_RelleLebby_
Jay Ahn has been watching Malik Tate from across the street since they were ten years old, and he has been loving him almost as long. Not the simple kind of love. The kind that folds itself small enough to fit inside a friendship and lives there quietly for years, patient and heavy and unnamed.
Malik Tate is magnetic, loyal, and building himself from the ground up in a world that wants to own every piece of him it can reach. He knows exactly who Jay is. What he does not yet know is what to do with everything he feels when he looks at him.
Set in Richmond, Virginia, this is their story. A decade of shared summers, cracked sidewalks, late nights, near-confessions, wrong moments, and the slow, relentless pull of two people moving toward each other against every force designed to keep them still.
It is not a fast story. It is not meant to be. The slow burn here is not a device. It is the whole point. Because some loves do not arrive. They are built, quietly, over years, out of ordinary moments that reveal themselves to have mattered all along.
When they finally reach for each other, everything they survived to get there becomes the architecture of something neither the industry, nor the fathers, nor the world's noise can dismantle.
This is Richmond. This is a decade. This is a love story that refused to be rushed.
Come in. Stay a while.
© Relle H.