Page 17 of Doors & Windows
Jonah was awake when he returned to the bedroom, sitting up with his arms loosely hugging his knees. He looked up when Liam entered, though his eyes only lifted as far as the mug in his hands, deftly avoiding his gaze. Liam ignored the twist in his stomach.
“Hey you,” he said, perching on the edge of the bed.
“Hi.” Jonah’s voice was rock salt and gravel first thing in the morning—a sound Liam hadn’t gotten to enjoy in far too long.
He held out the coffee, pleased when Jonah’s fingers slid over his own to accept it. “Yourroommateis home,” Liam said.
“I heard.” Jonah lifted the cup and took a sip. “Thanks for this.”
They fell quiet, the distant patter of shower spray starting up down the hall. Jonah sipped his coffee, and Liam tried not to watch him too closely. He was a sight to behold in just his boxer briefs and t-shirt, but therewas a clear line of tension in the way he held himself. Like he was bracing for impact.
Liam knew he should say something, that they should talk about last night. Somehow the idea was even more intimidating in the light of day than it had been in the heat of the moment.
He wasn’t naive about what he was getting into with Jonah. Even if they had been fine the last and only time they’d skirted the edges of intimacy together, it didn’t mean Jonah could shrug off his past like an old coat.
Privately, Liam had been doing research. It felt like too clinical a word for it, but that was what it was at its core: reading whatever he could find on how to be a supportive partner to someone who had the kind of complex trauma that Jonah did. What happened last night wasn’t outside the scope of what he should have expected, but that didn’t mean he was prepared to handle the reality of it. He recognized that the only way to work through this was to communicate, even if it was hard.Especiallyif it was hard.
But Jonah looked so vulnerable tucked into the corner of his bed, hands tight enough around his mug for his fingernails to whiten. He was waiting for the bomb to drop, and Liam couldn’t bring himself to deliver the blow.
Just because they needed to talk about it, didn’t mean they needed to talk about itright now.
“So,” Liam began, hating the way Jonah held his breath as he did. “I seem to recall your rave review of a bagel shop around here?”
Jonah looked up. There was something like gratitude in his expression.
Tentatively, Liam reached forward to wrap his hand around Jonah’s bony ankle, just for the tangible anchor of physical touch. “My treat?”
Jonah exhaled. He nodded.
Liam would find a better time to talk about what needed to be said. He would.Just not today.
The trouble with attending art school in New York City was that, no matter what skill level you brought to the table, no matter how far you outshot your classmates in whatever advanced placement high school art class you came from, you were most likely to become a small fish in a big pond overnight. For someone like Liam, who already carried an inferiority complex on his back like a boulder, this was a non-ideal headspace to be in. If he had already felt like a small fish in his rural Illinois hometown, what did that make him now? A fuckingtadpole?
On his first day of classes, Liam spent most of the morning sitting on the floor of his tiny bedroom, surrounded by half the contents of his closet. There was a version of himself that existed in his head; one that was sleek and mysterious and confident and cool. That person wore rare vintage clothes from curated shops and had the permanent contour of a cigarette pack in their back pocket. That person had piercings and dyed tips and painted nails and didn’t carry the scars of slurs hurled against him that made him shy away from that kind of self-expression. That person belonged in New York City, belonged with these artists. Andbelongingwas all Liam had ever wanted.
It was impossible not to be intimidated by his peers. Going to class felt more like a trip to an art museum. The projects he saw people work over in the student common studio looked like they came with a pretty price tag and the prestige to back it up. Liam tried to remind himself that he was there for a reason—that he had been accepted into this program along with everyone else, on his own artistic merit. His imposter syndrome couldn’t argue with the fact that someone along the way in the admissions process had recognized something in him.
But it wasn’t just about skill or execution; it was about voice, and the fact that everyone around him seemed to have found theirs while Liam scrambled in the dust. His classmates were the kind of people who had something important to say, and they knew exactly how to say it through their work. He couldn’t imagine some of these people—with their vibrant, sharp-edged haircuts and piercings in places Liam didn’t know you could pierce and cigarettes in the corner of their mouths that Liam still couldn’t quite get the hang of—ever being scared to show someone their art.
“It’s all false confidence,” Izzy told him. “Everyone is just faking it ‘til they make it. Some are just better performers than others.”
Which was easy for her to say, because Izzy was exactly the kind of artist he admired so much. For her, art was a form of protest. Her portfolio showed a steady thru line of themes in social justice. The images she created evoked realfeelingfrom its viewers—rage, grief, hope.
Liam used to think his art said something. All his life, it had been his way of coping with his own feelings of loneliness and longing. From his current vantage point, those feelings were harder to access. Liam’s past felt insignificant in contrast to the last year of his life and all the earth-shattering changes it had seen. There was a defining crack in his timeline, one that formed the night he met Jonah.
Maybe that was the only logical starting place.
He was in his acrylics class, staring down the barrel of a blank canvas, when the image came to him: two parallel beds and two sets of legs dangling in the gap in between, not daring to inch close enough for their feet to touch. Strangers still, but not for long.
It wasn’t the first time he’d felt the call to put the memory of that time in his life on paper. One of the first few nights he had spent with Jonah in Chicago, Liam had pulled out his sketchpad while Jonah slept and began putting to paper the details he saw around the room. Small, insignificant things—the wired telephone beside the bed, the lamp and its curved shadow thrown across the wall, the curtains that still held the scent of years-old cigarette smoke. Something he’d never admitted in the time since was that he’d sketched Jonah too. From memory, he outlined the image of him asleep against the headboard, an open book still propped against his chest before Liam had bookmarked it for him and set it aside; a rare moment of peace, preserved in graphite.
The memory of hotel rooms lingered closer to the surface after what happened in Jonah’s bedroom the other night. Liam had seen the shadows of the pastlooming in the dark, and in the days since, Jonah had seldom left his mind.
He didn’t realize how much class time had passed until his professor, a stoic French man in his late fifties, began making his final rounds. He came to a stop behind Liam, and Liam rolled back his shoulders, pretending—as Izzy instructed—that all the confidence he’d gained in the last two hours of work wasn’t wilting under the scrutiny.
“A hotel room.” Professor Olivet’s heavy accent and general lack of inflection made it hard to tell if that was an observation, a question, or a judgement. Liam nodded anyway.
There was a rustle of clothing behind him, a shift in posture. Liam was too scared to turn and see his expression, but it was easy enough to picture him with his arms crossed and brows stern as he tore Liam’s partial painting to shreds.
