Page 19 of Doors & Windows (Liam & Jonah’s Story)

Denial was an easy, knee-jerk reaction, and he was sure he meant it as he said it, but Jonah’s words planted a seed of doubt.

Was that what Liam saw when he looked at Jonah?

Even a little? Even without meaning to? From the very first night they met, Liam had been conscious of the dynamic between them and tried to navigate carefully.

Their circumstances were different now, but that didn’t erase the truth of their history, which was that Jonah had been victimized, and Liam had borne witness to his suffering in a way he couldn’t forget.

That didn’t change the love he had for Jonah, not then and not now.

But something must have shown in Liam’s expression, twisting Jonah’s thoughts into the worst assumption, because he lurched forward quick enough to make Liam jump, all knees and elbows as he clambered off the mattress, stumbling several feet across the hardwood.

“I need some air,” Jonah said, stuffing his bare feet into his shoes.

Liam followed after him, rising from the bed with palms raised. They’d been here before, too: Jonah and his instinct to run when he felt the walls closing in, and Liam desperate to show him that he was a safe place to stay.

“Jonah,” he said gently, reaching out to steady him.

Jonah flinched.

He flinched away from Liam.

If the air had gone stagnant before, it vacated the room entirely now.

Liam’s hand dropped to his side, deadweight.

Jonah met his eyes for the first time since the start of the doomed conversation.

They were bloodshot and exhausted, skin blotched pink at the corners.

He stole his gaze away as quickly as he’d granted it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Before Liam could find the words to reply, Jonah bolted from the room.

Liam tried to give him space, at first.

He made it ten minutes before peeking over the side of the fire escape.

He made it twenty minutes before climbing up to the technically-off-limits rooftop they’d made out on once.

Jonah was nowhere to be found.

The last of Liam’s restraint caved ten minutes after that, when he sent Jonah a text only to watch his phone light up from the top of the dresser.

He’d left it behind.

The writhing panic in his gut was probably, mostly irrational. Jonah was a grown man, and plenty of people have existed in this city without a cell phone and lived to tell the tale.

That didn’t stop Liam from reaching for his shoes at two in the morning and stepping out into the October night.

By the time he stepped out of the train station in Forest Hills, it had started to rain. Liam was soaked by the time he stepped onto the porch of the old house, sneakers squashing wetly under each step and hair plastered to his head.

He gave little consideration to the neighbors as he knocked, then pounded, on the door.

He paused to listen for signs of movement on the other side, wrapping his arms around himself to stave off the cold.

When he raised his hand to knock again, the door swung open, revealing Antonio Ellis, looking surprisingly un-rumpled by sleep and grasping at something at the back of his waistband the way someone might reach for a service weapon.

Liam took a step back, but Ellis pulled his hand away when he took in the young man on his doorstep.

“Liam?”

“Is Jonah here?” he asked, loud enough to be heard over the pounding of rain on the porch roof.

“I thought he was with you. What happened?”

It sounded a little too much like he meant to say “what did you do?” and Liam didn’t appreciate the accusation. As if this fucker had any room to play at protectiveness.

“Did he come back here or not?” he snapped, probably with all the ferocity of a shivering chihuahua, given his current state.

“Only for a minute. He asked if he could borrow the truck.”

“And you let him?” Jonah hadn’t really had that much to drink, so the train ride back to Queens was probably more than enough to sober him up, but Liam wasn’t much in the mood for logic right now.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Ellis said. “He said he needed some room to breathe. I figured that was better than going for a walk.” He gave a pointed look to Liam’s soggy form. “For obvious reasons. ”

“Did he say where he was going?” Liam asked. But even as the words left his mouth, the answer clicked into place.

The memory of salty sea air, wind-blown curls, and smudges of pastel on bronze skin. “It feels like you can breathe easier out here.”

“Look,” Ellis said. “Do you want to come in and dry off before we have this conversation?”

“No,” Liam said, already reaching for the half-waterlogged phone in his pocket. “I think I know where he is. I’m calling a car.”

“Call it in here, where it’s warm,” Ellis insisted. “And let me give you my number. Please, let me know that he's safe.”

It took an upfront tip of fifty-percent to convince the driver to let him into the backseat dripping in rainwater. For once, Liam allowed himself to feel less sleazy for accepting the small allowance his parents dropped into his bank account once a month.

The grandiose Long Island McMansion came into view like something out of a gothic horror, the only house on the street without lights glaring up at it from the garden. Jonah had told him that the house sat empty for most of the year, but especially while the renovations finished through the fall.

If Liam was wrong about this, he was probably risking a 911 call from a concerned neighborhood watch about a suspicious, wet man loitering in a neighborhood outside his tax bracket. It would also mean he was out of ideas for where to find Jonah, and that was arguably the worse consequence.

But when the car pulled up in front of the house, Liam could make out the vague shape of Ellis’s truck in the dark driveway. His chest deflated with relief.

Liam shot the driver a wave and a thank you as he closed the door behind him, wincing at the puddle he left behind on the leather seat. Now, at least, the rain had slowed to a faint drizzle as he made his way up the driveway.

The front door had keyless entry. Liam thanked whatever cosmic entity had compelled him to watch Jonah enter the five-digit code on the keypad previously. It only took a couple failed attempts before Liam got the green light.

There was probably a time in his life where he would have cared more about unlawfully entering someone’s home, but that time was not today.

His footsteps echoed inside the half-empty house, damp prints trailing in his wake. Sparing a thought for the homeowners, he slipped his shoes off at the edge of the foyer, but the rain had already soaked down to his socks.

“Jonah?” he called out at the base of the staircase. He wanted to avoid startling him, if he hadn’t already heard the door open and shut.

After a moment of tense, weighted silence, he heard, “Liam?”

Liam released a breath. He bounded up the stairs two at a time, catching himself on the railing as his wet socks slid on marble.

In the second floor hallway, he turned and found Jonah in the open glass doorway of the terrace off the primary bedroom.

The hard line of his shoulders rose toward his ears, his arms wrapped around himself like a shield.

It was the silhouette of a man braced for a storm—one Liam had no intention of bringing.

“Hi,” Liam said softly.

“How did you know I was here?” It was hard to make out Jonah’s expression in the dark, but he could tell from his voice that he had been crying. Liam tried not to let the thought kneecap him where he stood.

“A lucky guess, a train ride, a waterlogged car, and a quick pit stop in Queens,” Liam said. “Not necessarily in that order.”

Jonah’s eyes traveled over him as Liam stepped out of the darkness of the hall and into the moonlight-drenched room. “You’re wet.”

“Yeah,” Liam agreed.

“You came after me.” Jonah said it like he couldn’t quite believe the words himself. “All this way, in the middle of the night. In the rain.”

“Of course I did.” As if there was any version of reality where Liam simply rolled over and went to sleep in a bed Jonah had fled from. As if Liam wouldn’t have crossed far more than a few bridges and tunnels to find him.

“I left you,” Jonah insisted. “On your birthday.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“You should.” Jonah’s expression darkened. “You should be angry at me. You deserve better than that.” The unspoken words rang just as loud in the empty house: You deserve better than me .

Liam took a step closer, slow in his approach. “You’re the one who taught me that first, you know,” he said. “That I deserve better. You’re also the one who showed me what better looks like.”

Jonah turned his head away, a thin glow of moonlight tracing the strong line of his nose. He didn’t have anything to say to that, so Liam went on.

“What you said back there... You asked if I saw a victim when I looked at you. Is that really what you think?”

“Maybe that’s all that I am.” Jonah’s voice, low and gravelly, was nearly stolen away by the wind off the ocean at his back.

“We can’t pretend I’m someone different now.

A piece of me is always going to be stuck back there.

I’m always going to be that boy in the hotel room, in my memory and in yours. ”

Liam moved closer. “You’re right about one thing,” he allowed. “I will always remember the boy from that hotel room, and all the ones that came after. Because that boy turned my entire world upside down.”

He made it to the threshold of the glass sliding door and stopped, leaving them on opposite sides of the opening. Liam was close enough now to make out the twitch in Jonah’s jaw, a clear tell that he teetered on the fault line of warring emotions.