#tiny beautiful things

→ He’d spent the whole afternoon buoyed by the prospect: his father, of all people, had carved out an evening, a formal dinner, as though the four of you were a family stitched together rather than haphazardly stapled. Lucas kept sending you these bright, little glances, as if your presence might guarantee the man’s arrival.

But the clock performs its gradual death: minute hand dragging itself onward, each click a small laceration until he bleeds out. Clare scoffs and leaves like she had predicted this all along. The chair across from you stays obstinately empty. His grin falters first at the edges, then collapses inward, leaving something brittle in its place.

You reach for him but Lucas recoils into that practiced near-shrug, a gesture meant to trivialize the wound even as it bleeds.

“Let’s just go,” he says, already half on his feet, escape being the only dignity left to reclaim.

→ When arousal comes for him, his pupils don’t simply dilate, they engulf, black tides rising until there’s barely a ring of color left. Whatever softness he normally carries evaporates. What’s left is the stare of a creature who’s remembered its hunger.

That slender vein beneath his eye surfaces more prominently, pulsing with a kind of insurgent insistence, as if his body can’t quite keep the truth of his want contained. It’s the smallest thing, that throb, but it exposes him more than any groan or gasp ever could.

→ Lucas has this reflexive instinct to turn your own words into an echo chamber. Whatever confession slips out of you, he seizes it, moulds it back into your ear in his low, ragged voice. You gasp out something reckless — “wanna cum all over your dick” — and he answers with a sharp, hungry little laugh: “yeah? You wanna cum all over my dick?” Sometimes it sounds like he’s teasing you, but sometimes it sounds like the words have been punched out of him.

→ He gets embarrassingly earnest about helping you onto the horse, hands at your waist. Your legs are wobbling like you’re mounting a mythical beast instead of a placid animal, and you irately mumble something about needing a saddle.

Lucas just laughs. Of course you’d demand equipment.

“You’re not riding it,” he says, grinning so hard it borders on painful. “You’re just sitting.”

And he loves — truly loves — the way you cling to him, even when your nails dig into the back of his hand: one hand buried in the horse’s mane like you expect it to detonate beneath you, the other crushing his fingers in a grip that is indicative of a final prayer.

The horse shifts. A single, bored adjustment of weight.

Lucas loses it. Another laugh bursts out of him, bright and boyish, because your whole body reacts like you’ve survived a near-death experience.

“You’re okay!” he insists, still laughing, still holding on to you as though you might evaporate off the creature’s back at any moment.

→  He takes to your wash days with a grave solemnity. The seriousness would be laughable if it weren’t so endearing, eyebrows knit, his lips set, his fingers working through your hair with the painstaking care of a man afraid you might rescind the privilege if he tugs too hard. He sections, detangles, smooths, all with that dogged concentration he reserves for things he genuinely wants to get right. He hardly speaks during it; concentration lends him a monastic air, as though tending to you in this small domesticity grants him a fleeting sense of competence.

And sometimes the favor reverses. His own hair, stringy and neglected in the long aftermath of his mother’s death, has the forlorn quality of something abandoned to the elements. When you guide him to sit, he obeys without protest, shoulders bowed, expression vaguely chastened but ultimately laden with an ever-present fatigue. You work your curl creams through the freshly-washed strands, coaxing life back into them, his eyes closing as if the act of being cared for is almost too much to bear.

→ He accumulates mementos with the tragic fervor of a man convinced that discarding anything is tantamount to erasing himself. Lucas cannot release what wounds him; he broods over old slights, old griefs, letting them steep in him like bitter tea. Yet the same instinct makes him cling to the smallest relics of tenderness.

Cinema tickets are the clearest proof. You might forget the film entirely, mediocre drama in a half-empty theatre, popcorn that had the same consistency as cardboard, but Lucas keeps the tickets. A corrugated wrapper from a snack you handed him once without thinking. Receipts too, curling at the edges: a dessert you insisted on paying for, a bookstore you dragged him into, a grocery run where nothing happened except that you walked beside him.

He doesn’t arrange any of it. No scrapbook, no journal, no curated shrine. Not like his mom had. He simply places each scrap into a plain box, a little reliquary of inconsequential moments that became, for him, unbearably significant.