I Can Tell From Your Eyes
This is now beyond 100,000 words 😱
Thanksgiving morning. Dan wakes to a body he knows by heart in a room that is entirely new.
Before he even opens his eyes, he senses Jonah beside him. He smells him. Not his cheap body wash or 2-in-1 shampoo, but him. It's warm and faintly sweet, and Dan can't name it, but it's what he searches for on nights Jonah is not there, burying his face in whatever pillow or hoodie still carries the ghost of him.
Dan can sense the weight of him. The specific six-four gravity of Jonah Ryan in a full size bed, broad shoulders and long limbs taking up most of the space. His calf is hooked over Dan's ankle. As though even in sleep he needs to confirm that Dan hasn't left.
He's snoring softly. A low, rhythmic hum of deep breaths that once might have been annoying to Dan, but has become over the past year the sound his nervous system associates with safety.
Dan's eyes drift open. He's curled on his side facing Jonah, and he remembers, before even taking in his surroundings, where he is and why and what day it is. Because he sees him.
In the soft predawn light, Jonah is the first thing Dan sees.
Jonah is on his back, one arm flung above his head, the other resting on his stomach. His mouth is parted, his cheeks are flushed. Jonah runs hot and a night under blankets in a too-small bed with another man has turned his face rosy, his hair sticking in clumps to his forehead, making him look younger, softer.
The rest of his hair is a disaster, going in directions that defy physics and fanning on the pillow in a mess of brown, making Dan's fingers itch to touch. He's shirtless. He always sleeps shirtless, even in New Hampshire in November.
His skin is pink with faint freckles on his shoulders and a soft layer of hair across his chest. It rises and falls, deep, calm. Dan knows exactly how it feels to rest his head there. Again, Dan aches to touch him. He refrains and just studies.
Dan does this sometimes. In the mornings, before Jonah wakes, when his performance is off and his volume is muted, and Jonah is just a sleeping man with eyelashes that cast shadows on his cheekbones and a jaw softened by unconsciousness.
It's in these moments he doesn't wonder Why?
He knows because he's in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Thanksgiving Day for an old fashioned family holiday. Dan can't remember the last time he spent a holiday with family. For nearly a decade, holidays for Dan meant eating takeout in sweatpants with a six pack of IPA beer, the TV on low, and catching up on work while the rest of the world paused.
Somehow, in the year of our Lord two-thousand-and-sixteen, Dan finds himself domesticated.
Now it's morning. Pre-dawn. The room glows with the soft amber haze of string lights draped across the ceiling in zig-zags and the thin gray light of dawn pressing in through the windows.
Dan's internal clock says it's close to seven. His body says get up. His body also says stay, which is a newer instinct. One Jonah installed in him.
He lies still and lets his eyes adjust to the room.
Jonah's childhood bedroom is a converted attic, the ceiling tall enough to stand in through most of the space but slanting sharply at the far end where there are two dormer windows. Centered between these windows is Jonah's bed, and what Dan sees from where he lies is a museum dedicated to the typical '90s teenage boy.
Posters cover nearly every surface of the slanted walls. Dan identifies them in order: Beastie Boys. Metallica. Foo Fighters. Above the headboard is an Echo and the Bunnymen poster that makes Dan's chest do something involuntary, because he knows now what that band means to Jonah and what it means to both of them. Beside it, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures—the white pulsar waves on black that every hipster college kid in America has owned at some point, but that Jonah probably bought at fourteen from a record store that smelled like dust and vinyl sleeves.
And on the ceiling above the bed, the prime real estate of a teenage boy's viewing pleasure: Phoebe Cates in her iconic red bikini from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Dan stares at it for a full five seconds, then looks at the man sleeping beside him, then looks at Phoebe Cates again, and allows himself a private, silent laugh.
The room unfolds as Dan's eyes travel. A desk against one wall holds a green iMac G3. The bulbous, translucent kind that looks like a fishbowl designed by someone on ecstasy. Above the desk, a corkboard displays haphazard paraphernalia: photos of high school friends with '90s haircuts and fashion, concert ticket stubs layered over each other like faded bragging rights. Dan can make out a few: Weezer. Green Day. Something that might be a Warped Tour wristband.
A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf dominates the opposite wall, and it's the most Jonah thing in the room. The shelves hold figurines and action figures, a crowded row of comic books, with a few actual books wedged between. And trophies.
Dan's eyes catch on those. Basketball. Music. A debate trophy, tall and genuinely impressive, the kind that comes from winning, not participating. Below it, martial arts trophies clustered together, and on a shelf of its own, displayed with deliberate pride, a blue belt.
Dan looks at Jonah again and tries to picture him in a gi performing kata, and he finds that he can. The discipline. The focus. Jonah would be the specific kind of kid who needs to hit things in a structured environment.
An electric guitar hangs on the wall. Red, heavy metal style, the kind of guitar a teenager buys because it looks ferocious and then learns three power chords before moving on. Dan suspects Jonah can play it but never practiced enough to play well, because it looks new.
But the drums. In the corner, a full drum set sits with the patient permanence of an instrument that was played seriously and is waiting to be played again. The drums and cymbals are dented in all the right places. The sticks rest on the snare like someone set them down yesterday.
There's a basketball hoop on the back of the bedroom door. Because of course there is. Jonah is, by all accounts—or at least according to his word—an excellent free throw shooter.
A skateboard leans against the wall by the door, scuffed and well-used. Beside the desk, a stereo system. Not like the vinyl setup in his apartment. A tape deck and a CD player, with a tower of CDs beside it and stacks of cassette tapes piled with the loving disorder of a kid who spent his allowance at the record store every weekend.
And the bedding. It's the contrast to the rest of the room. The sheets, the comforter, the curtains on the dormer windows, all preppy plaid. Blues and greens, tasteful, coordinated, the kind of thing you'd find in a Pottery Barn catalog and obviously chosen by Nancy.
Dan rests in plaid sheets, under string lights, beneath Phoebe Cates, next to a man who played drums and earned a debate trophy and a blue belt and never practiced guitar enough and kept every concert ticket and has the best taste in music of anyone Dan has ever met.
The room is ridiculous and tender and completely, unmistakably Jonah.
Dan lets his gaze return to Jonah. The focal point of this '90s museum. This 34-year-old man in his childhood bedroom, in a bed that is too small for him, let alone two grown men, sleeping soundly the way one sleeps when they're in a home with a loving mother close by. And Dan doesn't wonder why he's here beside him. But how.
Dan reaches over and traces the line of Jonah's jaw with his thumb. Light. Not enough to wake him. Just enough to feel the stubble and the warmth and the particular architecture of this face that Dan has memorized without intending to.
They need to get up. They promised Nancy they'd help with Thanksgiving dinner prep.
Dan is an early riser by nature. His body doesn't know how to sleep past seven, and the clock on Jonah's nightstand reads 6:48.
But Jonah is sleeping. And Jonah sleeping means Jonah quiet, which means the world is quiet, which means Dan has approximately twelve minutes before his internal alarm forces him vertical.
Dan slides closer. Lifts the edge of the blanket and ducks underneath, into the warm dark, where Jonah's body radiates heat like a furnace with a heartbeat. The scent is concentrated here—skin, sleep, the faint ghost of the soap Jonah used last night.
Dan presses his mouth to Jonah's stomach, just above the waistband of his boxers, and feels the muscle twitch under his lips.
Jonah doesn't wake. The snoring continues, undisturbed.
Dan smiles against his skin. There's something delicious about it. The challenge of waking a man who sleeps like he's been sedated, the amorous act of tenderness on someone who won't know it's happening for another thirty seconds.
He hooks his fingers in Jonah's waistband and tugs, slow, careful, easing the fabric down with the patience of a man disarming something precious. He moves lower. Takes his time. The first press of his mouth is gentle, exploratory, a question asked in a language they've been speaking for two years but that still makes Dan's pulse climb.
Above the blanket, the snoring stutters.
Jonah makes a sound, confused, sleep-thick, halfway between a groan and a question mark. His hand finds the top of Dan's head through the blanket and rests there, uncertain, like he's not sure this is real.
He takes Jonah into his mouth slowly, and the intimacy of it hits him the way it always hits him. Not the act itself but the trust inside the act. The specific vulnerability of a man still half-asleep letting Dan do this, letting Dan have him like this, the weight and warmth of him on Dan's tongue and the taste that is just Jonah, just skin and salt and the particular human fact of the person Dan has built his entire private life around.
Dan's eyes close. His hands find Jonah's hips, the bones sharp under his palms, the skin thin and hot there, and he grips. Not hard. Just enough to hold him, to feel the involuntary roll of Jonah's body starting to move and to steady it, to say I've got you, let me.
Jonah's hips flex against his hands and Dan presses them down gently, firmly, and there's something in that control, in Jonah letting himself be held still, in the small surrender of a man who is loud and restless and takes up every room he enters, going quiet under Dan's hands. It makes Dan's chest ache and his own body pulse with a heat he isn't trying to manage.
Under the covers, in the dark, in Jonah's childhood bedroom with a Metallica poster on the wall and Phoebe Cates on the ceiling, Dan gives without strategy. Without performance. Just his mouth, warm and unhurried, and the slow undoing of a man who is surfacing from sleep into something better.
Jonah's hand tightens in his hair. His breathing changes—short, sharp catches that Dan catalogs and responds to, adjusting, learning, always learning even after two years. Dan knows every sound Jonah makes in this register, has a library of them stored in a place he'd never admit to maintaining. The low groan when Dan does something right. The held breath when Dan does something new. The soft, wrecked oh that means Jonah has stopped thinking entirely and is just feeling, just letting his body be a body in Dan's hands.
Dan loves this. He will never say so. He will never tell Jonah that this—the giving, the unhurried attention, the particular power of making someone come apart with patience and care—is as close to prayer as Dan gets. That the sounds Jonah makes go through Dan's body like current. That having Jonah in his mouth, heavy and warm and alive, while Jonah's fingers grip his hair and Jonah's breath comes in pieces, is the most honest Dan ever feels. No performance. No calculation. Just the raw, animal truth of wanting to make someone feel good, wanting it so badly his own body is shaking.
Jonah says his name and it comes out broken in the middle, the way Jonah always says his name in these moments, like the syllable is too small for what it's carrying. His hips strain against Dan's hands. Dan holds him. Takes him deeper. Feels Jonah's thigh tremble under his forearm.
Dan doesn't stop. Dan doesn't pull back. He presses his thumbs into the hollows of Jonah's hips and gives him everything, and when Jonah finishes, it's with a full-body shudder and a sound muffled by the pillow he's pulled over his face—because even in the grip of it, some part of Jonah remembers that his mother is two floors below.
Dan stays with him through the aftershocks. Gentling. Slowing. His mouth softening, his hands loosening on Jonah's hips, his thumbs tracing the bones he was gripping a moment ago with a tenderness that would ruin him if anyone saw it. He feels the tremors pass through Jonah's body and into his own hands, and he stays, because staying is what Dan does now, and being the reason Jonah is making these sounds is the closest Dan has come to understanding why people believe in God.
He surfaces from the blankets into gray morning light, chin on Jonah's chest, and finds Jonah looking down at him with the expression of a man who has just received an undeserved miracle.
"Good morning," Dan says.
Jonah's hand is still in his hair. His eyes are half-open, lashes heavy, cheeks flushed with sleep and the residual evidence of what just happened. He looks wrecked and grateful and so tender it makes Dan's ribs ache.
"You're insane," Jonah mumbles. "The best kind of insane."
Dan climbs up and kisses him, slow and sleepy, tasting morning and each other. Jonah cups the back of his neck and holds him there, deepening the kiss with the lazy thoroughness of a man who has nowhere to be and no plans to move.
Then Jonah's hand slides down.
Not rushed. Not tentative. The easy, purposeful movement of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and has been thinking about it since the first press of Dan's mouth woke him from a dead sleep. His palm drags down Dan's chest, his stomach, finds the waistband of Dan's sweatpants and slips under, past the elastic of his boxer briefs, and Dan's breath catches against Jonah's mouth hard enough that Jonah feels it.
"You didn't think I was just going to lay here," Jonah murmurs into the kiss. His fingers wrap around Dan, warm and sure, and Dan's hips jerk forward before he can stop them.
"Jonah—" A warning, or the beginning of one, but Jonah's hand is already moving, slow, deliberate, and the protest dissolves into a sound Dan didn't authorize.
"Shh." Jonah's mouth is at his ear now, his voice low and rough with the residual gravel of sleep and sex. "My turn."
Dan buries his face in Jonah's neck. This is the part he's worst at. The receiving, the letting go, the surrender of control to someone else's hands. Dan can give for hours. Dan can take Jonah apart with patience and precision and never lose his composure. But Jonah's hand on him, Jonah's voice in his ear, the specific way Jonah holds him like he already knows the answer to every question Dan's body is asking—this is where Dan's composure goes to die.
Jonah's free arm wraps around Dan's back, pulling him in tighter, holding him against his chest. Dan's face is pressed to the curve of Jonah's throat, breathing in the concentrated scent of him—skin, warmth, the faint salt of what Dan just did to Jonah—and Jonah's hand works him with a rhythm that's unhurried and relentless and exactly right, because Jonah has spent two years learning this the way Dan learned him: with obsessive devotion.
"That's it," Jonah says against his temple, low, private, a voice reserved for this room and this act and no one else. "God, you feel so good. You know that?"
Dan makes a sound into Jonah's neck that he would deny under oath.
Jonah's thumb does something specific and Dan's spine arches involuntarily, his hand fisting in the sheets, his breath coming apart in pieces. He's close. He's embarrassingly close, which is what Jonah does to him—strips away the discipline and the control and the carefully maintained architecture of his composure until there's nothing left but a man shaking in someone's arms.
"I've got you," Jonah says, and his hand tightens, his pace shifting, reading Dan's body with a confidence that comes from knowing someone so well it's obscene. "I've got you, baby."
Dan's breathing fractures. His hips are moving against Jonah's hand in small, desperate rolls he can't control. His fingers dig into Jonah's shoulder. He's making sounds against Jonah's throat—quiet, broken, nothing like the composed man who works on the Hill. This version of Dan exists only here, only with Jonah's hand around him and Jonah's mouth at his ear.
"Come on," Jonah whispers, and his lips brush the shell of Dan's ear, and his voice drops into something low and warm and devastating. "Come on, good girl."
Dan comes so hard his vision goes white.
The sound he makes is muffled entirely by Jonah's neck, his mouth pressed to the pulse point, his whole body seizing and shuddering in Jonah's arms. Jonah holds him through it—arm tight around his back, hand slowing but not stopping, drawing it out with the cruel patience of a man who knows exactly what those two words do and used them with military precision.
Dan's body empties. He goes boneless against Jonah's chest, breathing in ragged pulls, his face still hidden, his fingers still gripping Jonah's shoulder like the room might tilt if he lets go.
Jonah presses his mouth to Dan's hair. Holds him. Says nothing.
Dan lies there with his heart hammering and his body humming and his face against the throat of the man who just took him apart with one hand and two words, and he thinks: This is a problem I have no interest in solving.
After a long moment, Dan lifts his head. Jonah is looking at him with an expression of such smug, radiant satisfaction that Dan wants to hit him and kiss him in equal measure.
"I'm thinking a lot of things." Jonah grins. The crooked one. The one with the incisor. "Mostly about how pretty you—"
Dan puts his hand over Jonah's mouth. "If you finish that sentence, I will never do what I just did to you again."
Jonah's eyes go wide. He mimes zipping his lips still under Dan's palm.
Dan removes his hand. Kisses him once, hard, a punctuation mark.
"We need to get up. Your mother's expecting us to help with breakfast."
Jonah groans. His arm hooks around Dan's waist and hauls him in, tucking Dan against his chest like a favorite pillow. Dan goes, because resisting Jonah's gravitational pull is a project he abandoned sometime in 2015.
"Five more minutes," Jonah murmurs into Dan's hair. "I want to stay in bed with you all day."
"That would be awkward, given that your entire extended family will be downstairs in approximately seven hours."
"They can let themselves in. I'll be busy."
Dan flicks Jonah's ear. Jonah yelps. Dan extracts himself from the tangle of limbs and stands, and the cold air hits his body like a slap.
"Shower," Dan announces, pulling open his overnight bag. "Get up."
Jonah pulls the blankets to his chin and closes his eyes with theatrical finality. "Tell my mother I died. Beautifully. In my sleep. Cause of death: handsome boyfriend."
Dan grabs his toiletry bag and heads for the bathroom.
Nancy's house has one full bathroom upstairs, shared between two bedrooms. The water pressure is adequate. The towels are the kind you buy at Target in packs of four. The shower curtain has seashells on it. Dan uses his own products, because he is who he is, and spends twenty minutes making himself presentable in a mirror framed by fake driftwood.
When he returns to the bedroom, towel around his waist, Jonah is exactly where he left him. Asleep. Again. Or pretending to be, which is worse.
Dan crosses the room and yanks the blankets off in one efficient motion.
Jonah jackknifes upright with a sound that could wake the neighbors.
Jonah grabs the pillow and hurls it at Dan's head. Dan catches it—because his reflexes are excellent and because Jonah's aim is not—and drops it on the floor.
"Breakfast. Your mother. Get up."
Jonah flops back on the bare mattress, arms spread, staring at the ceiling with the resigned fury of a man being persecuted. Dan ignores him and opens his bag.
He's chosen his outfit with his usual precision. Dark jeans, fitted, the kind that pretend to be casual until you notice the cut. A burgundy crewneck sweater in merino wool that sits close to his body and does something particular to his coloring—the deep red against his dark hair and pale skin that Jonah once described as "literally criminal." Chukka boots. Belt. Watch.
From the bed, Jonah has rolled onto his side and is watching Dan get dressed with the fixed, appreciative stare of a man at a museum.
"Who's going to be here today?" Dan asks, pulling the sweater over his head.
Jonah shifts, tugging the sheet over himself. "Okay. Brace yourself." He settles into the tone he uses when delivering political stats, which is to say: dramatic and thorough.
"Uncle Jeff and Aunt Esther. Jeff is my mom's older brother. He's a dick. He'll comment on my job, my weight, my hair, and probably my sexuality, in that order. Esther is fine. She drinks white wine and doesn't make eye contact."
Dan threads his belt through the loops. "Jeff Kane. The one with all the political connections."
"The one with all the political connections. He basically runs the New Hampshire Republican donor circuit. Everyone owes him favors. He's going to spend the entire dinner telling me everything I've done wrong with my life while simultaneously implying he could fix it if I'd just listen to him." Jonah pauses. "Which I won't."
"You might," Dan says mildly.
Dan buckles his belt and doesn't push it. He files Jeff Kane away for later—a man with political power who insults Jonah and offers opportunity in the same breath. Dan knows this type. Dan has worked for this type. Dan knows how to handle this type.
"Cousin Becky. Jeff and Esther's daughter. She's fine. Married to Chad, who is exactly the kind of guy named Chad. They have two kids. Madison, she's seven, and Rory, he's four. Maddie and Rory are obsessed with me. Like, certifiably. Rory literally tries to climb me and Madison hangs on my arm."
Dan smiles. He can picture this. Jonah as a jungle gym. Jonah as a destination.
"And Robin," Dan adds for him. "The one you're not allowed to call a bitch."
Jonah grins, sharp and vindictive. "Robin is my mom's younger brother Al's wife. She's homophobic and she's not subtle about it. Last year she asked if we were 'roommates' while looking at me like I'd brought a disease to dinner." He shifts up against the headboard. "Make sure we do a lot of PDA. I want her to choke on her cranberry sauce."
"I'll hold your hand during grace."
"Hold my ass during grace."
"Your mother would kill us both."
Dan sits on the edge of the bed to pull on his boots. "Who else?"
"Shannon. She's married to my cousin Ezra." Jonah's voice shifts when he says the name. A cooling. A tightening. "Ezra is in the Middle East. Military. He's perfect. Everyone's favorite. The golden boy. Star athlete, war hero, saved a village or whatever. Every family gathering is basically a shrine to Ezra while I'm the cautionary tale sitting at the same table."
Dan laces his boots and says nothing. He hears what Jonah isn't saying. The specific wound of being the lesser cousin, the loud one, the too-much one, the one who gets compared and comes up short. Dan has been hearing it all morning, underneath the jokes, threaded through every name on the list.
The way Jonah's voice gets louder the closer the information gets to the bone. The way he overcompensates with punch lines that have a blade under them. It's a man armoring himself for a room full of people who have known him since he was small and still see him that way. Jonah's family is a house of mirrors, and every mirror shows him a version of himself he can't live up to.
Dan keeps his concerns to himself. Today is not the day for a diagnostic. Today is the day for being present, for supporting, for charming Nancy and deflecting Uncle Jeff and putting on the particular performance of himself that makes Jonah proud.
Dan can do that. Dan was built for rooms he doesn't belong in.
"Shannon will have Braxton with her," Jonah continues. "He's thirteen. Ezra's kid. He's aloof and rude and never takes his eyes off his phone. Basically a teenager."
"So he's you at thirteen."
"Your mother has told me stories, Jonah."
"My mother is a liar and a propagandist. And it was the '90s, Dan. I had a Gameboy, not a cellphone."
Dan stands. Adjusts his sweater. Checks his reflection in the mirror on the back of Jonah's door. The burgundy is working. He looks put together in the specific way that says I'm not trying this hard while trying exactly this hard.
He turns to find Jonah propped on one elbow, the sheet pooled at his waist, staring at Dan with an expression that has shifted from amusement to something more dangerous.
"You look incredible," Jonah says. "Come back to bed so I can take all of that apart."
Dan picks up the pillow from the floor and throws it at Jonah's face.
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