This is just my hopeless romantic side spilling onto a Word document.
A cold day brought him to me.
I heard the little bell jingle unimportantly, and I heard rummaging, but I didn't look up from my hands until a small cough came from across the counter. All I saw was a beat-up blue sweater and gold. Gold like the sort of fields you would see when driving through nowhere. Gold that wrapped around his head in spikes, messy and effortless and perfect. I saw small, strong hands wrapped around an old typewriter and he placed it in front of me and I followed his arms past his collarbones and around his lips and into his pink cheeks and across his nose and up into eyes that were blue, so so blue.
He blinked, and I took back the breath I hadn't realized I'd lost.
I pulled up the price for him and took his money from his hands so soft and small and remembered to breathe as I slowly slid the typewriter into a bag and handed it to him. His fingertips touched mine again and what is this why is he here why is there fire in my soul I leaned over the counter and kissed him on the edge of his perfect nose.
He blinked once more and he smiled, full and bright and so beautiful told me the typewriter was for all the letters he wrote to his sister.
I asked him where his sister lived.
He told me they share a room.
I grabbed a piece of paper from the table beside me, scribbled a note to my friend, and almost ran around the counter to pull this beautiful stranger from the corner antique shop and into the nearest diner.
"Roxas," he murmured.
"Axel."
Roxas smiled at the name such a smile and reached under the table, bringing up his new old typewriter, placing it delicately next to our basket of fries.
I asked him why he was using that now. "It's going to get dirty."
"You're inspiring me."
I smiled a half sort of smile and waited and watched as Roxas grabbed a napkin and unfolded it and slid it into the roller and began typing.
He was unsure at first, his fingers getting used to pressure of the wonderfully simple keys and punching out a few test words. He got to the end of the line and the bell in the machine chimed and his face lit up like a firework.
"I got one that dings, fantastic."
I had a leftover smile on my face and I couldn't stop looking at him. The eyelashes that clumped together, the almost permanent crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the barely-there-just-barely freckles that dusted across his nose, the little button at the end, his soft lips and the tongue that peeked between them in concentration and I could almost see teeth, almost-white and straight and all I wanted to do was –
"Done," the boy exclaimed and I leaned back without remembering ever leaning forward and Roxas pulled out his poem and flipped it around on the table. "Read it."
It was short, written in lines in the one and only font a typewriter could type, faded in all the right places making even the smallest words gorgeous:
Yours is a heart
Large and lovely and new
That I would like to hold
Would you give me the chance to
I found out in that booth on that cold autumn day that Roxas tasted like summer and long days and the ocean.
Weeks later, the air was colder and Roxas was against me and there were blankets covering us and blankets beneath us and blankets of snow beneath them as we had a frozen fireside picnic on a hill on the outskirts of the town.
"Why are we doing this again?" I wondered to him, holding his small frame to mine, feeling the curves of waist and his hips and his spine.
"Because I like fire. And I like you, and fire and you are often the same thing," he said simply. He always said the most extraordinary things in the easiest of ways that I spent most of the fall wondering if he was real.
"I'm fire?"
"Well, my fire, I suppose." He looked at me with the fire burning in his eyes and I was sure that he had his thoughts all mixed up. He was my fire.
I kissed a freckle on his collarbone and found that his skin tasted like branches and salt and the sun.
The warmer days made me realize I loved him.
February brought us to a movie, inside, away from the world, with his legs draped over mine, and our fingers fiddling with one another. Our eyes were sometimes on the screen and sometimes on each other and every now and again we would laugh and sometimes he would be towards the screen and I would still be towards him because he had a wonderful profile, with all the dips and curves and peaks of his nose and his lips and I saw the movie reflected in his blue oh so blue eyes but I saw something else there too and I wondered.
So I leaned over and my lips brushed his cheek, and I felt his mouth twitch up into a smile. He turned to me, that something-else absorbing the light of the movie.
He told me how stupid the main character was.
I agreed.
He told me how she was really a terrible lover to him.
I agreed.
He told how that if ever met someone like the boy in the film, he would make fake-homes in Ikea for as long as the boy would like and he would never wake up different.
I wanted to agree but I forgot how to speak.
He stared at me after that, his eyes so terribly blue how can they be so blue melding into mine until I felt like I was drowning.
We didn't move, the sounds of Summer and Tom and ending days so far from our ears.
The beginning of spring had me bent over Roxas my lovely beautiful Roxas my fingers on his hipbones and lips tracing an invisible map over his stomach.
I felt him breathe, and I saw his chest rise and my eyes followed along the contours of his body again, letting them take me on small trip until I stumbled over the bridge of his nose and found his eyes.
They were bright and dark and longing and still so fucking blue this isn't possible I felt his hand on the side of my face, brushing along my cheekbones. He pulled gently and brought me to him, and I kissed him and he kissed me and he tasted like home and waking up to the sun and bedsheets and snow and the ocean and everything. I broke away minutely, my lips still on his, noses touching, and I met his eyes and tried not to drown again.
"I love you."
I felt more than heard him hum, and he brought our mouths together again for a small moment, a small wonderful moment, and pulled away again.
"I know." His eyes breathed as he whispered, and I felt every unsaid word poured into my soul.
I kissed him again, stronger and with more passion than I had ever kissed anyone, and I tried to memorize every inch of him: from his hipbones to his awkward bellybutton; from the insides of his knees to his spindly wrists; from the creases in his elbows to the freckles on his collarbones.
The words became a mantra as I left them all over his skin. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you. His breaths and gasps and every sound out of his mouth I easily deemed my new favorite.
I was kissing and smoothing and nuzzling the skin on his thighs when his sounds became almost breathless and I heard a tiny little sentence escape him.
"I want you."
I looked up, once more trailing along the lines of his naked form, and one more look into those eyes those eyes I will never tire of them and I was brought into him, I was lost in him, I was drowning in the utter beauty that was him. Roxas. I felt as if my heart would explode in my chest and I was amazed by the fact that it didn't.
When it was over, and I kissed his nose, I heard him laugh a soft sort of almost-laugh, and I decided that it was the loveliest sound I had ever heard.
The heat of the summer only aided to the fire already burning between us. Whenever I saw him, which was all the time it seemed, I couldn't describe it.
It was like someone had flipped a switch in my head that told me everytime our eyes met He's the one he is I promise you don't you even think about don't you dare let this one go.
Right after such a thought, he would reach for my hand and I would rub along the veins on the back of his hand, and sometimes I would pull him to the side of the sidewalk just so I could look at him cause I felt like I could never see enough of him and he would smile at me and kiss me and he tasted like Roxas. Wonderful, beautiful, amazing Roxas.
Why would I ever think of letting go?
But he would pull away a little too quickly sometimes, and blush, and continue our walk, his hand squeezing mine a little too hard and I would begin to wonder what was hiding in those beautiful blue blue eyes.
One day towards the end of the summer found us stumbling into his room, lips crashing and giggles escaping at just how silly we were being but I hadn't seen him in a whole day and how did he expect me to react?
We collapsed on his bed, and my eyes began their road trip along his features my favorite part but it was cut short when I spotted the not-so-new old typewriter thank goodness for that invention on his desk.
There was but one piece of paper on the roller, and there was only one line of words, but I couldn't read them.
I kissed him quickly, but slowly stood, his eyes following me as I tried to get to his desk without breaking this eye contact that I never got tired of.
As I turned to face the ancient thing, I heard him stand and I read words that I had never heard from the blonde's lips.
His arms wrapped around me and I felt his lips move against my back as he voiced the words on the page.
"I love you, too."
I grabbed him and held him with all my might because he was mine and I was his and he tasted like all the memories I had ever remembered and all my dreams and the ocean and peppermint and the fall and long days and picnics in the snow and movie nights and all that was alright in the world and home.
He was my fire.
My Roxas.
My everything.
~o~