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Chase yawns, stretches. Blearily, his eyes travel to the other side of the queen bed, eyes falling onto the human-sized crinkle of sheets next to him, the lazily strewn aside blankets, and the sunlight fracturing through the window and shining a spotlight onto the empty spot next to him. Chase huffs, groans, pulling the sheets to his face in a meaningless battle against the morning that he’s sure to lose in a few minutes anyway.
He rolls out of bed with a last, defiant guttural sound and grabs the glass of water on his nightstand, glancing to make sure there’s no bugs in it, and chugs it.
He’s not really any more awake when he gets to the bathroom, still stuck in a half-awake, half-asleep state that transports him into momentary dreamlands and then right back to his place. His hands rest on the doorknob to open it, but the rushing of water from the other side of the door makes him drop his hand.
He sits on the bed, tempted to go back to sleep but too awake to do so. He watches the door aimlessly, focussed on the markings of wood that emerge despite the coating of cream paint over it. His heart thunders underneath his ribs, for some totally inexplicable reason, for some reason that certainly was not behind the bathroom door whatsoever. Totally. Certainly.
He picks up his phone, glance at the time, 7:38, diluted in favour of his lockscreen: a photo of Buddy acquiring his first taste of chocolate ice cream, a sort of blurry, semi-still photo of him that captured the moonlight on his skin, how it trembled against the blue of his eyes, wide in fascination. He remembers this night all too well, the two of them in puffer jackets (Chase’s a prominent red, Buddy’s a midnight blue), laughing and watching their breaths crystallize in front of them. Then, an ice cream truck. An absolutely absurd decision for ten in the night in the winter. Chase still remembers the faint flavour of chocolate after he’d pulled Buddy into a kiss.
Chase’s eyes trace the phonescreen as if it’s Buddy’s face, shuddering in the natural cold of the morning, cursing his decision to wear shorts in the winter time. His hands graze the flat lockscreen, the 2D picture of Buddy that didn’t do him justice, not really. He keeps the photo anyway, not as solely as a reminder of Buddy but more so in the reminder that Buddy is living. Breathing. Alive.
Chase’s eyes linger, not on the door, but on the precipice of a happy ending, the key to which lies behind it.
It’s then that the rushing water shuts off, and he hears the faint shuffling of feet on the bathroom tile. A few minutes of silence later, and Buddy emerges wearing sweats and a red hoodie—yes, that one—but these things are not interesting nor important at all. It is neither of these things that make Chase nearly fall out of bed in a gasp.
“What? What is it?” Buddy rushes next to Chase to block his fall, concerning flickering in and out of his pale blue eyes.
“You—you—” Chase splutters, staring up at Buddy, jaw practically hanging from the floor. “You—”
“I’m a bit more worried about you, Chase,” Buddy tilts his head to the side, and his eyebrows knit. Just a small bit.
“Your—your hair!” Chase exclaims. “It’s curly!”
Buddy hands touch his hair adorably, twirling some of the damp pieces between his fingers, the pieces that are just long enough. “It’s really more wavy.”
Chase blinks, staring at Buddy as if he’s got a halo. “It’s curly.” From his own vision, Chase sees his hands rest on Buddy’s hair, running them through it. The knots, the tangles that come apart in Chase’s fingers, the kinds that are common for this hair type.
“Yes, love, I believe you’ve mentioned that. More times than it’s necessary.” Buddy’s lips furl in a—well, not quite a smile, but perhaps like it could have been.
“It’s curly,” Chase repeats with wonder, and this time, both of his hands are Buddy’s head, combing through it rhythmically, soaking in the sensation of his frosty fingers on Buddy’s warm scalp. Buddy groans at first, then whines, then lets out a defeated sigh. In a manner so slow and stealthy that Chase almost would not have noticed, Buddy leans forward—forward toward Chase, and Chase finds himself accommodating for Buddy’s head upon his shoulder. He smiles, blushes, tries to think about how freakin’ unfair it is for someone to be that pretty and about how entirely awesome it is to be dating the guy in question.
One of Chase’s hands unravels from Buddy’s hair, trailing down Buddy’s face and neck and lifts chin up, gently, so as to face him. Buddy’s eyes are half-lidded, accentuating his down-turned eyes and the natural eyebags that accompany them. “Wha’?”
“I’ve never seen your hair curly before,” Chase hums. The scent of Buddy’s shampoo penetrates his nose—strawberry, blueberry just berry in general. He remembers Buddy picking it out. The drive to the grocery store, Buddy’s pure horror and morbid curiosity of how their capitalist world managed to create the ultra-convenient monstrosity of the supermarket. Chase had remembered grabbing the cheapest shampoo on the shelf, but Buddy had been so, so enamoured by the fruit-flavoured shampoos that Chase had decided fuck budgets anyway.
“Another astute observation,” Buddy snarks, and of course the consequence of this, decided by the universe, is a playful slap on his boyfriend’s shoulder, eliciting a gruff from him.
“Oh, shut it,” Chase mumbles, pressing a kiss to Buddy’s forehead. “You suck.”
“Gotta do better than that,” Buddy looks up at him—properly. The smug look in his eyes, the dubious smirk, the stupidly high raised eyebrow, the works. “C’mon, you had some killer insults, you know, back in the day.”
“That was, maybe like, three months ago,” Chase huffs. “And I’m not out. They’re being stored.”
“Stored? Heavens, what in?” Buddy lures him with the insult but Chase smirks, says ha-ha to himself and doesn’t oblige.”
Chase glances beyond Buddy, perhaps instinctively, to the nightstand. The empty glass of water from earlier sits, next to Buddy’s glasses, next to an empty jar of Narratonin. Chase isn’t sure why he kept it. There hadn't been a discussion between him and Buddy, but when it came time to pack their stuff (well, just Chase’s really), Chase had found himself holding the empty jar, and Buddy had been staring at him longingly and then it had been wrapped in bubble-wrap and filed away. That was that. And it hadn’t been a discussion when Chase had placed the jar on their nightstand, next to a framed photo of the two of them, next to a framed photo of Chase’s parents. That was that.
“Chase?” Buddy remark snaps Chase out of his trance.
“Hm? Oh yeah!” Chase slaps his hands down on Buddy’s shoulder, staring at him seriously, displacing Buddy from his place on Chase’s shoulder. “You still haven’t explained how come I’ve never seen your hair curly.”
Buddy snorts. “Does that need an explanation? I thought the hair iron was a sufficient explanation.”
“Hair iron?” Chase blinks. “You’ve been using the—you know how to—you know what a hair iron is?”
“I’m Victorian, Chase, not an idiot,” Buddy rolls his eyes, rubs his temples but the action carries only mirth in them, no contempt.
“So you’re telling me you didn’t burn yourself using the hair iron,” Chase squints at his boyfriend, focusing on the pale blue of his eyes, and how the sunlight always seems to make them look milky.
“I’m saying that eventually I found success in that tool,” Buddy proclaims, indignantly. “Which, is, by the way, looks as though it’s some sort of torture device.”
“You could’ve asked me to show you,” it’s Chase’s turns to roll his eyes. “I could’ve helped you avoid whatever disaster I presume you got into.”
“I do not get into disasters, Chase Hollow—I simply end up in them.”
“Uh-uh. Total coincidence.”
Chase lets go of Buddy’s shoulders, and just when he’s about to accept his fate of never knowing why Buddy seems to obsessively straighten his hair.
“I just never thought it looked good,” Buddy shrugs, sort of casually, sort of forced. “Just ended up kind of a rat’s nest. Frizzy, you could say.”
Chase ruffles Buddy’s hair, making the mess of the now nearly-dry raven locks that seem to lose a small portion of its length every minute. “Buddy, with all the love in the world, you are so incredibly, hopelessly wrong. The hair is beautiful. Adorable, even.”
Buddy gives Chase a look. “You would say that to me if I dyed my hair pink.”
“Well now that you mention it…” Chase grins. “But seriously. The wavy hair looks nice and it…it feels you.”
Chase’s hands find themselves in Buddy’s hair again, sifting through the strands of hair slowly, with reverence, as if the sight of it was something to be venerated which, to be fair, wouldn’t be far from the truth. Buddy stares at Chase with these wide, enchanting eyes that’s rare for him. An ephemeral, almost terminal kind of vulnerability that Chase had seen on his boyfriend once, maybe twice. Buddy’s lips part, and he whispers. “It does.”
And the conversation dissipates there, overtaken by a general wintery tiredness that leaves them unwilling to move for as long as possible. But over the next few weeks, Chase notices that the hair iron has found a home in the back of his drawer, and that Buddy’s curls seems to permanently peak through his midnight hoodie; like shrubbery breaking through a thick, penultimate layer of permafrost.