The air in the pool house was thick with the scent of chlorine from the afternoon’s swim and the waxy, nostalgic perfume of a half-burned Nag Champa incense stick. A CD, not a mix tape but a carefully curated mix CD, whirred in the player—The Shins’ “New Slang” bleeding softly from the speakers, a soundtrack for the golden hour. Seth was sprawled on the worn velvet rug, you leaning against the couch beside him, your shoulder a warm, solid point of contact against his arm. Your collective copy of Watchmen was open on the floor, but neither of you had turned a page in twenty minutes.

It had been six weeks, three days, and—he glanced at his watch with a surreptitious tilt of the wrist—approximately seven hours since they’d stopped being just Seth-and-You, Best Friends Since Forever, and started being… this. And the sheer, unadulterated rightness of it was still a novelty he was trying to metabolize, like a sugar rush that never crashed.

He watched your hand, the one not holding a forgotten can of Coke, trace the frayed edge of the rug. He knew the topography of that hand intimately: the tiny, pale scar on your index finger from a mishap with an X-Acto knife during a 9th grade art project, the way your nails were always bitten short. He’d known it for years. But now, the act of looking felt different. It was sanctioned. It was his to look at.

“You’re staring, Seth,” you said, without looking up. A smile played on your lips, the one that was just for him—a little crooked, a lot knowing.

“Am not,” he lied, his own voice a notch too high. He recovered with what he hoped was a suave, confident smirk. It probably looked like he had a stomach cramp. “I was merely observing the profound metaphorical weight of your cuticles. Very existential. Very… Camus.”

You snorted, a profoundly un-romantic sound that made his heart do a backflip. “My cuticles are so not emo, Seth. They’re, like, totally pop-punk.”

This was the alchemy of it. The banter was the same, the comfortable, worn-in rhythm of two people who had navigated the treacherous waters of high school side-by-side. But now it was laced with a new current, a low-voltage hum of affection that transformed his dumb jokes into flirtation and your eye-rolls into secret endearments.

He shifted, rolling onto his side to face you fully. The old floorboards creaked a complaint beneath the rug. The late afternoon sun, slanted and heavy, caught the dust motes dancing around your head like a halo. It also illuminated the faint, almost invisible freckles across the bridge of your nose, a constellation he’d secretly named when he was fifteen.

“Seriously, though,” he said, his voice dropping into a register he hoped was more Luke Wilson, less Urkel. “This is kind of rockin’, isn’t it?”

You finally looked at him, and your eyes—the color of which he could never quite decide on, sometimes hazel, sometimes green depending on what you wore—held his. “What? My pop-punk cuticles?”

“No. Well, yes, they’re totally rockin’. But… this.” He gestured vaguely between the two of you, the space that now felt charged, complete. “The whole… us-being-us-but-with, you know. Benefits. The good kind. The kissing kind.”