Page 1 of Doors & Windows (Liam & Jonah’s Story)

Liam

The box hit the top of the second staircase with a crash that sounded a lot like structural damage. Liam Cassidy shook out his bloodless fingers, striped with indents from the sharp edges of cardboard, and leaned back against the wall to catch his breath.

It was the sweltering armpit of August in New York City, and even his proverbial rose-colored glasses were starting to fog up inside this stairwell.

In most of Liam’s daydreams about life in the city, air conditioning was a factor he took for granted. Perhaps an elevator was, too.

His new apartment building was old. The exterior fit the aesthetic that every wannabe-struggling-artist wanted for their first place in New York.

Aged brick had been patched over through the years with coloring that didn’t quite match all the way down, the entry door was layered in spray paint that hadn’t been scrubbed away since the Reagan administration, and a set of Oscar the Grouch-style trash cans lined the sidewalk.

The interior reflected much more practical concerns.

The stairs didn’t so much creak as they did buckle under the slightest movement.

The painted walls of the hallways were scratched with jagged, overlapping stripes, evidence of a decade’s worth of furniture moving in and out of the building.

Now Liam was making his own contribution to the disarray.

There was something magical about that, right?

Maybe his rose-colored glasses hadn’t dimmed so much after all.

At the sound of footsteps behind him—frankly impossible to miss, with the way the entire staircase shook—Liam nudged the box closer to the wall with his foot, clearing a path.

Jonah Prince turned the corner with a duffle bag slung over one shoulder and a bag of Liam’s bedding hoisted onto the other.

The sight of him standing there in the flesh, mere meters between them instead of hundreds of miles, still took his breath away.

Liam hadn’t quite righted his equilibrium since he first lay eyes on Jonah that morning, standing on the sidewalk outside his new apartment, holding two coffee cups and Liam’s entire heart in his hands.

His hair was longer now. After eight months of watching the progression over video calls, Liam still wasn’t used to seeing the growth in person: brown-black waves that curled over the tips of his ears and at the nape of his neck, currently clinging to his forehead in sweaty tendrils, which was far more appealing than it had any right to be.

Liam’s own exertion probably just made him look like he was melting.

“Taking a break?” Jonah’s voice was unfairly steady. Liam’s, on the other hand, was strained between pulls for oxygen .

“There’s a reason I’m sticking to the arts,” he said. “Manual labor is not for everyone. We didn’t all spend our summers throwing around steel beams for fun.”

Jonah’s laugh filled the stairwell, still a rare enough delight that Liam had to clutch the wobbly railing behind him.

“I did offer to carry that one for you,” Jonah pointed out, nodding to the box on the landing. He had yet to put down either of the heavy bags in his arms.

“Yeah,” Liam said, “but it feels like kind of a dick move to bring my entire home library to college and make someone else carry it up four flights of stairs.”

“Only two flights now.” Jonah tilted his head toward the next set. “Trade me?”

“Are you sure?” Liam asked.

But Jonah was already moving, stepping around him to drop the bags on the landing. He crouched in front of the box and lifted it with practiced ease.

And Liam’s mind just sort of… blanked.

Because there was Jonah, with his sweat-damp hair and his kind gestures and his short sleeves that strained around his upper arms when they flexed against the weight.

With his well-worn boots from a long summer of construction work braced on the wooden steps and the movement of his back muscles when he tossed a look back at him.

And Liam was so in love he couldn’t think straight.

“You coming?” Jonah asked.

Liam closed his mouth and swallowed, his throat suddenly dry for reasons entirely unrelated to the heat. “Yeah,” he said. “Right behind you.”

When the final box was unloaded, Liam collapsed onto the bare mattress, currently situated on the floor in the corner of his closet-sized bedroom.

Jonah hovered in the scant patch of open floor, glancing quickly toward the spot beside Liam before settling onto the window ledge instead.

He pulled two bottles of water from his backpack and handed one to Liam, who downed half in one messy, dribbling go.

It wasn’t like anyone could tell the water stains apart from all the sweat on his shirt, anyway.

“Better?” Jonah asked.

“Ask me again when I’ve had a shower.” Liam grimaced, lifting the hem to wipe his forehead. He meant to continue that thought, but when he dropped the material from his eyes, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Jonah looking away from his exposed stomach.

A history of poor self-esteem might have made him self-conscious in any other context.

But this was Jonah, the boy who brought out a whole new spectrum of emotions in Liam, so that feeling low in his belly was something else.

Something warm and languid. Something like the urge to make Jonah want to look at him like that again.

It wasn’t new, this sparkling desire between them, but it wasn’t exactly familiar either.

In Chicago, their shared experience with physical intimacy had been limited.

Outside of the one reckless, perfect, catastrophic night in Liam’s childhood bedroom, the timing had never felt right.

Liam was always cognizant of Jonah’s circumstances and the power dynamic it created between them.

It had been eight months since everything changed.

The recovery wasn’t so cut-and-dry; the things that Jonah had been subjected to couldn’t be undone, and the scars he was left with wouldn’t suddenly disappear with a change of scenery.

But slowly, gradually, Liam had watched the heaviness recede from Jonah’s features, new life creeping in from the edges.

The spring and early summer had seen a shift between them.

In their nightly calls, their conversations began to take the occasional turn into something flirtatious, something more.

In one particular instance, the slow sizzle had built to a peak, both of their voices breathy and thick as Liam’s fingers dipped below the waistband of his sweatpants.

(That was not something he needed to be thinking about right now).

Liam cleared his throat at the same time Jonah found something interesting to look at out the window.

With either the best or worst timing, a man roughly Liam’s own age appeared in the bedroom doorway—tall and lean, wearing a Fordham Athletics shirt with a duffle bag thrown over one shoulder.

“Oh, hey.” The hint of a valley accent made Liam picture him on a surfboard somewhere in California. “You must be Liam.”

A sense of unease crept in before he could quash it, dampening the edges of his good mood even more than the humidity.

It was unfair of Liam to make a personal judgment at a glance, but he couldn’t help reacting to the fact that his new roommate looked like he could have been the evil triplet of his shitty ex-friends, Nathan and Ben.

Rooming with strangers from an online student forum had been a gamble, but one that came with an appealing price tag and at least the potential for common ground with his roommates.

But if this guy’s first impression was true to form, Liam didn’t know if he could take another year of mean-spirited jokes and sports references and casual homophobia.

He forced a smile up at him anyway. “Yep, that’s me. You’re… Tucker?”

“Hell yeah. Nice to meet you, dude.” Tucker stepped into the room, dropping his bag at the door and bounding toward him with an outstretched hand.

Liam stared at it a moment too long before he realized that he was offering a hand up.

He tentatively took it and nearly toppled over from the strength of the grip that pulled him up.

“Bring it in, man!”

Before Liam could process that, he was scooped into an enthusiastic hug that took his feet off the ground. His eyes widened over Tucker’s shoulder and found Jonah watching the exchange, brows lifted.

Maybe Liam was the only asshole here.

“Welcome to the penthouse!” Tucker released him with a final clap to his shoulder. “Sorry I wasn’t here to help you haul stuff up—Izzy already staked a claim on my muscle this morning.”

Isabel, the second roommate in question, trailed in behind him.

She was the visual ideal of every New York art student: two long braids tucked back under a bandana, a silver ring through her septum, and sporadic tattoos up the length of both arms. She wore a pair of paint-splattered overalls and the kind of easy confidence Liam could never pull off.

He desperately wanted her to like him.

She shot Tucker a withering look, then turned a smile on Liam.

“Hey there. Glad you got in okay with the spare key,” she said.

“Bad timing—I had Tucker booked this morning before I knew you’d be moving in.

It occasionally boosts his ego to model for my summer acrylic class.

It’s Liam, right?” Her hand, when she reached out to bump his fist, was smudged with flecks of dried paint. “I’m Izzy.”

“Yeah, hi.” Liam tapped his knuckles against hers. “No worries. It was quick work between the two of us. Mostly him.” He gestured back to Jonah, who stood from his perch. “This is my…” He stopped, voice sticking in his throat. “Um, this is Jonah.”

Real smooth, Cassidy.

If Jonah noticed his flub, he took mercy on him and ignored it, nodding a polite greeting at Liam’s new roommates.

For a moment, Liam worried that Tucker would try to repeat his bear hug on Jonah, who still struggled with strangers in his personal space on the best of days, but Tucker kept it to a polite wave.