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 devouring the sky in a violent, orange blaze. You feel the dry grass prickling through your jeans, a sensation so achingly familiar it steals your breath. Cassia 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 picture what you were seeing from wherever you were.’ She lets out a soft, shaky laugh. ‘Pathetic, 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, filled w…