Page 1 of Doors & Windows
CHAPTER 1
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 muchcreakas they did buckle under the slightest movement. The paintedwalls 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 cognizantof Jonah’s circumstances and the power dynamic it created between them.
