Venice

June 2024

Orange. The Italian tangerine sun worked its way through thin hotel room curtains and drenched everything it could reach in a deep warmth: the floor, the walls, the furniture. A loving embrace, yet relentless, bringing a sharp sting to Phil's ice-blue eyes the second he opened them even slightly.
He took a moment to appreciate the view out of their way-too-expensive-for-two-weeks hotel room: glistening blue water, not one cloud in sight, and he could tell just by looking at the concrete sidewalks that they were boiling hot, even at this time of day.
A feeling of heaviness settled on his chest at the sight. The kind of heavy that only happiness, gratitude even, for the beauty of this place, this day, this life, could bring. Before he could be suffocated by an endless inflow of thoughts, a soft rustle of light bedsheets jerked him back into reality.

"Hmm... morning."

He smiled at the sound and sight of the person next to him, brown hair peeking out from under the covers as he pulled them back over his head. The smell of sleep, vanilla, home filled his nose, and he couldn't help but smile.

"Good morning," a soft chuckle escaped his lungs. "About time you woke up."
"I love you. I can't handle how much I love you. I think I might explode soon."

He didn't say that last part out loud. They did that a lot, bickering and teasing the other person and leaving the deeper, truer things unsaid. It pained Phil a little, thinking about how life isn't endless and they are not immortal. Death would catch up with them one day, and he would have to spend eternity sharing a casket with all the words he never said.

"We're on vacation, idiot, I'm not getting up at seven in the morning."
"I love you. I love you more than sharks love blood. I will find you again in every lifetime."

Daniel didn't say that part out loud either.

"Breakfast?"

"You already know the answer."

They got ready side by side, bodies, souls, and lives intertwined like they always were. Dan sometimes felt as though his life hadn't truly started until he met Phil. Eighteen years of waiting and enduring, so much endurance until he saw him for the first time. The reward of a lifetime.

Phil once said that being without Dan felt like he lost a limb when he went on tour and left him at home to fend for himself and the plants for weeks at a time. Dan made previously unheard-of amounts of fun of him for that comparison, but truthfully it made him feel less humiliated about how much he needed him too. How devastating it was to even consider the possibility of losing him.

They had hotel breakfast, and Dan tried every type of coffee on the menu, stacking the small round table in front of them with mug after mug and giving extensive reviews on every single one of them. By the time he was done, it took Phil both of his hands and all his patience to keep them from falling and shattering into a million pieces on the floor, but deep down he loved it; how the smallest of joys in life, just a single sip of an Italian macchiato, brought a spark to Daniel's coffee-grounds-colored eyes. His face was proof that God created man.

And Phil would take years off his life to see him like this every day; excited, at peace, happy. Not an ounce of the insurmountable sadness that had pained him so often in his life, robbing him of so many lattes and so many rays of sunshine. It just wasn't fair.

"Cadini del Brenton, please." Phil told the taxi driver they had ordered four days prior for this exact occasion, and Dan chuckled at his desperate attempt to correctly pronounce Italian words. To little success, in the end, everything he said just sounded charmingly northern.

Dan was against spending an entire day of their much-needed vacation just to go on a hike. On top of that, the price of the taxi sent him on a ten-minute tangent on capitalism and the exploitation of the working class that Phil just smiled away as he swiped his credit card. He, on the other hand, was dead set on going on this hike, pulling up pictures on his laptop of Lake Mis, shoving the display into his boyfriend's face, and gushing about cold waterfalls in hopes that his enthusiasm might be contagious.