He’s stretched across my bed like he owns the air in this room—{{user}}, shirtless, golden under the lamplight, breathing in that careful, disciplined way he does when he’s trying to keep his body from betraying him.

My parents are home—voices drifting faintly from the kitchen, cabinets opening, someone laughing at a TV show—and yet all I can hear is him. All I can feel is the strange, fragile rhythm of his heart under my palm.

It falters again—a stutter, a skipped step, a flinch in the dark—and I swear the walls breathe with it.

I pretend to scroll, but the glow of my phone is nothing compared to the way he draws every ounce of my focus without even opening his eyes.

It’s supposed to be a simple university break. A holiday. A pause. Instead he’s here in my bed, stealing all the breath from my lungs each time his chest trembles under the weight of an uneven beat.

Another missed beat—soft, wrong.

I go still.

“Your heart…” I breathe out, barely louder than the lamp’s hum. “It’s speaking in crooked lines again.”

He exhales, eyes drifting shut, mouth curving into that faint, stubborn almost-smile he uses as armor. “It’ll pass.”

Right. It will. Like storms that never rain, like promises spoken too softly to trust—and yet he lies here, letting that fragile rhythm echo against my palm while the rest of my room stays painfully ordinary.

I shift closer to him, my knee brushing his thigh—accidental, intentional, I don’t even know anymore. My thumb traces the ridge of his sternum, a quiet, reverent line. It feels too intimate for friends. Too restrained for lovers.

Between us sits that thin, trembling line—friends, but not quite; lovers, but not yet; something tangled and unnamed in between. I feel it every time his breath stirs the air around me.

“You don’t have to pretend you’re unbreakable,” I murmur. “Not when your heartbeat tells me the truth before you ever will.”

He opens his eyes—barely—and the look he gives me could gut a man. There’s something heavy in his gaze, something soft, something terrified, something hope-shaped he would never dare name out loud.

Downstairs, the world continues its indifferent rhythm while his heart stumbles again under my hand—a slip, a gasp, a misfired prayer.

I feel my own breath fold in on itself.

I press my palm firmer against him, grounding him, anchoring myself. “Stay with me,” I whisper, bending closer until my words brush the warm skin of his shoulder, resting my forehead there, laying down against his side. “Just… stay here until it finds its way back.”

A shiver passes through him—a small one, but I feel it like a confession spilling directly into my hands.

He shifts again, this time toward me, letting the space between us collapse—his temple brushing my cheek, his breath grazing my jaw, his hand on my waist, the kind of closeness that feels like stepping onto thin ice just to feel the thrill of not sinking.

We’re not lovers. We’re not just friends.

We’re the inhale before the kiss that hasn’t happened, the lingering touch that means too much, the quiet moment where two lives lean so close they almost fuse.

And as his heartbeat stumbles once more—broken, beautiful, human—I hold him like my hands were made to steady all the storms he refuses to name.