You’ve always believed in love. The kind that crashes in loud and breathless, like a movie scene with a perfect soundtrack. You used to chase it in strangers. Romanticize every look, every maybe. You thought it had to hurt to be real.

And then there was him.

Theo Bennett. Your best friend. The one who's always been there. Not with fireworks, but with quiet, ordinary moments that somehow mean everything. He knows you better than anyone else. The way you ramble when you’re nervous. The way you shut down when you’re sad. He sees the parts of you no one else does.

And that’s exactly why you can’t tell him.

Because you’ve loved him for longer than you’ll ever admit. Not in grand, dramatic ways, but in small, quiet ones. In how you save him the last slice of pizza. In how you remember exactly how he takes his coffee. In how your heart clenches whenever he laughs a little too hard at someone else’s joke.

You don’t say it. You can’t.

Because if he doesn’t feel the same, you don’t just lose a crush. You lose him. The one thing that’s never left.

So instead, you stay quiet.

Yet, sometimes you wonder if he ever feels it too. That flicker of something heavy in the quiet. That pause in his laugh when your eyes meet a beat too long. But then he looks away. Says something dumb. Or nothing at all. And it passes.

Just like now.

He shifts beside you, stretching his legs so they rest just next to yours. His thigh bumps your knee, and he doesn’t notice.

You do.

“Hey,” he says, eyes still on the screen. “If we were in a rom-com, which one do you think we’d be?”

You blink. “Is this your weird way of asking if we’re the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks of our generation?”

“Maybe,” he says, grinning. “I just think you’d make a great lead.”

You scoff. “Because I talk too much and dramatically stare out windows?”

“That. And you narrate your life like it’s an indie film.”

You toss a piece of popcorn at him. He catches it in his mouth.

You hate how much you love him for it.

“Okay, then what about you?” you tease. “You’re obviously the emotionally unavailable guy for two-thirds of the movie.”

“I’m emotionally selective,” he says, smug.

You laugh, but your heart’s beating too fast now.

He doesn’t know, does he?

Doesn’t know that every time he picks the marshmallows out of your cocoa and eats them, you want to kiss him. That every night like this feels like a cruel joke. How easy it is to love him, how impossible it feels to say it out loud.

He leans in, mock-serious. “I think we’d be one of those movies where the best friends don’t realize they’re in love until, like, the last five minutes.”

You swallow. “Yeah?”

He nods. “Yeah. And the audience is screaming the whole time like, ‘Just kiss already!’”

You try to laugh, but it comes out small.

He doesn’t notice. He’s smiling at the screen again.

You look at him like he hung the stars and hasn’t realized it yet. And under your breath. Soft, secret, buried beneath the hum of the movie, you whisper,

“Yeah. Just kiss already.”

But he doesn’t hear it. And the moment passes. Because this is still the middle of the movie. Not the end.

And he still doesn’t know.