Chapter Seventeen

Ethan 

The office was quiet after Julian left. The quiet that comes after a door slams and the sound of it is still somehow the loudest thing in the room.

Ethan stood behind his desk with his hand still curled slightly, like it remembered the shape of Julian’s arm even after letting go of it. He looked down at his own fingers and didn’t recognize them for a second. They were shaking. Not badly. Just enough that when he reached for the water glass on his desk, he had to set it back down without drinking from it, because his hand wasn’t steady enough to bring it to his mouth without spilling.

Get out.

He hadn’t meant to say it like that, Goodness, he hadn't meant to say any of what he said, not the small cruelty of implying Julian had invented the whole thing out of nothing. He walked into his office to get a chance to talk to Julian. He remembers standing at the window rehearsing it before Julian even knocked.  And somehow between the door opening and him seeing Julian’s face remembering what had   occurred the last time they both were together, something else had climbed up his throat and taken out those words instead.

He tries sitting down. The chair felt too big suddenly, or he felt too big suddenly, or he felt too small in it. He couldn't tell which. 

He put his elbows on the desk and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw white and that was when it found him. 

Before the memory even had shape, his body remembered the stillness. Spine straight, shoulders locked, eyes fixed on one point and refusing to look away from it.

It was a crack on the ceiling back then when it happened. He memorized  the shape of it, turned it into the only thing that existed because it was easier than being anywhere else in his body.

“Just relax,” the voice had said. “This is normal. This is what people who care about each other do.” He’d been sixteen. He’d believed that it had to be true, because the alternative — that someone he trusted was lying to him while doing something no one should ever have done to a boy that age,  was too enormous a thing to hold at sixteen. So he hadn’t held it. He’d folded it up very small and put it somewhere he never had to look, and he had gotten so good at not looking that he’d almost convinced himself, over the years, that the room and the crack in the ceiling and the voice belonged to somebody else’s life.

Last Night, Preston’s hand had slithered and landed on his cock and Ethan had gone still in exactly that way. A voice telling him this wasn't difficult, wasn't a big deal, his body hadn't needed to be told twice. It already knew the choreography. 

That was the part that broke something loose in his chest now, sitting alone at his desk with his hands still not quite steady. Not that it happened again. That his body had simply known how. That freezing had never really left him, it had just been waiting, all this time, for the next man who wanted something from him he didn’t know how to refuse.

He made a sound then that he didn’t recognize as his own, something low and involuntary, half a laugh and half something much worse, and pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth like he could physically stop it from happening again. His eyes stung. He blinked hard, furious at himself, and didn’t let it go any further than that, because he never did, because crying felt like one more door he wasn’t sure he’d be able to close again once he opened it.

Maybe this is just what it is, wanting men. The thought settled into him like something cold poured slowly down his spine. Rooms you don’t get to leave. Hands that decide for you. Every time.

He knew, somewhere underneath all of it, that the thought was a lie dressed up as a conclusion,  that Julian’s fingers brushing his over a manuscript folder had never once felt like Preston’s hand. He knew it. He was too tired and too frightened, right now, to make himself believe it.

He picked up his phone with a hand that still hadn’t fully settled.

Ethan: Julian, I—

He deleted it before he’d finished typing the dash.

Ethan: What I said this morning wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.

He looked at that one for a long time.

He deleted that one too.

He tried twice more that afternoon, in the gaps between meetings he could not, afterward, have described the content of. Nothing came out right. Every version sounded exactly like what it was — a man trying to explain cruelty without explaining the fear that had caused it, because the fear didn’t have words yet.

In the end, he sent nothing.

Around eleven, noise drifted through his closed door, a whoop, laughter, a swell of applause that went on longer than office applause usually did. He didn’t get up to look. Lena appeared a few minutes later, her expression already doing the careful, professional thing it did when she suspected he wasn’t going to enjoy the news.

“Mark, from editorial,” she said. “He proposed. At the coffee cart. There’s a ring. Now there’s cake, and half the floor has stopped working to look at it.”

“Let them have it,” Ethan said, and was surprised by how rough his own voice sounded.

Lena studied him a beat too long before she let it go. “Should the company send something?”

“Champagne,” he said. “The good kind. Have it delivered to his desk.”

“Should I put your name on the card?”

He hesitated. In that hesitation was a whole life he didn’t have the strength to look at directly right now.  Mark had gotten to kneel in front of a coffee cart and an entire cheering floor and walk away engaged. Ethan had spent twelve years making sure no one in this building ever had a single reason to wonder about him.

“No,” he said. “Just the company.”

She nodded and left, and Ethan sat with the sound of celebration bleeding faintly through the wall, a laugh, the clink of plastic cups, an entire floor of people allowed to be happy about this kind of thing without doing math first. He told himself he was glad for Mark. He was, underneath everything else, unbearably jealous, in a way that made him feel small and mean, and he sat with that too, because there was nowhere left in him to put it.

By six the floor had mostly emptied. He stood at the window a long time, watching the city do what it always did, indifferent to whatever was happening behind any one particular pane of glass, and let himself think, finally, about Julian,  off somewhere with someone who wasn’t Ethan, someone who probably hadn’t spent the morning throwing him out of a room.

He deserved better than what I gave him today, Ethan thought, and the thought landed with an ache that surprised him with how physical it was, a tightness right under his ribs.

His phone buzzed on the desk. He flinched, the way he did now every single time, some low, permanent dread installed in him that hadn’t existed a month ago.

A number he didn’t recognize. The third message from this particular ghost since the one that had told him not to bother looking outside his own window.

“Trouble in paradise for our lovers, Ethan?”

“We are not lovers” he almost screamed in the silence. “It was one night,” he whispered. 

Someone must have heard them  or seen Julian and had known about it fast enough to hand it back to him like a knife.

He set the phone down very carefully, the way you’d set down something that might go off, and sat in the dark for a long time after that, the champagne he’d never see delivered sitting somewhere down the hall, the apology still waiting unfinished in his drafts, and somewhere underneath both of those, a crack running along a ceiling he hadn’t let himself picture in eighteen years, now impossible to stop seeing.