Another solo that should have been done months ago and wasn't. Set sometime at the beginning of April.
Word Count: 915
“I wish I looked as good as my mom does in a bikini.”
Paris stood in front of a mirror staring critically at his reflection. Too critically? Not critically enough? Whatever the answer, he felt... displeased. Almost uncomfortable. His reflection was in a lot of ways disappointing, and rather uninspiring to someone whose body was his way of life and therefore quite important to him. He paid perhaps a bit more attention to it than the average person. Paris was not unaccustomed to looking at it so attentively, but even so he was never particularly enamored of what it looked like—just of what it could do.
He was also not unaccustomed to having other people looking at him so attentively. As such, his appearance had not gone without various forms of criticism.
You weigh too much, they said. Then, You weight too little. Stand straighter. Lift your leg higher.
Why do you wear those clothes?
“You look good in anything,” Chris said.
He was focused on something on his phone and not looking in Paris's direction, which was just as well because Paris didn't really feel like being under his scrutiny, too. Not that Chris's scrutiny was bad scrutiny; Chris never criticized the way Paris looked. If anything, Chris usually seemed pretty captivated by him, but as Paris grew progressively more self-conscious standing there examining himself, any lingering glance had the power to further unsettle him.
“You're obligated to say that,” Paris said.
He and Chris were dissimilar in a lot of ways—Chris was tall, Paris short; Chris was tan, Paris perhaps too fair. Chris had a very overt strength, not obscenely bulky but still notably athletic. Strong arms, firm shoulders, a defined chest, a sturdy set of legs. Paris was scrawny by comparison. His legs were toned and nicely shaped, but he thought the rest of him was unremarkable. Thin arms, a boney torso. He could see his ribs, the blades of his shoulders, the knobs of his spine.
Flat, narrow. Discomforting. Not entirely repulsive, but not entirely agreeable either.
Wrong, somehow.
Unattractive.
Chris was attractive, but Paris didn't want to look like Chris.
He didn't even really want to look like himself.
He used to feel at least a little better about his body, two or so years ago when he'd weighed a bit more, when he'd had a little more shape, and a little more color in his pale, pale skin. He'd never been entirely at ease—when his body was on display so often it was hard not to notice the little imperfections and become a bit uncomfortable when something wasn't just right—but he knew he used to be moderately okay with it. It did the job, it suited its purpose, and if there was anything else about it that wasn't up to standard or didn't seem quite right, well... he could always work on fixing it or hide the things he couldn't. Then he could just ignore it. He could deal with it. Paris had learned how to dress his body to make himself look better, feel better. He'd always had a pretty face, feminine in a way he found pleasing, and that used to at least partially make up for whatever he might have felt he lacked.
These days, Paris felt more comfortable clothed than unclothed. He could do a lot with clothes. He could make himself look the way he wanted, hide his physical flaws and highlight only what he liked—his ballerina's legs, a slim waistline. With fabrics and colors and styles he could present to the world what he wanted people to see, and what he wanted them to see was pretty, traditionally feminine.
Beautiful.
A little bit of the inside showing without.
He wondered when everything had changed, though in reality he supposed things hadn't changed at all. He was just now beginning to listen to the little voice in his head that berated the unpleasant details of his body; it'd always been there, for as long as he could remember, he'd just gotten better at ignoring it over the years, focusing on other things. All along he knew he'd merely been pretending to feel more confident than he really was, to the point that he even fooled himself into believing it. He supposed it was easy to get lost in it, to pretend so much he forgot what he buried beneath his own make-believe.
“Are you ready to go?” Chris asked.
Paris saw Chris look up from his phone to finally glance in his direction, look him over in his skirted one-piece swimsuit and smile like what he saw was appealing, even though the neckline was modest and the flow of it failed to appropriately accentuate what little shape Paris had. Paris didn't want to trouble him, so he forced a smile in response and turned away from the mirror, pushed his thoughts aside for the time being and told himself he was just being stupid.
Like he always did.
Just a stupid little kid who didn't know what he was talking about, didn't know how he felt, didn't know what he wanted, and didn't know how to vocalize it when he did.
“Yeah, come on,” he said, like Chris was the one who'd been causing the holdup.
Chris draped an arm around Paris's waist, Paris grabbed their bag of towels and other necessities, and they left their room in the Gallos' beach-house to make their way out onto the beach.
