Love: telling someone about the things that keep you awake at night
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Zach loves.
When Cody huffs his breath out to blow the hair from his eyes, Zach feels it. When Cody is a lump under the covers and the only thing visibly Cody is the shock of sandy brown hair peeking out at the top, his heart constricts with it.
When Cody runs to Zach after a nightmare and cries into his chest, and Zach can barely make out what he's saying over the sobs in his voice, Zach wonders how he ever lived without this.
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Zach loves.
With his art, it's like...he doesn't really know how to explain it in words because he doesn't need words, but doesn't that say everything?
It's like, it just is.
When he's painting, this rush flows through him that's like the best drug because it just calms everything. There's no voices, no sound, no people when he's painting. It's just him and a brush, and the sound on his life gets turned down and all he can hear is the swish of the brush against the canvas.
When he's painting, he feels it. He feels everything, and it's the only time when he's not afraid to.
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Zach loves.
He feels it in the morning when he wakes up, when he rolls over and is met with warmth and softness and love.
He feels it when Shaun looks at him, the way his eyes travel over Zach's entire body, taking it all in even though Zach is sure that by now Shaun could read his body in total darkness.
Zach first felt it stirring on that day they went surfing. It was the way Shaun was so genuinely surprised that Zach liked his book. And the way Shaun was always so mesmerizing to watch while he surfed, the assured stance of his body on the board, the way he dove headfirst into everything the ocean threw at him. He'd always been aware of Shaun, how tall he was, his weird sense of humor that Zach never really understood. But, that day, he found himself noticing other things, too. Like the color of Shaun's eyes, blue, with sort of green specks, like the sea after a storm, and Zach remembers thinking that was a good way to describe Shaun. Calm, easy-going, warm. That was when he first felt it in motion. Something inside him was shifting, coursing itself through him, and it left him feeling...loved.
He felt it then, and he feels it now.
At night, when Shaun joins him in the shower after putting Cody to sleep, and he hugs him from behind, his firm chest pressed tightly against Zach's back, he feels it.
When Shaun is inside him, Zach's chest aches with it. Shaun's eyes never leave his, and he's there, always, touching a place so deep inside him, taking up residence in this place inside Zach he never knew existed, and he feels it so much in those moments that he thinks he's going to burst.
Zach feels it late at night, when he can't sleep and his thinking wakes Shaun up, because Shaun knows. He always knows. He always knows and he's always there, with a warm embrace and a soft kiss and a tender whisper of what's wrong. And it's times like that when Zach feels it the most, when Shaun's presence in his life, in his mind and his body and his fucking soul, are everything, and he wonders how he ever lived without this.
Zach loves.