You never stood a chance.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about growing up next to someone like Leon Kane — the way it happens so slowly you don’t even notice until it’s already too late. Until he’s just there, threaded into the fabric of your life so completely you can’t remember what it looked like before him.
Your brother’s best friend.
Three years older and a thousand miles out of reach.
He was always around — taking up space, filling every room with that particular gravity of his. Not loud. Never loud. Leon didn’t need volume. He had something quieter than that. Something that made every eye in the room find him without him ever asking.
You found him too.
God, you found him early.
You followed him around with your heart basically outside your body — that humiliating, obvious crush bleeding through every look, every laugh, every moment you angled yourself into his orbit hoping he’d finally, just once, look back.
He called you brat.
Said it easily. Like punctuation. Like that one word was enough to define you and dismiss you in the same breath.
You told yourself it was the age gap. Three years when you’re young is a canyon — he saw a kid, that was all. When you were older it would be different. When you caught up it would matter.
Then he started dating your best friend.
Same age as you. No gap there. No excuse left standing. No reason left to hope.
It wasn’t like Leon was waiting around either.
There was always someone. A rotation of beautiful, willing women who knew better and didn’t care. On again, off again, never serious, never staying — that was just Leon. That had always been Leon.
“That’s just how he is,”
you told yourself.
It had nothing to do with you.
So you stopped.
Quietly. Without ceremony. You put it down like something too heavy to keep carrying and you walked away from it.
Grew edges where the softness used to be. Started snapping back instead of reaching forward. Learned to match his carelessness with your own until it stopped feeling like pretending.
He still calls you brat.
You stopped feeling it a long time ago.
Or so you tell yourself.
-----
And now you live with him.
Temporarily. That’s the word Mason used when he offered you his couch — then his spare room — then the whole arrangement. You’re new to the city, new to college, still finding your footing. It made sense. It was practical. Your brother’s apartment, your brother’s rules, your brother’s best friend sprawled across the couch like he owns the place.
Which, in every way that matters, he does.
You told yourself it would be fine.
-----
Leon prefers the quiet.
He’s been here long enough that the silence has settled properly around him — glass on the table, shoes off, nothing asking anything of him. Eyes closed. Shoulders down. The specific stillness of a man with nowhere to be and no one to answer to.
This is the part of the day he actually likes.
He hears the door before it opens. Doesn’t need to look.
He already knows.
She comes in the way she always does — not loud, just present, the kind of presence that fills a room before she’s fully through the door. Their apartment. Mason’s idea. Leon had said nothing when Mason suggested it, which Mason took as agreement, which it wasn’t, which it also wasn’t not. Leon doesn’t open his eyes.
And then he hears it.
A date. A restaurant. Some guy who was so sweet, some night that was so easy, some kiss that was —
His eyes open.
She’s not looking at him. Moving through the room lit up from the inside, voice running a hundred miles a minute, not a single thought spared in his direction. Leon watches her from the couch with an expression that gives nothing away.
He’s just annoyed about the noise.
That’s all this is.
“Hey.”
She doesn’t hear him.
“Be quiet.”
Nothing. Just more words about some guy he’s never met and has absolutely no opinion on whatsoever.
“You’re giving me a headache.”
She waves him off.
Keeps going.
Leon sets his glass down. The sound of it is quiet. Deliberate.
He stands. Crosses the room.
She turns mid-sentence — eyes finding him, mouth still open, still going —
His hand finds her jaw and he kisses her.
Nothing like whatever she’d been describing.
Nothing like that at all.
Deep. Deliberate. Unhurried in the most devastating way — one hand at her jaw, the other pulling her in like the distance between them was personally offensive to him. He kisses her like patience finally, quietly ran out. He feels the moment she stops thinking. Feels her go soft and still and breathless against him.
There.
He pulls back. Looks at her.
Flushed. Lips parted. Thoroughly, satisfyingly speechless.
Something in his chest does something he doesn’t look at directly.
The smirk comes easy. It always does.
He steps back. Drops onto the couch. Picks up his glass like gravity simply reclaimed him.
“Finally,”
he murmurs.
“Peace.”
He closes his eyes.
Doesn’t think about it.
Doesn’t think about her.
He never does.
(He always does.)
