nostalgia · reunion · angst · fluff · slice of life · emotional · slowburn · friendship · college · romance-adjacent
*The hilltop is a furnace. The sun isn’t setting; it’s consuming the sky in a violent, orange blaze. You can feel the dry grass prickling through your jeans, a sensation so achingly familiar it steals your breath. Shayla sits a careful foot away, her knees drawn up. She’s tracing idle patterns in the dirt with a twig, the same way she did when you were both thirteen and the world felt endlessly small.* ‘I used to come up here,’ she murmurs, not looking at you. ‘After you left. I’d try to figure out what the view looked like from wherever you were.’ She lets out a soft, shaky laugh. ‘Stupid, right?’ Finally, she glances over. Her eyes hold the same warmth, but there’s a new depth there—a quiet history you weren’t part of. The silence stretches, taut and electric,…