Page 12 of Doors & Windows (Liam & Jonah’s Story)

Jonah

The house felt alive despite the quiet when Jonah crept down the staircase a little after midnight. The hum of static from a muted television, the kind you felt more than heard, told him he wasn’t the only one awake.

It wasn’t the first time he had fled his room in the late hours in search of space to breathe, only to find Antonio Ellis already one step ahead of him, sprawled out and awake on the living room sofa.

Unlike the times before, though, Jonah didn’t retreat at the flicker of blue television light on the wall.

He was too restless tonight to confine himself to the walls of his bedroom.

He had never been under any illusion that his previous abandoned trips downstairs had gone unnoticed—the house was too old and creaky for that kind of stealth—but Ellis had been generous enough never to call him on it, always keeping his eyes toward the TV and letting Jonah slink back upstairs without comment.

That was probably why he waited this time, not turning his head to acknowledge Jonah’s appearance until long after the groaning floorboards had given him away .

Their eyes met, and Jonah held his gaze, almost as if in challenge. To test just how much weight his promise of Jonah’s free rein held.

“Hey.” Ellis was the first to break the silence. There was something cautious in his voice, as if he were just as aware of how precariously this dynamic of theirs balanced upon a treacherous mountain of history.

“Hey,” Jonah echoed. He scuffed his toes against the edge of the area rug, worn and frayed from years of use.

Some rerun of a 90s sitcom played almost silently on the TV, only the occasional murmur of a laugh track audible on the low volume. Ellis gestured to the bowl of food in his lap.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “There’s still some more chili in the fridge.”

It was, Jonah decided, an olive branch; one of many he’d extended in the little over three months Jonah had lived under his roof.

One of the first things Ellis did when Jonah arrived in New York at the end of spring was install a new knob on Jonah’s bedroom door.

He’d let Jonah watch him open it, brand new from the box, and handed him the only two keys when he was finished.

He was nearly religious about giving Jonah his space, even if Jonah had seldom left his bedroom for the entire first week.

He’d paralyzed by fear that he had made the wrong choice, fear that the city outside these walls would be just as cruel to him as the last. That this shell of a person was all he would ever be, and that no amount of running would let him escape the past that bit at his heels .

Then one evening Ellis had caught him on a trip to the kitchen and asked, the words spilling like he’d been rehearsing them on a loop, if he wanted to go grab a slice of pizza.

Jonah hadn’t particularly wanted that, but something in him—some desperate part of him that fought tooth and nail toward the idea of life—made him agree.

On the walk to Nona’s, a little shop a few streets away with only two tables inside, they passed a library. Jonah set a goal in his mind, a small and achievable task: tomorrow, he would leave the house on his own and sign up for a library card.

From there, the world began to open up around him. He had a full roster of library locations across the five boroughs, nice weather to walk in, and a new reason to get out of bed in the mornings.

Then, of course, Ellis’s most significant olive branch (aside from the house Jonah currently resided in, rent free): he had offered him a job.

Jonah was getting better at accepting these small offerings for what they were instead of hunting for the motivation behind them, settling into the knowledge that there was no tally being scored against him in secret.

In the grand scheme of things, midnight chili was easy enough to accept.

Jonah stood with his back against the kitchen counter, arms folded as he waited for his food to reheat.

From the adjacent living room, the volume on the television rose a few notches, an exaggerated argument cut with audience laughter spilling in under the hum of the microwave.

A lifetime away, he saw himself in another midnight, standing in front of the coffee maker in a hotel he didn’t remember the name of.

Liam sleepily half-watching the TV behind him, his attentive gaze on Jonah when he didn’t think he was looking.

The comfort and terror of being seen. The camaraderie of being awake in the dark with someone else.

A shrill beep from the microwave had him blinking away the memory.

He used a paper towel to guard his hands from the heat of the bowl and carried his food into the doorway. He hesitated, deliberating whether to take the chili to his room or read the offer of food as an invitation to stay. Would he be encroaching on Ellis’s space? Did Jonah even want to?

Ellis pretended not to notice him hovering until Jonah took a step toward the stairs.

“You can stay,” he offered. “If you want some space for yourself, I can head upstairs.”

The offer was so absurd he nearly laughed. “It’s your house,” he said, adjusting the paper towel to shield his thumb from the ceramic.

“Only by the luck of family lineage,” Ellis said. “And, in case you need reminding, it’s your house, too.”

It was not that simple of a truth, even if Ellis truly did see it that way, but Jonah saw no reason to argue right then. Tentatively, he crossed to the far end of the sofa and settled into it.

“You don’t have to go,” Jonah said after a moment, stilted and stiff. It was strange to give permission that wasn’t really his to grant, but Ellis seemed to relax at the reassurance and let it drop.

For several minutes, neither of them spoke.

The quiet was surprisingly comfortable, smoothed over by the shared meal and the drone of the television, but it didn’t stop the familiar tingle of anxiety that prickled in Jonah’s fingertips.

He gripped his spoon tightly, the metal edge digging into his skin, and forced himself to breathe normally.

He resented this part of himself that had emerged from the rubble of the last couple of years—the one that reacted poorly to something as innocuous as proximity to another person, even when his brain understood that there was no immediate threat to his safety.

Sometimes the feeling would hit before he could make sense of it, all reaction and no logic, and it required him to retrace the steps of his anxiety to find the root.

Sometimes there wasn’t one, at least not that he could discern.

Sometimes it was this: being alone with a man in the middle of the night, every nerve in his body waiting for the moment a hand would fall heavy on his thigh, fingers would stroke his cheek, would turn his head and—

“I’ve been seeing someone.”

Ellis’s words were so unexpected that Jonah had to run them back a few times to make sense of them.

Jonah glanced his way, but Ellis was looking at the TV, his expression carefully blank. A few long seconds passed without elaboration, so Jonah cleared his throat. “Like… a girlfriend? ”

Ellis’s responding laugh was equally unexpected. He shook his head, some of his tension shaking off with it. “No. I mean a doctor. A therapist.”

“Oh.” Jonah didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t know why Ellis was telling him at all. “Okay,” he said. Then, because he was inexplicably curious to know the answer, he asked, “Because you can’t sleep?”

“Among other things.”

Jonah gave a meaningful look at the clock on the wall. “It doesn’t seem to be helping.”

His laugh this time was a quiet, self-deprecating thing.

“It would probably work faster if I could take her advice on getting a prescription. I was…” He stopped and started again.

“I’m an addict. I haven’t used in a decade, but that doesn’t mean I’m immune to relapse.

I don’t like to put myself in a position to slip. ”

This was more information Jonah didn’t know what to do with.

He thought about the little white pills Shepard used to slip him, back in the beginning, when it was harder for Jonah to quell his body’s resistance to the abuse.

He could still taste the lingering powder in the back of his throat.

He wondered how much Ellis knew about that element of what went on in the house.

How much of a threat it posed to his stability.

“It is helping, though,” Ellis said. He was looking at Jonah now, his eyes intent. “In ways that are less visible, I think.”

All at once, Jonah understood why he had brought this up. His hackles rose.

“I don’t want to overstep,” Ellis said. “Do you mind if I ask… Have you seen anyone? Since moving home with your mom? Or moving here? ”

The idea of seeing a therapist while he lived with his mother was laughable.

It was a fundamental truth that had been instilled in him since childhood, that when you face hardships, you turn to prayer.

You humble yourself. You search inside for the things you’ve done wrong in the eyes of God and make yourself clean.

To turn to the conceit of man in place of spiritual guidance would be blasphemy.

For the brief time he’d been back in Indiana, Jonah had watched his mother go to her knees every night in prayer as her eldest son wasted away before her eyes.

Not once had it occurred to her to get him help from a professional.

Not once had Jonah had the strength to ask for it, nor to weather the judgement that asking would bring.

Now that he was here, now that his head stayed above water on most days, that reasoning felt thinner. Old habits died hard, he supposed.

But it was more than that.

Seeking professional help meant embarking on an excavation that Jonah was not ready to undertake.

Things he had carefully buried would be dragged to the surface with all the tenderness of a breathing tube ripped from his throat, snagging on flesh, making him choke.

He would have to tell someone—a stranger—about where it all started.

With his parents. With Dominic. Then, with everyone who came after.

He would have to recount the visions he still saw in blood-soaked nightmares.

Shepard’s face shadowed in the belly of the whale and the weight of his corpse on Jonah’s lungs.

No. He didn’t want to remember .

You already remember, a cold voice whispered at the back of his skull. You will never forget.

“No.” Jonah winced, surprised to hear the steel in his own voice. “I don’t… I haven’t. I’m fine.” He could feel the burn of a gaze on the side of his face, but he refused to meet it.

“Jonah,” Ellis began uneasily, and Jonah was suddenly aware of just how rarely he addressed him by name.

Names had a strange history between them; when they’d met, they’d been Leo and Marcus. He wondered if Ellis, too, had trouble remembering which one he was some days.

“What you’ve been through would be a lot for anyone to cope with, but especially someone so young. Sometimes I forget just how young you are.”

Rage ate through the lining of Jonah’s stomach.

He bit down on the side of his cheek hard enough to leave an impression.

Young . Jonah didn’t feel young . He felt aged beyond his years.

Sometimes it felt like his chance to be young was permanently cut short before he could ever truly experience the freedom of it.

The only youth he had ever known was a repressed and captive thing.

“No, that’s not true,” Ellis amended before Jonah could bite back. “I could never forget that. But it’s never easy to think about.”

Jonah couldn’t do this right now. He couldn’t have this conversation so close on the heels of his spectacular failure with Liam, the proof of his own brokenness.

The idea of going back up to the very bedroom that had hosted that particular humiliation was hardly appealing, but he couldn’t sit here and entertain this either.

He dropped his feet to the floor fast enough that the spoon rattled in his bowl. “Thanks for the food,” he muttered.

“Wait,” Ellis said before he could stand. Jonah stopped but kept his eyes averted. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to chase you out of here. You should stay. I should be getting to bed anyway.”

Jonah spotted the lie easily—Ellis didn’t look any more ready to fall asleep than Jonah felt himself—but he conceded with a nod, settling back against the couch once more.

He pretended to be invested in the television as Ellis took his dishes to the kitchen and retreated toward the staircase. He paused at the bottom step, the familiar groan of old wood giving him away, even with Jonah’s back to him.

“Please, just think about it,” Ellis said quietly. “You don't owe me anything. But you owe it to yourself.”