Empty Frames

Harry watches the smaller man, arrange the leftover photos to different shapes and take photos of them.

He can’t help but wrap his arms around the small torso to be able to hold the camera while it was in the model’s hands. He feels the model tense up in his arms and he has to hold back a smile. The models he knew have been around enough not to tense up or jump up at a foreign touch. Louis is still not tainted by his occupation.

He takws photos of the pictures on the ground and watches as the model’s face lit up like a 5 year old. It is then that Harry flipps the camera and takes a photo. A photo of the love of his life smiling in his arms that now lays next to their bedside table in a double frame that is still missing another photo.  

*

Harry really enjoys Louis’s company. He is kind and sweet. Modeling isn’t his choice of a career. It’s just that his stepfather walked out on them one day and Louis had to step up to make sure that his four sisters can go to good schools and live comfortably. He was actually discovered. He was flipping burgers on Sundays and Mondays, brewing tea on Tuesday, cleaning houses on Thursdays and restocking the grocery stores around in the weekend. It was in the meat alley when a man approached him and told him to give him a call if he’d like to give modeling a shot. Louis threw the card in his drawer, but when he lost 2 of his 5 jobs and couldn’t find anything else that didn’t need him working 5 days a week after school, he rang the man.

He is a natural at it. Louis says it might be because he is interested in theater and production. He isn’t shy in front of cameras. When he is in the setting, he likes to look around imagine birds flying, aliens coming to see his photo shoot ( because he is important like that) , and Simon Baker stripping when he was told to be seductive for the camera. Harry laughs finally knowing why Louis was staring at a point in the air during the photo shoot.

He asks him what was he imagining during their photo shoot. Louis is hesitant and chooses his words carefully “I just was imagining how it would’ve been like, if it was just you and me. What would go different”.

A lot of things go different. They are less dressed; the setting is not of fancy chairs. It’s of Harry’s bed. And the theme is not of “try to sell the next line of Armani” it’s of “pure love and need”. At that point Harry knows he was falling but haven’t fell yet.

*

Harry falls when they both realize that at some point when they were children they both lived in the same town. A windy one that Louis’s only memory of is making paper planes and flying them. He tells a Harry, who is biting his lips having just learned that the man in front of him is the reason of his being, that when his real dad left him and his mother Louis made paper planes everyday and flew them. Not towards his father, he flew them thinking that they’ll go somewhere, reach someone that will find Louis somehow. Harry cries that day, Louis doesn’t know why but he doesn’t ask him. They hug and Harry figures they found each other.

*

Harry knows he was in love so when the media was attacking Louis, he steps in. He makes it public that no, Louis didn’t sleep to get his award or the jobs he landed. That no he wasn’t the guy that Nick Grimshaw was cheating with on his boyfriend.  Harry makes it public that for the past two months the only bed he slept in was Harry’s and it was going to stay that way.  

Harry doesn’t mind the media much, but he sees what effect it has on Louis. So Harry suggests that Louis would be his personal model, Harry takes heat for it but he knows all the designers wanted Louis’s face in their catalogues and that wether the media says Louis is being favored or not, they do want him wearing their clothes.