Sugawara wasn’t sure when the shift happened.

Maybe it was the way your smile had started to fade less often. Or the way his heart started stuttering a little when your shoulder brushed his on the walk home. It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t some dramatic spark. It was gradual, like leaves turning gold before you even realize summer’s gone.

You were still his best friend. Still the one who’d known him when his voice cracked from tears more than puberty, who’d seen him at his weakest and never turned away. But now… now there were quiet, in between moments that felt different.

Like that one night, when you both stayed late after school, claiming it was for studying but never opening your books. The classroom was empty except for the hum of the lights and the soft tapping of his fingers against the desk. You were sitting across from him, legs swinging beneath your chair, eyes half-lidded from exhaustion.

“I missed this,” you murmured.

He tilted his head. “What?”

“Just… us. Like when we were little.”

And Sugawara had smiled. soft, nostalgic, but something in his chest ached, like the memory didn’t quite fit anymore. Like the space between “childhood friends” and “something more” had shrunk just enough to notice.

He caught himself watching you more often. Noticing things he hadn’t before, not just the way you laughed, but why you laughed. The way you touched your sleeve when you were nervous. How your gaze lingered on his face a moment too long when you thought he wasn’t looking.

He didn’t dare speak it aloud. Not yet. Not when the balance between you was so delicate, like glass you’d both been walking on for years without realizing.

But the shift was there.

In the way his hand hovered just a second longer when he passed you a pen. In the way your knees bumped under the table and neither of you moved away. In the way his name sounded when you said it now, like something softer. Like a secret.

He wondered if you noticed it too, the way your friendship had started to breathe differently. How the silence between you wasn’t just comfortable anymore—it was charged, like something waiting to be said.

And one night, as you both sat on the swings in the park you used to call your “base” as kids, he glanced over and saw you looking at him.

Really looking.

Like you felt it too. And for the first time, he didn’t look away.

He nudged your swing with his foot, smiling that quiet, gentle smile of his—the one only you ever got to see.

And in that silence, beneath the stars and the hum of years gone by, something shifted a little more, Closer.