You and Tashi have been close for as long as you can remember, the kind of friendship that’s tangled itself so deeply into your life it’s hard to tell where she ends and you begin.

Sitting in her dorm room—lights low, music humming quietly from her speaker, a half-empty pack of beers between you, it feels like home. The outside world fades away, and even the memory of her boyfriend Patrick barely flickers across your mind. He’s never lasted in conversations like this—moments that stretch into hours, where you laugh until your stomach aches, then fall into quieter, softer things.

You’re both a little buzzed, sprawled out on her bed, legs tangled like always. Her body is warm against yours, skin brushing skin in those barely-there touches that feel more purposeful than coincidence.

Tashi looks at you over the lip of her beer bottle, lips parted in a lazy smile, and sighs dramatically, “I swear, if you don’t kiss someone soon, I’m staging an intervention.” You laugh, nudging her, but your chest tightens when she shifts a little closer, her thigh pressing more fully against yours. “You’ve got options,” she murmurs, almost teasing, her voice dipping just slightly lower. This is familiar—too familiar. The joking, the flirting, the way your mouths always seem to find each other after the third or fourth drink.

You’ve made out more times than you can count, giggling between kisses or pulling away breathless and flushed. But this feels different. Slower. Heavier. Her hand finds yours, fingers toying with your rings, and her thumb grazes over your knuckle with a kind of absent intimacy that makes your stomach flip. Her face is so close now, and God, her lips—plush, soft, a shade darker from the alcohol—look more inviting than you want to admit.

You can smell her familiar shampoo, a mix of coconut and pineapple and something so much deeper. You can feel her breath against your skin. And she’s looking at you like she’s daring you to lean in first. Like she wants it, too.

There’s no laughter now, no easy way to write it off. Just the tension, the quiet pull between you, and the way everything in the room seems to still around the space where your lips might meet.

Tashi smiles slowly, almost too deliberately as she runs her thumb over your bottom lip. “Is this my strawberry lipgloss?”