They were kissing again, and suddenly—

Ezra was always sudden.

He never made eyes over the dinner table, the way Jacob did. Ezra needed little entertainment, other than music, and the music he liked was cerebral. Best enjoyed with noise-cancelling headphones, impossible to dance to. There were no wandering hands when they sat together on the couch at night. Jacob read on his tablet or watched movies, but Ezra would only be present physically, staring at nothing...even before the surgery, he'd always been someone who took long journeys in his head.

My space cadet, Jacob always teased him, when Ezra emerged from these trances and came to bed. My Yuri Gagarin, so handsome, he landed in the potato field and the village girls found him...

Ezra didn't flirt, in short, and instead would simply begin it all at once in some moment that seemed to him like the right one. If he wanted you at all, he wanted you all at once. Like the sudden bright plummet of a kingfisher.

So in a moment something shifted, and Ezra's hand was searching Jacob's fly for his zipper. Quick, urgent, clumsy. "Keep talking to me," Jacob whispered to him, because sometimes he felt alone when people were touching him. "Keep talking to me."

"I hate your zipper, I hate your belt," Ezra murmured, kneeling down in front of him, uncomfortably cramped between some pallets of water bottles. As he pulled Jacob's trousers down over his hips, he rubbed Jacob through his underwear, flashing a grin. "You like the dirty talk," he chanted in the universal taunting melody, like a kid on the playground. "You like the dirty talk..."

"I just like to hear you talk, because it's intimate, I did not say dirty talk—"

"Jacob Roth likes dirty talk. That's going in the papers tomorrow, you know that? You like dirty talk so much, I'm just gonna tell everyone what kind of shit you're into." Ezra widened his eyes, faux-salacious. "You know what I can't do with my mouth if I'm busy talking to you..."

This Ezra, glimpsed rarely, was a pearl that Jacob found early on inside the oyster shell of his boyfriend—an oyster was itself a delicacy, of course, but an acquired taste. Pearls were easier to love than oysters, even when strangely shaped, irregular, or unfit for lapidary. It was Ezra's sheer ungovernable weirdness that Jacob loved, a strange foxfire in an otherwise murky personality. Something that could lead even the cautious Jacob Roth off his normal path.

"I didn't tell you to do anything with your mouth," he told Ezra, pretending starchy disapproval. "Other than talk. You're the one who's jumping to conclusions—"

"Yeah, yeah. You're gonna tell me to do it in a minute, liar."

"This is what you use your God-given talent for." Jacob was laughing, his hands winding through Ezra's curly hair. They had safe words so that Jacob could do this, playfully pretending to turn Ezra down, something they both knew he'd otherwise never do. With his other partners, Jacob had always felt like he was lucky to have anyone's attention at all, and he wouldn't have dared to refuse them. "A legendary gift. That you use to predict your husband's erections. Ezra, I think this is beneath you."

And Ezra, for his part, liked to pretend to be cocky instead of what he really was, which was ruinously self-conscious and shy. "I don't have to predict anything, I know you. And I know that goddamn dick. You've got like, three minutes tops and you'll be begging."

"Uh-huh. You're very sure of yourself."

Ezra was trying not to laugh, barely keeping a lid on it and only succeeding because he was horny. He started to pull down Jacob's boxers, with elaborate slowness. Acting like this was a bad seduction when really it was a foregone conclusion.

"The last girl I ever tried to date, you know, it didn't work out, but she was the queen of dirty talk, all right?" said Ezra. "She lived in Warsaw. Long, long distance. She didn't have to be good at dirty talk at all, because when I heard her voice in my ear speaking Polish, I'd lose it anyway. Something about that just drove me insane. The sound. Like that little...rub in your voice. Almost a creak, almost throaty, like you're trying to be so quiet but—mmmm. Yup." Ezra got Jacob's waistband down, fingertips brushing over the skin. "Right there."

"Ezra..."

"That sound. That one. When you lean over and murmur in my ear, in a business meeting, you just...you've got no idea what forces you're meddling with." Ezra paused to give some attention to Jacob's member. "Anyway. We did dirty talk on the phone once, me and the Polish girl, Kasia. She did it, I mean. I couldn't, because I had no idea about anything. What I wanted, what other people wanted, what sounds good on the phone. It was all a mystery to me. But it's sexy to get that kind of attention from someone, you know? Someone who'd never met me in person, even, but she liked me enough to want to make me feel good. Even when she was talking to me, though...I couldn't admit that she wasn't what I wanted."

"How old were you?" Jacob asked, although he could guess from his extant knowledge of Ezra's romantic history. He was just embroidering the fantasy. "Twenty?"

"Twenty-one. She was telling me about other guys she'd been with, because...because that's what I asked about," Ezra said, laughing at himself again. He was working Jacob over unceasingly through all this, with his long clever fingers. "Talking about unbuttoning a guy's jeans with her teeth, rolling the condom on with her mouth, and I was like...could I do that if I practiced? Like a straight guy thinks, you know. So I practiced."

"What, on a cucumber?"

"A zucchini. You're good." Ezra pulled his boxers a tiny bit lower to brush his lips over Jacob's thigh. "This is how well I know that dick. I know I can tell you this story—and it's the unsexiest story I know—and you're still gonna beg me."

"I don't know if that's confirmed yet."

"You're gonna ask me. You'll say please."

Jacob shook his head, smiling. "Be that as it may. Stop dragging it out."

"Dragging what out?"

"The story, don't be..." Jacob tapped him lightly on the forehead with a finger. "Impertinent. And I'll tell you when you can put your mouth on me but not a second before, all right? Behave yourself. What about the zucchini?"

Ezra's mouth was technically not touching him, as any judge would agree, but Jacob could feel the humid warmth of his breath. "So. I was trying to teach myself the rolling-it-on-with-your-mouth trick. In the spirit of scientific inquiry. Like, is this a thing? Can it happen? Is it just a sexy urban legend? Gotta bust the myths. One second into the experiment," said Ezra, his lips almost brushing Jacob's skin, "startled by hearing Mum on the stairs, I inhaled the condom."

"Oh, Ezra."

"Yup."

"Were you okay?"

"Radiology said it went down the esophagus, not the trachea. I was fine. It was the dumbest thing that had ever happened to me. The dumbest, gayest thing. I had to reconsider my whole life."

"So that swallowed condom put you directly on a path to my door, you're saying."

"I mean I don't believe in fate, but."

Jacob was still trying to win this little game, trying not to laugh, although he never succeeded. "Well, I'm not aroused at all by this story. I don't know why you think that'd get to me."

"You love it."

"I do not, sir. I bid you good day."

Despite his anxieties, Ezra was stubborn and wilful, and in daily life he didn't like to be refused. With Jacob, though, the conflict delighted him. Instantly he was up from his subservient position, grabbing Jacob by his coat lapels and pulling him down, hands on his shoulders. It had taken time for Ezra to learn that he had this kind of freedom; he used to prefer the most explicit instructions from Jacob, careful as a minuet.

"Ask me. Ask for it."

Jacob moaned a little, yearning. "Babe, c'mon..."

"Yeah?"

"Just touch me, just touch me, please," whispered Jacob, a flood of surrender.

Ezra brought him back up with a touch, a virtuoso knocking his bow against the strings. This was what Jacob loved: when Ezra had the time and the space to get to know a subject, he learned every cubic millimeter of it. Once, he'd been a confused college dropout swallowing condoms due to an overactive startle reflex, and now he'd learned how to make Jacob weak in the knees.

Jacob had taught him.

"My boy," Jacob whispered aimlessly, pressed back against the side of the truck with his hands in Ezra's hair. Ezra's mobile, expressive mouth and chapped, bitten lips. "My boy."

Loose-limbed and sweaty, Jacob was working Ezra over with sensible tenderness, which was secretly the way Ezra loved to be touched. Fearlessly, without surprise or hesitation, and with patient expertise, as if Jacob were an electrician working on some dangerous piece of wiring.

—Am I ever...
—What?
—Like, too much. For you. Too much for you.
—No. You're exactly enough.

Maybe that was just pillow-talk; maybe they really were too much for each other. Sometimes it felt like that. But Jacob had promised himself that whatever happened, he wouldn't be the one who ran away. Not from this.

Outside the open doors of the truck, the aurora seemed to make a sound, which wasn't the wind. Like radio static, maybe, or something rustling in dry leaves, a whisper raising the hairs on the back of your neck. Neither close nor distant, crackling in the cold air. The frogs were singing in the marshes.

Afterward, lying with his head in Jacob's lap, Ezra disappeared mentally for a few minutes, watching the lights but not seeing them. His breathing was steady, without that factory-piston hiss that came with the seizures.

At last Ezra blinked and said, "I've read about that noise, the crackle in the sky."

"Is it—it can't be the aurora," said Jacob. "Right? Is something down here causing it?"

"Something up there. There's..." Ezra made one of his gestures at the invisible, his hands describing the shape of something no one else could see. "A layer of trapped heat in the atmosphere. Like a lid. Negative charge below, positive charge above. The geomagnetic storm of the aurora breaks through the lid and releases the charge. Crackle. Like static."

"Mm." Jacob was trying to remember all this so that he could tell the kids when they saw it. Ezra would have loved to ramble on about space weather and physics to his audience of half-interested grade schoolers, but he wasn't always around. Or aware. "Ezra?"

"Yeah?"

"Are we gonna be okay?"

It was a question that Ezra answered for a living and he had every right (and perhaps every reason) to refuse to answer. But then he nodded, turning his head in towards Jacob's hand, seeking his touch. "Yeah. Yes. I think so. I'll tell you more in the morning."