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There were pretty boys in the states. There were pretty boys in England. There were pretty boys in Italy. But it was in France that Sapnap found the prettiest boy.
He was all alone in a cafe, sitting in the corner with his cup held too close and dirty blond hair in his eyes. He was wearing glasses that framed his face to perfection, reading a book with a title Sapnap couldn’t discern from where he was standing by the counter and he looked so perfectly content.
He looked like all the things Sapnap couldn’t feel—like belonging. Like he was at home. Like it was all meant to be. Because Sapnap had gotten caught up in trying to find a place to stay, running around the states until his feet hurt bad enough to move across the ocean. And he’d been running around Europe since then, gripping tight to a travel visa bound to expire and hoping for the best of a world he couldn’t see all of.
But that boy, he looked like he knew what he was doing. Like he belonged in France, perhaps had always wanted to live here for as long as he could remember. A boy with a childhood dream came to fruition, a dream that now left him sitting in the corner of a little coffee shop.
And Sapnap’s newfound dream—because he had always been a lover of spontaneity—was to talk to him.
It couldn’t be too hard. Sapnap prided himself on an ability to talk to new people, social skills developed by means of practice. He’d been traveling on his own without a solid place to stay for the past two-odd years, he had to get good at asking for help and talking with strangers.
So he lacked all the hesitation he would’ve had at one point, waited for his coffee with more excitement than nerves and strolled over to that pretty boy the moment a cup was clutched in his hands. The still-nameless stranger was sitting alone at a booth for two, so when Sapnap got up to him and found the second seat empty—free of bags or feet or anything—he pointed to it with a gain of interest.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked, catching the intention of the boy sitting beneath him.
He looked startled for a moment. And he moved to set his book down, adjusting his glasses where they’d slipped down his nose with the quick shake of his head.
“No,” he muttered, voice just as sweet as he looked. “You can sit there.”
And his accent was distinctly American, not going completely unexpected—he did look pretty American as well—but still a little bit different to Sapnap’s ears, seeing how they’d grown accustomed to the French curve of people’s words.
But he sat down, setting his coffee down on the table and watching the boy mark his page in the book, looking up at him through those freshly cleaned lenses with a glowing interest in his eyes. He was smiling, friendly and polite, but the curve of his pink lips was a good look for him, teeth still hidden behind the expression.
“I’m Sapnap,” he introduced, returning the smile on the stranger’s face.
“Karl,” the boy returned, a name so simple yet so distinct and fitting. “Do you always sit with strangers?”
Sapnap laughed, loose and casual. He could’ve been surprised by how easy it felt to sit with Karl despite having only just learned his name, but it could barely be shocking when the boy looked so much like a charm. It made just as much sense as his name, and the fact that he was drinking his coffee so terribly slowly, and the fact that he was sitting in the back corner of a cafe in France with his nose buried deep in a book.
“I guess so,” Sapnap relented. “I’m never really in any one place for too long, so I don’t know anyone who isn’t really a stranger.”
Karl raised an eyebrow. “What’s that mean?”
At first, Sapnap only shrugged. Then he gave himself a moment to consider it, sipping his drink while he mulled over the words that could outline his thoughts in truth.
“Well—” he started, setting his cup down on the table, “like—I meet a lot of new people all the time, so if I’m not alone I’m with someone I just met.”
He shrugged again, this time without the same level of unsureness and instead replaced with nonchalance. “I don’t really have any friends,” he admitted, to which Karl sank back in his seat.
“Oh,” the boy whispered, eyes finding interest at the center of the table. “Well, you said—” he paused, furrowing his eyebrows. “Where are you from?”
Saying that Sapnap was surprised by the question would be incorrect, but he was caught off-guard. It was a question he’d expected to come up at some point—maybe even one he’d ask himself—but he hadn’t been expecting to hear it right then.
“Texas,” he answered simply. “You?”
“North Carolina.”
Karl took another sip from his coffee, and Sapnap hummed in acknowledgement to his answer. He nodded slowly, a small movement but present even still.
“Nice state,” he complimented, and the familiarity in his tone made Karl raise his eyebrows again.
“You’ve been?”
“Yup,” Sapnap responded. “Every one except Alaska and Hawaii.”
And it was true, he’d seen 48 states in his lifetime and planned to one day see the final two. It just wasn’t the direction he was headed in at the end of his statewide journey, when he was going east and those two states were out west, it would’ve been more inconvenient than it needed to be and he was already itching to get across the Atlantic.
So he put Alaska and Hawaii on his one day soon list, told himself that he’d visit them when he inevitably had to return to the states. Because even if there was a part of him that wished to run away from America and never look back, that place was still his home; and travel visas could only last him so long.
“Really?” Karl prodded, interrupting a thought process Sapnap didn’t even realize he’d gotten lost in.
“I spent like a year living out of an old pickup truck in the states,” he said casually, knocking fingers against his cup of coffee just for something to do with his hands. “Moved to Europe when I got tired of it, and I haven’t seen enough of this continent yet but it’s been a nice change.”
Karl hummed when he listened, sipping his drink slowly when the silence persisted between them. It was only for a few seconds, and the clatter of a shared space with other people kept it from feeling too painful, incoherent chatter and the occasional shout filling the room they were in.
Sapnap tried not to stare at Karl when he drank, tried not to notice the light fog the steam gave to his glasses lenses or the way his hands wrapped around at the cup. It made him feel fidgety, attempting to look like he wasn’t staring and perhaps overcompensating for a fear that didn’t even need to be there.
“Do you have a car out here?” Karl asked suddenly, catching Sapnap’s eye when he was busy feigning interest in the art behind his head.
“Yeah,” he said breathily. “Sold my truck back in Boston and bought a used Volkswagen when I moved out here.”
Those stormy eyes narrowed at him even if just for a moment, nails clicking against the sides of a cup full of coffee when Sapnap furrowed his brows.
“I’m envious,” Karl admitted, to which Sapnap laughed.
“Of what?” he asked with a chuckle. “My beat-up old car?”
“No,” Karl said quite matter-of-factly, “of your lifestyle.”
Sapnap laughed in a disguise for disbelief, shaking his head slowly. He took another sip of his coffee to fill the space between them, speaking when he’d only just barely brought the cup off his lips.
“Nonsense,” he argued. “Tell me about yours.”
Karl hummed, the low sound of it seeming to carry a feeling of thoughtfulness when it spilled out into the air. He adjusted his glasses again, pale fingers fiddling with a wire frame, and Sapnap could only pretend he wasn’t wrapped up in every way that pretty boy moved.
“Well, I live in France,” he started. “I have since I finished school,” laughter peeled from his lips, “and ‘finished’ is a word I use lightly, because I dropped out.”
Sapnap laughed a little, too, but not as hard as he had to. He didn’t go to college at all, so he could barely relate to any of it, but he asked more questions anyway because he wanted to know more about Karl.
“Where’d you go?”
“Some community college back in my hometown,” Karl stated, a bored sense to his tone when he spoke in flat notes. “I thought I was gonna stick around with the same people and keep up all the same things, but everyone moved away and I was left there all alone, so I got out.”
Sapnap nodded, perhaps imagining it. It was vastly different from the path he’d taken after high school, running off in that old pickup truck almost as soon as he graduated and trying to make something of himself without much money in his pocket. It was a disappointment to his parents when he refused to apply for college, a disappointment to his parents when he ran away to random places.
He never had a plan for his life, even when people wanted him to. And he never pretended to care about those things, never bought into the appeal of college or sent in an application just to be a people-pleaser. He did as he pleased, which was not of the enjoyment of others, and he abandoned high school friends in favor of the open road and found solace in strangers and all the people he hadn’t met yet.
People like Karl. Who, even if his life had been incredibly different from Sapnap’s, still felt like someone similar to his own close-held ideals. It was a weird feeling. Sapnap decided that he liked it.
“Glad you got out?” he asked, a question that felt strange on his tongue, but really, he just wanted to know more about the boy he spoke to.
“That’s an understatement,” Karl said with a laugh, and Sapnap laughed, too.
“Well, I’m glad too,” he said in earnest, even if he couldn’t know the half of all the reasons why. “I wouldn’t have met you if you were still back in North Carolina.”
Karl seemed to think about that for a moment, face etching deeper in wonderment when his hands were wrapped around that piping-hot cup. But he settled on agreement, spoken in light and air and underlying awe, because nothing felt quite as real as it was when they were in a situation like this one.
“I guess you’re right,” he said, not much louder than a whisper, and Sapnap smiled with hidden teeth at the shine in his eyes.
He was right. If Karl had stuck around in North Carolina and finished community college, if all his friends had stayed behind with him and given him a reason to remain, then they wouldn’t be sitting here, in the far back corner of a coffee shop in France, because Karl wouldn’t be in France at all.
It wasn’t quite the butterfly effect—dropping out of college was too big of a decision to be equated to the flap of butterfly wings—but it was something adjacent. Cause and effect, the matter that things would be different if Karl had made smaller choices, and a reason for Sapnap to defend spontaneity into the soil-ridden ground.
Because spur of the moment decisions made for times like this. He quite liked this.
“But what have you been up to in France?” he wondered aloud, dragging Karl’s attention back to his face when he waited patiently for the inevitable answer.
“Writing,” Karl supplied. “Learning French. Just, keeping on.”
There was a moment where he seemed to think, lips pursing and voice pausing when he wasn’t sure what to say. His eyes practically lit up when he found the words for it.
“I work at a bookstore that no one ever comes to,” he laughed quietly again, “so I sit behind the counter and read all the old books until the dust stings my eyes.”
He stared down into the swirl of his coffee, two hands wrapped around the still-warm cup when he did. And Sapnap smiled, smiled at the simplicity of it all and the way he seemed to love all the things he looked like he did.
French. Old books. Writing. Karl looked as he was, and Sapnap hadn’t found a way to say that about everyone he met. (And he’d met a lot of people).
“You’re still better off than me,” he tried. “I jump around doing odd-jobs for gas money.”
Karl raised an eyebrow. “Like, house-sitting and stuff?”
“Basically, yeah,” Sapnap agreed. “I sold weed in the states it was legal back in America, met a lot of weird people and smoked with a lot of them, too, but I don’t do that as much anymore.”
Karl giggled a bit, perhaps imagining all the things Sapnap said. It made Sapnap grin, meet Karl’s eyes across the table and sip his coffee slowly when neither of them spoke for a moment.
“No?” Karl prodded, to which Sapnap shook his head.
“Nah.” He set his drink back down on the table. “Still have some money left over from it, though.”
Quiet overtook them again. Quiet like comfort, like the libraries Sapnap spent time in as a kid, like his pickup when he was too distant for a radio station and his phone was sitting dead in his center console.
It was known despite feeling unfamiliar. And they sat across from each other with both too much and not enough regard for each other, watching milk and coffee stir in their already-mixed state and studying the woodgrain of the table they sat at.
Karl was the first to speak again. And he spoke quietly, like there was fear in his throat, but he said all the things he wished to say anyways.
“I bet you have a lot of stories.”
Sapnap huffed out a laugh, raising his gaze to meet Karl’s once more. “Probably not many more than you.”
“I doubt it,” Karl deflected. “My life’s pretty boring. It’s just books and words and buying new glasses when these ones bend the wrong way.”
“Stories don’t have to be true, Karl,” Sapnap proposed in argument. And he lifted a hand to gesture in Karl’s direction, two fingers pointing at his chest across the table. “I thought you said you wrote.”
“I do, but writing about some made-up fighter pilots in World War I isn’t the same as driving around a country for a year meeting new faces.”
Sapnap frowned. “It doesn’t have to be the same to be equal.”
Another laugh tumbled from Karl’s lips, disbelieving and airy. Sapnap smiled with attempted reassurance as Karl was shaking his head.
“You’re weird,” he jabbed.
Sapnap only raised an eyebrow. “And?”
Karl did not, however, elaborate. He only changed the topic, spinning the conversation around like a top on hardwood until Sapnap nearly got whiplash.
“Tell me a story,” he requested simply, and it caught Sapnap off-guard.
But he tried not to show how startled he was. Only cleared his throat softly, took another sip of coffee in an attempt to ground himself, and looked at Karl curiously.
“About?”
Karl shrugged. “Anything.”
Sapnap thought for a moment. Maybe Karl was right, maybe he did have a lot of stories to tell, because he was having trouble picking one when he wracked his brain in search of something to say.
48 states and a whole lot of memories, 6 countries and a whole lot of strangers. He took another sip of coffee when it was cooling against his tongue, gave too much thought on how to start something before he finally opened his mouth.
“Okay,” he huffed, setting his cup down with a quiet sound. “Back when I was selling shit in the states, I met this guy who knew one of my regulars, and like,” Sapnap paused to take a breath, realizing his story made no sense.
He sighed. Could he start again from the beginning? To an extent, yes.
“I was in Colorado,” he attempted again, “and I’d been sticking around the same place for a bit to earn some more money doing some minimum wage job, doesn’t matter what. Probably waiting tables or some shit. But I had this girl who would buy from me a lot, and she was nice and funny and this story’s not about her,” he laughed, “it’s about her friend.
“Her friend was this guy, y’know, long hair and no shoes, that whole thing. He really looked like if you pulled up your phone and looked up the word ’hippie’ like,” another peel of laughter escaped him, “I swear he wasn’t real.
“First time he bought from me he was all ’oh, I know Anna, she told me that you sell and I wanted to roll some joints with you,’ and I went, cool, yeah, we can smoke, as long as you pay for all the weed and papers and shit. So we did, we sat in the back of my pickup and smoked looking out at the mountains.
“I had parked on, like, this cliff, and we had to crawl out my back window to get in the truck bed we were so close to the edge, but we could dangle our feet off the edge and just, smoke. It was really cool, and he was pretty cool, too. It was the only time I’d ever met him, and I don’t even remember his name, but I don’t think I’ll forget that guy anytime soon.”
There was another pause between them. Karl was nodding slowly, eyes downcast on the table between them, like he was still processing all the words Sapnap had said.
To be fair, he’d spoken quite a bit.
“Some people are just like that,” Karl said finally. “Memorable.”
Sapnap grinned. “Couldn’t agree more.”
An unspoken implication sat beneath the curve of his words. It had to do with impossibility, and how difficult he thought it would be to forget Karl.
He didn’t say anything. And if Karl could feel the same silence, he didn’t say anything, either.
“I like the way you tell stories,” he said instead, and it was earnest through every sense.
Even still, Sapnap struggled to believe him. “Yeah?”
“It’s nice,” Karl said as emphasis, like reassurance dressed in compliments. “I could get lost in it.”
Sapnap wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to that; so he didn’t. He only felt his face flush and looked down at the table, stifling a laugh when he felt too embarrassed and letting the silence take hold of both of them again.
It hadn’t yet lost any of the comfort it had before, quiet yet heavy and warm in all the right places. Sapnap was the one to pierce through the quiet this time, bringing a request of his own to the space between them and refusing to hesitate when he spoke.
“Well, you tell me a story,” he requested. “Doesn’t have to be true.”
Karl seemed a bit startled, biting his lip when his eyes went wide in register. But he looked to be thinking about it, perhaps in all the same ways Sapnap had earlier, without sureness on what story to tell or maybe even hung up on the end of Sapnap’s sentence.
Sapnap couldn’t help but wonder which he would settle on: truth or fiction. Only time would tell, really, because Karl didn’t include a warning as to which one he’d chosen before he started to speak.
“Alright, um, how about this one,” he began, shifting slightly in his seat before he really got into his words. “It’s a time, when… when the world feels like it’s ending. Not in the war kind of way, or the apocalypse kind of way, just… the end.
“But maybe that’s exactly what everyone needs right then, is an escape. A sure one. Where no one sees the other side of something, and we’re all standing alone on different beaches in front of the same oceans and thinking the exact same thing about life. That it’s over, and that the sky is too bright and too dark, and that we’ve never seen so many stars before because the universe decided to be kind to us on the last night.
“And there’s a boy, he’s on the beach all alone, standing on the rocks. Maybe it’s me,” Karl laughed a bit, “yeah, it’s me, and I’m standing alone on the rocks looking at the stars, and I’m trying not to find disappointment in all the things I did and didn’t do just because it’s the end of them all.
“Then there’s someone behind me, and I don’t know him but I do, and maybe we’ve met before somewhere else and talked about things that don’t matter. He looks a lot like you, I think, and maybe he is you. Yeah, you know what? It’s you, and we spend the end of the world together.
“Like, I stand next to you, and maybe I think about holding your hand because it’s the end and maybe I chicken out because it’s you. But we’re there, together and all that, and nothing hurts at the end because it’s beautiful, I think. To me, it is.”
For a bit, the only thing Sapnap could do was blink. It felt like a lot to process—maybe even too much to process—and it was safe to say that it was fiction. He’d figured that much out before Karl got too far, but it was a type of false story that he hadn’t been expecting until it was already in his face, presented to him with a weight that felt foreign in his hands but he held it even still.
He stared at Karl for another moment. There was a look of worry that had begun to assert itself on the boy’s face, and Sapnap wanted to do away with that.
“That’s…” he started, hoping the awe in his voice felt as loud to Karl as it did to him, “heavy.”
Karl laughed, more nervous than anything. And he shrugged, too, though the fear on his face had begun to dissipate, even if only just a little.
“A bit,” he agreed. “The only book I ever finished writing was something like that, about the end of the world.”
Sapnap raised an eyebrow, leaning forward in his curiosity. “Was it?”
“There’s inevitability in death,” Karl explained, “but maybe it feels different when you know that it’s coming.”
“Heavy,” Sapnap repeated, and Karl laughed with aching nerves again.
“I guess so,” he admitted, though there was a reluctance that persisted in his voice through those words.
“Is that book published?” Sapnap asked, and it wasn’t condescending, only earnest, because he genuinely wanted to know the answer.
“No, I’m still editing it. Hopefully one day, though.”
“Yeah. Hopefully,” Sapnap said in breath. “I’d love to read it, when it’s published.”
“I’ll get a copy to you, wherever you are,” Karl said with a smile. “Promise.”
“Yeah?”
The dirty blond nodded. “Yeah.”
It was quiet for the umpteenth time. Sapnap took the last sip of his coffee, setting the empty cup down on the table the same way he had when it was full. And he noticed that Karl’s cup was reaching its bottom as well, so he asked a question that tasted bitter because he didn’t want to know the truth.
“Do you have somewhere to be?”
Karl glanced at the time, shrugging despite the need in his eyes. “Not urgently.”
Sapnap narrowed his gaze accusingly. “Do you have work?”
Biting his lip, Karl found the answer Sapnap had been dreading. It promised an end to this, to their moment, the one that Sapnap had grown to enjoy so much, which said a lot for someone who had so many memories.
“In half an hour,” the boy whispered, and Sapnap laughed when he didn’t know how to do anything else.
“Go to work then, Karl.”
Karl frowned, but he seemed to know that he had to relent. Sapnap was right, and there were places for him to be, even if he wanted to stay right here forever and never go anyplace else. Sapnap could know how to feel the same way, even if there wasn’t anywhere for him to be; he had no obligations at that moment, though he could certainly find one in Karl.
“Alright,” he sighed. “I’ll talk to you later, maybe?”
“Yeah,” Sapnap agreed without pause. “I still have a few hundred more stories to tell, and I’m sure you do, too.”
Karl laughed. “I bet I could write a book full of all the stories you’ll tell me.”
“Wouldn’t be a very interesting book,” Sapnap mused, but the look in Karl’s eyes begged to differ.
“Someone would read it,” he argued.
“My mom, maybe,” Sapnap said with a laugh. “But I’d only let her if she didn’t know it was me.”
Karl laughed, too, and they sat still for a moment. Not wanting to get up and not wanting to abandon the moment, to break it apart so soon and so quickly when both men were far too willing to hold onto it in a vice grip.
But they had to. Obligation called from streets several over, and they had to.
Karl was the one who stood up, waving slightly when he forced himself to retreat away from the booth.
“I’ll see you, then,” he said solemnly, to which Sapnap nodded in firmness.
“Yeah,” and he stood up, standing right in front of Karl with their gazes locked together. “I’ll come back here tomorrow. To this booth,” he pointed towards it, “and we’ll meet.”
Karl smiled. “In the morning.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see you then, Sap,” he said softly, and neither of them were sure how to part ways when they had to.
“Yeah,” Sapnap agreed, just as quiet and unwilling as Karl. “Then.”
He turned to watch him go, a pretty boy disappearing out the cafe’s door and off into the streets of France. Sapnap knew he would see him again, and he knew he’d have at least one more chance to say all the right things in the right order, but it still felt bittersweet when he’d finally disappeared from view.
Perhaps like standing by an ocean when the world was ending, only a little bit less final and full of a bit more hope.