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Phil watches a crab skitter across the sand, kicking out its legs and moving the granules with its wide body and its rapidly moving legs. He follows it with his eyes, the warm sun encapsulating his body in a lazy haze where all he wants is to watch and sit around.
The crab pauses its movements and rotates, as if looking around. What is it seeing? Is it looking for danger? Does it wonder if someone is watching it?
Phil leans back and stretches his legs in front of him. Glittering lights are cast on the sea, waves light and swaying back and forth. The morning breeze against his skin alternates with the warmth of the sun. It's a beautiful beach and, the best part? Very private. They saw a family with two kids near the leftmost part of the beach, but after a few minutes of walking, they were just little circles in the distance.
Phil loses sight of the crab and sighs to himself. He flexes his fingers, half-buried in the warm sand, and watches the grains fall over his skin. It's almost meditative, the way they separate from a seamless blanket to countless tiny rocks. Phil brings his hand up and watches them fall to the ground, joining the rest of the blanket and blending together again. He could see the edges of each grain, but only because he looks closely, pays attention.
"Phil!" A voice calls from behind him.
Phil turns to see his boyfriend, hair mussed and a little damp from an earlier swim, his skin already tan despite this being only their second day of vacation. They woke up early today and after a quick stop for breakfast and coffee, they were off to the beach. After Dan applied sunscreen and supervised Phil putting on his own, he ran to the sea, dipping his head quickly to get used to the temperature. He kept trying to convince Phil to join him, but Phil was happy to sit and watch him from a spot on the beach where the water would occasionally kiss his feet.
That was about an hour ago and eventually, Dan got tired of playing mermaids by himself and resurfaced. He brought with him a small collection of rocks which he showed off to Phil, the latter snapping a few pictures because it was just so adorable. Then, Phil went to sit back at their lounge chairs and read a book as Dan wandered around. That was until he got distracted by a crab and began following it around, then got distracted by his boyfriend shouting at him.
He looks at him now, newly surfaced freckles dotting his face and his arms and his bare chest. He seems to glow in the Vietnamese sun. He looks breathtakingly gorgeous in hot climates, Phil has always thought so.
"Look, I dug myself into a hole!" Dan claims and Phil realizes that his body is partly sunken into a hole in the sand.
Dan is sitting on his knees, hands grabbing clumps of sand and pushing them away from himself, effectively creating a crater in the ground. It's already deep enough to hide his long legs. A hill of sand is behind him, evidence of how long he's been doing this.
"Fancy yourself a mole, do you?" Phil teases, walking over, facing his half-submerged partner.
"More like a muscly Diglett," Dan says, smiling at him. "I'm buff like one too."
Phil traces his eyes down Dan's chest and torso as he says this. "Yeah, right."
"Oi."
Phil laughs and pokes him in the chest. "I like your body. I don't need someone shaped like a Diglett."
Dan blushes a little, which is so funny to Phil because he's said much worse things over their sixteen years together.
"Any reason you're digging? Trying to get away from me already?"
Dan chuckles, his hands alternating from digging and throwing. "Wish it was that easy."
"Hey!" Phil protests in mock-offense, but in reality it's all a farce, a part of their game.
They tease and prod at each other when they're not ready to get to the root. Eventually, they will find their way there, but the teasing serves its own purpose. They push and pull until one side gives. It's how Phil convinced him to come back to Youtube.
"Just feels good to dig," Dan explains finally. "Maybe it's something passed on, it feels primal, like it's hardwired into me to dig."
Phil ponders on this for a few moments. "Are you sure you're not just bored? Sometimes, I feel like you always need a project."
"Shut up. You don't know me."
"I beg to differ, actually."
They fall to silence for a few moments as Dan digs away. He has a method to it, because that's who he is, methodical and thoughtful in his actions. He rotates his body to the left, grabbing sand with his large hands, and throws it to the side, then continues in a clockwise direction, returning to the left once he finishes the circle. Well, it's not exactly a circle, because he isn't turning around to dig behind him. It's also more than a semi-circle, maybe like 3/4ths of a circle.
Phil watches him dig in deep concentration. He wonders if this is a meditative exercise for Dan, because the look on his face is one he sees during intense meditations. The kind he does after a really tough therapy session.
He sits and watches, enjoying the warm sun on his skin and the cool sea breeze. It's the perfect day to spend with the love of your life and Phil refuses to deny himself the sappiness. They're on vacation. It's basically a requirement to be sappy in ways that he would shy away from in their daily lives.
He wants to tell Dan how much he means to him, how much the world has changed because of his light, how much Phil has changed because of his existence. Dan, who always tries to downplay his achievements, who shies away from compliments. The same Dan who Phil has watched grow up from a shy, insecure emo kid to the kind, creative person he is today. He has fought so much, broken down so many barriers, wrought iron bars preventing content creators from living a successful life, chain-link fences trying to keep queer voices quiet and powerless, and barriers inside Dan himself: vines cultivated from thorny childhood phrases, weeds growing from the echoing hatred of a small town with beliefs insular and narrow.
Over the years, Phil has watched Dan break them all and now he can live freely and without farce. He has fought to be where he is today, where he belongs, happy and right next to Phil. Even during the tough times, Dan has chosen to be by his side, even when he banged against the fences and poked himself on the thorns, even then, Dan at the end of the day, would turn towards him and complain about cupboards left ajar.
Phil tries to be brave, just like him.
So he says, "I love you so much, Dan."
Dan freezes in the middle of his digging and Phil instantly regrets it. They're in public, anyone could hear—
"Shit, sorry," Phil is suddenly horrified. "I didn't think, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—"
Faceless people appear before him, disappearing when he blinks, then appearing again, closer. Their gasps fill his ears, hands pointing at them. The part of his brain grounded in reality shrinks into itself. Flashes of light flood his vision. He fucked up, his words leaving no room for interpretation.
He can't think clearly, can only hear what he said, again and again and again. It echoes around him, bouncing off of the walls.
He was so stupid to say that, what was he thinking? Are any phones recording? If he acts now, he might be able to ask them to delete. But what if they don't? What if they tell him they deleted it, but secretly saved it? That kind of statement was unmistakable in intention. He said what he said and now they know and he can't take it back. It was always going to be him, he always fucks up, he's always been bad at secrets—
"Phil." Dan's voice cuts through, his hands hovering over Phil's shoulders, a moment of hesitation, before he bears down, skin warm to the touch. "Hey. Can you hear me?"
Still, the words feel far away.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!" Phil takes deep, heaving breaths. "I wasn't thinking!"
Phil is free falling, the horrifying feeling of the ground disappearing beneath his feet consuming him. The world is falling apart, giving way for endless air and sky, and he can't find his footing. The panic swells up in him, fear grabbing at him from all directions, heart beating hard against his chest. He loses his balance, leaning to the side, but he can't grasp anything to get upright. He tries to kick his feet out in a feeble attempt at steadying himself, but it does nothing. His eyes are closed and he feels nothing but air beneath him, the deafening wind engulfing him, leaving no auditory space for any other sound.
Suddenly, he feels arms around him and he opens his eyes as he sees Dan, pulling his body towards him. He feels himself falling again, for a moment afraid that Dan is going to fall with him—Dan can't be here, he needs to be safe, he can't go down with him—but immediately feels sand beneath his feet, his body halting from flight.
Disoriented, he looks around and finds himself in a pit. He stumbles forward, but Dan stabilizes him with strong, warm hands around his wrist and on his chest. The touch shocks Phil out of his panic, eyes wide, vision clearing, head wild from the feeling of continuous falling. His feet wiggle against the finer grains in the lower layer of the sand. He vaguely remembers where he is and where he is right now is in Dan's sand hole.
"Hey, you're okay," Dan says, voice soft and low. "You didn't do anything wrong. I reacted—uhm, not great…But we're okay."
Phil looks behind him, eyes wide. Everything is normal. There's the ground, there's the resort villas, there's the sea.
"Phil? Are you hearing me?"
There's also no one in sight. The family earlier might have even left, he can't see any of their heads anymore. He can't hear anything but birds and the waves. He turns his head back to Dan who has his eyebrows scrunched, a worried look on his face.
Phil blinks, trying to focus against the loud thud of his heartbeat. He nods, still grasping for words.
"Oh God. Okay. Breathe with me."
Dan is so close, brown eyes shining gold in the sun, reflecting the sand and the sea. He offers a tiny smile, bringing a hand back to Phil's shoulder, present and grounding. He tries to breathe in and out, following the pattern Dan is setting, his partner exaggerating his breaths for him to follow along.
He absentmindedly runs his fingers through the sand at the side of the hole, watching the grains fall. He pinches them, loosens his fingers, forming disparate patterns in the sand. Each figure causes the grains to separate from the of wall their small pit, falling down in a way that reminds Phil of an hourglass. Time moves strangely for a moment and it almost feels like the slower Phil dislodges the sand, the slower time is passing. He stays in that space, until he feels like he's back in his body.
Slowly, his body catches up. He is in a pit that his partner has dug up for an unknown reason during a vacation in a tropical beach, thousands of kilometers away from home. Everything happened so fast. Everything was normal, until suddenly, it wasn't.
Dan is saying something, but he has to focus to hear the words.
"…but it's essentially just water being trapped in sand, except certain combinations make it so that stepping on it makes it sink really fast and they're, like, usually lower than they look. But it's nothing like what everyone thinks, when you sink, you can't really drown in it, you just fall until you reach less liquidy sand—"
He is confused. "What are you talking about?"
"Oh!" Dan looks at him, surprised that he spoke. "Hi. I was…Well, you stopped responding and you looked like you were far away, so I thought maybe just talking would help? Uh, I was reading a few pages on Wikipedia on quicksand this morning. So I thought I'd…let you just think while I yap…"
It's such a sweet sentiment that Phil is fully back, remembering the hard launch, the freedom of the past six months. The podcast they produce now, the stories they've shared that they could never share before, the jokes they can now make. How was it possible to forget something like that?
He smiles, bringing a hand to Dan's arm, just holding. "Thank you. Did I scare you?"
"Ah, a little bit," Dan admits. "It's not the first time I lost your attention, but…you were panicky for a moment, then so quiet the next. I was worried."
"Sorry, I…Old habits, you know?" Phil says, giving Dan an apologetic look.
"What happened?" Dan asks, his worry evident on his face.
Phil sighs. "For a moment, it was like I was there again, in Vidcon or at TATINOF, and I was always so afraid to mess up—and I did. It was one of my worst fears for such a long time. I was always so scared. Sorry."
"You don't need to apologize," Dan says, bringing his hand off of Phil's shoulder. "More than anyone in the world, believe me, I get it."
"I was seeing them, Dan. They had no faces, but they saw us and they were going to…I don't know. I think my brain regurgitated the worst thing it could think of."
"The public finding out about us?" Dan asks.
Phil sighs again. "Specifically, me outing us. It being my fault. Maybe I imagined it too much that my brain couldn't escape the thought even when…Like, if I thought rationally, I would remember that we already…But I couldn't think, all I felt was fear and panic."
"I'm sorry," Dan says.
"Then I was falling and I couldn't hear anyone anymore. There was only wind, like I was falling off of a plane. I couldn't even open my eyes."
"Yeah, I kept asking if you could—Like, the five senses mindfulness thing. Five things you can see, four things you can touch technique…But you weren't hearing what I was saying."
It's a technique they learned a while ago, to help ground Dan when he would spiral from hopelessness and to soothe Phil when he would start imagining medical emergencies. Simple enough to remember when things were tense.
Phil offers him a smile. "It was really scary. I don't think it's ever been…like that for me. Not after. You'd think the past six months didn't happen by the way I reacted."
Dan hums thoughtfully. "Well, brains are weird. The squishy fleshy organ in our skulls doesn't always react rationally."
"Ew," Phil says. "Don't describe it like that."
Dan lets out a small laugh. "But…I get what you mean. Sometimes, I forget too."
"You do?" Phil watches him purse his lips. "You didn't tell me."
"Well, like earlier, I forgot for a moment. But I usually remember, shortly after. Sometimes, I'll forget then I'll see a podcast prop and then I'll remember. It's not really a big deal."
Phil frowns at that, not liking this new knowledge that Dan has been worrying without him having any idea. When it happens to him, does Dan suffer by himself? The thought of him going through something like he went through by himself is making his gut twist.
"I don't care," He insists. "I want to know. Tell me next time."
Dan chuckles. "Yes, sir."
Phil looks around them again, quickly checking if anyone is present. A couple of stray dogs are chasing each other at the far end of the beach, but no humans are visible. God bless private beaches.
"Can I have a hug?" Phil asks, still cautious despite it all.
Dan doesn't say anything before pulling him in, hand going to the back of his head to scratch softly. Phil breathes him in, the scent of salt, sand, and Dan calming him down. He lets go of the worry and lets himself be comforted.
"You're good, you're safe," Dan is muttering.
Phil clutches at him until he feels stable and hinged. It really only takes a few minutes, but it feels like it takes hours. Phil pushes away the fear of being seen and lets himself be held. He finds comfort in the way Dan's fingers weave in and out of his hair. He pays attention to the soft breaths that fall down his back.
He gives himself time to feel the discomfort of doing something for the first time, publicly hugging, in a way that would be unmistakably and undeniably homosexual. There's no one here right now, but anyone could walk in. An employee of the resort, another guest, and that knowledge scares him, but he lets the fear fade away in Dan's embrace.
Eventually, slowly, he extracts himself, keeping his hands on Dan's arms, needing the touch.
"Sorry I ruined your fun," Phil points out the deformed hole they sit in, trampled on by big feet.
Dan snorts. "It's literally just a hole, Phil. I can just dig more."
"Let me help." Phil offers, patting at the section that looks the most collapsed.
Dan raises an eyebrow. "Your delicate fingers are really gonna do manual labor? I never thought I'd see the day."
The playful ribbing is familiar, comforting. Phil smacks him with a hand full of sand, the grains falling down Dan's shoulder as he shakes in laughter. It shocks him how…hot he finds the sight, seeing sand fall off the tanned skin. A few pieces get stuck on his chest and Phil uses it as an excuse to pat Dan's skin, moving the sand away. Dan is smiling, beautiful under the sunlight.
"Hey, get to it, princess," Dan commands, already in the process of widening his hole to accommodate the both of them. "Put those fingers to work."
"Yeah, yeah." Phil turns his attention to the sand, grabbing chunks in his hand and moving them away.
After a few minutes, Phil is fully focused, working towards their collective goal. They don't discuss with words, but their eyes meet every now and then, before they turn back to continue digging. Together, they widen the hole, neaten the walls, and reinforce the parts chipping away.
They always work together seamlessly, so used to each other's particularities that it's second nature for Phil to catch a rock when Dan digs too fast, that Dan knows to move his legs in the right moment just as Phil's start getting uncomfortable. It's testament to their shared lives that they know right when they're needed, right when they need to hop in.
"Hey, can I get a take two on earlier?" Phil says once they sit comfortable in the widened hole.
Dan is fidgeting with the edges, not really digging as much as shaping.
"What earlier?" He asks, pausing in his movement.
"Before I freaked out."
"Oh," Dan's cheeks flush, remembering what he said.
"Come here," Phil gestures him over, Dan shuffling forward the two inches between them.
His legs are bent on either side of Phil, resting on the walls of the hole they dug together. Dan doesn't say anything, waiting. Phil looks at him, his pink cheeks, his tanned face with freckles new and old, his curly hair. His partner, more than 16 years after they first met and fell in love hard and fast. His partner throughout the years, when they were falling forward into momentous opportunities, when they couldn't believe their luck. His partner, when their privacy was invaded left and right, when even looking at each other on camera had Dan spiraling for hours after. His partner today, who chose him and kept choosing him.
"I love you, Dan," He says, the words clear.
The world doesn't explode.
There aren't any cameras here, no fans, no questionable tabloid writers. Even if there were, everyone knows anyway. Everyone knows how special this man in front of him is, how integral he is to Phil's life. How intertwined their lives are, from the creative demands of work to the mundane routines they've built together.
Dan laughs, a little embarrassed at the unabashed affection directed at him.
"I love you," Phil repeats, suddenly giddy with the achievement. "Hey. Are you listening? I love you."
Dan brings his hands up, hiding his face. "Stop, I can't handle this!"
Phil laughs, grabbing his hands and pulling them apart, revealing Dan's eyes, misty with emotion. He is blushing again but he can't help the smile from creeping up, and Phil loves him.
"Say it back," he demands. "Stop hiding and say it back."
"God, you're so annoying!" But Dan is blazing red, even his neck starting to get pink.
"Daan! I love you."
Dan mumbles something, hands still covering his mouth. No, that won't do. Phil pries them apart and demands he repeat himself. Dan sighs loudly, but true to character, he obeys.
"I love you too, okay!" Dan almost shouts.
Phil giggles, feeling heady with the declaration. It's probably the loudest Dan has ever said it in public. He remembers that they exchanged whispers early on, before they learned to keep those words in private, when they were falling hard and fast in 2009, but nowhere near this volume.
Declarations of love were always sacred between them, shared in spaces only each other could hear. Even when they were in the safety of their home, they always said it softly. Was it always meant to be like that? Only said during solemn moments or whispered to each other when one needed comfort?
Dan's face is still red, but he looks surprised at himself, astonished by his own words. It's strange, to be surprised by such a simple statement, sixteen and a half years in.
Phil wants to kiss him. He won't. He just lost his footing and imagined himself falling to an endless void because of some words said in an empty beach; it's not happening anytime soon. Not in public, not for a while.
"Have we fully enjoyed your hole? Can we go back to the room?"
Dan laughs and laughs. Phil wants to bottle it up so he can listen to it when he needs more of Dan's laughter in his life. Which, now that he thinks about it, is all the time. He hopes it isn't consumable because he needs an infinite supply.
Now, he settles for accepting Dan's help as they stand up, careful to not dislodge their hole. He settles for putting his arm around Dan's shoulders as they walk back to their room, the one with a big bed in a resort where the receptionist called them "Mr. and Mr. Lester," and neither of them corrected her.
A lot of things have changed in the past six months in monumental ways and Phil is so grateful for the kind and caring responses they've received. Still, there are parts of him that haven't fully caught up yet. Maybe they won't catch up for a long time or some parts will catch up and others will forget. He is quiet as they walk, but luckily, Dan is happy to lead the way.
"Hey," Dan says once the door closes behind them. "You good, bub?"
He launches himself forward without any warning, expecting Dan to catch him which he does, stumbling a few feet backwards. He breathes him in, along with the remnants of warm sun and sea salt, and raises his head to press kisses below Dan's jaw. He feels Dan giggle above him.
"That tickles, Phil!"
"I'm really happy." Phil insists, wanting Dan to understand. "Even when…I panic or I get overwhelmed, I'm so happy. Like, deliriously happy that I get to have this. With you."
Dan gently coaxes him out of his neck so they can make eye contact, tucking some hair behind his ear. His expression is fond and soft, smile lines prominent beside his eyes.
"I'm really deliriously happy, too," Dan says, before leaning down to kiss him.
They stand there for a while in each other's arms, press together. For sixteen years, behind hotel doors were one of the few places they felt safe, aside from their home. Today, things have changed for the better, but it takes longer than six months to untangle all the weeds that grew from all those years of hiding, of fear, of guilt.
Phil looks forward to the day neither of them flinch, but today, he is happy to just be.