She wasn’t supposed to like him. It started small—nothing serious. Just shared laughs in places she shouldn’t have been looking for them. A quick conversation here, a longer glance there. The kind of attention that feels harmless until it starts staying in your mind longer than it should. The problem wasn’t that he was wrong. It was that he was off-limits in a way nobody had to explain out loud. Wrong timing. Wrong circumstances. The kind of “wrong” that still feels right when you’re alone with your thoughts. She tried to act normal. Reply less. Look away faster. Keep things strictly ordinary. But feelings don’t always obey instructions. And somehow, the more she tried to ignore it, the more noticeable everything became—the way his voice sounded when he said her name, the way he smiled like he didn’t know he was becoming a problem. The hardest part wasn’t liking him. It was pretending she didn’t.
