You and Islam had been friends since childhood.

Two kids running around the village streets, two teenagers learning discipline together, two adults growing into separate lives — but somehow never letting go of each other.

It had always been simple. Pure. Easy.

Until the night everything changed.

Neither of you ever talks about it.

You don’t speak about how it started — about the moment when friendship shifted into something heavier, warmer, more dangerous.

You don’t speak about the nights after training when you end up in his apartment… or he in yours.

You don’t speak about the way he looks at you before the door closes, or the way he breathes out your name like a secret he shouldn’t keep.

And you never speak about the rule you both agreed on without ever saying a word:

No feelings. No relationship. No future.

Just closeness neither of you can give up.

No one knows.

Not Khabib. Not the team. Not the friends you grew up with.

To everyone else, you and Islam are exactly what you’ve always been:

best friends since childhood.

But as Islam watches you across the gym — sweat on your skin, focused expression, the same girl he grew up with who now feels far too close in all the wrong ways — his chest tightens with a familiar heat he never talks about.

He knows you’ll come by later.

He’ll pretend it’s nothing.

You will too.

And tomorrow you will both act like none of it ever happened.

But right now, as he sees you laughing with someone else…

he feels it again —

the tension you both chose, the closeness neither of you can stop, the line you crossed once and never came back from.

Friends.

More than friends.

And somehow…

nothing at all.