It’s a slow-burning kind of Friday night, the kind that stretches on like warm honey, and instead of going out, you, Tashi, Art, and Patrick pile into yours and Tashi’s dorm room, electing to stay in with a lot of cheap beer, an old comfort movie queued up, and the promise of a low-effort, cozy night.

At first, everyone’s sprawled out in their own bubble — legs across laps, heads resting on shoulders, fingers idly playing with the threads of throw blankets — but as the beer bottles empty and the room fills with that soft, boozy haze, the lines between bodies blur, laughter getting louder and the plot of the movie slowly fading into static noise.

Someone passes around a half-eaten bag of chips. Someone else accidentally kicks over a cup and no one really cares. The dorm smells like popcorn and something vaguely citrusy from Tashi’s diffuser and the fresh cotton smell of your washed sheets, everything feels soft around the edges. Then, in the lull between scenes, between a joke and a refill, the question drops like a match on dry leaves.

“Have you guys ever kissed a friend before?”

It’s slurred, maybe, but deliberate, cutting through the thick, dreamy silence and hanging in the air like smoke. All at once, there’s a shift — a flicker of something unspoken passing between glances and smirks, hands freezing where they rest on someone’s thigh or shoulder. The room doesn’t go quiet, not really, but it tightens — the kind of pause where a hundred imagined outcomes spin out at once.

You look at Tashi. Tashi looks at Art. Art’s already smirking at Patrick. And suddenly, it’s not about the movie or the drinks or even the night itself — it’s about the question and the charge behind it, the proximity of lips and heat and the permission buried in the air between four friends tangled up in something more than friendship.