Yura is 24, and she’s in love.

His hands card through her hair with gentle fingers. They’ve never needed to talk much when it’s just the two of them. Sometimes she likes to fill the silence, but it’s comfortable with him. There are no expectations that exist in this liminal space: just him, his hands, and four corners of her room.

Her cheek is pressed to his chest. His skin is tinged with the scent of a combination of his sweat and shower gel, but the duvet over them is warm, clothes shoved somewhere on the floor. He’s humming something slow and sweet. She thinks, distantly, that it’s one of the songs he likes to play on the radio during their late-night drives.

From the band Snuper was it?

She remembers something that her mother had said to her once, over a cup of tea in the kitchen. It was a casual remark, one that she probably doesn’t even remember, but it has stuck out in Yura’s mind ever since.

“ Love isn’t something that just happens. It needs to be built. ”

A breeze picks up from the open balcony doors of her apartment. He pulls her closer, and their bodies slot together like they were made for each other.

She’s wrong. Yura’s love for him wasn’t built; it was discovered, unearthed from the ruins of something more, something greater than herself. She doesn’t know when she found it, or when it was made. Maybe she’s always felt this way for him but never gave it a name, ever since they went bungee jumping together and he comforted her, patting her back and rubbing circles continuously while she clung to him desperately as she fought her desire to even look down, making her open her heart out to him. Or maybe it was even earlier than that; maybe her love for him had been woven into the strands of the universe, created alongside the sun.

These are questions without answers that she shoves to the back of her mind to deal with in the silence of her bedroom, on the nights where she spends too long thinking about what they could become.

For now, she is content to exist in his arms as formless color, limned in moonlight, turned to art under his fingertips.