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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
A.J. Barlowe
Read between
December 13 - December 13, 2024
“I’m going to base this moment on who I’m stuck in a room with. It’s what life is. It’s a series of rooms, and who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are.” - House, M.D. One Day, One Room
“Oh. Leo, Liam. We’re sort of like. . . Phonetic fraternal twins.” Please stop speaking.
What if Leo had nowhere else to sleep tonight? What if this overnight job, this hotel room purchased as a joke at Liam’s expense, was his only opportunity for shelter?
he didn’t need all the information to understand what was right in front of him: that this person was in desperate need of a break, and Liam was in a unique position to grant him one.
Liam, Thanks for everything. Happy birthday. Your friend, Jonah
For the week since their first interaction, the memory of that night had been a warm flame he’d kept shielded between his palms, a singular moment of reprieve like a pinhole of light in the dark. Was a week all it took for him to change his mind?
“I have the cash this time—all of it, plus what I owe you from last time. Whatever it is you don’t want to tell me about, whatever you do outside of here. . . It just seems like you could use a break.” A break.
Before, his misplaced trust had cost him everything. This time, he had nothing left to lose. The realization stung almost as much as the one that followed: that it didn’t matter if he trusted Liam or not, because really, there was no choice. Whether Liam’s intentions were genuine or not, he was Jonah’s client. He had paid for a night—a full one—of Jonah’s company, and so Jonah’s fate had been decided the minute the door closed behind him. And really, long before that.
“Do they happen often?” Liam asked. “The nightmares? Or whatever that was last time?” “Often enough,” he said with a shrug, ever the man of few words.
The words died on his tongue as he glanced up at Jonah and realized, horrified, how privileged he must sound. Complaining about going to community college and whining about how his parents made too much money.
“Have you read the book, Liam? I’m pretty sure this story is about him getting swallowed by the whale.” “No,” Liam said. “The story is about him getting out.”
He didn’t want it to stop smelling like Liam.
“It looks worse than it is,” he lied. “It looks like someone beat the shit out of you.” “Maybe someone did.”
“The fact that it’s sometimes like this is bad enough.”
“You okay?” he asked, finally. There was only a moment of hesitation before Jonah nodded. Liam could read the transparent apology written all over his face, in his flushed cheeks and downcast gaze, and he thought he might physically lose his dinner if he had to hear that boy say he was sorry for what just happened.
His first thought was: his eyelashes look even longer wet.
Their fingers were pruned by the time a hotel employee knocked on the door to let them know the pool was closed, but he caught Jonah’s reflection on the elevator ride to their room and saw he was smiling. Liam couldn’t help but smile, too.
how he probably wouldn’t take it if they offered, because something about accepting a full-time job in his hometown felt like signing the death certificate on his dreams.
He hadn’t wanted those things from anybody in a long time, and he didn’t know what it said about him that he still could. There was a dull sense of shame, but maybe something like hope, too; maybe he wasn’t as broken as he thought he was.
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.” He didn’t dare turn his head to see Liam’s reaction. They both kept their eyes on the ceiling, even as Liam’s pinky unlatched from his, just long enough to slide his palm fully over Jonah’s, lacing all their fingers together. He gave a squeeze, and Jonah gave it right back. “Yeah,” Liam whispered. “You’re mine, too.”
“I have another confession,” he whispered into the silent room. Liam let his eyes trail over the profile of Jonah’s face; the long, sloped nose, the cupid’s bow of his lip, the eyelashes that kissed the skin of his cheek with his eyes closed and a jawline that was just a little more pronounced than it should have been. Liam tightened his hand around Jonah’s. The alcohol was a sedative quickly pulling him under, but Liam knew, even then, that wasn’t the reason for the warmth that flowered in his chest. “I think I might accidentally love you.”
“I’m not throwing anything away, Jonah. Not my dreams, and not you either. You’re not disposable. After all this time?” There was a genuine twinge of hurt in his voice. “You really think that’s how I feel about you?”
Maybe they were tears of relief, wrought with inexplicable gratitude that his attempts to push Liam away hadn’t worked. He had refused to take the easy out that Jonah had gifted him, and decided instead to push back. To fight for him in a way no one had ever bothered to do.
“Jonah?” “I killed someone,” he heard the words tumble out in his own voice before he could stop them. The answering silence rang through him like a bell. Jonah couldn’t pull his hands away from his face. He was sure that if he looked at Liam right now, the world would crumble around him.
It was a series of favors that got out of control—first for Shepard, then his friends, and eventually for strangers—and Jonah seeing less and less of the money each time. Until he stopped seeing any at all. It was a growing well of debt that Jonah had no chance of climbing out of, and leverage he could never wriggle out from under. It was a slow spiral into freefall.
Suddenly the room felt like a battleground after the white flag was raised, and they were standing alone in the rubble as the dust settled around them.
Dear Jonah, Call me. Your friend, Liam
“Whatever we have to do,” Liam said. “Anything, if it means getting another week.” Fire. Ice. A heartbeat in his throat. A voice that tried to drown it all out. And a single spark of rebellion that hadn’t yet been extinguished.
For that matter, neither was commuting to the city every weekend to live out some fucked up Pretty Woman fan fiction, but hey. Life comes at you fast.
He always knew that was the plan, that it would be naive to expect anything different, but it was harder thinking about it in such concrete terms. Liam getting into art school. Liam saving up the money to move. Liam moving on, forging a future and leaving Jonah stagnant and stale, a distant memory in the past. Just part of his story; a series of Friday nights strung together during one strange autumn, and the boy he left there in the end.
“Feeling like an outsider in the place you grew up. Not exactly the same circumstances, but I know these places aren’t always kind to people like us. It was the same for me in Indiana.”
“They told me it was that or nothing. It was the condition I had to meet to live under their roof, to have access to any of my college savings. But I couldn’t. . .”
“You know this doesn’t make me feel differently about you, right? The knowing?” Liam said.
“What you did in the past does not make you deserving of what’s happening to you now. You were only trying to survive.”
“I’m just very aware of. . . I never want you to feel obligated.” “It’s not like that,” he promised. “Not with you.”
Jonah leaned his head against the window for the remaining few minutes of the drive, grieving for the boy he lost, the boy he had been inside the safety of their bubble, and the goodbye he’d never get to say.
“You sure you’re alright, kiddo?” I’m not. I’m so out of my depth. Help me. I don’t know what to do. “Just tired,” he said.
The isolation weighed on him. He felt like he was living a double life, and to some extent, he was. He was navigating this dark underbelly of a world that, a few months earlier, he hadn’t even known existed, and there was no one there to share the burden of his knowledge. Of his guilt. Even his mother, whom he trusted more than almost anyone else in the world, couldn’t know about this. If he told her everything that had happened, beyond being appalled at the danger her son had gotten involved in, she would undoubtedly tell him to go to the police.
“Hi, Liam. It’s me. Jonah.”
“I know you’re probably working or. . . I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t have much time. I just. . . It’s Friday,” he said. “And I wish it was you waiting for me upstairs.” Liam was going to shatter apart. “Listen, I. . . I don’t know when—if—I’ll have another chance to say what I want to say to you, so I just. . . I saw the phone and I needed to call you and say I’m sorry that things ended the way they did. I never wanted you to get anywhere near all of that. Any of it. I hate that you did. I hate that I was selfish enough to let you.” A pause. “I only have another minute, but I need to tell
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I’m sorry, Jonah. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. That I can’t keep your promise. That I didn’t break it sooner.
“I want. . .” Liam’s voice broke off. “I want to kill him. All of them. Anyone who ever touched you.” “They weren’t all bad people,” Jonah said. “Most of them didn’t know.” “Just because they weren’t terrible doesn’t mean it wasn’t terrible for you.” Jonah didn’t argue with him there.
“You were never a burden, Jonah.”
“Jonah, I’m not going to abandon you,” he promised. “I won’t.” “I’m not asking you to.” What are you asking for, Liam wanted to beg. Anything. He couldn’t imagine denying Jonah a single thing.
“Hey, you’re my friend first. Okay? The best one I’ve ever had. Anything else. . .” He waved his free hand in front of him. “We’ve got time to figure out the rest.”
The monotony of being inside the diner—of tending to unkind patrons and listening to petty gossip in the kitchen—was like trudging through wet concrete.
He recognized, in that moment, that there was no world in which he could heal under that roof, sharing space with the ghosts of his past. Jonah clung to her this time because he knew it was a goodbye.
Meet me in the fall? He typed, then sent the message off to Liam.
If Chicago was the place where Jonah had learned how to survive, New York was where he learned how to live.
