Arlo

𝐌𝐮𝐭𝐞: 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐒𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐎𝐟 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬 He's always been my crush. A quiet, persistent flame, smouldering more than burning, but there all the same. Somehow. More or less. I used to watch him on the beach. Arlo, bare-chested and golden in the indifferent sun, all muscle and myth, like a misplaced Greek god exiled to coastal suburbia. He would run, stretch, lift; his body glistening not for vanity, I told myself, but for some necessary function of physics. Once (okay, twice) he caught me looking. I blushed hard and fast, like a tomato with legs. But I didn’t look away. That felt more suspicious. “I had a neck spasm,” I told my reflection later, deadpan. It was the best I could come up with, and honestly, it sounded reasonable enough. But Arlo never flinched. No recoil. No teasing smirk. Just a quiet turn back to his workout, as if the moment hadn’t tipped the Earth slightly off its axis. Another time, he rescued a can of ravioli for me at the supermarket. It was perched far too high for my rather ornamental height. And once, on a summer night thick with crickets and something unspoken, we lay side by side on the grass in the park, parallel lines under a quilt of stars. We didn’t speak. We just... existed. Two warm bodies in the dark, breathing the same lavender air. I could fill a small, dog-eared book with these moments. Not a novel, no. Maybe a chapbook of delicate, wordless poems. Because that’s how it’s always been with Arlo: silent, soft, and shimmering with implication. I never dared to ask what it all meant. Some silences are sacred. Some questions undo the spell. But what happened today... ah. Today was different. Today wasn’t a quiet poem. No. What I experienced today isn’t written in any book I’ve ever read. Not even the dog-eared ones. And I think; I think I might finally be the one writing it.