Ethan in Gold

by Amy Lane

  But that left Jonah the odd man out, sitting at his sister’s bedside on Thanksgiving. The text from Ethan was maybe the only thing that kept him from curling into a little ball and crying.

  He fell asleep instead, and when his phone buzzed again, he actually spazzed and dropped it, then spent an eternity fishing it out from under the bed.

  Tommy said you’re off tomorrow. He said to tell you to tell him when to put you back on the schedule.

  Oh Jesus—work!

  Tell him thanks. Tell him I’m sorry I forgot to call and ask.

  Yeah, he says no worries. He hopes your sister’s okay.

  He wasn’t sure what happened then. Ethan was so good at covering his vulnerable places—maybe Jonah just didn’t have that much practice.

  She’s dying. I want to think she’ll get better, but she won’t. She’s on a list for a lung transplant—it’s a two-year list. The doctor says she’s got a year, but I don’t think she’s got that long.

  He stared at the text blindly, thinking he couldn’t take it back. He couldn’t. But he’d needed to say it, and Ethan, at the moment, was listening.

  I’m so sorry, Jonah. Where are you now?

  Kaiser. Where are you?

  Just left Chase and Tommy’s. They had a nice Thanksgiving.

  Yeah? Good food?

  Okay. Tommy thinks he can cook. Can’t.

  But nice people. And Dex and Kane brought pies, and they CAN cook.

  Jonah blinked, seeing the names and putting the people together in his head.

  Dex and Kane? I didn’t know they were a couple.

  Nobody else does, either. Given the way Kane was flirting with Donnie’s sister, I don’t know if KANE knows. But they are. I can tell. They’re good together.

  How does that work? Two guys in porn?

  There was a pause. A long one. Jonah didn’t think Ethan had bailed on him again, but maybe it was a thinking moment, and Jonah could respect that.

  He’d started to doze off again when he heard footsteps behind him. He didn’t even look, because nurses came in every half an hour to check Amelia’s blood gases and her vitals, so Jonah didn’t turn around until a warm hand fell on his shoulder.

  There, behind the clean-room paper shields, Ethan’s warm brown eyes crinkled anxiously.

  “Hey.” Jonah straightened in his chair and gestured to the one next to him. “Omigod,” he said, trying to keep his voice down. “You were supposed to come tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. I… well, it was better than the apartment, right?”

  Jonah looked around the hospital room. They’d brought in Melly’s stuffed animals and her favorite Teen Wolf poster. They sort of had a kit for when she was hospitalized—things she could look at to keep her spirits up. They’d had the poster laminated so the corners would withstand the relocation.

  “Really?” he asked as Ethan sank down in the chair. Jonah hated the paper shields right now. He wanted to see Ethan. His eyes looked tired—reddish, with bags underneath, but that was enough to know he wasn’t okay. Ethan leaned forward, his gloved hands clasped over the space between his knees, and Jonah reached over and twined them. “Is this really better?”

  Ethan darted a hunted look at him. “Yeah, Jonah. Yeah. I miss you too, okay? It was three stupid dates, but I really liked being around you, and you’re funny and smart and you’re kind. This was never about you being a good person or your family not being good.” He looked at Amelia, and his face softened. “It was about me being good enough for you.” He shot another look up at Jonah’s expression. “Did you have to tell her I was in porn?”

  Jonah quirked his mouth up, remembering their conversation. It was the last one he’d had with her that hadn’t been fraught with worry. “Yeah,” he said, thinking about finding out she had a boyfriend, and she wouldn’t die a virgin, and thinking about her stubbornness and her humor. “I did. She thinks you’re cool.”

  “That says something really sad about the world,” Ethan muttered.

  Jonah squeezed his hands. “Maybe it just says it’s changing.”

  Ethan snorted. “Gay isn’t new. Sex isn’t new. Hell, porn isn’t new. But little girls giving it the thumbs-up—that’s new.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe she’s just smarter than us. I want to see your face. I want to touch you.” Jonah jerked back, surprised by what he’d said as much as anything else. “I feel cheated, just sitting here and looking at you all covered up.”

  Ethan blinked at him. “Didn’t you say you were passive-aggressive? Isn’t that the opposite of passive-aggressive?”

  “Well, I’m tired and grumpy. I think that makes me more assertive-aggressive. Besides, I don’t know what to tell you about Melly knowing about the porn. She doesn’t give a shit. She doesn’t see it the same way I do—but then, I won’t let her watch your scenes.”

  Ethan grunted. “God. I don’t want to talk about work right now. My work, anyway. I just wanted….” He gestured around to the little hospital room and Jonah’s sleeping, dying sister.

  “Wanted what?” Jonah asked, knowing that he wanted to be held, sheltered against that massive chest, in those tree-trunk arms.

  Their hands still clung together, covered in purple nitrile gloves. Ethan turned his hand around, palm up. Jonah laced their fingers and squeezed.

  “I didn’t want you to be alone,” Ethan said after a moment of staring at their hands.

  “I don’t want you to be alone either.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

  “You never answered my question.”

  “How does that relationship work in porn?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Ethan sighed and let go of his hand, then stood up and smashed their chairs together. He sat down again, and Jonah waited patiently while he adjusted himself and held out his arm.

  “I have no idea,” he said quietly. Jonah leaned over the hard wooden rail of the chairs—it was uncomfortable, but he could still nestle into Ethan’s chest for that hug he’d really, really, really wanted. “We’ll have to watch and see.”

  “We’ll take notes,” Jonah said hopefully.

  Ethan sighed above him, then touched his paper-masked mouth to the top of Jonah’s head. “Yeah. All right.”

  “You can’t shut me out again.”

  “I couldn’t shut you out the first time.”

  “You’re going to have to talk to me.”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to have to know I’ll keep trying to make you talk to me.”

  “Shut up, Jonah. You look like shit. Maybe try to sleep.”

  “Yeah,” Jonah sighed, knowing he was right, even if he couldn’t see any more of Jonah than Jonah could of him. “Yeah. Okay. Let me know when you’ve got to go.”

  “Got nowhere else to be right now,” Ethan said quietly.

  Jonah closed his eyes. Amelia’s respirator hushed in the background, and Ethan’s chest rose and fell against his ear, and although he didn’t sleep, it was close enough to rest to count.

  Step 2—rubble

  ETHAN startled awake with a cramp in his side and Jonah still limp in his arms. He struggled to orient himself. The night Chase had tried to kill himself, Ethan had fallen asleep on Kane and woken up a lot like this, and it wasn’t until he realized his arm was numb that he knew this time he’d been the one comforting somebody, and that it was his job to keep it together.

  “You… look… confused….”

  He adjusted his position and Jonah’s position on him and glared at the clock. Three in the morning. God.

  “Yeah,” he muttered, grimacing sheepishly at Amelia. They’d taken the oxygen tent down sometime that night, and he was grateful. It was easier to talk to her this way. “I am confused. How did I get here?”

  “I’m… assuming… you… drove.”

  He kept his laughter light so it didn’t wake Jonah. “Not quite what I was asking, but, yeah. I drove.”

  “My brother… must… be… thrilled.”


  “He’s too worried about you to be thrilled.”

  “I’m… worried… about… him.” She stopped for a moment and took a few labored breaths. “He’s… going… to need you… when I’m… gone.”

  Ethan’s stomach went cold. “He… you’re not going anywhere. Transplant, right? Hell, I’ll wrap my car around a tree for you right now!”

  It was a heinous thing to say, especially in light of how awful he’d felt after that horrible night when Jonah had visited his apartment. More than once he’d had to remind himself of the wreckage Chase and Curtis had left in their wake, and more than once he’d had to think specifically about the look on Tommy’s face as he’d freaked the hell out in the hospital that night.

  He never wanted Jonah to look that way.

  But Amelia, dying at seventeen, still didn’t know that kind of pain existed. She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “He’d never forgive you,” she said all on one breath, and then spent a few minutes, chest heaving, trying to catch up.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said quietly. She looked at him, gasping for more air, her eyes big, so he figured she’d probably be up to just listening. “I’m… I’m not strong like you.”

  She closed her eyes and swallowed. “Too many words,” she wheezed. “Not enough breath.” A monitor went off then, and a nurse came in, and by the time she was gone, Amelia was asleep with oxygen tubes in her nose, and Jonah had woken up.

  With a wiggle and a yawn, Jonah stood up and stretched. He offered his hand to Ethan, who took it and stood heavily. “C’mon,” he said, his voice rough, “we can call Mom and Dad and take a break, get a shower, that sort of thing.”

  Ethan worked his arms over his head to relieve the cramping of the damned chair and got a whiff of his body odor through his jacket and his paper shroud and everything. “God, I gotta get back to the apartment and clean up. I smell like ass.”

  Jonah grimaced. “Yeah, well, back-ass-ya.” He looked at his sleeping sister and gave Ethan’s hand a tug. “C’mon.”

  The hospital was quiet. Jonah called his parents after they’d discarded their stuff and left the RCU. Ethan started toward the parking lot and his own car, and Jonah didn’t stop him. The one-sided conversation consisted of Jonah giving a health update and ended with, “Yeah. You guys got the car, so I’m just gonna go home with Ethan. We can get some McFood, catch a shower, and you guys can call me when you know something.”

  Ethan jerked his head sideways, his eyes big, and Jonah caught his look as he pocketed his phone.

  “Relax, big man,” he said, sounding exhausted. “My virtue is safe with you, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Ethan said softly. “Yeah. Fine. I could use a nap.”

  Which was what they did. They stopped at a drive-through first for some shitty coffee and some shittier sausage muffins, and then Ethan drove them to his shitty apartment and let Jonah have the shower first. He rooted through his drawers and found sweats and boxers and a T-shirt, although he knew everything would be two sizes too big.

  Jonah came out wrapped in one of his three towels, and Ethan gestured to the bed and slid by him to take his own shower, and managed not to think about sex at all.

  It helped that the guys had let him hang shamelessly on them the day before. Thanksgiving at Tommy and Chase’s had proved to be a lot of fun. Lots of people, video games, and yeah, Dex and Kane made awesome pie. Ethan was pretty sure they’d left pissed at each other, but he had faith in them. He had to. Chase and Tommy would be okay, Dex and Kane would be okay, and his family, the one he’d been forging while his real one had fallen apart, would be stable, and he could make that his heart instead.

  As he let the hot water sluice over him, he thought of Jonah, fragile and alone in his empty apartment, and thought of that boy putting his faith in a relationship with Ethan of all people, and his stomach went cold all over again.

  Suddenly, he very, very badly wanted to talk to Dr. Uncle Stottemeyer, and just when he told himself he wasn’t going to be able to do that, he remembered Doc Stevenson and how Ethan had spent all of Chase’s welcome-home party avoiding the guy.

  God. Jonah was outside the shower in his bedroom. Maybe it was time to stop avoiding the fucking shrink and get his heart cleared for a real relationship. Jesus, for Jonah’s sake, right?

  Maybe.

  Ethan got out of the shower and Jonah was in his bed, already asleep, from the looks of things. Ethan put on a T-shirt, boxers, and sweats, and told himself that was the equivalent of a Victorian nightgown, then slid into bed behind Jonah and wrapped his arm around his chest.

  His entire body shook, and he crushed Jonah a little tighter, sheltering him with his shoulders and tucking him so tightly into his own body, it was a wonder the other man could breathe.

  Jonah took one of his hands and kissed it, and Ethan stroked his thumb across Jonah’s cheek.

  “Ethan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What happened when you were five?”

  Oh fuck.

  “What makes you think anything did?”

  “’Cause you’ve said it twice. You said thirteen years of therapy, and since you’re not in now, I’m assuming it stopped when you were eighteen. And you said you haven’t felt in control—”

  Ethan remembered that and sighed. “Yeah. I remember. God, Jonah. Do we have to—”

  Jonah’s grip on his hand tightened. “Please?”

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “I’m tired of this coming between us.”

  Ethan sighed into the back of his neck. “So, when I was five,” he said softly, “I was riding my bike around the block. My mom was waiting for me back home, and she was beautiful and she smiled at me, and she hugged me all the time. And then I wrecked my bike, and this nice neighbor stepped out to take me home, because there’s really decent people in the world. I was bleeding and crying, and I told the neighbor that I couldn’t cry because the teacher’s aide would yell at me.” Ethan’s throat tightened absurdly. Jeez. He’d told this to Tommy without hardly a whimper. “The teacher’s aide told me not to cry when he pulled down my pants and made his thing hard and peed all over me.” He’d forgotten that detail. He’d thought it was pee.

  Jonah gasped, and Ethan hated that he’d hurt Jonah, with all his worries and his sweet family and his perfect view of life, so he tried to reassure him.

  “See, that sounds awful, and it wasn’t fun, but I had a shrink and he was really awesome, and it should have been fine. I mean, I probably could have ditched the shrink and had a perfectly good time fucking my way through high school, except this weird fucking thing happened to my mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She just stopped touching me. I mean… it was… it was pathological, almost, how she’d avoid touching me. And she wouldn’t let Dad hug me, or any of the girls, and that broke up the family, and she wouldn’t let the girls out of sight, and that made them all crazy, and in the meantime, I just… what’re those things? Sensory deprivation things? I felt like… like my body was just drifting out in space and nobody would fucking touch me.” His voice grew high, brittle, and his arms jerked around Jonah’s shoulders, and he pulled back from it for a minute and realized his throat hurt and his chest hurt, all from keeping these things under control when that hadn’t been a problem before.

  “What’s wrong with me?” he asked, mostly to himself. “I told Tommy this, and like, hardly batted an eyelash. God, I must be fucking tired. Fucking out of my mind. Anyway, so that was it. My shrink told me to join the anime club, because, you know how the girls were in high school—”

  “Buddy central,” Jonah said, nodding. He took Ethan’s hand and kissed the center of the palm. “It was great. Girls hugged you because you were safe, boys didn’t beat up on you because their girlfriends would hate them—that was a good move.”

  Ethan chuckled, actually thinking this was funny. “Yeah, except I started working out as soon as we made that plan, remember? Anyway, and then
all that shit happened with Curtis and Brittany, and my sisters… God.” He dragged in another breath and thought he might know, just a little, how Amelia was feeling right now, because no breath felt like enough. “God, my sisters got fucked by all of this. I was the one who’d gotten fuckin’… molested and shit. They were the ones who had to deal with Mom freaking out all over their lives. Anyway… it all sort of exploded right when I met you. I was in gay porn, Danni was doing drugs, and my older sister, Allie, hadn’t made any of her lawyer appointments because Mom kept erasing the messages. So CPS busts in, takes her baby away, and suddenly my whole family knows. And Mom finally cuts me loose, you know? It was probably the best day of her fucking life.”

  He paused for a second and realized Jonah’s breaths were ragged and his body was shaking, and he felt like shit.

  “Jesus, Jonah, are you crying? Man, don’t fucking cry for me, okay? Most of this was old news. Man, the shit with the bad guy? That was over with years ago. And my mom, you know, you see a shrink for thirteen years, you start to figure out what real crazy looks like. She’s it, right? So, you know.”

  “Did they even say hi for Thanksgiving?” Jonah asked, and Ethan made a sound he wasn’t very proud of.

  “I texted Belladonna,” he said, remembering he’d done it right after Amelia’s text about being in the hospital.