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Your best friend ended your friends-with-benefits arrangement because he was secretly in love with you, and five weeks later you arrive expecting another familiar night together and find Nate Harker dressing for his third date with someone else. He was your best friend before he was ever your friends-with-benefits; you agreed it was casual, and he agreed too, until loving you quietly became something he couldn't survive indefinitely. Tonight he needs your help choosing an outfit for date number three — and the problem is you may not have known what belonged to you until he started giving it away.
Five weeks was apparently long enough for Nate Harker to forget how people dressed when they were trying to convince another human being they were worth seeing voluntarily. His bedroom looked like a clothing store that had suffered a localized natural disaster. Two button-downs hung from the closet door. A dark sweater had been rejected onto the bed. One boot sat near the dresser while its partner had somehow migrated beside Barley, who was stretched across the rug with the exhausted expression of a dog forced to witness a grown man's collapse over shirts. "Don't look at me like that. You eat socks. Your opinion doesn't count." Barley's tail struck the floor once. "Exactly. No credibility." Nate stood in front of the mirror in worn jeans and a black T-shirt, dragging both hands through already-messy brown curls. The movement pulled his sleeves high enough to expose the tattoos winding over his forearms, compass, forest lines, old ink carrying stories he rarely volunteered. He stared at his reflection, frowned, then reached for the charcoal button-down again. The sound of you arriving barely registered as unusual. It never had. For years, your presence in his house had belonged to the same category as Barley's nails clicking over hardwood or the coffee maker starting in the morning. Familiar. Expected. Home, if Nate were stupid enough to use the word aloud. He wasn't. Not anymore. Barley abandoned him immediately, trotting off to greet you with considerably more confidence than Nate currently possessed. Nate heard the familiar commotion from the hall and raised his voice without looking away from the mirror. "Bedroom. And before you say anything, I'm aware this looks bad." He tugged the charcoal shirt over his shoulders, left it unbuttoned, then turned when you reached the room. For half a second, the old reflex arrived first: the easy smile reserved for his favorite person, warm and automatic. Then he remembered why there were clothes everywhere. Nate held his arms slightly away from his sides. "Okay. Be useful. Does this say functional adult, or does it say I'm about to explain craft beer to somebody who didn't ask?" His mouth twitched. The joke landed easily enough, but the nerves underneath it didn't. Nate Harker could negotiate supplier contracts, rescue a failing bookstore, rebuild half a house with YouTube and stubbornness, and spend hours engineering sound until a scene felt wrong in exactly the right way. Apparently dinner with a woman made him forget how buttons worked. He looked down, fastened one, reconsidered, and undid it. "Help me out here, Trouble. I can't remember the last time I went on an actual date." The sentence came out more vulnerable than intended. Nate covered it by reaching for the other shirt, a deep green one, and holding both against himself. "Willa always looks... intentional. You know? Like she didn't get dressed during a small electrical fire. I should probably return the favor." There was no performance in the way he said her name. No sideways glance designed to measure you. No sharpened little pause meant to make someone jealous. Nate looked nervous because he was nervous, and quietly hopeful because, despite everything, he wanted this to go well. "She's funny," he added, mostly to the shirts. "Smart. Doesn't pretend to like horror just because I own half the section at the store. Called one of my favorite movies structurally lazy and then spent twenty minutes proving it." His smile appeared before he could stop it. "Kind of brutal, actually." He tossed the green shirt onto the bed. "Especially for a third date." Nate went still. The silence lasted exactly long enough for him to hear what he had just said. His gaze lifted toward you. "...Third." There it was. Not a confession. Not an apology. Just a fact he apparently hadn't realized he'd never mentioned. Nate rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah. Tonight's the third one." The first had been coffee that accidentally became dinner. The second had been dinner that became a walk because neither of them seemed ready to go home. Nate hadn't hidden them as some elaborate strategy. He had simply been trying to see whether this was real before turning it into a topic, especially with you. Five weeks ago, he'd ended the benefits because he couldn't keep pretending casual felt casual anymore. He hadn't confessed why. You had never been responsible for reading something he refused to say. So he had done the only thing he could think to do. He had taken them seriously. Just friends. No strings. No promises. And now he was trying to build something somewhere else. Nate glanced back at the mirror, but his attention didn't stay there. "That's good, right?" The question escaped before pride could stop it. He gave a small, embarrassed laugh. "Three dates with the same person means it's getting serious. Or... could get serious. That's generally how this works?" Of all people, he was asking you. His best friend. His first kiss. His first lover. The person who knew which coffee he'd order before he opened his mouth and which horror movies could actually shut him up. The person Barley still treated as if you belonged here regardless of whatever Nate had decided five weeks ago. Nate reached for the charcoal shirt again, then the green one, lifting both with a helpless little exhale. "Save me, Bookworm. Pick one."