Page 4 of Doors & Windows
Thankfully, Liam didn’t leave him waiting long on his reply.
HA! Ugh sorry. I’m nervous ok
You know that makes it worse, right?
Liam’s ‘typing’ bubble appeared and disappeared several times before his next reply came through, in a series of disjointed messages.
SHIT
Ok, so this is hard.
Because this feels like the kind of conversation to have in person.
But now I’ve already opened the door.
Liam…
NO SORRY
It’s not anything about you
I mean
It is
But it’s nothing bad
I PROMISE
Shit. Doing a bad job. Hang on a second.
Jonah was about to put them both out of their misery and hit the call button, but a knock against the side of the truck startled him out of his spiral. He looked up to find Beatriz gesturing at the spot beside him. Her dark hair was tied back in a single, tight braid, the flannel shirt she had been wearing this morning tied around her waist.
“Mind if I join you?”
Jonah nodded to the open space and forced himself to take another bite. His body desperately needed the fuel, so he couldn’t let his anxiety stop him from eating. Bea kept a couple feet of distance between them as she went to work unwrapping her own sandwich.
She was older than Jonah, maybe in her early thirties, and she had immediately taken him under herwing from the very first job. Bea had the uncanny ability to read Jonah’s unspoken cues for space. She never touched him with a casual clap to the back or a bump to the shoulder as so many of the crewmen did. Jonah had even seen her covertly step between him and some of the more enthusiastic guys, providing a barrier.
Antonio Ellis, the man with whom Jonah had a complicated past and an unusual present, had promised him that none of his construction pals knew about Jonah’s trauma when he hooked him up with this job. Some people, Jonah supposed, just had an innate instinct for empathy. Liam had been the first person to prove that to him.
“How’s your boyfriend?” Bea asked around her first mouthful, shooting him a sly grin that Jonah staunchly ignored.
“I never said he was my boyfriend.”
Bea snorted. “Sure. I always look at my phone like that when I’m texting mybros.”
“How do you know that’s who I’m texting?”
“Is it?”
Jonah’s avoidant silence was all the answer she needed to have a fresh grin splitting her face.
The truth was, Jonah wasn’t lying. Not technically. He didn’t know if Liam was his… hisanything, really. They hadn’t put a label on it. But Beatriz wasn’t wrong, either. With or without the words to describe it, what he and Liam had was more than friendship. If he was honest with himself, it had been for a long time. At least for Jonah.
The day Liam told him about his acceptance to Fordham’s art program, a countdown had begun.
Even if they never said it outright, both of them knew that moving to the same city would put them at level ground in a way they had never experienced. There was a silent expectation that it would change their relationship inevitably, though it was hard to predict exactly what that meant. But the truth of it was there all along, waiting for one of them to gather the courage to say it out loud.
