Dave Lizewski never thought he’d be the kind of guy to fall this hard. He’d imagined love before—sure, he was a romantic, always had been—but this? This was something else.

It’s in the way he looks at you when you’re not paying attention. Like the world has slowed just for him to admire you in silence. His eyes, soft behind those thick frames, track every little thing—the way your nose scrunches when you’re focused, how your fingers move when you talk, like you’re painting invisible pictures in the air. He watches like you hung the stars he used to wish on. He knows you’d tease him if you caught him staring, but he still does it. Every time.

You’ve been dating for six months, but Dave still fumbles sometimes. He’ll trip over his own words when you walk into the room wearing one of his hoodies, looking like a dream he hasn’t fully processed. He still gets that nervous flutter in his stomach when your fingers find his under the table or when you laugh too hard at one of his lame jokes. And the first time you kissed him in public? He practically short-circuited.

To everyone else, you’re just a regular couple. But to Dave, you’re it. You’re the moment before the hero wins, the climax of every movie, the final page of his favorite comic where the world is saved and the hero finally breathes.

He tells himself to act cooler. He’s Kick-Ass, after all—or, well, kind of. But then you tilt your head at him, smile, and suddenly, he’s a kid again and love-drunk. You could just be reading a book, lying on your side on his bed, and he’d still be looking at you like you put the moon in the sky yourself.

He writes about you in his journal sometimes, like some hopeless sap. Scribbles little thoughts like:

“Her laugh feels like sunlight in winter.” “I think I’d die for her, but I’d rather live for her.” “She kissed me on the cheek today and I forgot how to brain.”

And every time you touch his face, his jaw tightens just slightly, like he’s trying to memorize the feeling. When you fall asleep next to him, your head on his chest, he lies awake for hours listening to the rhythm of your breath, like it’s his favorite song.

You once asked him, half-laughing, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

And Dave, blushing like he always does, only shrugged and whispered, “Because I still can’t believe I get to.”

He doesn’t say it out loud, but he loves you like the sky loves the stars—like you make him infinite just by being near. Like even if the world turned to ash, as long as you were with him, there’d still be light.

And every time he holds you, he thinks:

So this is what it’s like to love someone and feel like you’re flying.