It looks like some of the magazines here. The “tropical vacation” ones. [Koby says it on a little laugh, shaking his head, still not quite able to believe that the images he’s always associated with home, with normalcy, are someone’s exotic dream in this place.] Strange, really. That’s just home, for me.

[He’s essentially done with the waves running their way up Louis’s arm, so he doesn’t resist the shift, the switch, though of course there’s a momentary tension in his shoulders, both of them scrunching forward in an instinctive gesture to hide his chest. The brush tickles, the paint drawn in a slow, looping arc but then –

Then Louis says exactly the right thing, and Koby’s anxious tension abates instantly, replaced with a pleased, bashful blush that spreads from his ears down his neck, hovers around his collarbone. He grins helplessly, boyish and smitten and suddenly looking like the very young man he still is, beneath all the serious, focused intensity, the perpetual need to help.]

Quentin. He misses the ocean too, but if you lie down on a boat on the lake and just look up at the sky, it almost feels the same. [There’s still a touch of homesickness in Koby’s voice, but it’s laced through with sweet fondness, with the blissful relief of meeting someone who understands the deepest, most painful parts of your soul, who sees it and heals it simultaneously.] It helps us both, I think.