You Make My Life Complete (Boyxboy)

Chapter 11

Levi's POV

I knocked on Jay's door as I entered his house. "Hey, Jay! I'm here." I yelled. 

Today, Jay had asked me to come over for dinner, just the two of us since we hadn't had an evening to ourselves in a while. However, I didn't hear him call back, which immediately makes me nervous. 

"Jay?" I yell out again as I make my way to his room, only to find he's not there.

"Yeah!" He finally calls back, his voice muffled. "I'm in the basement, come on down."

"Jay? What is this?" I ask after descending the stairs. Jay comes out from behind a thick black curtain hanging from floor to ceiling that separated the basement in half.

"Come here," he says, popping his head out from behind the curtain. He smiles hugely, holding his hand out for me to take. I smiled back and gripped his hand, letting myself be led behind the curtain. 

As I moved past the thick black fabric, a small dimly lit room came into view. As my eyes adjusted to the dim red and yellow lighting, I could start to make out what was in front of me. In the corner to the left was a table set up with a large metal machine. Stacked along the wall to the right were large bottles of fluid and straight ahead was a table with what looked like trays of water set in a line. Strung to the wall above the table were photos, attached to a string by clothes pins.

"What is this?" I asked, still taking everything in. 

"It's my own dark room. Before my parents had me homeschooled, I took a couple classes on art photography and learned I absolutely loved photography. I learned how to develop film and print pictures but when my parents took me out of school, they took away all of my photography stuff and basically banned me from doing anything artistic. However, I managed to hide some rolls of film with pictures I'd already taken on them and was finally able to develop them today. I even printed a couple pictures." He said as I moved to look at the printed pictures he had hung on the wall already. "Thank god for Youtube videos or else I never would have been able to do everything." As I moved my eyes over the photos, I felt him come up behind me. 

"I took these when I was fourteen, the last summer before I was homeschooled. My parents would have this week of conferences about an hour north of here every summer and drag my sister and I along with them. When I was nine, I realized I could go explore on my own, caught a bus and it brought me here. From then on, I came here as much as I could for the time we were down here. I actually took these pictures on that beach we went to a few weeks ago." 

There were six different photos lined on the wall. The first three shots were of the scenery. A picture of the ocean was showcased to the far left, beside it a photo of the rocks that extended into the ocean taken from the side, and then a close-up of a shell. The next three, however, were photos of two boys surfing, obviously taken from afar. The first one, the two boys were sitting on their boards in the open water, talking to each other. The next, one of the boys had caught a wave and the other could be seen behind him, seemingly cheering him on. It was the last one that really caught my eye though. The last photo showcased the two boys, each with a surfboard under their arms. Though the photo was in black and white, you could see a weird spotted pattern of discoloration on one of the boys' swim trunks which sparked a memory in me. 

"I-I think that's me." I said quietly, pointing to the picture on the end.

"What?" Jay asked.

"You said you took this when you were fourteen?" I asked, not taking my eyes off of the photos. 

"Yeah, the summer after freshman year." Jay mumbled. 

"I think that was the first day my parents let Cam and I go to the beach by ourselves. We were twelve and I was wearing the pair of board shorts I had stained with paint when we were painting our skateboards a couple weeks earlier." I said, lifting my fingers to lightly graze the photo.