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Translucent veins of rain drops on the windows cast shadows on Philip’s cheeks. Car pulled up by the side of the road two miles outside of Tivoli, the hushed patter of rain holds a subtle beat to the way they kiss. Lukas holds the full warmth of Philip’s lower lip between his and sighs into his mouth, his fingers carding lightly through his curls.
They are barely touching with Lukas reaching across the center console with his arm resting against the headrest of Philip’s seat and the other hand holding the side of his face. Philip sits turned towards him, a hand on his leg crossed across the seat, the other pressed flat against Lukas’ chest. They kiss in the listless pace of memory, the quiet of complete familiarity neither has to explain to the other. It’s not about desire nor a claim. It’s their bodies talking, saying what their hands and tongues and voices has long learned to say. They kiss and still, eyes closed, breathing each other in, brushing the tips of their noses against each other’s skin before they kiss again, heartbeats not frantic but heavy, aching with intimacy that doesn’t strip them of their clothes but levels down all their defenses. Behind the tinkering veil of rain falling around them and the undiluted gray of twilight mist, from the hair on their skin to the marrow of their bones, they only belong to one another.
Philip does this thing when they slowly pull away after a kiss, and Lukas always tries to open his eyes in time to catch it while Philip’s are still closed. Philip's head follows the pull of his lips like he is tranced, adam’s apple moving beneath pale skin as he swallows the last traces of him before his eyes flutter open, lashes so impossibly long Lukas sometimes thinks he must have dreamed him to life. He watches him, watches the way everything Philip feels blaze alight in the dark of his eyes and emotion twists wildly in his heart; love in such vastness he feels he is submerged two miles deep in the trenches of the Atlantic.
He loves him. He loves this.
Philip chuckles like he heard what he was thinking and it takes him too long to understand that he actually said that out loud. He grins at him.
“Every time you kiss me, you kiss me like it’s your first time,” Philip muses, amusement flickering in his face.
“That’s cause it feels like the first time every time,” Lukas returns without missing a beat. Philip raises his eyebrows, which shouldn’t be this impressive with him being only a few inches away from his face but somehow it is.
“Was your first time really that good?” he asks and Lukas curses himself for backing himself into a corner while the memory of it makes him flush up to his ears, which Philip, of course, notices right away.
“Ooooh, you have to tell me,” he laughs with mirth in his eyes, patting his chest with his hand.
“Nope.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Not happening.”
“You are blushing.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Oh yes, you are,” Philip says and if his lips weren’t pressing against the spot under his ear, Lukas would be able to object more heartily because all he manages is a deflating “No,” which Philip accepts as his victory right away and god damn it, it is.
He finds his eyes and Philip looks so giddy he almost forgives him, almost.
“I can’t believe you are making me talk about this. I never told anyone,” he laughs, shaking his head.
“Why not? Is it embarrassing?”
“Kind of.”
“Aww, were you really bad?”
“Hell no. I’m a great kisser.”
“Then why?”
“I uh… didn’t see it coming.”
“Oh my god, now you really have to tell me.”
Lukas shakes his head again and looks up at the rain speckled sunroof.
“Well… I was in middle school,” he begins and Philip is already laughing so he sneaks a hand under his sweatshirt and lightly pinches where he knows he is most ticklish. There is a squeak and all that accomplishes, every single time, is Lukas kissing him breathless so it is only a couple of minutes later that Philip coughs apologetically and solemnly says “I’m sorry, you were in middle school.”
“So,” Lukas stares at him warningly to which Philip raises both hands in mock surrender and continues. “So I was in middle school and there was this girl that was in the same class with me. Her family used to live close to my dad’s ranch so we’d sometimes see each other but never really, hung out, you know? Anyway one day we have this field trip for science class. We were all like, divided in groups and were gonna launch rockets we had made and she was in my group. So we go to this field out the Bay and everyone is freaking out cause we are outside and we are gonna launch fricking rockets. Then the groups take turns launching and right when it was our turn she accidentally spills her apple juice on the thread of the igniter. The other kids in my group start giving her shit and she is crying so I tell her it wasn’t her fault and we can just wait till it dries and try it again.”
“Aww.”
“She looks at me funny for a second and then runs away crying harder than before. The other two are laughing at this point so I just throw the igniter and bottle of fuel at their feet and go after her.”
“Such a gentleman.”
“Shut up.”
“No, I mean it. That’s really sweet of you.”
“Guess I’m just a really sweet guy.”
Philip gives him one of his sunrise smiles that makes Lukas feel like he has never seen people smile before, and says “Yes, you are.”
Lukas stares at him transfixed before he remembers he was telling a story and it takes him even longer to remember where he was at.
“So uh... yeah, she runs away and I go after her. She is crouched under this tree and I stand there like a loser and I am like ‘hey it’s ok. Nothing’s ruined. Don’t listen to those two. They are assholes anyway’ and she just stands up all of a sudden, grabs me and kisses me.”
“Oh wow,” Philip manages before failing to keep his laughter in check and starts shaking against him.
“I mean I didn’t even understand what was going on! She did that and then ran away again!” Lukas laughs with him, eyes fixed at the top of his head bent over laughing, “I definitely didn’t follow her the second time.”
“Oh my god I’m so sorry, Lukas. That’s almost traumatizing.”
“Nah, I think I turned out okay.”
“Pfffft, you think?”
“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Lukas, you turned out gay.”
“Oh my God, is that why?!”
Philip rests his head against his seat and laughs so hard there are tears in his eyes and Lukas just watches him with a grin of his own. When Philip Shea smiles the world smiles with him and there is no way to stop that from happening. He leans in and presses his lips to his temple and repeats again.
“I think I turned out okay.”
Philip’s laugh quiets in the gaze they share and then he is running his fingers along Lukas’ jaw, his dark eyes following the path of his touch before tilting his head to give him a mind-numbingly deep kiss. It takes all Lukas has to not pull him into his lap and kiss the air out of him.
When Philip softly hums his appreciation into his ear, Lukas nudges him with the tip of his nose.
“What about you?”
“Mmm?”
“I told you mine, what was your first kiss like?”
Philip stills where he is nestled against him, tilts his head down with forehead pressed against his neck and speaks into the space between their chests.
“It wasn’t cute like yours.”
Lukas keeps his lips in his hair while running his hands across the length of his arms, he pauses when a thought occurs to him.
“Dude, it wasn’t… I wasn’t your first, right?”
At that Philip sits up to find his gaze.
“No, what? No.”
He stares at him until Lukas almost tells him it doesn’t matter, that he doesn’t need to talk about it. Philip looks down at his hands, half covered with his sleeves pulled down into his palms.
“It wasn’t you.”
In the pitter patter of the rain’s drizzling, the tail end of his words hang incomplete. Lukas can almost swear he meant to say ‘I wish it was,’ and it makes him regret asking the question at all. He brushes the knuckles of his hand against his cheek, letting his thumb caress against his skin.
“Was it bad?”
Philip looks up outside the front window and slowly shakes his head.
“No, not really. It was just… It meant nothing.”
Lukas reaches with his other hand to hold his, fingers curling around Philip’s thumb, caressing gently.
“Was it... uh… was it with a guy?”
Philip turns his gaze to him.
“Well, yeah. I’ve never even tried being into girls.”
“I know, I just… I thought maybe you’d-“
“No.”
Lukas frowns, searching his gaze.
“Did he…”
Philip shakes his head, tightening his hold on his hand.
“No it wasn’t like that. He didn’t force it on me.”
“Okay.”
A shrug.
“I used to get bullied at school. People would call me names and there were pranks and shit. I didn’t care. I mostly just stayed away from everyone else. There was an incident in the cafeteria, this one guy tried to trip me, you’d hate him, Jason really reminds me of him, so I dumped my tray on top of his head and left. He called me a ‘faggot’ and I didn’t stop to deny it.”
Lukas decides he hates center consoles for not letting him hold Philip closer. His thumb rubs circles against the inside of his wrist and he pulls him in with a hand in his hair, burying his lips there as he listens to him talk.
“After school this guy a year older than me catches up to me by the fences and asks if what they say about it me is true. I told him it wasn’t any of his business and he asks if we could hang out.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah. That’s what I said too. Anyway we hung out three times. Nothing big, just drinks at diners away from school and watched an action flick. We mostly talked about random stuff. He was stupid about video games. And all that time he never… tried anything.” Philip speaks looking down at their knotted hands.
“Like, he didn’t even try to hold my hand or anything. At school, he pretended he didn’t know me and I was cool with it, I didn’t like hanging out with anyone at school anyway and he was just. I don’t know. I’m not even sure I liked him.”
“So about two weeks after we last hung out, he is waiting outside the school for me and pulls me away to this corner by the football field’s bathrooms and says he can’t keep hanging out with me, that he doesn’t want people knowing or thinking he is… like me.”
Lukas keeps quiet. His whole body burns with the memories of every time he had made his eyes look away from Philip in the hallways, every time his hands had pushed him away when he had tried to talk to him, when his own mouth had thrown the same words at him. He turns his head in Philip’s hair, hiding his face away, holding him tighter.
He owes it to Philip to listen to him to the end.
“I told him it was fine. He could do whatever he wanted. He stepped closer and held me by the shoulders and it was like he was asking and I just... let him.”
“… Why?”
Philip shrugs.
“I guess, I just felt like that would be the only way someone would ever kiss me.”
Lukas feels his heart break open.
“It wasn’t even for me, you know,” Philip explains. “He just wanted to know what it felt like before he went back to pretending he wasn’t gay. It was for him.”
“I’m sorry.”
Philip raises his head to find his eyes and when he does, it takes him less than a second before he is cupping his face, brows furrowed, voice alarmed.
“Lukas, it wasn’t… It wasn’t like that. Nothing like you and me. I didn’t… He didn’t mean anything to me.”
“But I’ve done the same thing.”
“No. You didn’t. When you kissed me in that cabin it wasn’t for you. That was for me. And every kiss after that, it was for me. I’ve never felt like I was a thing you experimented with.”
“You never were,” Lukas hates that his voice is on the verge of breaking but he needs Philip to understand so badly he can hardly breathe around it.
“The things you have done for me,” Philip swallows and Lukas knows he only does that when he is on the verge of tears himself so he burrows closer to him, forehead against his, both hands on his face, nuzzling. Showing him that if he falls apart, he’ll be there to catch and put together every little piece of him.
“You make me feel like I’m worth everything, Lukas. I used to think I wasn’t even worth a kiss, you make me feel like kissing me is worth everything.”
“Philip," he sighs, his voice quavering. "It is.”
And then he shows him, holds his face like his precious downfall, breathes the entire expanse of his love into his mouth, kissing him slow like the silent approach of night, tender like the raindrops falling around them. He kisses him like he is the life in his lungs, the blood in his veins, the warmth across his skin and every conscious thought ricocheting in the hallways of his mind. He holds him in his hands, against his lips like he never knew how to breathe without him, kisses him like he never existed before him and when he pulls away to let him draw in a trembling breath, he presses his lips to his forehead, his temple, his hair, pulling him tight into his arms.
Philip shivers against him, not with cold, Lukas knows, but with the aftershocks of feeling whirling inside him. He holds the side of Lukas’ neck and pulls his head down to his lips and through a kiss shattered with breathlessness, he whispers to him.
“I don’t care who kissed you first. I don’t care who kissed me first.”
His eyes burn with a wildfire no downpour could put out. Lukas looks at him like he can see all the way to the end of their truth, all the way to the end of their lives.
“I only care that you kiss me last,” Philip says.
“I will,” Lukas vows.