Page 8

Jonah

The thump of the bass was so heavy it reverberated through Jonah’s ribcage, his heart beating in time with the music like he was a part of it. A red light pulsed from the ceiling, feeding him glimpses of the room; a sea of sweaty bodies through a hazy, neon glow, drinks raised and spilling over tangles of limbs. The borrowed shirt clung to him like a second skin, tight mesh cropped at the midriff. Jonah remembered feeling self-conscious when he put it on, but he couldn’t remember why.

Around the room, eyes followed him, watched him, entranced by the movement of his body as he lost himself in the warmth of the alcohol and the safety of the low lighting. There was no one in particular who stood out, just a sea of blurred faces that churned with unified desire. Jonah had never been looked at like that before. Their attention, distant and anonymous, was intoxicating.

Hands found his waist from behind. Familiar chapped lips dragged over his neck. He let his head fall back against Dominic’s shoulder, hips and legs and torsos moving together like one body. A laugh bubbled out of Jonah. It all just felt so good.

For the first time in his life, Jonah felt alive.

Sweat covered every inch of his body, hair clinging to his face in sticky, wet clumps, but Dominic didn’t seem to mind, because he was just as hot and sticky in the most appealing way. Of everyone who looked at Jonah tonight like they wanted a taste, he only had eyes for one. Overtaken by a rush of desire and affection, Jonah pushed his hips back against him, rewarded with the graze of teeth over his neck.

“You feel so good,” Dom murmured against his ear, making goosebumps erupt over his flesh. He spun Jonah so that they faced each other, capturing him in an eager kiss. Jonah wound his arms around Dominic’s neck, only in part to steady his weight as the room spun around them.

“I feel good,” Jonah echoed. He could almost make out the sound of Dom’s laughter over the noise.

“I have something for you.” He drew Jonah in closer and leaned forward to whisper it against his ear, making him shudder at the heightened sensation. Everything felt so much more like this, so much better, and he didn’t ever want it to ever stop.

A finger tapped twice on his bottom lip and Jonah opened his eyes. There was a tiny pill pinched between Dom’s fingers, presented inches from his face. Jonah had to blink a few times to bring it into focus.

“One for each of us,” Dom said. He popped one into his mouth from his other hand and swallowed it dry, then gestured for Jonah to take the other. For the briefest moment, a sharp peck of clarity tapped the foggy glass of Jonah’s intoxication, some buried-deep instinct trying to call attention to a bad idea. An old, familiar guilt roiled in his stomach. Conviction, his pastor would have called it.

But that wasn’t who Jonah was anymore. He had left that life behind, or it had left him behind. Either way, he wasn’t bound by the laws that had dictated most of his life.

But if Jonah had already crossed about a thousand lines he never thought he would, this particular temptation felt like a line too far.

“I don’t know,” Jonah said, leaning in close so Dom could hear him.

He was already having fun. It was perfect. He would have liked to have stayed just how he was, but Dom was smiling so close to him, little kisses peppering his jaw, his neck, and it felt so nice. Dom was so nice.

He wouldn’t do anything to bring Jonah harm. He had been the one to take him in. He had been the one to bring him home and clean him up, give him a place to sleep for a few nights that had turned into weeks. Dominic gave him clothes to wear and the first sense of trust he had been able to feel since climbing onto the night bus just outside of Indianapolis almost a month earlier.

Besides, Dom had taken the pill, too. It couldn’t be that bad.

“Please?” Dom purred against his skin. Jonah could feel the vibration more than he could hear the word. “I don’t want to come down yet. I want to feel like this with you for as long as I can.”

Somehow, in the moment, Jonah couldn’t argue. He opened his mouth .

A finger pushed gently between his lips, placing the pill on his tongue. Dom closed his mouth over Jonah’s and kissed him, hard and deep, until he swallowed.

The night got harder to track after that.

Time was fragmented, jumping and skipping like a broken tape, moving in slow motion one moment and careening into freefall the next.

At some point, the scene changed around him. They were still at the club, the bass pounding in muffled staccato on the other side of a wall, but it was quieter. Emptier. He could tell, even without opening his eyes, that it was darker, too.

“They’re looking at you.” It took a moment to realize the voice came from Dominic, who was pressed against his back. Jonah was sprawled on his lap, a sticky, vinyl sofa beneath them.

“Who?” The word slipped out of him, dazed and slow.

“Everyone.”

Jonah opened his eyes and saw that Dominic was right. Eyes peered at him from the darkness, a silent audience washed in the glow of a single strip of red light from above. The men from the dance floor—or were these different men? He couldn’t tell.

“You could have anyone you wanted tonight,” Dominic told him.

“I want you .” It came without thought, without reservation, but Dominic was laughing. The sound was easier to hear away from the crowd.

“I get you for free,” he said. “They’re just easy money.”

Jonah didn’t understand. Not at first. The connection clicked when he remembered the sparse details of Dominic’s past that he had shared. The way he had gotten by in the city when he was Jonah’s age. He started to sit up, sobered slightly by the suggestion, but Dominic shushed him with a flat hand against his stomach, gently pulling him back.

“Shh, it’s okay. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said, and Jonah relaxed, mollified by the promise. “But you haven’t had much luck with work, and you’re good at this. I know from experience,” he added with a kiss to his cheek.

Jonah laughed, heady and charmed. “I don’t know,” he said for the second time that night. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. He was beginning to realize there was a lot he didn’t know about the world.

“Isn’t it illegal?” Jonah asked, feeling younger than he was.

Dominic smiled against his neck. “Do they look like cops to you?”

Jonah thought—but did not say— wouldn’t that be the point? “Do you want me to?” he asked.

“I don’t mind sharing.”

“But do you want me to?”

He was quiet for a long time. Jonah began to drift again, but he was pulled back to earth when Dominic said, “It might be nice to have some help.” Jonah twisted around so that he could look at him, his expression pinched. “With bills. Rent.” Jonah’s guilt must have shown on his face, because Dominic squeezed him around his middle. “You know I love having you. It would just help me out a little.”

Jonah’s stomach was splitting open. Maybe it was the pill. It had to be the pill. His body couldn’t really be pulled apart at the middle by the gnawing feeling inside of him .

“I could try,” he said quietly. Then, spurred by Dom’s easy affection, repeated it. “I could try.”

As if beckoned by his acquiescence, quiet as it was, another presence appeared at their side. His weight dipped the couch beside them, jostling Jonah’s body.

“He your boyfriend?” the man asked, little more than a shadow silhouetted in red.

Dominic’s hand came up to push away the sweat-damp hair from his forehead.

“Don’t be shy, Jonah. Say hello.”

“Hello.”

Liam was smiling when he opened the door. Jonah let out a breath. A cynical part of him had been expecting anyone else, preparing for the possibility that Liam had come to his senses and decided to leave his brief encounters with Jonah in the past. But there he was.

“Hi,” Jonah said.

Inside the room, the same stack of clothes Jonah had borrowed the week before were folded on the corner of the bed. On top of them were two paperback books, both worn and tattered at the edges. There was a takeout container on the dresser with a logo he didn’t recognize on the side. The smell made his empty stomach roll with hunger.

“I came straight from work,” Liam explained when he saw him looking. “We get a comped meal with every shift. I hope you like burgers. ”

“And these?” Jonah asked, gesturing to the books.

Liam flushed, his pale skin making the color stand out. “Don’t feel obligated to read them,” he said. “I thought you might get bored of just watching TV and blaspheming our former religions all the time. I brought a couple of my favorites from home.”

Jonah picked up the thicker of the two novels, turning it over in his hands. He skimmed the synopsis on the back, thumbing over the glossy paperback. “Thank you,” he said.

“No problem.” There was a brief lapse before Liam cleared his throat. He turned, heaving a large backpack onto his designated bed. “I also wanted you to have something to do because I’m going to be pretty bogged down tonight.” He unloaded two textbooks and a notebook onto the bed. “School stuff,” he said, glancing up at him. “I have exams coming up, but I’ve been picking up so many extra shifts at the diner that I haven’t done any of the prep for them.”

A cold weight settled in Jonah’s chest. Overnight calls weren’t cheap, and the rooms couldn’t be either, even the more modest ones they found themselves in. Jonah didn’t know much about Liam’s financial situation, or about his life in general beyond the walls of these weekly hotel rooms, but it seemed like a fair assumption that the ‘extra shifts’ were going toward his visits with Jonah.

If Liam noticed his mood drop, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he settled into his bed and cracked open a textbook.

“I ate before I came, so feel free to dig in,” he said. “Or you can shower first, if you want. I’ll be here, suffering. ”

Jonah looked at the box of food, then to the pile of clothes, opting for the latter. Suddenly, he didn’t have much of an appetite.

They had been working in silence for at least an hour—Jonah making headway on one of the novels and Liam scratching away at his notes—when a loud thunk startled him. He looked over to see Liam had thrown his head back against the wooden headboard, hands over his face.

Jonah closed the book, using a finger to keep his place. From behind his hands, Liam said, “I’m dropping out of school.”

“Seems hasty,” Jonah said. “What are you working on?”

“Math. A required credit. No one would take this of their own volition.”

The ugly stab of jealousy snuck up on him before Jonah could quash it. It was easy enough, most of the time, to push away thoughts of what could have been. The image of an acceptance letter pinned to his fridge, his parents smiling. What-ifs were parasitic; they sucked your energy dry. Jonah had gotten good—better, at least—at rationing his mental energy and steering himself away from this kind of useless self-torment.

It was harder to do with Liam around.

At his age, Jonah should have been sleeping in a lofted dorm bed at whatever state school would take him, instead of bouncing between the prison of Shepard’s house and a series of nondescript hotel rooms. He would have given anything to be drowning in homework, his largest concern an impending exam or a heavy course load. That was the way it was supposed to be. Those were the kind of stressors people his age were supposed to have.

But of the two people in the room, Liam was hardly the one at fault for that.

“What kind of math is it?” Jonah asked.

“Calculus,” Liam said. “Sorry, I won’t bore you with this. I was just complaining into the void. Don’t let me keep you from your book.”

“ Your book,” Jonah corrected, swinging his legs off the side of the bed. “Can I help?”

Liam raised an eyebrow, looking at him in a way that Jonah couldn’t quite decipher. “Really?” He shrugged when Jonah nodded. “Sure, have at it.” He plucked the worksheet closest to his bent knee from the pile, handing it across the gap between the beds.

Jonah leaned over and took it, bringing it closer to inspect. He scanned over the loopy scrawl of Liam’s pencil marks, mentally trying to work through the problem. He couldn’t help but smile at the sheer number of smudged eraser marks and scribbled out numbers that littered the page, as well as the distracted doodles he had done off in the margins. After a moment of deliberation, he looked up at Liam, whose hair was tousled and unruly from the stress.

“You kind of suck at this,” Jonah said.

Liam’s mouth popped open in feigned offense. “I was very transparent about my shortcomings. You don’t have to rub it in.”

“I’m mostly kidding,” Jonah said with a smirk.

“ Mostly ,” Liam echoed. He rubbed the heels of his palms over his eyes. “Honestly, maybe I should just bomb the exams. At the very least, it will serve as an ‘I told you so’ to my advisor, and maybe I’ll be able to take my Math for Idiots class next semester as God intended.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Jonah said. “You actually were close on a couple of these, you just missed a step, and it threw off the rest of your work. Here. Can I borrow your pencil?”

“Please,” Liam insisted, clicking his mechanical pencil up a couple notches before handing it over.

Without thinking about it, Jonah sank down next to him on the bed, propping his leg up to supply a writing surface.

He scribbled his additions alongside Liam’s work as he talked him through the equation, small, jagged streaks of graphite stark against the smooth, curvy penmanship. It was kind of amazing, even to him, that he was able to slip into the process like an old sweater after all this time, the feel of a rapidly scratching pencil as right as rain between his fingers.

Numbers had always made sense to him. He couldn’t deny the tiny thrill he felt at the realization that this part of him hadn’t withered completely with time, the way so many others had .

When he finished, after plugging in the answer to check his work, Jonah breathed a long exhale and circled the new number, flashing it toward Liam with a smile.

“See how I got that?”

“I absolutely did not.”

Jonah’s mouth quirked, and he got to work on the next problem.

Somehow, inexplicably, the distance between them shrank little by little over the course of an hour. By the end, they were side by side against the headboard, the knees of their pajama pants brushing just slightly as they balanced the notebook between them. At some point, Liam had retrieved the leftovers from Jonah’s dinner from the mini fridge, rewarding himself with a cold fry every time he got a question right on his own.

That became a game within itself, as Liam, desperate for any short distraction from the math, challenged Jonah to try and toss them into his mouth. They usually missed, and one time he’d thrown it a bit too aggressively, resulting in a retching gag as the fry harpooned the back of Liam’s throat, but that only made them laugh harder.

It was the most like his age Jonah had felt in a long time.