Page 29 of Doors & Windows
“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 alsomean 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 ofthe 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.”
