“I don’t have a wife, Nana,” Ezra said gently.
“Well, get one,” she snapped, and smacked his shoulder as he straightened up. “No wonder you’re too skinny. Ceri! Ceri, come here! Who are you?” she added, squinting at Jesse. She had ferociously blue eyes, like chips of ice, and they gleamed viciously in her collapsed face.
“Nana, this is Jesse. My boyfriend,” Ezra said, and drew Jesse closer by the hand.
“Boyfriend?” Nana snapped, then sucked in a breath. “I would have thought your father would have beaten that nonsense out of you by now.”
Jesse flinched. Ezra didn’t so much as twitch.
“Where is he? Useless, worthless layabout, drifter like his father. Zach! Zach, get out here and sort this nonsense out!”
“Mum, what are you talk—Ezra!”
A woman on the cusp of being elderly appeared in the open doorway, drying her hands on a tea towel. While Nana looked nothing like her grandson—probably thanks to her age—this woman was very obviously Mrs Pryce. She had the same beautiful dark eyes, the same length to her face, the same long limbs and delicate hands. Her hair was greying from a light brown, and cut fashionably short, and when she came down the steps to hug her son, she moved with the beginnings of age-related stiffness.
“I was beginning to worry,” she crooned, hugging her son close, and Ezra looked lanky between his diminutive Nana and his equally tiny mother. “And this is…?”
“Jesse Dawkins,” Jesse introduced himself, holding out a hand. She shook it, although a little warily. “I’m Ezra’s partner.”
He saw the flickering gaze as she took him in, and knew what she was thinking. The visible tattoo of the fire service crest on his bicep. His biceps in general. His big hands. His height, and his—density, Ezra called it, because Jesse wasn’t particularly wide or bulked up, but he was rock-solid with muscle, and it showed. The shaggy fair hair that Ezra had banned him from shaving off. The braced wrist.
He saw the way she shrank back a little too. She didn’t like him already.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Of course. Well. Come in, both of you.” She turned away from them hastily. “Come on, Mum, it’s nearly dinnertime. I’ve made Swedish meatballs.”
“Pah!” Nana scoffed.
Ezra hung back, pulling Jesse back to the car and unlocking the boot under the pretence of getting something. “You all right?” he murmured, and Jesse grimaced.
“She doesn’t like me,” he said, and he wasn’t sure which one he was referring to.
“It doesn’t matter if they like you or not,” Ezra soothed.
He swallowed, trying to believe him. He fished for something else, staring up at the door as the women argued on the step.
“So—is—is Nana your mother’s mother, or—?”
“Dad’s,” Ezra said. “Nana Lindquist.”
Wait, what?
“Lindquist? How does that work?”
“She’s Swedish,” Ezra replied. “She came over with her fiancé in the fifties, then he ran off with a barmaid in Bristol. Dad was her only son, and she claimed he was the bastard of the bloke in the bedsit below hers. James Pryce.”
“Oh. So your Dad was—”
“Zach Pryce,” Ezra confirmed. “Technically speaking, we should be Lindquist, but she put Pryce on his birth certificate, so here we are. But she’s been living with my parents ever since they got married, hence Mum just calls her Mum.”
“Jesus Christ, your family is confusing,” Jesse muttered.
“Get used to it,” Ezra said, and used the open boot as a privacy screen to cup his face and kiss him. “Be grateful Grace isn’t here. She’s a right bitch.”
“Ezra!” one of the women called.
“Come on,” Ezra said, taking Jesse’s hand again and slamming the boot. “Don’t look so serious! They’re not going to lynch you.”
That wasn’t what Jesse was afraid of.
The house was of the small and cosy variety. The kitchen was lit by the slowly setting sun, baking the brown and cream tiles in a golden hue. A border collie was stretched out in front of the cooker, as old as Nana judging by the greying fur and the complete lack of interest in newcomers, although one brown eye regarded them warily for half a second. A fat tabby cat was curled up on the windowsill and showed a little more interest when Jesse hesitantly scratched its ears, nudging its face into his fingers and purring lightly.
“See, this cat likes me,” he told Ezra snidely, who maintained that his own cat, Flopsy, didn’t hate him.
“Jingle likes everyone,” Ezra sniped back, and pulled out a chair at the enormous kitchen table. Nana, already seated, had rustled up some knitting from somewhere. “What’s that, Nana?”
“A sweater for Grace.”
Jesse privately thought Grace must be eight feet tall and two inches wide, but kept his thoughts to himself, directing his nerves into petting the appreciative cat.
“Do you like animals, then, James?”
“Jesse,” Ezra corrected his mother sharply.
“I guess,” Jesse said, and swallowed. “I like playing with Ezra’s cats when I visit. Don’t have any of my own, though, my job’s too unpredictable for pets.”
“What do you do?”
“He works for the fire service,” Ezra said.
“Oh!” Mrs Pryce looked startled. “A firefighter? Well. I thought…well, I supposed that Ezra had met his…partner…at the school.”
Jesse shrugged. “Nope.” He didn’t think telling Mrs Pryce that they’d met in a gay bar would help his cause.
“Sit!” she said, plonking a tray of sloshing teacups onto the wood. “I’m afraid we don’t know anything about you. None of my children are all that communicative.”
Ezra rolled his eyes and took a cup. Jesse warily took another, wondering if she’d put holy water in it or something, to see if he was possessed by Satan. Did people still pull that kind of shit?
“So,” Mrs Pryce wrapped her hands around her mug. “Where are you from?”
“Originally?” Jesse swallowed his nerves. They couldn’t find fault with him here. “Portsmouth. I’ve been living in Brighton for years, though.”
“With your family?”
“Um, no, just me. My…” he hastily fudged the truth. “My parents both passed away a few years ago.”
He had expected some noise of sympathy but didn’t get it. She hummed, but her face and tone didn’t change.
“How old are you, then?”
“Twenty-five. Twenty-six in November.”
She hummed again. Ezra had definitely gotten the habit from her.
“Are you a Christian?”
“Um.”
Ezra snorted. “No, Mum. He’s atheist. Like me,” he added pointedly, and the corners of her eyes tightened.
“Were you ever Christian?” she demanded.
“Um, no,” Jesse said. He couldn’t have lied about his religion if he’d tried—he’d been in a church once in his entire life, and that was for his mother’s funeral. He just didn’t know enough to lie passably. “No, I—my parents raised me atheist.”
She rolled her tongue over the front of her teeth. “I see.”
“Can we not have this argument again?” Ezra snapped. “What do you care if Jesse goes to church? I don’t go either.”
“It’s better than that Jewish boy,” Nana piped up.
Judging by the looks Ezra and Mrs Pryce gave her, Jesse wasn’t the only one struggling to find the meaning in that. Jewish boy?
“Okay then,” Ezra said slowly.
“You don’t want to be hooking up with no hellbound hebes,” she said sternly, wagging a crooked finger at him.
“Mum!” Mrs Pryce exclaimed, and went pink. “You can’t say those sorts of things!”
Nana puffed up, and an argument briefly stormed around the table. In the midst of it, Ezra squeezed Jesse’s hand and smiled at him. “You’re doing fine,” he murmured, and Jesse grimaced.
“Grace is coming the
day after tomorrow,” Mrs Pryce said, once Nana had huffed and gone back to her knitting with fierce jabs of the needles. “Ezra. She’s your sister.”
“She’s a jumped-up, born-again nutjob,” Ezra muttered darkly.
“Ezra!”
“She is!” Ezra protested.
“Don’t talk about your sister like that. I bet Jesse doesn’t talk about his sisters like that.”
“I haven’t got any,” Jesse interrupted on reflex, and mentally winced when he realised he’d spoken out of turn. Damn it. “I’m, um, an only child.”
She cupped her hands around her near-empty cup of tea. “Any particular reason for that?” she asked primly.
“I don’t know,” Jesse said honestly. He’d been eight by the time his parents had split up. Plenty of time for more children, they just…hadn’t had them.
“And what did your parents do?”
Sweet fuck-all, but he knew better than to say it. “Er—”
“Mum, you’re being nosy.”
“I need to know the kind of…people that my children are seeing,” she said carefully.
“You’re picking out reasons to tell all your church friends that I’ve been swayed to the dark side by some only-child atheist firefighter from the wrong coast,” Ezra said flatly, and Jesse would have laughed if he wasn’t so anxious about this whole disastrous meeting.
“Ezra—”
“Mum.” Ezra let go of Jesse’s hand to lean across the table towards her. “I know what I’m doing, all right? I know you don’t like it, but it’s not going to change. Whether it’s Liam or Jesse or someone else, it’s always going to be a man, and right now, it’s this man. So how about you try getting to know him instead of picking holes?”
Mrs Pryce’s face tightened in an irritable expression that Jesse knew all too well. The pinched mouth, the deepening lines in the forehead and around the eyes—he knew that face. If she’d been standing, he would have been willing to bet money she’d have folded her arms over her chest just like Ezra did.
“If only your father were still here,” she said quietly.
Ezra’s face closed down. When he spoke again, his voice was tight. “It’s nothing to do with Dad.”
“Boys need fathers. Without them—how old were you when your father passed away?” she asked Jesse.
“Mrs Pryce, being gay isn’t—”
“Homosexual,” she interrupted instantly. “Gay means happy. The word is homosexual.”
Jesse had never actually heard anyone say homosexual before. It jarred. It felt almost like a swear word. For a moment, Jesse had no idea what to do—then he realised that Ezra was grinding his teeth, and Jesse’s nerves at pleasing this hostile woman were overridden by his instincts. He wrapped his fingers around Ezra’s lightly and squeezed.
“It’s nothing to do with Dad not being here. You don’t go gay, Mum, and I won’t spontaneously recover or whatever you think is going to happen and spontaneously go straight either. I’m gay. I’ve always been gay.”
Jesse wanted to hug him, but was unsure of how it would be received. He tightened his grip instead, and felt a faint answering pressure.
“Audrey Hepburn was a lesbian,” Nana interjected, then her knitting needles thumped the table when she dropped her hands. “Ceri, for goodness’ sake, it’s five o’clock!” It was quarter past six. “When’s dinner?”
* * * *
They escaped at eight.
Dinner had been tense, hostile and awkward. Mrs Pryce had asked probing questions the whole way through—if Jesse had had girlfriends, if Jesse liked sports, if Jesse was interested in fashion, even if Jesse had HIV. Anything else, anything that might not relate to her definition of gay as a picnic basket, had been studiously ignored.
Ezra had made their thinly veiled excuses at eight and gotten them out of there, heading back to the hotel in silence. It was buzzing with activity when they got back, but they bypassed it all. Ezra hauled Jesse up the stairs to their room by the hand, unabashed by the milling people. It looked to be a wedding reception or something similar, and the jaunty atmosphere was at odds with the dark cloud over Ezra’s expression.
In their room, though, it lightened. He shut the door on the noise and immediately pushed Jesse down onto the edge of the bed, climbing onto his lap and settling his head on Jesse’s shoulder with a heavy sigh. Jesse stroked a hand down that long back and kissed his wavy hair, which was beginning to finally escape from its mousse-induced tidiness.
“You okay?” he murmured.
“Mm,” Ezra wound his arms around Jesse’s shoulders and kissed his neck. “She just exhausts me. She’s always like that. It’s been like that since I came out.”
“Who’s Liam?”
He hadn’t meant to ask. Jesse had meant to console and say it was fine and he hadn’t really expected them to like him anyway, and he would have meant it because Ezra was sitting in his lap and hugging him, and it hadn’t made him question the wisdom of being with Jesse—yet—but it slipped out.
“Liam? My first boyfriend,” Ezra murmured, and grumbled incoherently into Jesse’s T-shirt.
Jesse pushed it aside. He’d known Ezra had had a boyfriend before him. He’d not said, but he hadn’t been as nervous as Jesse about getting together. He had been all cool and practised and confident. Jesse, who’d only had one-night stands and casual sex before Ezra, had been a nervous wreck.
Was still a nervous wreck, truth be told.
“Did they not like Liam?”
“Nope.”
“Was he Jewish?”
“Nope. No idea where Nana got that from. Anyway, Mum and Grace hated him—they won’t like anyone who isn’t a girl, and preferably a Catholic one—but Nana liked him fine,” Ezra said. He slid to the side, leaving his legs draped over Jesse’s lap. “Urgh. I should do my routine.”
Jesse considered it. Ezra’s routine was a long and gruelling yoga session, the point of which—for him—was flexibility, strength and stress-relief. Or—for Jesse—live porn. Nothing got him turned on faster than walking in on Ezra being bendy in his clingy yoga blacks.
But Ezra’s tone suggested it wasn’t what Jesse was going to get tonight.
“Or?” he prompted.
“Kind of just want a drink,” Ezra admitted.
“I could get with that.”
Ezra eyed him. “You sure? Your wrist not bothering you?”
“Nah. Brace’ll probably come off when we get back.” Jesse wiggled his fingers at Ezra and grinned. “Anyway, an excuse to see you tipsy? Yes please.”
“I still haven’t worked out if you get handsy when you’re drunk, or if it’s because I’m drunk.”
“Definitely you.” Jesse squeezed his knee before pushing his legs off to the floor. “Come on, beautiful. Couple of drinks, then you can show me where you used to hang out here?”
“There’s very few places,” Ezra warned. When he stood, Jesse rose from the bed to hug him from behind, tucking his chin into the top of Ezra’s shoulder and squeezing him tightly. “What was that for, hm?”
Jesse shrugged, swaying them lightly before kissing the side of Ezra’s head and letting him go. “Felt like it,” he said, and smacked his arse to get him moving. “Let’s go. I have the feeling I’m going to want to get drunk every night if I’m going to cope with this.”
Ezra laughed, opening the door. “Oh, it’ll be worse when Grace arrives.”
“Your sister?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Older? Younger? Twin?”
Ezra rolled his eyes. “Younger. She’s twenty with the attitude of a sour, eighty-year-old nun. I’ve got students with more sense of proportionality and priorities than she does.”
“Ouch, Ez.”
“It’s true,” he said dismissively as they reached the bottom of the stairs and the hubbub of the party. It was a christening party, Jesse vaguely realised, not a wedding. And lots of people had babies. “Let’s go down the road. Jackie’s is noisy but it’s good-mus
ic noisy, not baby noisy.”
The darkness had well and truly swept in. The street was quiet in the early night, the streetlights all glowing an ill-looking orange, and the faintest fumes in the air from the petrol station over the road. A drunk couple staggered past, giggling to each other, and Jesse felt the urge to get into a similar state—but a contented urge, somehow. Mrs Pryce hadn’t liked him very much, but Ezra was so hostile to that dislike…maybe it would be okay.
Jackie’s was a loud cross between a bar and a club, with a sticky dance floor populated by both straight and gay couples, and a tiny LGBTQ+ flag above the bar with a sign declaring it to be a safe space. Jesse had no idea what that was meant to mean, but he grasped that it was okay to be gay in here, and slid an arm around Ezra’s waist at the bar.
“You’re clingy,” Ezra said lightly, but tucked his head briefly against Jesse’s neck in a kind of half-hug pose. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Jesse said, and slapped Ezra’s hand down. “I’ll get this round. I want you to get tipsy, and you’ll never do that if you stick to your bloody lager.”
“Mr Dawkins, are you trying to get me drunk?”
“Yes,” Jesse said, handing over a twenty to the bored bartender. In the pause as the guy wrestled with the till, Jesse twisted to kiss Ezra soundly, transmitting his exact intentions with his tongue and his hand possessively low on Ezra’s hip.
“Mm.” Ezra hummed as he pulled back, and his eyes were just a little darker. “Maybe I’ll get a little bit drunk.”
“You do that,” Jesse said, and pressed the glass into his hand.
Jackie’s livened up a little as the bar slowly filled and the money kept changing hands. Jesse kept Ezra on the vodka, relishing the chance to be able to get him drunk. Jesse couldn’t usually drink—he couldn’t chance not being called out—and Ezra didn’t like to drink alone. So it was nice to let go a little, to drink a bit more than the two-pint maximum, to feel the first fuzzy edges of poor coordination and disjointed thinking take over his brain. The music was kind of shitty—late-nineties stuff he hadn’t heard in years—and the bartender was stingy with the doubles, but it was fairly cheap and it was nasty enough to work, and when that wide, beautiful smile bloomed across Ezra’s face when a tiny little lesbian and her girlfriend dragged him to dance with them, insisting they knew him as insistently as he said that they didn’t, Jesse felt happy. Despite Mrs Pryce, despite Audrey Hepburn being a lesbian, despite the crucifix on the gatepost, he felt happy.
Enough Page 3
