Ethan said, trying really hard not to think about the cheap vinyl couch and the lumpy mattress and beige carpeting. “It’s fine. I’ll have my clothes, I can crap in the bathroom for as long as I want—it’ll be great.”
“I like the comforter you got,” Tommy said, smiling weakly.
Ethan nodded, trying to work up some enthusiasm. “Me too—it has the rainbow, it’ll be great! Once I find a real place to live, I’ll find some other stuff.”
“I don’t know, those ugly yarn dolls, those got character.”
Ethan’s smile had all his teeth and burning eyes. “Thanks,” he said, his voice thick. “Here. Let me get my stuff out of the back of the car.”
>
He hopped out, and Tommy popped the hatch and put the car in park. By the time Ethan had his bag out of the back, Tommy was standing in front of the car, ready with his arms open. Ethan stepped into his hug like Tommy was saving his life. In a way, he was. It was all Ethan was going to have until he visited Chase the next morning.
Tommy kissed him on the cheek and patted him on the back, and Ethan said, “See you in a few. Let me know what else we gotta do for the party, okay?”
“Yeah, sure. When’s your next scene?”
Dex had set him up with two a month—for one thing, the roster was empty without Chase and Tommy. For another, well, Ethan had told him, in a small, painful voice, that he needed the money. It was the only lie he’d ever really told Dex, who had been boss, mentor, and older brother all rolled into one. The truth had less to do with money and more to do with what he knew was coming when he walked down the bleak, foggy concrete walk.
His apartment was on the bottom floor. If he’d known anything about apartments, he would have asked for a top floor, because he had heard the frat boys above him having parties for the past three nights. He’d had a thought about going upstairs to meet people, but then he’d thought again. Great. A random hookup. Yeah, sure, he had sex for money, but at least he knew those people, worked with them, hung out and had coffee. The idea of going up and meeting a stranger and then letting them touch him…. He shuddered. It was repellent. He needed touch, but it needed to be warm touch. Dex would never let him touch a guy who made him feel cold and exploited. Ethan had asked specifically never to work a scene with Scott—and Scott was Dex’s ex-boyfriend—and Dex had made it so.
No.
Ethan would get his sex in Johnnies, where he was safe, and his geek from Jonah, who would stop looking at him like he was a god eventually, and after Christmas, he’d find another place.
He jiggled the key in the cheap lock and the door swung open. The wall blocked his right, the living room and kitchenette sat to his left, and the bedroom was straight ahead. On top of the empty mattress perched the sleeping bag he’d borrowed from Tommy, along with the pillow he’d bought at the drugstore on his way from Tommy’s with all his clothes in the trunk of the damned hybrid.
