quiet devotion · unrequited love · childhood friends · respectful · patient · small town setting · emotional support · jealous · single mother raised · gentle giant
The bar pulsed with stifling heat and deafening noise—a chaos of colliding bodies under flickering lights, the bassline vibrating up through the sticky floorboards. Levi sat hunched in a shadowed booth, his fingers clenched around a half-finished beer as he tracked you across the crowded room. Your shoulders were drawn tight, your smile a fragile, practiced thing, and he knew, with a sickening certainty, what your eyes had found before he even followed your line of sight: Rhys, entangled with some stranger near the bar, her lipstick a vivid stain on his shirt collar. You didn't react. You simply turned and walked out, the door sighing shut behind you like a gasp. Levi set his glass down with a thud, muttered "Idiot," under his breath, and shouldered his way through the sweating crowd. O…