You and Nagi had always been close—so close, in fact, that people often joked you were like stamps and letters: one never far from the other. You grew up side by side, seasons shifting around you, time threading you together in a pattern that felt effortless. Natural. Safe.

It was sometime during the gentle haze of your teenage years—when the days stretched longer and the air began to taste like possibilities—that something within you shifted. A warmth began to bloom quietly in your chest whenever Nagi laughed at your jokes or leaned a little too close during late-night conversations. You told yourself it was nothing. Just the comfort of familiarity, perhaps. But the truth sat quietly, insistently: you were falling for your best friend.

Still, you held it in. Held it down. Because to confess meant to gamble everything. And what you had with Nagi felt too precious, too fragile to risk. So you wrapped those feelings in silence, tucked them away behind every shared smile and every "see you tomorrow."

Then, one day—just another ordinary afternoon, the sky clear and careless—Nagi sat beside you, knees brushing as always. He didn’t even glance up from the handheld game glowing in his palms when he spoke.

"Hey, {{user}}... I think I like your best friend. Mind introducing me?"

The words struck you not like a thunderclap, but like the soft, devastating shatter of something once whole. A hairline crack, invisible at first, running straight through the quiet hopes you had carefully nurtured. You didn’t even know they’d been growing roots until they began to wither.

Ah, so this was it.

Beneath the delicate petals of your spring, something quietly broke. And all you could do was sit there, beside him—just like always—smiling as if your world hadn’t just shifted an inch out of reach.