Chapter Text
When he fell the summer before sophomore year, he fell a lot harder than he should’ve. But Albert’s smile was molten, palpable sunlight, drawing him closer and closer into his orbit, and he’d never been very good at refusing the boy anything before that, anyway.
They didn’t actually get together until that October, though, about a week before Albert’s sixteenth birthday. Race was doing the same shit he always was, doing stupid things while they skateboarded around in the increasingly cooling weather to try and make Albert laugh. The executive decision he made to give the boy his birthday present early had been a good one, because instead of dizzyingly blurry photos of his shenanigans, the beautiful new camera he’d saved up for since two Septembers before made him look much better than he did in real life.
“Let me take one of you, please?” He drew out the final word with a smile, timing the jump off his board perfectly so he could walk into Albert’s space without bumping into him. “You’ve got so many of me, now, how’s anyone gonna know you were here, too?”
With it as a memory now, instead of happening in front of him, he knows he was making the other nervous, the tips of his ears burning red as he stammered out an answer. “I– No it’s… I’m better behind the camera, Racer, not–”
“Uh-uh, c’mon, let me have it.” He made a half assed grab for the camera, more as an excuse to step even closer, and this was before Albert had gotten tall enough to simply hold things above his head out of his reach, so their faces were barely two inches apart, and he just…
He leaned in and kissed him. Randomly. Because that’s what you did when you were sixteen and stupid and crowding your best friend’s space after months of him being unreasonably sweet and making you trip and fall into love with him. His hands still shake with the thrum of his heart when he looks at the pictures in his childhood bedroom from that day, at the visible difference in the pictures before and after the kiss. At the picture, singular, he managed to get Albert to take of him pressing his lips to the redhead’s cheek as he scrunched up his face to hide his furious blush against his pale, freckle dotted skin.
Put simply, kisses were not few or far between after that day. Pictures of Albert, however…
For the rest of highschool, he was the only one in their friend group with a shot in the dark of getting Albert out from behind the camera, even for a picture or two with the lot of them. There were hundreds - thousands, in Race’s case - of pictures taken by him, of individuals, of couples, of groups. There was rarely any posing unless it was for something, but Albert had a knack for picking the perfect moment to snap a photo. At exactly the crescendo of Jack’s laugh, the moment just before Katherine and Sarah closed their eyes and leaned in, Medda’s fond eye roll at her sons and their ridiculousness.
Race’s hand just as it squeezed his. Race’s twirling his baby cousin as she screeches and giggles and sparkles in her pretty dress. Race grabbing a rockstar from the fridge at the gas station at four o’clock in the morning in his pajamas. Documentation of every angle, every reflection, the manifestation of how Albert’s eyes saw him.
Now, as he finally packs up his apartment placed approximately two thousand, nine hundred and forty three miles away from the settings of all those memories, nearer to twenty five then fifteen by now, he can’t stop staring at the manifestation of how his eyes saw Albert.
It was the last week of July, the summer after their senior year, and they were eating ice cream on the fire escape outside Albert’s bedroom. Despite the uncharacteristically sweltering heat, they were pressed together from shoulder to ankle, soaking in the last bit of closeness before Race got on a plane with Medda to California and made a home of the sunny Stanford University campus.
“If– If I had asked you not to go eight months ago when that letter came, would you be leaving?” Albert’s voice was weirdly shaky, considering it’s typical smoothness, and it made Race pick his head up off his shoulder to look at him.
“Probably not, no.” Race answered honestly, dropping his eyes to the cup of steadily melting ice cream in his hands. Stanford had been his dream school since he was eight, and the scholarship they’d offered him was enough to make him nearly hyperventilate when he first opened the letter, but if it had been Albert, of all people, asking, there’s no way he could stomach going.
His response was too quick, too honest, too genuine, and it made the boy’s eyebrows scrunch together, an expression he only made subconsciously that Race liked to study.
“Do you regret not asking?” It’s an answer he almost didn’t want, because Albert’s response was going to be charmingly devastating either way, but he couldn’t not know, either.
“Never. Especially if it would’ve actually made you stay.” Albert’s not someone who cries easy, he never has been, but his eyes were shiny and his lip quivered slightly looking at Race. “You’d really ruin your whole plan, just for me?”
“Albert Dasilva, I’d figure out a way to put the damn sun in a jar just for you,” He’d said.
And then Albert’s lips were on his, and he has to set the slightly blurred photo of shirtless Albert’s drowsy smile back in the box to keep the rest of the memory from playing against the back of his eyelids from there.