He could smell the fire.
He was blind. His eyes streamed. The curling wallpaper crackled and hissed. His skin was burning. The air in his lungs seared him from the inside out. And there was nowhere to go—no escape from the heat, no escape from the orange towers and acrid black smoke, no air.
“Ezra!”
The smoke wrapped itself around his teeth and tongue like a grotesque mockery of a kiss, and there was no reply but the roar of hot air and climbing fire. The house was burning. The house was burning!
“Ezra! Ez!”
A scream. A piercing scream, like nothing he’d ever heard, but before he could move, the wooden boards crumbled to ash and he was falling, tearing through the shreds of stairs into the inferno, and—
Jesse hit the carpet with a thump and jarred himself awake.
The flat was quiet. The streetlight touched the other side of the curtains with a faint orange light. There was no smoke, no fire, no sound. Nothing.
Jesse dragged himself back onto the bed. The sheets were impossibly tangled and his tank top stuck to him with sweat. His wrist ached in its brace where he’d bumped it, but the panic hadn’t quite eased its grip on his heart or his lungs, and he fumbled for his phone, ignoring the pain.
Thank God for speed dial.
The clock on the side said two-fifty-eight, and the phone rang six times before the line coughed and crackled and a sleepy voice, tinged in the early hours with the fading edges of a Welsh accent, mumbled a vague sort of question.
“Ez?”
There was a rustle of sheets. “Jesse?”
“Oh, God,” Jesse breathed. The air escaped in a rush, loud and hard. His lungs shook with the effort. “Shit. I just— I needed to check—”
“Jess? What’s happened, sweetheart?”
The soft roll of his vowels, the accent entirely muted when he was properly awake, was as comforting as a hug, and Jesse coughed out, “Nightmare,” before thinking twice. Ezra was okay. He was okay. It was all okay.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Ezra murmured, low and crooning. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“I need—can I come over? I know it’s late and I know you have work in the morning, but—I just—I need—”
“No,” Ezra interrupted, and Jesse’s stomach twisted violently.
“Please, Ez, I—”
“Hey, hey, hey.” Ezra cut him off. “Hey, stop, calm down, sweetheart. I meant you can’t come here. You don’t sound okay, not to me, and I don’t want you to go out like this, so I’ll come to you, all right?”
Jesse exhaled, the twist easing. “Okay.”
“You okay if I hang up, or do you want me to put the phone on speaker?”
“Can—speaker,” Jesse swallowed against the nausea. He was still shaking, he realised faintly. “I just—I couldn’t find you, Ez. The house was burning and I couldn’t find you, and I—I need to hear you. You don’t have to talk to me, but I need to hear you.”
“Okay.” The phone crackled again and clunked, and suddenly Ezra’s voice was loud and echoing. Soothing. The Welsh hint was fading, and Jesse could suddenly hear him dressing, but he was there. “Was it my house or the one last week?”
“Yours,” Jesse said. “I was on the stairs, and they gave way, and I woke up. I couldn’t find you.”
“If my house was on fire, I would probably be in the kitchen having caused it,” Ezra said, and yawned loudly. “Make yourself useful, sweetheart, and make up a brew for me? I’ve not slept long.”
Jesse knew better than to apologise. He shrugged out of his sweat-soaked pyjamas and pulled on a pair of jogging bottoms before taking the phone through the narrow hall into the kitchen. The kitchen window overlooked the main road. A police car trailed idly by on the prowl. Phone to his ear, he listened to Ezra swear sleepily at his cupboard, and the soft sounds of those narrow feet padding downstairs.
“Sweetheart?”
“Mm?” Jesse listened to the front door and the heavy sound of the key.
“I’m going to hang up while I drive. You all right for ten minutes until I get there?”
“Yeah,” Jesse croaked. His heart had come down out of the rafters, and he could breathe. The streetlights didn’t look threatening anymore. He just felt…shaky. Sick and shaky and scared. “Yeah, Ez, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Love you.”
The dial tone was immediate. Jesse dropped the phone to the counter and switched on the kettle, staring out of the window and waiting, arms folded against the chill. It wasn’t the first nightmare, and it wouldn’t be the last. He usually managed one a week without fail, and the injury hadn’t helped matters. But they didn’t usually involve Ezra in burning buildings. They didn’t usually involve losing him.
And Jesse couldn’t stomach the thought of losing him.
Which was a bit scary in itself. They’d only met eight months ago. At a gay bar, of all places—the one place where he went to meet sex partners, not partner partners. Jesse had thought the freckled blond with the dark eyes was pretty in the neon lights and had bought him a drink, talked him into a dance, bought him another. Kissed him at the back of the dance floor—and had promptly found himself alone, but with a phone number in his back pocket.
He’d wanted sex. That was all he’d been after. Sex with a pretty guy. But then they’d gone on a date and he’d met Ezra properly, and he was lost. Ezra wasn’t just a handsome face and nice legs. Ezra was the world. He was Jesse’s world, and it had only been eight months, but Jesse still knew that this was it, for him. Ezra was it. There would never be anyone else like him.
So he stood in a tense vigil at the window, waiting for the faithful little Peugeot 207 to creep around the corner. Waiting for Ezra to come, because there was emotional shock and there was sense, and the two weren’t in line right now. He knew Ezra was okay. He knew it. He’d answered the phone. He’d been sleepy and understanding and sworn at his cupboard. He was fine.
But Jesse still needed to reach out and touch him, just to make sure. Somehow.
The little blue car was lonely on the three-in-the-morning road, and Jesse propped the door of his flat to creep down the communal stairs and open the main door. Ezra had gotten sort-of dressed, in jeans and an open check shirt, feet shoved into his trainers without socks, and his hair was wild and fluffy, in gleeful disarray, as he locked the car and wrapped himself around Jesse in a tight, warm hug.
Jesse clung back until something creaked, and pressed the side of his face against that wild hair.
“You’re all right, sweetheart,” Ezra murmured.
Jesse squeezed again until Ezra’s grip on the nape of his neck tightened in warning, then he let go and dragged Ezra up the silent stairs by the hand. Concrete stairs. They wouldn’t collapse in a fire until the whole building came down.
He didn’t say a word until he’d pressed the requested tea into Ezra’s hands, locked the door again and bundled them both back to the messy bed. Ezra was equally silent, taking a couple of mouthfuls before abandoning the tea, stripping to his underwear and crawling into the mess to mould himself into Jesse’s arms.
“There you go,” he murmured lowly, kissing Jesse’s encroaching stubble and stroking a hand gently through his hair. “Feel better now?”
“Mm,” Jesse pressed his nose into Ezra’s neck, tangling their legs together. He could feel a strong pulse in Ezra’s jugular. He could feel the rough skin of the bumpy scar on Ezra’s shoulder under his fingertips. He could feel the fuzzy mess of Ezra’s hair, usually styled and stiff in that messy-but-it’s-on-purpose-so-it’s-okay manner, now just loose and wild. He could feel him. “Thank you.”
“Thank me again tomorrow afternoon when I’m grumpy and exhausted after two hours of the Year Nines.”
“Okay,” Jesse agreed, sliding his arms completely around Ezra’s back until he enveloped him. They didn’t often sleep cuddled together—or even together at all, between Ezra’s eight-to-four and Jesse’s shifts—but he needed this. He needed it.
“Mind if I go to sleep?”
“No,” Jesse squirmed until Ezra got the hint and tucked his head under his chin. His hair tickled. Jesse kissed the top of his head and wished he had the easy grace with language that Ezra did. Wished he could express himself properly. Wished he could talk as easily as he hugged. But all that came out was, “I just needed to touch you.”
Ezra said nothing to that, simply shifting until he was comfortable, one arm over Jesse’s ribs and the other tucked over his own waist in a casual sort of drop. Ezra was long—long limbs, long neck, all willowy lines and bendy joints, and he settled like water into the bulkier, stiffer contours of Jesse’s body.
But he fit, and he fit perfectly, and Jesse wrapped him up and held him, breathing in the smell of store-brand shampoo and cheap aftershave until the last traces of the nightmare-induced fear washed away.
It was still a long time before he slept.
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