Page 20 of Doors & Windows
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 feelyoung. 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 humiliationwas hardly appealing, but he couldn’t sit here and entertainthiseither.
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.”
CHAPTER 7
Liam
Liam was getting paid to make art today. Real, cold-hard cash in exchange for his artistic services.
He had always been a dreamer, but not without a healthy dose of pragmaticism. He understood that pursuing a career in the arts was a risk, and that there was a chance he would never make a cent from his passions. But here he was, less than a month living in New York City and taking on a paid gig.
That he got to do it while spending the day with Jonah only made his first job all the sweeter. While Liam worked on the mural in the nursery, Jonah would be the one-man painting crew for the rest of the house.
“It’s cheaper to pay one person than a whole crew,” Jonah had told him. “So Sal had no arguments when I asked to have the house to ourselves for a day.”
Liam had met with the homeowners on a video call to discuss the details of the mural. The twins were going to be named Robin and Wren, so they wanted an avian theme to match: birds and branches against a backdrop of sky.
They had looked over Liam’s portfolio ahead of time, and he thanked his lucky stars that he had really hunkered down on his painting craft this past spring.They had great things to say overall and pointed out a few of his styles they might have liked to see emulated in the mural. Otherwise, they were happy to see his creative interpretation.
A sunrise, Liam decided. Something that evoked the peaceful feeling of birds chirping at the start of a new day.
Izzy had gone shopping with him for supplies the day before, all of which were being reimbursed by the family as part of his compensation. He’d decided on a palette of soft pastels, with a few darker, earthy tones for the birds.
Having Izzy’s expertise at his disposal was a gift. She was only a year above him, but she had gone to an arts high school in New England and had a much firmer grasp on the right types of materials to use for a specific outcome. She never made him feel stupid for not knowing, which probably wasn’t a high bar for a healthy friendship, but Liam knew enough to appreciate it anyway.
He boarded the Long Island Railroad at Penn Station before sunrise on a Friday morning and rode into Great Neck. Jonah met him outside the train station in Ellis’s borrowed truck. The image of him behind the wheel caught Liam off guard. It hadn’t occurred to him until then that this was the first time he’d seen Jonah drive. There was something so stupidly, pleasingly domestic about the idea of riding shotgun with him today.
“Hi,” Liam said when he was close enough to be heard through the open window. He hoisted his bag ofsupplies into the bed of the truck and climbed into the passenger side.
“Morning,” Jonah said. His voice still clung to the remnants of sleep in a way that Liam was sure he appreciated a perfectly normal amount.
Classic rock played quietly beneath the rumble of the engine, Jonah having bumped the volume down when he saw Liam coming. The air was crisp and clean this many miles from the city. It was still early enough that the morning clung to its dewy reprieve before another hot day descended on them. Jonah smelled like fresh deodorant and the hot coffee from his thermos. Liam breathed it all in as they rolled onto the main road.
They hadn’t had a chance to see each other much since the night of their first date, with Liam’s classes starting and Jonah’s work schedule picking up in the last stretch of summertime. So Liam couldn’t puttoomuch blame on himself for failing to broach the subject of what happened that night in Jonah’s room. While they’d kept up with their daily thread of text messages, it never felt right to bring up something so delicate without being face-to-face.
Jonah seemed okay, at any rate. He seemedgoodtoday, light and at-ease in a way Liam wasn’t used to seeing on him. Now he wondered if too much time had passed. Maybe dredging the subject up now would do more harm than good.
(He definitely wasn’t chickening out. He definitely wasn’t avoiding the conversation because he was scared shitless that he would get it wrong).
As they drove farther toward the outskirts of the island, toward the smell of beachy water, the houses they passed grew both in size and splendor. Liam had grown up financially secure in a way he probably took for granted too often, but this was a level of wealth he couldn’t touch. He stuck his arm out the window, letting the wind weave through his fingers, and wondered how many nursery murals he would have to paint to afford one of these.
A few minutes into the drive, when Jonah’s hand landed not-so-casually on the center console, Liam took him up on the offer.
It was difficult to tell the difference between Liam’s usual run-of-the-mill imposter syndrome and a trauma response, but he was starting to lean toward the latter as he stared up at the blank wall in front of him. Stuck in a memory years and miles in the rearview—seventeen years old and humiliated beyond repair—Liam couldn’t bring himself to pick up the brush.
He would never forget that morning when he showed up to the park in his hometown, alone at sunrise on his final morning of his city-sponsored mural project. He’d had his earbuds in, something upbeat driving his legs to the tempo. His bucket of paint, or what was left of it by the last day, slipped from his grasp when he first sawthat wordspray-painted over his hard work. The weight had landed on his foot, which had frozen mid step, but he hadn’t even registered the pain until later.
