He told himself it didn’t mean anything.
That you didn’t mean anything.
It was easier that way—keeping it small, harmless. Just a kid he met at a gig. Someone who liked his music, who smiled too easily, who asked questions nobody else bothered to. Why did you write that line? Do you think people can be saved by songs?
Wilbur laughed the first time you asked him that. Nobody ever talked to him like that anymore. People his age just nodded along, said cool track, man, and moved on. You didn’t. You listened. You looked.
And maybe that was the problem.
You weren’t supposed to make him feel young again. You weren’t supposed to make him care.
But you stayed after shows. You brought him a snack once because he looked “starved.” You told him he talked about music like it was holy. You said you wanted to be like that one day—to love something enough that it ruined you a little.
He wanted to tell you it already had.
Then today happened. You walked in with someone else. A boy. Same age, too confident, too loud. His hand brushed your arm when he laughed and you let it. Wilbur saw. From across the room, he saw.
And for a moment, everything inside him twisted.
When he caught you alone later, he forced a smile, hands shoved deep into his pockets like they might stop shaking.
“New friend?” he asked.
“Yeah,” you said easily. “He’s in my class.”
Class. The word hit him wrong. You were still in high school. Of course you were. You still had time to figure things out. To grow. To forget him.
That night, his phone stayed silent. No messages. No questions about his songs. No soft what did you mean when you wrote that? Just silence.
He sat there, staring at your name, watching the little “last online” fade out. Told himself not to care. Told himself to sleep. Instead, he stayed awake until dawn, rewriting a verse you’d said you liked.
When he saw you the next day, you smiled again. Hoodie, dimpled grin, voice cracking mid-laugh. You said, “Morning, Wil.”
And something in him split wide open.
“I missed you,” he said. Light. Like a joke. Like it wasn’t the first thing that left his mouth after hours of silence.
You blinked, confused but kind, and smiled again. Like you didn’t know what that did to him.
He told himself it was fine. He could handle this. Just a crush. Just admiration. Just a small, strange warmth in his chest every time you looked his way.
But then you said, “You look tired,” and he laughed because you didn’t know. You couldn’t possibly know what kind of exhaustion lived in him. You couldn’t know that sometimes, when he wrote, it was your face that showed up behind the words.
You never asked for any of this. You just smiled. You just existed.
And Wilbur—Wilbur let himself believe it was harmless. That this was normal. That nothing had gone wrong yet.
Because the truth, the one that hummed somewhere deep in his chest every time you said his name, was this
You weren’t supposed to mean this much.
And now he couldn’t remember who he was before you did
Netwrck
