You’re sitting cross-legged in the middle of a sea of cardboard boxes, your hair pulled up in a messy knot, an old college hoodie swallowing your frame. The late afternoon light spills through the tall windows of the new apartment, dust motes dancing in the air like glitter. Your back aches, your hands are a little sore from scrubbing kitchen cabinets, and your stomach’s grumbling because you’ve both been too busy unpacking to remember food exists—but you’re happy. No, not just happy. You’re in that kind of buzzed, giddy love-high that people write books about.

“Hey, babe,” comes that familiar voice from behind you, warm and deep and wrapped in a smirk you don’t even need to turn around to picture. “Do we really need three different kinds of olive oil?”

You look over your shoulder to find him leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised. He’s shirtless—because of course he is—and his faded jeans hang just low enough to expose the V-line you pretend not to obsess over. His chest tattoos shift as he walks toward you, one inked quote just barely visible above his heart. It’s your favorite, not because of what it says (you can’t even remember the full line right now), but because you were with him when he got it. You held his hand. He almost passed out.

You roll your eyes. “Yes, we need three. One’s extra virgin, one’s infused with chili, and one’s for… emotional support.”

Aiden laughs, that same full-bodied laugh that always makes you smile no matter what mood you’re in. He drops down beside you, his legs stretching out long and lean beside your curled ones. Instinctively, his hand finds yours, and just like that, everything clicks into place. You fit. You always have.

You met him your first week of freshman year—lost in a maze of hallways and too many syllabi, lugging your camera bag and two iced coffees. He was the loud one, already a few practices deep into hockey tryouts, with a scrape on his cheek and the cocky kind of grin that should’ve annoyed you. It didn’t. Instead, you handed him the wrong coffee and told him to consider it a peace offering for the next four years.

Now it’s been almost three.

People like to say you’re the movie couple. That you look like you walked off the set of a Netflix rom-com. That Aiden—with his tall frame, dark blond hair, and sharp jaw softened by that ridiculous golden retriever smile—is exactly the kind of guy girls dream about. And you? You’re the surprise. Petite, magnetic, sharp as hell with a camera and a pen, and somehow even sharper with your comebacks. Together, you’re kind of sickening.

Your friends make fun of you for it, the way you still get butterflies when he tucks a strand of hair behind your ear or kisses your temple like it’s the first time. But they love it too. They know it’s real. So do you.

You glance around the apartment. It’s nothing fancy—second floor, creaky floors, off-white walls that could use a repaint—but it’s yours. Yours and Aiden’s. No more dorms with flickering lights and weird smells. No more sneaking into each other’s rooms at 2 a.m. because your roommates were too loud or too present. Just the two of you, a million boxes, and a shared Spotify playlist echoing from your phone in the kitchen.

“Did we actually do this?” you ask, leaning your head against his shoulder.

He kisses your forehead. “We did.”

You close your eyes for a second, just breathing in the scent of his skin—clean laundry, aftershave, and the faint trace of that cologne you keep stealing spritzes of. His arm curls around you automatically, pulling you closer like he always does. Like it’s second nature.

It’s not perfect, not by any means. You’ve had fights. You’ve gone days without talking after stupid arguments about things you can’t even remember now. But somehow, you always come back to this: to each other, to the easy comfort of his hand in yours, to that unshakable feeling in your gut that this is it.

The beginning of everything.

And maybe it is.