“Where’ve you lived, then?” Jesse asked, opting for safer waters.
Ezra laughed. “Oh, God. Swansea, Rhys, two places in Bristol, Northampton—but not for long, we left really quickly—then Milton Keynes. Ealing for a little while, but the job fell through. Then we came here, and—” He shrugged. “Then Dad had the accident.”
Jesse perched on the edge of the bed, leaning gingerly against the pillow. “Do you have pictures?” he asked gently.
Ezra bounced off the bed to the desk, returning with two binders that had faded from exposure to the light along the spines, but were still a brilliant forest green on the sides that had been hidden. He crawled up the bed with them to settle on the pillows beside Jesse, opening one across their laps and revealing a picture of a very young Mrs Pryce, long brown hair fluffy around her face, in a hospital bed, a pink bundle clutched to her chest.
“Grace,” Ezra said, but Jesse wasn’t looking at the baby.
A man sat behind the bed, a young boy on each knee. The man didn’t look much like Ezra, aside from the flyaway fair hair and the brilliant wide smile that Jesse knew so well. He had a huge hand wrapped around the middle of each boy, who were both around the age of five, and dressed in identical jeans, red trainers and blue T-shirts with cartoon fish on them.
Ezra, as a—Jesse worked it out—four-year-old was just like any other blond four-year-old boy in the universe. He was beaming toothily at the camera, tousled fair hair in the disarray that it would maintain for the rest of his life, and looked frankly identical, if a bit smaller, to his brother.
“Josh?” Jesse guessed, pointing at the older boy.
“Mm.”
He turned the pages slowly. It was a generic family album, pictures mainly of the children growing up, the odd foray into birthday parties and Christmases with ugly jumpers, and often of a new house. As Ezra grew older, Jesse noticed that the unabashed grinning lessened. By the time he was eleven, the spontaneous pictures of a laughing family had been replaced by the kind of formal pictures that hung in people’s hallways, and he always stood at his father’s side, as far from his siblings as possible.
Jesse’s heart ached, and he slid an arm around Ezra’s back.
Apart from the formal pictures, Ezra was often absent altogether. There were many pictures of Josh and Grace together, but very few of Ezra at all. The odd time a more natural photo occurred, he tended to be with his father.
“I just wasn’t like them,” Ezra said, when Jesse tentatively asked. “Josh and Grace were—they were like twins. Josh adored her. They were like the same person, and I…wasn’t. I was quieter. I wanted to read, and find bugs in the garden, and I kept begging Dad to take me to the science museum in London for my birthday.” He shrugged. “We didn’t get on.”
Jesse rested his cheek on the top of Ezra’s head and kept turning the pages.
He jolted when he found the last picture, taken outside a chapel on some sunny day. It was unmistakable what the day had been. It showed nothing but Mrs Pryce, Ezra and Grace on either side of her, standing by a dark blue car and dressed in formal black.
Mourning black.
“The funeral?” he whispered.
Ezra just nodded and pushed the other album into Jesse’s hands. He didn’t dare linger.
Time jumped between the two albums. On the one hand, Jesse was disappointed. He’d seen no pictures of Ezra growing up before, and the gap between fourteen and nineteen missed most of it, including the point of learning to shave and whatever had broken Ezra’s nose as a teenager. He claimed a rugby match, but Jesse couldn’t see Ezra playing rugby.
But on the other hand, the first picture—a group of young men outside the University of London Students’ Union—showed a happier Ezra. His smile was genuine. He looked relaxed. He looked at home, even if he was in public, and he looked so much more like the man that Jesse had seen across a dance floor in a gay bar eight months ago.
“See, this is you,” Jesse said, tapping the picture, and Ezra laughed.
“Mm. Me with a booze problem. I swear I don’t remember most of my first year.”
Jesse grinned—and kept grinning through the drunken photos of people Ezra couldn’t name and weekends away to Amsterdam or Edinburgh or Barcelona. One picture of Ezra and another boy with pink glitter and lipstick on their faces that Ezra passed off as, “Ibiza and too many shots,” and Jesse’s day was made with the discovery of evidence of Ezra at Brighton Pride in his second year, wearing a leather jacket and looking surprisingly hot.
“Kind of badass,” Jesse admitted, turned the page, and scowled.
Liam beamed up at him. It was a formal-ish shot in a pub, the prick in a suit and looking like an even hotter underwear model at twenty-odd. Ezra was arm-in-arm with him, also in a suit, and Ezra grimaced against Jesse’s shoulder.
“Christmas ball, second year,” he said. “We’d been together about three weeks.”
“He looks like a boring tosser,” Jesse decided.
“He was,” Ezra said, and laughed. “Mind you, I was just as bad back then. Took nine months before I had sex with him. Too scared I was going to get smited at any minute or something.”
Jesse ran his hand down Ezra’s side to pinch his hip. “Three weeks,” he said smugly.
“Two and a half,” Ezra countered, and stretched up to kiss his cheek. “You might not like him, but Liam did get my ingrained Catholicism to fuck off and stop thinking I was sick every time I wanted to do so much as kiss.”
Jesse grunted and kept turning pages. Liam was everywhere now, and he skipped a lot of pictures to avoid that perfectly styled hair and practised smile. And the arm he always had around Ezra’s waist. It was irrational—the pictures were years old—but he wanted to smack him and tell him to get his hands off.
“Two years?” he said.
“About that,” Ezra agreed. “We split up when we graduated.”
“What, the same day?”
“Mine,” Ezra said. “And yes. Right after the ceremony.”
“And you dumped him?” Jesse couldn’t help asking.
“Get me drunk one day and I’ll tell you the whole sorry story,” Ezra said, and paused. “Actually, in hindsight, it’s kind of amusing, but it can’t have felt nice for Liam.”
“That’s fine by me,” Jesse said, pushing the albums away and turning to press Ezra down into the mattress. “Did he do something really stupid that I should avoid doing?”
“Yes, but I doubt you’d be that thick,” Ezra murmured, tilting his head back when Jesse began to kiss his neck.
“Did you ever bring him home?”
“Mm, no,” Ezra hummed, pushing his hands up under Jesse’s shirt and tracing the muscles in his back. “My family met him at my graduation. Same day I dumped him. It was a bit awkward.”
Jesse rubbed a hand over the front of Ezra’s jeans and toyed with the button. “So you never brought him home to christen your old room?”
Ezra laughed breathlessly. “I’ve never so much as had sex in this room,” he said, and drew his right foot up towards his hip, opening up invitingly under Jesse’s weight. “And I’m not having sex now, but I wouldn’t say no to a bit of…manhandling.”
“Oh, I can—”
“Ezra! Dinner!”
The shout from the landing was like a bucket of iced water over the head. Jesse jolted up, and Ezra laughed and caught him again for a quick kiss before sitting up.
“Maybe after dinner,” he said, tracing his fingers over the shell of Jesse’s left ear. “I could lock the door and everything.”
* * * *
“So, Jesse”—Grace speared a piece of pasta on her fork as though it were Jesse’s balls and held it up in front of her face to examine it critically—“how long do you intend on being with Ezra?”
“Er—”
Ezra’s face twisted.
“What do you mean?” Jesse hedged.
“Exactly what I said.”
“What you said doesn’t make sens
e.”
“Of course it does,” she said flippantly. “Gay relationships are about sex.”
“Grace!” Mrs Pryce exclaimed.
“It’s not just—” Jesse began, exchanging a startled glance with Ezra. Or, rather, he offered surprise, and Ezra met it with a weary shrug.
“Of course it is.” Grace waved his objection aside, ignoring her mother. “Men can’t commit. It’s a fact. Two men trying to commit to one another? It doesn’t happen. So how long do you suppose you’ll put up with Ezra?”
“I don’t put up with Ezra, I—” Jesse tried.
“Even if you’re deluded, he’s not. Liam offered commitment, and Ezra ran a mile. It’s the way he’s built.”
Ezra flushed an angry red. Jesse was half-curious and half-derisive. Because what the hell did Grace know—what did she mean by Liam offering Ezra commitment?
“I’m in it for the long haul,” Jesse said, as diplomatically as possible, and squeezed Ezra’s thigh under the table. From the way her eyes flickered downwards, Grace caught the flex of his biceps and guessed his action anyway. The disgusted look intensified marginally.
“However long that is in your book,” Grace muttered, almost to herself. She stabbed another piece of pasta. “I suppose it’s from moving around so much in childhood, having no stable male influence after Dad was killed, then turning out gay thanks to that lack of influence. I suppose it was inevitable, really.”
“Grace, I swear to your stupid fucking God—”
“Ezra!” Mrs Pryce yelped. Nana crossed herself, eyed her knitting needles, and crossed them too, apparently for good measure. Wouldn’t do to have blasphemy-tainted knitting needles, after all.
“Do you keep in touch with your ex?” Grace demanded of Ezra.
Ezra narrowed his eyes. “Not really.”
“Shame. You could invite him over and ask him to—”
He made a sharp motion, she shrieked and Jesse surmised he’d kicked her. Mrs Pryce snapped both their names with an exasperated, futile sort of air, like she’d been hearing the same old crap for the last twenty-odd years. Probably not how she phrased it, though.
“Look”—Grace threw up her hands, turning to their mother—“I just don’t understand why he’s here.”
“Because it’s Nana’s birthday—”
“It’s not my birthday,” Nana chirped.
“Yes, it is, Mum. And Ezra hasn’t visited since—”
“He’s in the room,” Ezra snapped, but they both ignored him.
“He shouldn’t be here, Mum!” Grace interrupted hotly. “He’s sick, and until—”
“Grace Mary Pryce, don’t you talk about others like that!”
“It’s true!”
Ezra stood up abruptly, his chair screaming on the tiles, and stormed out. Jesse threw down his fork and followed, Mrs Pryce saying, “Oh, Grace,” tiredly over his shoulder, and he felt a vicious wave of anger towards the woman. Who just let their daughter say that kind of thing to their son?
“Ez!” he called and caught up to him at the front steps. It was dark outside by this point, but some motion-sensitive floodlight boomed into life as Ezra’s shoes crunched onto the gravel, and highlighted the sheen in his eyes. “Oh, Ez, don’t.”
Ezra’s jaw worked furiously, then he gave in to Jesse’s hands and let himself be hugged, clutching at the back of Jesse’s shirt briefly.
“Let’s go?” Jesse pleaded, stroking Ezra’s hair lightly. He could feel him shaking. “Let’s just go. I know it’s your nan’s birthday, but she doesn’t know. She won’t miss us. We can get dinner at the hotel and just…put the TV on, lounge around, be us. Don’t let Grace ruin tonight.”
Ezra took a shaky breath. “That,” he croaked, “has been every fucking dinner since Dad died.”
Jesse winced and kissed the side of his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Ezra shook his head and clung a little harder for a moment.
“Ezra, put him down!”
They broke apart when Nana called, shuffling out into the night waving a crooked hand at them.
“We have to go, Nana,” Ezra said, wiping away the tears with the heel of his hand. “I’m sorry, I know it’s your birthday, but—”
“Come here,” she ordered imperiously.
He went. Jesse hovered at the bottom of the steps as she hugged her grandson. She really was ridiculously small.
“You’re just like me,” she said, and patted his cheek. “Stubborn to the end. You won’t let a thing sway you, not even God.”
Ezra offered her a half-smile and a shrug, neither of which was convincing.
“Spiteful little cat,” Nana said suddenly. “She needs a good smacking. Zach never smacked any of you enough, no wonder you all turned out funny. Ceri! Ceri, for goodness’ sake, where’s the belt! I’m still young enough to belt these hooligans into shape!”
She turned away, and Ezra stepped down into Jesse’s open arms with a half-laugh, hugging him tightly once more before letting go and nodding.
“Okay,” he said, the rasp fading from his voice. “Let’s go and be us or whatever it is you said.”
Jesse squeezed his hand, and finally got a smile that looked genuine.
“I really hate your sister,” he offered as they got in the car, Ezra apparently aggravated enough to not bother saying goodbye to his mother.
“Join the club,” Ezra said, and glanced at Jesse with a half-smile in the light of the dashboard. “I love you, you know.”
Jesse smiled, propping his elbow on the door and his chin on his hand, watching Ezra out of the corner of his eye. The upset seemed to have passed or been locked down and Jesse turned over the information in his head before gently saying, “You know, I’m a little bit—glad.”
“Glad?”
“That you don’t get on with them,” he said. “Because if you did, maybe you would have stayed here. Or come back after uni. Instead of coming to Brighton.”
Ezra huffed and shook his head, but he was smiling, so Jesse pushed his point.
“I mean, why Brighton?”
“The school offered me a job and I wasn’t picky.”
“If you were picky, you wouldn’t have given me your number.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ezra said, shifting gears. Whatever he said, Jesse swore he handled the gearstick like a porn star with a dildo. “Maybe in ten years you’ll look like the back end of a bus, but that night, you were doing everything right.”
Jesse flushed and subsided. Ten years. Ezra didn’t think the possibility of them being together in ten years was stupid. But then, Grace had said that Liam had offered commitment, and Ezra—
Maybe Jesse had been doing everything right in the club, and maybe he’d been lucky since—but how long until he was doing everything wrong?
Chapter Five
“You have a plan,” Jesse said, when Ezra came back from paying for the petrol with a cheap bunch of carnations.
“Mm,” Ezra said, putting the flowers on the back seat. “I forget, sometimes.”
“Forget what?”
“How much you don’t know,” Ezra said, and shrugged. “I’m just—I guess I’m used to everybody knowing things. This trip’s made me realise how much you don’t know.”
Jesse felt lost and said so.
“Sorry,” Ezra said, and gave him a rueful smile. “I mean…with Liam, you know, I was working through a lot of crap. I didn’t like myself, I didn’t like being gay, I didn’t know what I was going to do. And, you know, it was natural for Liam to get to know everything in helping me through it. But with you—I don’t have those issues, so I’ve never, you know, had a meltdown all over you—”
Jesse couldn’t quite imagine Ezra having a proper meltdown at all. He’d seen him irritable and he’d seen him scared and he’d seen him upset, but never more than Ezra could reasonably manage on his own anyway. A meltdown? Not likely.
“I forget how much that means you don’t know.”
“I’m sti
ll lost.”
“We’re going to see Dad,” Ezra finally clarified. “I’m going to tell you what happened.”
Jesse winced. “Ez, I—if you don’t want to tell me, I—”
“I’m happy to tell you,” Ezra said. “I’m just—” He shrugged. “I think it’ll be easier to explain this way.”
It was only a short drive before Ezra pulled his Peugeot through the open iron gates of a cemetery. It was a small one but had the look of the chapel being attached for the purposes of funerals, rather than the graveyard having been born of the presence of a church. The shaved-down grass, the shiny black headstones and the long gaps of unturned land said that burials here continued. The charred remnants of the chapel said that funeral services now happened elsewhere.
“It burned down about four years ago,” Ezra said, catching Jesse looking. He pulled the car up about a third of the way inside and hauled on the handbrake a little too harshly. “Come on.”
“You okay?” Jesse asked lowly.
“Mm,” Ezra said. “It’s—difficult. I don’t visit as much as I should.”
Jesse took his hand once they were out of the car. The flowers were mockingly gaudy in the sombre silence, and Ezra squeezed his fingers with a tight smile.
The grave was amongst a cluster of new, flower-heavy resting places. It was taller than most, with a space between the names. Zachariah James Pryce, beloved son, husband and father, had been forty-four. A space waited for his wife’s name to be added later. His son, Joshua Christopher Pryce, had been only sixteen.
“‘Resting in the arms of Jesus,’” Jesse recited, and frowned. “Um.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ezra shrugged, kneeling at the graveside to pull out the dead flowers from the vase. “Hi, Dad,” he said softly, but gave his brother no greeting and said nothing more. Jesse had heard of people chatting to graves, but Ezra seemed unwilling to say anything else. He knelt beside him and waited for the flowers to be arranged to his satisfaction before putting an arm around him.
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