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You first realize your feelings may have changed when you look at him pouring coffee, eyes bleary and curly hair flopping around chaotically as if he’s had a restless night again. You feel something glow in your chest at the sight, as if the reason the sun isn’t shining outside is because it’s too busy filling you up from the inside.
It’s been a while since you felt anything like this - too long maybe, but you recognize it immediately. You’re not sure what to do with it this time. Usually it’s not that big of a problem - meet a cute guy, feel something good, move on.
But when it’s him, you’re not sure. He means so much to you. You can’t lose him, not over what might be a misunderstanding of your own feelings. That’s happened before, after all, with people who have disappeared from your life long ago now.
So you push it away. You’re good at that, good at hiding your feelings, even to yourself. It barely takes a second, before you feel like you can breathe again.
And that’s what you do: you take a deep breath, focus on feeling the air fill your lungs. It’s something he taught you, coming home one day from therapy, so exhausted from the sheer amount of stress his thoughts can give him that you could see it written in the circles under his eyes. His therapist had given him breathing exercises, and they’d gone through some of them together. You didn’t expect it to come in handy right now, but here you are anyway.
You notice him looking at you, eyes slightly less bleary now.
“You ok?” He asks.
“Yeah,” you shrug. You notice your hand is trembling a little. It’s making the milk spill from the spoon. You put the spoon down, suddenly mesmerized by how it makes the colourful cereal move through the bowl. You stir it a little more, because you can, watching the cereal give off a little bit of colour and leave behind multi coloured stripes in the milk.
He frowns, then shrugs too. “D’you want to watch some bake off?”
“Sure,” you reply. “But only if we can go buy some snacks afterwards. I always get so hungry.”
He laughs, the corners of his eyes crinkling. You don’t understand people’s obsession with his dimple, when his eyes are right there looking beautiful. The warm feeling in your chest grows.
Oh fuck, you’ve got it bad.
“How are you still alive,” he says, still laughing as he passes behind you towards the living room. You smile, and follow him.
The feeling comes back more and more often after that. You still do all the same things with him: you watch tv, you cook dinner, you work on projects together, both as a duo and as supporters for each other’s solo projects.
You catch him looking at you sometimes, eyebrows knotted as if he knows something’s up. But neither of you says anything. Why would you - everything works fine now, and you don’t want to risk losing any of it.
The turning point comes one day, out of nowhere, while you’re cooking dinner. He’s somewhere behind you while you stir the fake-chicken - an attempt at compromise between the two of you. You want actual chicken, he wants to be vegan, neither of you wants to eat alone or only cook for themselves. Fake chicken it is, even if neither of you really likes it.
“Can you give me the spices?” You ask.
“Of course,” he replies, and you can hear him open the right cupboard immediately. You would have had to search for that for a while. He’s the one who unpacks the groceries in this household, since you, apparently, “can’t be trusted with anything with sugar in it, which is everything.” He’s probably right.
He hands you the small, red pack, and before you know it you blurt out “thanks, babe.”
You both freeze, the little pack caught between you as neither of you is letting go. A small part of you hears alarm bells ring over the almost burnt chicken. You ignore it, in favour of staring back into his eyes as he looks at you.
It takes two, three moments for him to make a decision, but you can see the look in his eyes change in the split second before his lips are suddenly on yours. You hear the soft thud of the spice pack falling to the floor as you both let go of it, wrapping arms around each other, touching, feeling, as if you’ve been drowning all this time and this is the only way you can survive.
By the time you both resurface, the fake chicken is well and truly burned and about to set off the fire alarm. He swears as he reaches behind you from where you’re pressed against the counter, picking up the pan and dumping the whole thing in the sink.
“I guess we’re going to need a new pan,” he sighs, running his hand through his curls.
“I guess we’re going to have to order food,” you reply. “I say this is a celebratory pizza moment.” You try to say it with confidence and cheer, and to not let any of the anxiety in that’s currently pooling in your stomach.
He turns around, and smiles at you, looking at you shyly from underneath his eyelashes. “I say so, too,” he says, softly.
You feel your body fill with warmth and sunshine, and you let it.