You Can't Choose (BoyxBoy)

Chapter One

Collier couldn't remember it unless his eyes were closed.

Couldn't remember the sound of the waves beating against the cliff rocks or the smell of salt and sand and rain. Even though it had been just days ago, he couldn't recall the exact color the ocean that night, the exact shade of gold that had reflected off the water from the sunset.

But when he did close his eyes, Cole was back there, on that cliff edge just above the beach, with the wind in his hair and the unmistakable swearing of a sailor trying to fight the waves with his small fishing vessel.

And then there was the memory of his aunt, who he had prior associated with gumdrops and other sweets she had always snuck him when he was a child, but now he would forever affiliate her with that cliff top as she gripped his arm tightly to steady him. "Aren't you afraid?" She had asked him, not looking away from the sky because how could she.

"To go home?" Cole asked, kicking his legs out to the sky.

"To fall," his aunt clarified and he had leaned over the edge of the cliff then and looked down at the beach. It was surly a fall that would kill him, but he wasn't afraid.

"No". He had never felt more stable in his life.

But his aunt didn't see it that way, and forced him to lean back away from the edge of the rocks. "You've been here for three months, Cole, and I figured out about two days in that you were the least graceful person I have ever met".

Sadly, this was true, but at that moment he didn't care. He didn't care because this would be the last time he even had the chance to fall, and if he was meant to, Cole figured he would, and if he wasn't meant to, then he'd have to leave to go back home anyway. "It's already been three months".

When he didn't look at his aunt this time, it wasn't because he was enthralled by the sunset, but because his eyes were brimming with tears and he was too embarrassed to show them to her. "I know," she had said in a voice that lead Collier to believe she was holding back her own sadness. "I'm going to miss you". Cole didn't respond because he couldn't, not with what felt like sand in his throat, so he lifted his head and looked out towards the sun again, waiting for it to edge over the horizon and disappear into the depths of the ocean. "When I miss you, I'm going to come and watch the sunset". To remember that night, Cole had assumed, but then she was adding, "you're a boy of the sea. Eyes the color of the golden sunset reflected off of the water and hair the color of wet sand at dusk".

He belonged there, and he knew it. Not specifically there, in Washington State, but there as in on the ocean. It was in his blood.

But Collier couldn't keep his eyes closed forever, and the second he stopped, it all went away again, and he was left feeling sea sick. Not the kind most people get, from being sick out at sea. His kind of sickness was the kind you got when you missed the sea, kind of like being home sick. Though, perhaps for him, this was the same thing.

Cole had been repeating this process for the past hour, sitting on his bed cross legged, his sketch book resting against his thighs. Every time he closed his eyes, he would go back to the ocean, the house on the cliff, to his aunt Annie, but every time he opened them, the hues would be gone from his mind and his fingers would randomly ghost over his many different colored pencils before he'd give up and have to close his eyes again.

"Eyes the color of the golden sunset," Collier mumbled, recalling it from his most recent memory, which he had harvested the night before last, back before he had flown home to Florida.

He had many different gold pencils. Each had their own name: white gold, dandelion, fire, pineapple, but he knew from enough self portraits the name of the color he was looking for. Butterscotch. Carefully, he brushed the pencil over his paper, testing the color on the image he had already sketched out with a lead pencil.