fake it til you make it | greta van fleet

a kind stranger | two

You were never one to get attached to people very quickly. Especially after the trainwreck that had been your relationship with Joseph, the only other time in your life in which you'd allowed yourself to be reckless with your heart, you tended to keep everyone a reasonable distance away. It was safer that way; never again would you allow yourself to fall into the clutches of the wrong sort of person.

Joshua Kiszka was an anomaly.

It had been mere weeks since he'd come crashing into your life, well and truly, and already he'd become a staple in your day-to-day existence. He'd taken on a starring role, as you liked to say–finding a bit of humor in the metaphor considering just how he'd come into your little circle of human connections.

Even despite the fast-paced, insane sort of bond you'd created with the man, it didn't feel reckless. It didn't feel reckless to plate your heart up on a silver platter and hand it over to Josh. It didn't feel reckless to trust him so easily, to let him in so soon.

But, then again, you were learning that Josh Kiszka was the sort of man you'd feel safe walking into a house fire with. If he had asked you to jump off of a bridge with him, you'd have simply asked: which bridge, and when? Maybe it was all due to the atypical fashion in which you'd met, or maybe it had more to do with his charm.

You were hesitant to call it a crush. Something about calling it a crush, calling it for what it was if you were honest with yourself, felt so juvenile. It didn't quite fit what you felt for him, which was anything but juvenile.

Some part of you pondered if it was some sort of rescue romance, like a shitty daytime television trope. No matter how much you thought over the possibility, though, you knew that wasn't the case. You'd gotten to know the man a little too well to brush your feelings off as an extreme form of gratitude.

Plus, he had gotten you written up again for being late to work a third time. You were pretty sure any sense of gratitude over what he'd done had all but vanished at that moment. He did make it up to you with coffee, though, so at least you could still say he was too kind for this world.

Since that fateful night in The Styx, not a single day had gone by without you having at least one interaction with Josh. He'd very awkwardly asked for your number at the end of the night, stumbling over his words and rambling about the possibility of him overstepping considering the circumstances, but the look of sheer joy on his face when you'd simply handed over your phone without a word had been more than a little endearing. He'd saved his number under the moniker, "#1 Boyfriend," and you'd never changed it.

It still made you grin every time the name appeared on your phone.

Speaking with him was entirely juvenile. It was like you were sixteen again, staying up into the early hours of the morning just talking endlessly about everything and nothing all at once, purely because neither one of you was ready to be apart from the other. The number of times you'd woken up to find you'd fallen asleep in the middle of typing a text message, or the phone still connected via a voice call or facetime was sickening.

That, in all actuality, was exactly how he'd made you late to work for the third time in a month. The two of you had been face-timing well into the night. It had started out innocent–just setting up a video call to watch a movie together because you'd yet to have made house calls–and somehow the hours had ticked by with the movie long forgotten.

Eventually, you'd both migrated to your respective beds as the midnight hour came and went. You'd been the first to turn off your light, leaving only the glow of your phone to illuminate your face, and eventually, Josh had followed suit. Somewhere around the time he'd started yawning, and later rambling about the meaning of life almost incoherently, you'd fallen asleep.