The first time Blaine saw him was also his first day in Ohio. They’d finished unloading the boxes from the truck and he was starting to remove his old room from its temporary storage, and attempt to reconstruct his old life. The life he’d left behind in Connecticut for his father’s job. The life that suddenly felt as if it had existed only in a distant memory, the same way it felt every time they moved.  

                He had gotten through the first few boxes when the light flickered out. The bulb seemed to stutter at first, and then it was gone all at once.

                “Fuck.” He swore, something he ordinarily did not do, but he was discontent and the damn light bulb going out didn’t seem to be positive foreshadowing of his new life in Lima. He blinked and, while the darkness wasn’t entirely hindering, he didn’t want to strain hi eyes to unpack. He couldn’t find his desk lamp or his candles, they were buried in packing peanuts somewhere in tower of boxes, so he fumbled his way to the back wall of his narrow room where he’d earlier noticed a window with a built in seat.

                Thick blinds blocked the evening sunlight from entering his room and he lifted them with some hassle, the two sides inching up at different times. Finally the darkness was illuminated, at least enough that he could get back to unpacking his things. He turned his back to the window to start work on the box nearest him when he felt the tug.

                It was the tug that everyone experiences at some point in life. When, by some unknown force, you’re compelled to turn around, to take a step forward, to open your eyes. Maybe it’s the universes way of making things happen, a means of setting the ball rolling. Maybe it’s just fate.

                Whatever it was, it tugged at Blaine’s soul. And his cardigan. His hands stilled and he placed the half submerged object back into the Styrofoam peanuts. He felt it, a flutter. The flutter which tends to follow the tug. He quirked his head to the side and willed both the tug and the flutter to go away. They didn’t. Fate doesn’t typically work that way.

                Cautiously he approached the sill, placing his fingers delicately on the frame, as if he were afraid it might crumble beneath his grip. What he saw took his breath away.

                Laying in a truck bed, propped up on his elbows, sat quite possibly the most beautiful boy he’d ever seen. One of his long legs was bent up at the knee, the other out straight and lean. His face was pointed toward the sun and was colored by the orange bath of light. His upturned nose paired angelically with his eyelashes, which Blaine couldn’t see, but imagined them to be chestnut like his hair and fanned across his porcelain cheeks. His eyes were closed softly and he looked lost in a dream. Probably a lovely one.

                Blaine sighed before he could stop himself and cringed. He was being creepy, wasn’t he? He should stop looking.

                But he couldn’t steal his eyes away. He was physically frozen on the spot, his pupils wide and fixated on the boy who was daydreaming in the summer sunset.

                Blaine wasn’t sure how long he’d been watching him, possibly only a minute, more probably fifteen. Eventually, though, the sun crouched down behind his house and the warm pink and orange water color of light faded from the boy’s face. The boy blinked. Blaine found himself in a momentary panic, what if the boy saw him? He was peeping. Blaine was a peeper. He cringed again at the thought and flattened himself against the wall to avoid being seen.

                His eyes strained, but he could still see the boy clearly. He had extended his bent leg, at which point Blaine noticed how skin tight his jeans were, and was stretching lazily like a cat. His hands clamped together behind him and he pushed his chest forward, throwing his head back and opening his mouth. Probably groaning, Blaine realized. He swallowed and cursed himself, he really was being a creep, wasn’t he?

                The boy yawned and then glanced back up above Blaine’s rooftop, where the sunset had just been. His lips curled upward into a smile and he blinked up at the sky, and Blaine’s heart stopped.

                He was beautiful.

                The boy clapped his hands together to get the dirt from the truck bed off and hopped down to the concrete. He turned and walked back to his garage without so much as a second glance back.

                Blaine swallowed hard and finally tore himself away from the window. He intended to unpack some more before bed, but all he could muster up the will to do was to plunk himself down on his uncovered mattress and lay his hands over his eyes. He struggled between wanting to erase the boy’s face from his mind entirely and to burn it there permanently.

                Mostly he just hoped that this was not the last time he would see the boy in the driveway. Something, maybe the same thing that had tugged at him before, told him it wouldn’t be. And the flutter returned.