The Face of Love (boyxboy short story)

The Face of Love

For anyone who has ever shown me the face of love,

thank you.

***

*The Face Of Love*

When Chase is seventeen, he meets love for the first time.

Love is a boy named Ivan, and they find each other on a bridge just outside of their tiny town. Ivan has his own demons to escape from, and they meet on the bridge often. When Ivan's father hits him and Chase's mother gets too drunk to stand, they find each other. They spend cloudy days on their bridge outside town, watching the river flow and the barren branches sway in the winter wind. They pass notes in class and steal kisses in Chase's bedroom when his mother is at work.

Curled together, whispering sweet nothings, they clasp hands to keep the world outside the walls they've built from tearing them apart like wreckage caught in a tide. Two ships with tangled anchors swirling in a typhoon, resisting the current together.

***

The next time love finds him Chase is twenty-one, and love bounces up to him on the street wearing the dark skin of a girl with wild hair and firework eyes. Her name is Macy, and together, they adventure. By day they explore the city he now calls home, the twisting, narrow streets and the hushed museums and the sunlit cafes. By night they explore each other, explode against each other like waves crashing onto rocks.

Ivan helped him escape the storm. Macy helps him become it.

***

When Chase is twenty-two, love reintroduces itself to him in a dusty, used book store on his birthday. Love says, Hi, I'm Gemma, and that is all it takes. She sits behind the counter of the shop smiling a smile that reminds him of a warm sweater, of coming home after a long day of work to fall into the comfort of your own bed.

Their love is one of the laughter shared between two friends, of a single soul shared between two bodies, the siblings neither of them had growing up.

***

Love crashes into him again at Gemma's wedding when he is twenty-four.

This time, love has broad shoulders and dark hair and light skin lined with stubble. Love looks like a model, and love is charming and cocky and all too infuriating. Love has changed its name to Jason. The lights of the ballroom are reflected in his eyes, and he asks Chase to dance.

Long after Gemma and her husband have left for their honeymoon and the guests have begun to filter out of the hall, Chase brings Jason back to his apartment.

The light from the streetlights outside shines through the thin white curtains, and in the dim illumination Chase breathes softly as Jason removes his pants to reveal a prosthetic leg. Chase kisses the spot where skin meets plastic, and Jason leans back with the sigh of relief of a man who has been rejected too many times.

It sounds like the start of something important.

***

This time, love does not find Chase: he goes looking for it.

In a shelter, from the other side of cage bars, love stares into his eyes. He sticks his fingers into the cage and love, a tiny gray tabby with round yellow eyes, rubs against his searching hand.

He bundles love in his coat to protect it from the harsh cold, and love purrs against his chest the entire walk home.

***