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There were a million ways to learn a thing, Phil knew.
In school he’d learned through books, hand cramping around a pen, ink smearing across wrinkled paper, fingers learning to search for the keys of his computer with more and more precision over time. Phil adapted in school, blending just enough to get through. He’d learned who and how to look at people in order to fly under the radar, to be safe.
While at Uni and then in the last few years Phil had learned ways in which he was made for creative endeavors; planning, making, editing videos and sketches. All of his oddities, quirkiness, humor: he’d found a home for them through trial and error on YouTube.
Phil learned about love by its absence, through a simple yearning for it, through failure, and finally, finally, through Dan.
It wasn’t as if Phil was old, but Dan wasn’t the only dramatic half of the whole they made; Phil’s drama just looked different. Reflecting on having finally found love at twenty-three was perhaps a touch dramatic. Many people waited longer. Many people would never be as lucky as he, to find someone to love the way he loved Dan. They were both still young. But the bigness of what his heart held for Dan was the answer to a question Phil had hardly known to ask. It filled every corner that had been lonely or had a lot of Phil-shaped love to give as well.
The night was warm. Not any warmer than it would be in Manchester maybe, but it was still thrilling warm. It was Italy-warm. It was “we’re on holiday together” warm.
On nights light this, eating out under the stars, table littered with drinks and so full from dinner, it was easy to forget PJ and Chris were even there. Inhibitions lowered, it was nothing for Phil to just watch Dan. The way Dan’s dimples fluttered in and out of view, the movement of his cheeks altering their appearance based on every emotion that wrote itself across Dan’s lovely tan skin.
Here and gone: a shy smile.
The smallest indent: something held back, perhaps anxiety or concern.
Lingering, lingering, lingering, bracketing but failing to contain Dan’s too-loud and just-right laugh.
Buzzed and disgustingly infatuated, Phil thought about beginnings.
He was only beginning to learn the language of Dan. He wanted years and years of this. To press his thumb or lips against those dimples, to lick the salt of sweat damp skin when they were tangled together, to take picture after picture of an unsuspecting Dan at his best and worst. Every day they were together, Phil was building mental and physical scrapbook of Dan’s face in movement. A dictionary of Dan’s emotions, made for and readable only by Phil.
He wanted to learn everything with a selfishness and ferocity he knew were probably just the heady rush of a honeymoon period.
Despite the need for discretion, he couldn’t help but tug Dan away from PJ and Chris as they walked back toward the hotel. Dan’s face was still, eyes wide and watchful. He went where Phil took him, let himself be pressed gently against a tree deep in shadows cast by streetlights at midnight.
Hidden behind the tree, raucous laughter trailing behind PJ and Chris they moved on without them, Phil held Dan’s face between his palms, thumbs surely placed where he knew those dimples would appear. Dan wasn’t smiling, nor was Phil.
But Phil knew. Knew that when he leaned in to kiss him, the smallest brush of his lips against Dan’s, his thumbs would linger right in those dimples as Dan’s smile would bloom.
Under the wide unblinking moon lighting the cobbled Italian street, Phil pressed another entry into the scrapbook dictionary of Dan: dimples in the moonlight, Italy nights with friends, three drinks in their blood, and the heady daring rush of a stolen kiss in public.