Ethan in Gold

by Amy Lane

  “And?”

  “She said, ‘Happy Thanksgiving, E. Gotta go.’ And my dad texted me almost the same thing, without the ‘gotta go,’ so that was, you know, downright normal.” He hadn’t texted his mother, and she hadn’t texted him, and he figured he was relieved about that. Maybe someday, years in the future, there would be a tearful reunion or something, but right now? He felt relieved just to have escaped with most of his sanity intact.

  Jonah’s tears plopped hotly onto the back of his hand, and he was suddenly grumpy. “Goddammit—I said not to cry over me. This whole time, man, I wanted you to like me, because I’m just pathetic, and now you feel sorry for me, and that sucks. That’s why I didn’t want to go to the fucking shrink for any of this.” He started to pull his arms from around Jonah’s shoulders, but Jonah stopped him.

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” he muttered. His voice sounded thick, and Ethan was hard put not to get up and beat a hole in his own fucking wall.

  “Goddammit—”

  “Shut up,” Jonah whispered. “Just shut up. I’m just so fucking happy you told me. ’Cause Ethan, that’s awful. But if you can tell me all that fucking awful shit and I’m still here, maybe you won’t ever try to push me away again.”

  “I got no answer for that,” Ethan said gruffly. “I think we’re both trashed. It’s like six in the morning—we should probably get some sleep.”

  Jonah nodded, and Ethan closed his eyes and thought about how sweet his body was right there, lined up and soft against the hard line of Ethan’s.

  “Ethan?” Jonah whispered.

  Ethan kissed the back of his neck under the curly sandy hair. “Yeah?”

  “My little sister isn’t going to die a virgin.”

  Ethan half laughed. “That’s… that’s sort of good, right?”

  “Yeah. But I still might.”

  Ethan could only laugh silently, hugging him close and drinking him in.

  HE WOKE a couple of hours later, Jonah still nestled in his arms like a baby bird. Ethan absently stroked his bicep under the T-shirt, thinking he really had become more defined in the past few weeks. Some of his baby fat was melting off, and that left stringy, slender muscle. Jonah gave a little shiver under his hand, and Ethan spread his fingers, playing into that. Oh God. God. He felt so good.

  My little sister won’t die a virgin.

  The words popped into Ethan’s head, and he nuzzled Jonah’s neck and his shoulder, thinking about them.

  Jonah shifted a little, reacting in his sleep, and Ethan remembered, of all things, the way Ry had done just that too. Ethan wanted this kid—wanted him so badly. And Ethan was probably not the right guy for him—God, definitely not the right guy. But talking about school, about Ry, had reminded him: they hadn’t been right for each other either, but those moments spent together—he wouldn’t give them away for anything. Having his family ripped away, that had twisted something in him. All that time in the shrink’s chair learning that sex didn’t have to be bad, and two years in porn, learning that sex could be great, and he’d taken one look at Jonah and forgotten all of that. All he’d been able to think was that Jonah was too innocent for a whore.

  But here he was anyway, in Ethan’s bed, soft and needy and so damned sad. Hadn’t Ethan learned yet that mourning for the perfect life only made you fuck things up even worse? Wasn’t that what happened to his mother? Her perfect life had been shattered, and suddenly she hated the things that had shattered it—including Ethan?

  Ethan wasn’t the perfect guy for him, but Jonah didn’t seem to want the perfect guy. And right now, he needed Ethan.

  He moved up to Jonah’s neck and started kissing the warm hollow of his shoulder.

  Jonah sighed and stretched and rolled over to his back, tilting his chin and giving Ethan better access. “Mm…,” he groaned, and Ethan felt the languid stroking of his hand in Ethan’s hair. “What’s this?”

  Ethan moved back to nuzzling his ear. “I’m not perfect,” he said quietly, mouthing his neck again. “And you’re going to move on. But I can make this really good for you if you give me some time.”

  Jonah grunted and rolled over to his side, facing Ethan and forcing Ethan to face him. “Rules,” he said, looking at Ethan firmly, none of the sleepy sensuality Ethan had felt under his skin surfacing now.

  “Rules?” Ethan put a hand on Jonah’s hip and held him still while he jerked his groin against Jonah’s.

  Jonah groaned and clasped his bicep. “God, you suck, lemme think here. Yeah, that’s what I was saying… ahhh….” Because Ethan had started kissing his throat again and was working his way down Jonah’s chest through the thin oversized T-shirt. “Stop that a sec,” he muttered, and Ethan, hearing “stop,” froze and looked up at Jonah, feeling a little fearful. “Boyfriend,” Jonah said on a pant of breath. “Not fuck buddy, not one-night—boyfriend. That’s my line.”

  Aw, man! “But Jonah, your parents!” Ethan buried his nose in Jonah’s chest, and Jonah tugged at his hair to get him to look up.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “We’re going to tell them.”

  Ethan sighed, and the morning wood that had throbbed so insistently in his pants wilted and died. “Can we still be friends if we don’t?” he asked, and he couldn’t look at Jonah’s face, because this was the sort of hurt he’d been trying to avoid.

  “If we don’t tell them or we don’t have sex?”

  Ethan sighed and rolled out of bed. “We’ll just be friends. You’re right. It’s a horrible idea. I’m sorry. You know, we should get dressed and go see your sister, maybe go out to lunch afterward. I—”

  Jonah hugged him from behind, and the touch grounded him enough to stop babbling. “Someday,” Jonah said against the back of his head, “it’ll happen. But I’m not gonna be your one and done. You’re not going to write me off like that.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Ethan mumbled.

  Jonah tightened his hands around his waist, and Ethan petted the veins across the back of the one on top. The skin was smooth under his fingertips.

  “Then what was it like?”

  “It was like, I remembered, you know? What sex was like when it was new, and good, and it just made you feel good. I just… I wanted to give you that.”

  Jonah laughed a little, and Ethan felt his cheek against the curve of muscle in his shoulder.

  “What?” Ethan asked, moving his fingers to pet the blond hairs on the back of Jonah’s arm. “What’s funny?”

  “You. Thinking you’re not a good guy. You’re the best guy, Ethan. I’m going to wait a little longer for you, okay? Maybe not until you’re out of porn, but, you know. I’m going to wait for the boyfriend, because you deserve the boyfriend, and the family, and the people who love you.”

  “I got people,” he said, and he heard the pride prickle in his voice.

  “Yeah,” Jonah sighed. “Someday, I’m going to be your most important person. Your best person. The only person you want in your bed.”

  Ethan sighed and spread his fingers, petting more of Jonah’s arm. “It’s not about the sex,” he said after a moment, because this was important. “It’s… I need to be touched.”

  “Can’t you be touched without the sex?”

  Ethan’s throat tightened until it was tough to swallow. “I can’t trust it,” he said, knowing it was true as soon as he said it. “I… you know. Two years, and my sisters hugged me sometimes, but… porn was all I had.”

  Jonah breathed softly in his ear. “Fair enough,” he said, and he didn’t shift or move or anything. Just went terribly, terribly still. “Then you start to trust me, and eventually talk to my parents, and somewhere in there, when it’s right, there will be sex… you know. It’ll be like an old-fashioned courtship, okay?”

  Ethan smiled a little, thinking about Victorian nightgowns. “If you wear a dress, I’m out of here,” he said, thinking Jonah would look cute in a dress, all long limbs and gentle muscles.

  “Understood.” Jonah kissed his
back again and just stayed there, arms around his waist. Ethan felt himself shuddering, relaxing, falling into Jonah’s embrace, and he startled forward. “Shower,” he mumbled, but Jonah tightened his arms around Ethan’s shoulders.

  “This,” he said quietly.

  “God, you’re stubborn. How come you didn’t put all this energy into losing your virginity at fifteen?”

  Jonah laughed, but he didn’t move, and Ethan started to relax into that standing hug like he didn’t ever remember relaxing in bed.

  “I was shy,” he said softly. “If I’d been as brave as Melly, believe me, I would have done it. And then, after a while, I started to realize that being shy was sort of a perk. I watched a bunch of my friends make a lot of painful mistakes. And then, when I was old enough to actually talk to someone, I was part of the Amelia support team, so I sort of got to skip all of that.”

  “Says you.” Ethan finally got the courage and wherewithal to step away from him. “I’ll be out in a few.”

  Ethan got into the bathroom and closed the door.

  Jonah’s voice calling through it as he sat on the potty was as much of a surprise as anything else. “See?” he said. “You don’t want to have sex anyway. We both have to do that, and I understand that’s something you want out of the way beforehand.”

  Ethan’s stomach muscles froze midflex. “You know,” he said a little desperately, “if you talk to me through the door, I’m gonna clench up and this might take a while.”

  “Yeah, but that’s what I’m asking. How come you don’t have to do that in the middle of a porn scene? I mean, you know, your cock is like… Jesus, and those guys are like cracked wide open. Why doesn’t it all fall right out?”

  “Jonah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Does your entire family talk to each other when you’re in the bathroom?”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t everybody do that?”

  “I made fart noises under my armpit at the dinner table when I was nine. I ate in my room for a month.”

  “Oh.” And then Ethan could actually hear the light bulb switch on. “I’m making you really uncomfortable, aren’t I?”

  “If you don’t go away right now I may never crap again.”

  “Going!” In a few minutes, Ethan heard the new television he’d installed in the living room, and he thanked God. It still took him another five minutes before he could get down to business, but before he settled in and relaxed, he had a moment to reflect on the fact that there were a lot of things he had to learn about being with another man. Maybe Tommy had been right. Maybe there was some virgin left in him after all.

  THEY were in the car on the way back to the hospital when Ethan pulled the subject up, literally out of his ass.

  “Two things,” he said seriously. “Enemas and fiber. We barely eat for a couple of days beforehand, evacuate the holy hell out of ourselves before a scene, and then rinse the whole works out.”

  Jonah had been gazing moodily out into the misty day, and now he sort of gaped at Ethan, his mouth opening and closing slowly, like one of those science shows doing a close-up on a really big fish. “That’s what you have to do when you have butt sex?” he asked in disbelief. “Because I’ve had guys tell me they’re having lots of it and that’s a lot of prep and—”

  Ethan sighed, feeling stupid for even having to talk about it. “No, that’s what you have to do to have porn sex. You have to clean all the, uhm, poop out of the way so it’s pretty.”

  “So, uhm, regular sex, say?”

  Ethan thought about the hookups he’d had with the Jonnies guys and how they’d been pretty conscientious then too, but a lot more relaxed about the simple human stuff that could go wrong.

  “Well, you try to be ready then too, but, you know, bodies are bodies. Sometimes you lube it up, take your chances, and be real good with a washcloth and hope for the best.”

  “So, uhm, morning sex?” Jonah said tentatively.

  Ethan shrugged. “Can be messy. But, you know, be honest. ‘Dude, I ate a massive burrito last night, maybe no bottoming before breakfast!’”

  Jonah burst into giggles and Ethan felt his face heat.

  “Nobody tells you that shit,” Jonah said earnestly.

  “Well, you know. Takes the illusion out of watching the porn, right? Everyone wants to imagine that time when it’s perfect, just kissing and hot sex and no stupid real-people things in the middle.”

  “Real-people things get messy,” Jonah said, suddenly sober. Ethan thought about visiting Amelia, meeting Jonah’s parents even as just a friend, and being next to Jonah in general and not feeling the freedom to touch him, to touch his face, to wrap his arms around his slight shoulders.

  “Yeah. You’re telling me.”

  THE visit with Amelia went pretty quickly—she was asleep almost as soon as they got there, for one. Ethan said a polite and shy hello to Jonah’s mom and shook hands with Jonah’s dad, and then told Jonah he’d see him later—and he did.

  They went together to visit Amelia, and they took in a movie and even went Christmas shopping together. At the end of the dates, Ethan would leave Jonah at his parents’ or at his job or at the hospital with an almost chaste kiss on the lips, a few touches on his jaw, and then—at Jonah’s insistence—a full-contact body hug.

  It was very sweet, very cute, very Sweet Valley High.

  Ethan started dreaming about him naked, pressed into his arms, Ethan inside of him, engulfed in his body, just like all the porn pictures promised—no worries about stupid human things, just the sensation of their bodies together, of all of his skin being touched.

  The Tuesday after Thanksgiving, he got a blessed distraction.

  Dex called him up and asked him if he could house-sit, which was wonderful, even if it meant taking care of all of Kane’s whacko animals. On top of that, Ethan, Tommy, Chase, and Kelsey got to watch over the home improvements Dex had planned to house those whacko animals. It was exciting—it was a project, and he got to hang with his friends, and that alone was worth the price of sitting in a room full of turtles and crickets and mice and other assorted reptiles, including a giant snake named Tomas who had a reputation for getting out and trying to get personal with Dex’s balls.

  Even Kelsey—who, it turned out, was pregnant by her ex-psycho—was sort of excited about getting to help. Whenever Ethan came into Johnnies to talk to Dex about the whole thing, her apple-cheeked little smile would make an appearance, and some of the tiredness would ease from her eyes, and that made him feel good too.

  So he spent much of his time sneaking around Kane’s back and getting instructions and talking to the workmen who were going to come in and break Dex’s house and then fix it while its owner was off visiting his folks in Montana.

  And for this one thing, Ethan was suddenly resident expert.

  “Hey, Ethan,” Dex called as they both pumped iron at the gym. Dex was a rangy guy, tall, slender—probably built a little like Jonah, except Dex had been in the business for a long time and his body was honed like a razor blade. Right now he was doing lat lifts with weights that probably weighed as much as Jonah, and not breaking a sweat.

  “Yeah?” Ethan was doing bicep curls, which had always been one of his favorite exercises because he felt like he could see the improvement in his body.

  “So your family—they’re not talking to you, right?”

  Ethan grunted. “Right.”

  “So… what’s that like?” Dex had this full Kewpie-doll mouth, and he was worrying his lower lip. It made him look really kissable, and Ethan thought fondly of all the times he’d done exactly that. Then he realized he’d trade all those times for one night with Jonah, and almost dropped his weight.

  Then he ponied up to the question. “Sucks,” he said between reps. “But, you know.” He thought of what Jonah had said, that one awful night when Ethan had waved his ass in the air and begged him for the shittiest form of affection. “I deserve better,” he said simply.

  Dex lowered his wei
ght, looked over his shoulder at him, and smiled. “Yeah, you do. We all do.”

  Ethan smiled back shyly. “Yeah. Truth. We do.”

  That night he went to pick Jonah up just to take him out to dinner. Jonah’s parents had ordered pizza—enough for seven—and he ended up sitting in the front room of the little apartment, shredding napkins with his fingers, shooting the shit, eating a fuckton of Mountain Mike’s Meat Lover’s Special, and enjoying the hell out of himself. Jonah’s dad was funny, and if his mom didn’t crack as many jokes, she did tend to smile warmly at him. He saw them both yawn one too many times, and thanked them for the pizza, then made his excuses to leave.

  Jonah walked him out, and they stood by Ethan’s car in the chilly, clear night.

  “Thanks,” Jonah said quietly.

  “What’d I do?” he asked. Casually, he hooked a finger through Jonah’s belt loops and brought him closer so they were standing groin to groin, and Ethan, for one, appreciated the warmth from Jonah’s body. Jonah’s eyes were colorless in the darkness, and his hair was frizzing in the cold, damp air. His mouth, though, looked especially full, and Ethan remembered how he’d been willing to trade all of his kisses with Dex for one night with Jonah. He couldn’t—not really. And maybe all those kisses with the guys he liked but didn’t love had helped make him someone who could actually love….

  He stopped that thought right there. Jonah was looking at him like he’d rescued orphans or something, and he was so close. Ethan wasn’t going to risk that for the big scary word.

  “What’d I do?” he repeated.

  Jonah blinked like he’d been daydreaming about inappropriate words too. “You talked to my parents,” he said quietly. “I mean, there was no ‘boyfriend’ word, but you were nice to them. With Amelia back in the hospital so close to Christmas….” He trailed off and Ethan grimaced. One day. She’d been home for one day before she’d spiked a fever again and gone back.

  “Yeah. I noticed, no tree.”

  “You getting one at your place?”