Discover Top Posts Tagged with #drop dead

Apr 19

Drop Dead

So I’m a big Olivia Rodrigo fan LOOL this is based off her new song which I think is so fun and cute and whimsical and I think every girl should fall so hard like this for someone at least once in her life

Here’s what I think would have influenced popstar!reader to write Drop Dead abt alysa

It’s late enough that your whole apartment has gone soft and quiet. The lamps in your bedroom are on low, your makeup is half gone, and the city outside your windows has dissolved. You are sprawled sideways across your bed in an old shirt from a past tour, hair loose, one sock still on because you had been too lazy to fully get ready for sleep.

Nights like this are rare now. Usually there is always something waiting for you—another demo to approve, another performance clip your team wants you to repost, another interview quote turned into discourse by strangers with too much time and a Wi-Fi connection. Your life has gotten so loud that quiet feels expensive.

You have been famous long enough now that people think they know exactly who you are. To them you're the girl who writes her own songs, turns every crush into a hit, and somehow manages to make yearning sound glamorous instead of embarrassing. They call you a hopeless romantic like it’s both a compliment and a warning. Your fans make jokes that you could make eye contact with someone in a grocery store and have three unreleased bridge ideas about them by the time you get home.

The joke is funny because it isn’t entirely wrong. You do fall fast sometimes, just not in the crazy, delusional way strangers online accuse you of, but in the way that life catches your attention so sharply it’s hard not to lean toward it. You notice things like the way people laugh when they stop trying to sound cool and the way a voice changes when someone starts talking about the thing they love most.

You also know the way desire can start as something so small it almost feels harmless. So when your phone lights up on the bed beside you with a text from your manager that says, you need to see this, and then a link follows, you don’t think much of it at first. You assume it is another dance clip, another celebrity using one of your songs for publicity. But then you press play.

It’s Alysa Liu on the ice, and the first thing you register is that she doesn’t skate like someone trying to impress people. She skates like someone who loves it too much to care about anything else. You don't even realize the fact that it’s your song opening through the arena speakers, one you wrote yourself in the middle of a stupid, dizzy, embarrassingly happy crush and then somehow turned into one of the biggest songs of your career. A song your fans have loved for years, partly because it’s catchy and partly because it became one more piece of the mythology around you—the hopeless romantic, the girl always half in love with life, with people, with possibility.

Alysa is using that song, your song, but she is not precious with it. She doesn’t treat it like something sacred she’s too intimidated to touch. She uses it like she understands it. Every little rise in the melody finds its way into her body. The sharpness of a turn, the ease of her landing, the little flashes of mischief in her expression when she hits a beat just right, it all feels natural, like she picked the song because it belonged to her and because she trusted herself enough to make it hers for four minutes.

By the time the program ends, you’ve sat up fully in bed without realizing it, your pillow pushed aside, your legs folded under you now. The video ends on crowd noise and your own faint reflection in the black screen for half a second before it replays.

Your manager texts again. Cool right? She picks her own music a lot. Thought you’d like this.

You type back, Who is she? and then immediately delete it because that makes you sound insane, considering of course you know who Alysa Liu is in the vague public way everyone knows who Alysa Liu is. Olympic figure skater. Blonde and brown halo rings. A little unpredictable, in a way people find charming because she seems so entirely herself.

So instead, you send, Wait I love this???

Your manager reacts with a laughing emoji and says, careful. another crush incoming?

You roll your eyes at that, but you replay the video anyway.

Then you do what anyone with a phone, a bed, and poor self-restraint does… you open the internet and start digging. At first it’s almost innocent. You watch another program, then another. Then you find interviews, and that is where it really gets bad for you, because skating is one thing, but a personality is what gets you.

Alysa has this way of talking that feels disarmingly unfiltered without ever seeming careless. She doesn’t sound rehearsed in that glossy media-trained way you know too well, the way people in the public eye learn to answer questions without saying anything at all. She sounds like she means what she says. In one clip she shrugs off a question about pressure with this half-smile, loose and unbothered, like she genuinely refuses to let fear dictate too much of her life. In another she talks about wanting to enjoy things while they’re happening, not just chase the next achievement. You know what it means to be young and publicly ambitious, to have strangers package your life into eras and outcomes and comeback narratives before you’ve even had time to live it. So there’s something magnetic about a girl who seems to move through all that noise with this philosophy of just doing what she loves, fully, while she can. No regrets, no dragging herself halfway into things.

You click through clips of her laughing mid-answer, squinting under arena lights, making jokes with that effortless comedic timing that can’t be taught. In one interview she says something a little offhand and funny, and the interviewer breaks before she does, like Alysa’s sense of humor always lands half a beat later because she says things so straight-faced.

You grin at your phone, then immediately feel ridiculous for grinning alone in bed at a figure skater you have never met. But still, you keep going.

Her Instagram is somehow worse. Or better. You haven’t decided. It is one thing to think someone is cool when they are framed by competition footage and media clips. It is another to see the smaller pieces: blurry photo dumps, friends with their arms slung around each other, weird angles, a caption that makes no effort to sound polished, the kind of face card that would be obnoxious if she didn’t seem so unpretentious about it.

She is annoyingly pretty in a way that doesn’t seem engineered. Pretty in motion, pretty mid-laugh, pretty with no obvious awareness of how devastating she looks to everyone else.

There are training clips, medal photos, candid shots where she’s clearly being silly on purpose, and then posts that catch you off guard because there’s a kind of openness in them, a lightness. She looks like somebody who actually has fun being alive. You find yourself lingering on one video longer than necessary because her voice in it is lower and more amused than you expected, and when she smiles off to the side at someone behind the camera you feel a stupid flutter low in your stomach that makes you physically put your phone down for a second.

“Oh, brother,” you mutter to the empty room, dragging a hand down your face before picking it right back up again. There is no one there to witness your loss of dignity, which is the only reason you continue.

You go onto TikTok next, which is a mistake so immediate it almost feels karmic. There are edits of her everywhere. Some are sincere, all soaring music and slow-motion spins. Some are dumb, built around the fact that the internet has agreed she is someone who makes everyone a little bit stupid. The comments are full of people openly folding.

She’s the coolest girl alive. I’d let her ruin my life. No actually why is she soooo fine.

One edit uses a clip of her smirking after a skate and you laugh out loud, quiet but real, because the top comment just says she knows exactly what she’s doing to us and three thousand people have agreed.

Eventually, because the internet is the internet and your name is unfortunately always invited into rooms you never entered, you come across the ship edits. At first you almost scroll past because you assume they’ll be dumb in a way that makes you cringe, but then one catches you off guard.

It opens with the first notes of the song she used for her program, cuts between clips of you performing it on stage and Alysa skating to it under arena lights, and then layers in random little visuals—your smile from an interview, her laughing in a press conference, both of you looking over your shoulders in separate clips as if by some accidental cinematic miracle it almost looks like you’re turning toward each other.

There is absolutely no evidence, no interaction, no meeting, not even a shared event. Just editors with too much imagination and apparently a very specific belief that the universe should get on with it already.

The caption says something like she wrote this song about Alysa and Alysa knows it, trust me, now someone do your job and make this happen.

You snort, but you watch the whole thing. Then another. Then another. One uses a soft love song and comments underneath are losing their minds in a way that is strangely endearing instead of invasive.

They would be so cute together. I just know she’d fall for Alysa in like ten seconds. Someone show this to her manager like rn. The love album for Alysa would go platinum. I wonder if she knows Alysa skated to her song.

You should feel weird about it, probably. You should close the app and reclaim at least a scrap of your pride. Instead you’re lying there with your chin tucked into your pillow, smiling despite yourself, reading each comment like they are passing notes directly to you. Because there is something harmlessly adorable about it. People are not making up scandals or forcing some bizarre narrative. They just think two girls who seem bright and soft and a little intense in complementary ways might fit together.

And worse—most humiliating of all—you can see it for one fleeting second. It's not in some wedding bells, soulmate, psychotic way. It's a silly little vision.

The two of you side by side somewhere real and ordinary, close enough to be sharing the same private joke, Alysa with that loose grin she gets when she’s amused, you trying and failing to play it cool. The image arrives so easily it startles you.

You drop your phone onto your chest and stare at the ceiling for a minute, letting out a breath that sounds suspiciously like a laugh. Your room is quiet again except for the faraway hum of the city and the faint sound of your air conditioner kicking on.

“This is actually stupid,” you say softly to yourself, though there is no heat in it, just disbelief.

You turn your head and look at your phone like it has personally betrayed you. A crush is too dramatic of a word, you tell yourself. You have not met Alysa Liu. You do not know Alysa Liu. All you know is that she picked your song, skated the hell out of it, seems funny and smart and way too pretty, and lives according to a philosophy you admire enough that it makes something in you ache a little. That is not a crush. That is appreciation. Professional curiosity. Artistic respect. Normal interest.

Except none of those explanations really account for the giddy warmth still fizzing low in your chest, or why the ship edit comments made you bury your face in your pillow for a second just to hide your smile from absolutely no one.

Your fans would never let you live this down if they knew. They already joke that your type is anyone talented and emotionally interesting within a ten-mile radius. The idea of them finding out you spent part of your night watching edits of yourself with a figure skater who used your song would probably become fandom folklore by morning.

You can almost hear it already; she definitely saw the edits and fell in love immediately. you guys know how she gets. She writes one bridge and suddenly they’re married.

That thought should embarrass you more than it does but it just makes you grin into the dark, because there is something sweet about being known that well by people who have watched you turn feeling too much into a career.

When you finally force yourself off the apps, it takes effort. You exit TikTok, then Instagram, then go back to the original video one more time because now that you know more about her, the program feels different. Then you lock your phone and set it face down on the nightstand before it can tempt you again.

In the mirror across the room, you catch a glimpse of yourself climbing under the covers with this faint, private smile still lingering around your mouth, and you roll your eyes at your own reflection.

“Get a grip,” you murmur, though your voice comes out fond instead of stern.

You reach up and switch off the lamp, and the room drops into darkness. Alone with your thoughts, you admit at least that it is not a crime to admire someone. It is not even a crime to think a girl you have never met might be a little extraordinary, pretty and funny and cool and maybe the kind of person who makes a room feel more alive just by stepping into it.

As you settle deeper into the pillows, the night folding around you, your brain replays fragments against your will. You see her skates carving across your song, hear her laugh in that interview, remember the dumb sweetness of those comments, picture the silly little image of the two of you standing side by side as if it’s already happened somewhere.

You know it’s silly. You know you are being just self-aware enough to be embarrassed and just entertained enough not to stop. And when sleep finally starts to pull you under, your last coherent thought is helplessly simple, warm with possibility in a way you would never say out loud.

You really do think the two of you would be cute together.

———

Ten minutes before a concert consists of a kind of manufactured chaos that has become so normal to you it almost feels comforting.

People are everywhere, but with purpose. Someone is adjusting a headset near the side curtain. Someone else is carrying garment bags past your dressing room like their life depends on it. Your band is doing last checks, your dancers are stretched and glowing with that pre-show adrenaline, and the hallway outside hums with footsteps, voices, clipped instructions, the distant swell of a crowd that has already started chanting your name in waves.

You stand near the lit mirror in your quick-change area with a mic pack half clipped on, rolling your shoulders back, then forward, trying to keep your body loose.

Your glam is done, your hair falls exactly how it is supposed to, your stage outfit catches the light every time you move, and still none of that steadies your nerves the way people think it should. The ritual before a show is always the same: water, vocal warmups, pacing, a little joking around to keep yourself from overthinking, then the strange internal switch where you stop being a person in a hallway and become the version of yourself built for an arena.

Your manager comes hurrying now to you with that particular look on her face that means she knows something you don’t. You don’t think much of it at first, you're too busy humming through a run, one hand pressed lightly to your chest, the other holding your in-ear pack away from your dress while a stylist fixes something near your shoulder.

Your manager waits until the stylist steps away, then crosses her arms and goes, with far too much satisfaction, “Guess who’s in the VIP section tonight.”

You glance up instantly, already smiling. “Oh my god, don’t tell me Ariana Grande,” you say, too fast, eyes widening. “Yo, I’ve been dying to see her.”

Your manager laughs in your face, actually laughs, and shakes her head. “No, not Ariana. Think Olympic gold medalist.”

And just like that, everything in you stops. You go still so abruptly that the girl fixing your hair pauses with her hand midair.

“What,” you say, but it comes out quiet, not because you didn’t hear her, but because you did.

Your manager just lifts her brows, enjoying this entirely too much. “Mhm.”

For one long second you can only stare at her, mind doing that horrible blank-and-overheated thing at the same time.

Alysa is here. Alysa Liu, who a couple nights ago had been nothing more than a late-night internet rabbit hole and a stupidly compelling face on your phone screen and an embarrassing little fantasy you had laughed off into your pillow, is apparently somewhere beyond those walls in real life, in a VIP section at your show, breathing the same air as you.

Your first thought is confusion. You didn’t invite her. You don’t know her. None of your close friends had mentioned bringing her. Your second thought, much worse, is an electric burst of awareness that she is going to watch you perform. Not as a clip online later, not as a stranger in a crowd of twenty thousand, but here, tonight, in one of the sections close enough that she’ll actually be able to see you.

“Why would you tell me that now?” you groan, pressing both hands over your face for a second before dragging them down your cheeks. “You are evil. That is genuinely evil.”

Your manager, who has known you long enough to be immune to your dramatics, just grins and says, “Just don’t mess up out there.”

You make the most wounded sound imaginable and point at her like you have been personally betrayed. “You cannot say that to me ten minutes before I go on stage.”

She only pats your arm like she’s soothing a child and says, “You’ll be fine. Just thought you’d want to know.”

Then she disappears back into the movement of backstage before you can say anything else, leaving you standing there in a full body buzz that feels almost identical to what happened in your bed that night, except stronger now, heavier and warmer and threaded through with the unreal knowledge that this is no longer hypothetical.

Somewhere out there is the girl whose interviews you watched until one in the morning, whose Instagram you scrolled with your face half-hidden in a pillow, whose edits made you grin like a loser alone in the dark. And now you have to go be effortless in front of her.

The seconds leading up to your cue are always sharp, but tonight they feel almost surreal. You line up in the wings, your heartbeat pounding so high in your chest it almost makes the room feel thinner, and for once it is not only the crowd doing this to you.

Usually the nerves are broad, impersonal, part of the ritual—thousands of eyes, the pressure of the show, the knowledge that every note matters. Tonight all of that is still there, but it has narrowed itself around one person. Somewhere in VIP, Alysa is waiting.

You try not to think about whether she looks the way she did in those videos, whether she’s dressed up, whether she came because a friend of a friend invited her or whether she even knows you know she’s there.

Your intro starts. The arena erupts. The stage manager counts you in, and the moment you step out under the lights your body does what it was trained to do. The performance takes over. Your nerves don’t disappear, but they alchemize into something brighter. You hit your opening exactly, and from there the entire show clicks into place with a cleanness that almost feels supernatural. You are locked in from the first number onward with your voice controlled, body loose, every mark found without effort, every joke to the crowd landing the way it’s supposed to.

The audience is deafening, LA especially loud because half the room knows every word and the other half wants to prove they do too. Your friends and industry peers are somewhere in the front sections, but you only let yourself think about that during transitions, because if you linger on it too long you’ll spiral. A few times, against your better judgment, you glance toward VIP while the lights are blown out enough to make details difficult.

During one song you nearly smile in the middle of a line for no reason at all, just because the idea of Alysa hearing you sing words you wrote alone in your room years ago feels suddenly intimate in a way you didn’t prepare for. It does not throw you off, though. If anything, it sharpens you. By the time you reach the last stretch of the set, you know you are having one of your better shows. It doesn't feel perfect in a robotic way, but because you are so alive inside it. Every emotion is sitting right at the surface, making everything bigger—your voice, your smile, the way you reach for the crowd on instinct. There's one person to thank for that.

When you thank the audience at the end, breathless and glowing under the final wash of light, wishing them a good night with your chest still heaving from the last song, the applause that comes back feels almost physical. Then you run off stage grinning, high on adrenaline and sweat and relief.

The moment you get backstage, your close friends close around you in a blur of arms and perfume and loud congratulations. Someone grabs your face and says, “You were insane tonight.” You hug them one by one, laughing, still buzzing so hard from the stage that your hands feel a little shaky.

For a few minutes you let yourself just be in it. The post-show high is one of the only things in your life that still feels childlike because it's this rush of having done the thing, of having survived it and maybe even been great, of being immediately folded into the people who know you best.

You’re halfway through making a joke with one of your producer friends when your manager appears again at your shoulder and says, “All your other guests are in your dressing room waiting.”

You nod without really thinking about it. In your head, that means the people you personally invited, the friends that aren't that close but close enough with a few extra familiar faces your team let into VIP because that always happens in LA. Alysa, if you think about her at all in that moment, exists in some separate category in your brain, filed under your team messing with you or a coincidence or maybe not someone who would actually come backstage after.

You wipe under your eyes, adjust your outfit a little, and head toward your dressing room with your pulse finally beginning to settle into something like normal. And then you walk in and see the line of people waiting to hug you, and it’s all fine, all exactly what you expected, until it’s not.

You go down the line, smiling and warm and still a little breathless, hugging your friends one after the other, thanking them for coming, letting their praise wash over you in pieces. The room is bright, crowded in that cozy post-show way.

By the time you get near the end of the line, you see your friend Laufey there and your whole face softens because of course she came.

“Thanks for coming,” you say as you step toward her, already leaning in for a hug.

She smiles, sweet and calm as ever, and hugs you back. “Of course. You were amazing.” Then, with the kind of casualness that changes your whole life in a single second, she turns slightly and says, “You know Alysa, right?” And there she is, standing just behind her.

Everything else falls away so fast it feels actually stupid. The room doesn’t literally stop, of course. People are still talking, moving, laughing. But to you it narrows so completely around the two of you that the rest might as well be underwater.

Alysa is real in the way all internet crushes fail to prepare you for. Not larger than life, exactly, but sharper. She’s dressed simply enough that it comes off better than if she had obviously tried too hard, and there is something about the way she stands—easy in her own body, one hand tucked half into her pocket, expression hovering between amused and just a little careful—that makes you understand why every comment section on the internet loses its mind over her. She has the same face you stared at in your room, the same mouth that always looks like it’s one second away from saying something funny, the same eyes that somehow manage to be both observant and unreadable at first glance.

You feel your own body react before your brain catches up. Heat floods your cheeks, your stomach flips so sharply it nearly makes you dizzy. And because this is exactly the kind of moment where your social instincts betray you, you smile, step forward, and go in for a hug at the exact same time Alysa extends her hand.

It happens in one humiliatingly clear beat. Your arms begin to lift. Her hand comes out. Both of you freeze, realizing it at once. You pull back with an audible little “Oh—” and switch toward the handshake at the exact moment Alysa, clearly registering your movement, abandons the handshake and leans in for the hug instead. For a split second you almost collide in the middle of both decisions.

Then you both stop again, look at each other, and laugh. Alysa’s shoulders dip with it, her cool expression cracking just enough to reveal nerves underneath, and that alone is so weirdly endearing that your embarrassment loosens immediately.

“Wow,” she says, smiling, voice low and dry. “Strong start.”

You laugh harder, ducking your head. “I know. Sorry. I’m actually normal, I swear.”

“No, yeah,” she says, still grinning.

The room around you seems to brighten at the edges again, but only barely, because then you do finally manage the hug—quick, warm, real—and the second you feel her arms close around you your whole brain short-circuits in that embarrassingly soft way it has when you like someone.

She smells clean, a little like outside air and something faintly expensive, and because the hug is brief you barely have time to register any of it before you pull away. But it’s more than enough.

“Thanks for coming,” you say, and you can hear the slight breathlessness in your own voice no matter how hard you try to sound casual. “Seriously. I, um—I saw the program. To my song. I thought it was really great.”

Alysa’s expression changes at that, the cool teasing giving way to something more direct. “I love that song,” she says. “So thank you for making it.” You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from smiling too wide and fail completely.

From there, the conversation slips away from everyone else almost naturally. You don’t even realize you’ve both angled slightly off from the group until a minute later, when the room has become nothing more than background noise and Alysa is standing close enough that you keep losing your train of thought over it.

Up close, her nonchalance reads differently than it did online. It’s still there—she has that same easy cadence, that same deliberate lack of trying too hard—but now you can see the effort beneath it. Not in a fake way but it's just like she knows she’s nervous and is choosing to lean into deadpan humor, so she doesn’t show too much. Once you notice it, it’s impossible not to like her even more for it.

There’s a tiny delay before some of her replies, a small shift of her weight when you hold her gaze too long, a brief glance down that gives her away before she recovers and says something cool. And it makes something in you unclench because, instantly, your brain goes, oh. She’s just like me. Or at least close enough.

So you talk at first about the obvious things—her program, your show, how she ended up here.

“Laufey invited me,” she admits, tilting her head toward where your friend is now talking to someone else across the room.

“Invited is generous,” Laufey calls from somewhere behind her without turning around, which makes Alysa roll her eyes a little.

“Okay,” she says, glancing back at you. “I asked to come.”

“That's very sweet. I would've just given you a ticket if you slid in my DMs,” you say, and she smiles.

You ask if performing to someone else’s song ever feels weird, and she says, “Not if it’s good or if I really relate to it. Then it kind of does half the work for you because someone else so perfectly encapsulated your thoughts for you”

You laugh and say, “That is a dangerous thing to tell a songwriter,”

She shrugs like she doesn’t care, though her mouth curls at one corner. “I can take it back if you want.”

“No,” you say quickly, too quickly, and she catches it.

There’s a brief beat where she just looks at you, amused, and you can feel your blush deepen. You glance down at your shoes and tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, only to end up twirling it around your finger a second later without meaning to.

The more you talk, the less the room exists. Alysa has this unnerving ability to make a sentence sound light and loaded at the same time. She asks questions in a way that feels genuinely interested, not performative, and when you answer she listens with her whole face.

You catch yourself looking at her mouth when she talks and immediately force your eyes elsewhere. Then you realize you’ve looked at the floor for too long and look back up too fast. She notices that too.

“You always this awkward after shows,” she asks, tone so even it takes you half a second to realize she’s teasing, “or should I feel special?”

Your mouth falls open a little. “Oh my god.”

She laughs, softer this time. “That was mean. Sorry.”

“A little bit,” you say, trying and failing not to smile. “I’m not awkward. I’m just—” You stop, because nothing you were about to say sounds convincing. Tired, maybe. Overstimulated. Flushed from the stage lights. All technically true and none of them the real answer, which is that you have spent the past several days half-crushing on the idea of her and now she is standing three feet away in your dressing room being funny at you in real time. So instead, you give her a look that makes her grin again, and she mercifully lets you off the hook.

But the ease of it all—the teasing, the eye contact, the way she keeps leaning slightly closer without seeming to notice—is making you giddy in a way you can’t hide. You keep biting your lower lip just to have something to do with your mouth. You keep smoothing your hands over the sides of your outfit though there’s nothing wrong with it. Twice you catch yourself smiling down at your feet for no reason at all, just because she said something dry and clever and looked secretly pleased when it made you laugh.

She tells you a story about choosing program music and how people think there’s always some grand artistic explanation when sometimes the truth is just that she liked the song and wanted to skate to it.

“I love that reasoning,” you say. “I like when people care about something to stop acting cool about it.”

Her face shifts then, just slightly, something more open moving under the composure. “That’s nice,” she says. “Unfortunately, I’m actually pretending to be cool right now because I care too much. I think you’d find me uncool if I wasn’t trying.” The confession is so quiet, so matter-of-fact, that it catches you off guard into a real laugh.

You tilt your head and look at her fully. “No way.”

“Mhm.” “I don’t believe you’re pretending. Maybe you’re just cool.”

“That’s because I’m doing a good job.” The line is delivered perfectly, but there’s a tiny tell after it—a glance away, a brief exhale—and it is so unexpectedly sweet that you feel your whole chest go warm.

“You kind of are,” you admit.

“Kind of?” she repeats.

“Okay, no, you are,” you say quickly, smiling. “But now I know the secret.”

She looks back at you then, and the eye contact holds just a little too long. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess you do.”

You would probably have stayed there all night if the room had allowed it. That becomes obvious to both of you by the time someone from your team appears at your elbow to say they need you for a quick photo with a sponsor rep who’s about to leave. At almost the same moment, there’s movement from the rest of your guests as people start gathering bags and saying their final goodbyes, the loose signal that the night is winding down.

The interruption feels unfair in a childish way. You look from the staffer to Alysa and back, visibly pained enough that Alysa’s mouth twitches.

“You should go,” she says, but she says it with the same slight hesitation you’re feeling, and it softens the blow only a little.

“I know,” you say, and then immediately glance down again because you sound like someone being told to leave recess. Your fingers are back in your hair, twirling a strand slowly around one finger while your other hand hangs uselessly at your side.

Alysa shifts her weight once, then makes a decision. You can see it happen in real time; you see the moment where she seems to gather herself and lean into the cool demeanor on purpose because she clearly wants to get this right. “Can I ask you something?” she says.

“Yeah,” you answer too quickly, then flush and soften it. “Yeah, of course.”

She slides one hand into her pocket, then back out again, like she didn’t know what to do with it. “Could I get your number?” A beat. Then, with forced casualness so transparent it’s almost unbearably charming: “Maybe take you out sometime?”

The line itself is fine enough, but you can hear the nerves just under it, the careful flattening of her tone, the way she’s trying not to come on too strong and accidentally landing somewhere even sweeter because of it.

And because you are, unfortunately, exactly the kind of person built to be devastated by earnestness in a good outfit, your heart just folds. You smile so hard you have to look down.

“Yeah,” you say, softer this time. “Yeah, definitely.”

When you take your phone, your hands are not shaking exactly, but they are close enough that you’re very aware of them. Alysa hands hers over and the brush of your fingers is brief, almost nothing, but it still makes your stomach flip. You put your number in while twirling that same piece of hair again, a habit you know makes you look about sixteen, but at this point you are beyond managing optics. When you hand the phone back, Alysa glances at the screen, then up at you.

“So this has been real,” she says, like she’s half joking and half checking.

You bite your lip, cheeks hot. “I mean, unless this is fake.”

That gets a real laugh out of her, bright and surprised. “Right,” she says.

The second hug is less awkward because now both of you know what the other is doing. It still isn’t smooth, exactly. There’s still that slight mutual hesitance of two people who have moved very quickly from strangers to something else and are trying not to rush while also clearly wanting to. But it’s warmer, more certain. Your arms settle around each other in a way that feels oddly natural for something so new. Up close again, you can feel the faint rise and fall of her breath, can feel how she lingers for just a second longer than politeness requires.

When you pull apart, both of you are blushing, and that might be the most disarming thing of all. Alysa, who has spent the past twenty minutes pretending to be cooler than she is, has pink high on her cheeks now, and she seems to know you’ve noticed because she gives you this small, crooked look like don’t say anything. You smile back with the exact same expression, because you get it.

“I’ll text you,” she says.

“Please do,” you answer.

The staffer at your elbow makes an apologetic face, still waiting, and somewhere behind Alysa someone is calling her name too, but for a second neither of you move. Then she nods once, almost to herself, and steps backward toward the door. You watch her go in the most embarrassing way possible, with eyes following, smile you cannot hide, fingers still touching the strand of hair you’ve practically destroyed by now. And when she disappears into the hall with one last glance over her shoulder, the room rushes back in all at once.

Underneath all of it is this bright, fizzy certainty that won’t quiet down.

She came to your show. She asked for your number. She asked you out.

And worst of all for your dignity, every ridiculous, lover-girl, fall-too-fast instinct in you is already standing at the altar.

------

A few days later, the show is over, the city is different, and the strange suspended feeling that had taken hold of you since meeting Alysa still has not let up. Tour has finally loosened its grip enough for you to come up for air, and for the first time in what feels like weeks, your evening belongs to no one else. Just a date.

Alysa had texted you with the kind of false ease you already recognize in her now—something lowkey tonight?—and then followed it with a place that made you pause, not because it was glamorous, but because it wasn’t.

It was a bar tucked into a side street, the kind of place that didn’t trend, didn’t get tagged by every aspiring influencer in the city, didn’t scream for attention. The photos online looked dim and slightly worn in the way places only get when they’re actually loved by the people who go there.

You had smiled at your phone for a full minute after the text came in, then typed back something cooler than what you felt. Sounds perfect :)

In truth, Alysa could have texted you a pin to a junkyard, some random skatepark, a gas station parking lot, and you probably would have found a cute outfit and gone anyway. That is humiliating to admit even privately, but it is true.

By the time you get there tonight, pulling your jacket tighter around yourself and stepping from the Uber with your heart already tapping too hard under your ribs, you know the place barely matters. She picked it, and you were always going to come.

Inside, the bar is exactly what you hoped and maybe a little better. Warm in the way crowded places get when people have been sitting close for hours, talking over low music and the clink of glass. There’s a soft amber cast over everything, old wood burnished by years of elbows and spilled drinks, little pools of dim light over the tables. People are with each other, leaned in, laughing, halfway through stories. The air smells like citrus peel, beer, and something fried from the kitchen. It feels private even though it isn’t. That alone is new enough to make you breathe a little easier.

This kind of date doesn’t usually happen to you. Usually if someone takes you out, there’s an edge to it before you’ve even arrived—will there be paparazzi, will someone leak it, will the restaurant seat you in the front window because your face is good for business, will the person across from you look more excited by being seen with you than by actually getting to know you. Even the nicest dates you’ve been on in the past have sometimes come with a strange layer of staging, as if being around you turns everything into a set.

But Alysa is already there when you walk in, tucked into a booth in the corner like she belongs in places like this, one arm resting along the back cushion, a beer in front of her, head lifting the second she spots you. And something about how unceremonious it all is—her just being there with a little smile that turns into a real one when she sees you—makes you feel instantly, stupidly fond.

You slide into the booth across from her, cheeks already warm, and she gives you this once-over that is not subtle enough to miss.

“Hey,” she says. Her voice is easy, but there’s that tiny carefulness under it again, that trace of nerves she tries to smooth out.

“Hey,” you say back, and already your body feels too aware of itself, of your hands, your knees under the table, the fact that you suddenly don’t know how to sit like a normal person.

The first few minutes are a little awkward in the harmless way first dates are supposed to be, which actually calms you more than perfect ease would have. It means this matters to both of you and that neither of you is gliding through the moment untouched.

A server comes by, Alysa asks if you want anything, and when you order a dirty Shirley she pauses just long enough for you to catch it.

“What?” you ask, smiling suspiciously.

She shakes her head, mouth twitching. “Nothing.”

“Say it.” “I just wasn’t expecting that.” “What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know,” she says, lifting one shoulder. “Something less… pink.”

You laugh, leaning back against the booth. “Okay, well, sorry I contain whimsy.”

That gets a real laugh out of her, quieter than yours but warm, and from there the conversation begins to loosen. Your first drink takes the edge off, not enough to make you sloppy, just enough to make your shoulders drop. Alysa sips her beer, fingers wrapped around the bottle neck, and starts talking with the same rhythm she had backstage—dry where it counts, observant, never trying too hard to be interesting and therefore somehow always interesting anyway.

She asks you about tour in a way that makes it clear she actually wants to know so you tell her about the weird disorientation of living out of a suitcase, how every city starts to blur unless something specific catches and brands itself into your memory. She tells you about training and travel, about how competition cities can do the same thing if you don’t force yourself to notice the small stuff. You talk about where you grew up, both of you skimming the surface in that first-date way that isn’t dishonest so much as gently protective. Alysa tells you a story from when she was younger that makes you laugh into your straw, because she tells it like it’s no big deal even though the whole point of the story is that she’s been chaotic since birth.

You tell her something from your own childhood about singing too loudly and too seriously in places that did not call for it, and she says, “So nothing’s changed,” with such a straight face that you have to look down at your drink to hide your grin.

That becomes the rhythm of the night. You talk, and every so often Alysa slips something in under the conversation—a compliment so casual you almost miss it, a teasing line delivered like an afterthought, a look that lingers one beat too long.

It helps that the bar itself seems built to make things feel softer around the edges. Conversations around you rise and fall like weather. Sometimes someone near the jukebox laughs too loudly and the whole room turns briefly toward the sound before settling again. A song changes overhead and another one slips in. It all folds around the two of you without interrupting the little world building itself at your table.

By the time your second drink arrives, you’ve stopped worrying about how you’re coming across and started simply enjoying her. Which is dangerous. A tiny buzz settles low in your body, just enough to make you less guarded, and now when Alysa flirts, you stop pretending not to notice.

When she tells you she always thought your interviews were funnier than people gave you credit for, you smile and say, “So you’ve been watching my interviews?” and she gives you a look over the rim of her bottle and says, “Maybe.”

The banter comes easier now, and with it comes something warmer, stranger. You start catching yourself watching her when she’s mid-sentence, not even because of what she’s saying, but because of how she says it. Every small thing feels unreasonably vivid. At one point she says something complimentary about a song of yours, but she says it with that same unshowy sincerity she’d had backstage, and it makes heat run all the way through you. You look down at your drink immediately, smiling at the ice like it personally did something charming. Alysa notices. You know she notices but she doesn’t call it out, just looks quietly pleased with herself for a second and then keeps talking.

Sometime in the middle of all that, Just Like Heaven by The Cure comes on over the speakers and Alysa glances upward, listening for half a second before her face changes with recognition.

“Oh,” she says, smiling. “I love this song.”

It takes you a second to place what she means because you are too busy looking at her face when she says it, but then you hear it too. The chords thread through the bar, familiar and romantic and a little melancholy.

She says a few of the words under her breath to prove her point—spinning on a dizzy edge, I kissed her face and kissed her head, dreamed of all the different ways I had to make her glow—just enough to show she knows it well, and then she looks back at you with that faintly amused expression like she expects you to make fun of her for it. Instead you just smile.

Something about the way she says those lines, so lightly, while sitting across from you in this dim little bar, makes the song hit differently than it ever has before. You’ve heard it a thousand times. You’ve probably loved it for half your life. But right now, with Alysa leaning toward you over a sticky wooden table, beer bottle turning slowly between her fingers, the room all warm blur and shadow around her, you understand it in a way that feels almost embarrassing.

You understand how a person can look unreal simply because you want them badly enough. How being with someone can feel so exactly right that your body starts to distrust it, starts waiting for the trick, the reveal, the point where you wake up. You understand so completely what Robert Smith means when he sings, I opened up my eyes and found myself alone alone alone above a raging sea that stole the only girl I loved and drowned her deep inside of me. You're almost ready for her to disappear.

You look at Alysa and think, with this bone-deep clarity that nearly startles you: this is insane. This is too good. She is too pretty under this terrible bar lighting, too funny without trying, too easy to talk to.

The whole night has gone with such improbable smoothness that you almost can’t believe it belongs to your actual life. It feels curated by a version of you with much better luck. A dream you would have mocked yourself for having a week ago.

Alysa is saying something else now, a quiet joke about how everyone who knows her knows she gets attached to songs like a freak, and you laugh, but part of you is still caught on the image of her across from you, the song threading between you, the weird rush of feeling more alive than you’ve let yourself feel in a long time. The kind of alive that makes your chest feel almost tender.

When you finally have to get up to use the bathroom, it’s mainly because you need the bathroom and because you need thirty seconds to stand somewhere else and get a grip on yourself.

“I’ll be right back,” you say, sliding out of the booth.

Alysa looks up immediately. “I’ll come with you.” She says it casually, like it’s nothing, but something in you lifts at the offer anyway.

The back of the bar is narrower and dingier than the front, all scuffed walls, old flyers layered on top of each other, a flickering light near the hall to the bathrooms that should probably be fixed but somehow only adds to the charm. There’s a short line, which under any other circumstance would be annoying, but tonight feels almost comically perfect.

You and Alysa end up standing close because there isn’t room not to, shoulders nearly brushing, the crowd pressing and shifting around you in slow little movements. The smell back here is less romantic—soap, old tile, spilled liquor—but somehow even this feels gilded by your mood.

Alysa is close enough now that when she leans toward your ear to keep talking over the noise of the bar, her voice lands warm along the side of your face. It shouldn’t be such a big deal but it really is. You are trying very hard to stay in the conversation and not focus too much on the fact that if you turned your head even a little, your noses would probably bump.

She pushes her hair back and glances toward the line like she’s judging how long it’ll take, and under the dingy yellow light she looks unfairly good but not in some polished way, just real. The shape of her profile. The slope of her nose. The way she laughs softly at something you say and dips her head for a second like she doesn’t want to laugh too hard at her own joke.

The whole thing is so absurdly, painfully lovely that your mind flashes back to that night in bed, to your phone screen glowing in the dark, to that silly split-second vision of the two of you side by side that had made you smile into your pillow like an idiot. And now here you are. Standing with her in a cramped line at the back of a crowded bar, dressed up enough to look like you meant to impress each other, her shoulder practically against yours, her face lit gold and shadow, and some stunned part of you thinks, oh. This is it, I called it.

“You good?” Alysa asks after a beat, and you realize you’ve gone quiet.

“Yeah,” you say, then smile because that sounded too immediate. “Sorry. I’m listening.”

Alysa studies your face for one second longer than necessary, then smiles too, softer now. “You don’t look sorry.”

By the time you make it back to the booth, something in you has tipped fully over into certainty. You are gone for her in a way that is difficult to pretend around now. The rest of the date moves with that knowledge humming under every small thing.

You notice everything. Her hands first and how expressive they are even when she’s trying to seem laid-back, how her fingers trail through the condensation on her glass absentmindedly while she talks, drawing shapes that vanish as quickly as they form. Then the smiley piercing, there and gone whenever she laughs, making your stomach do that humiliating little flip every time. Once, under the table, your feet touch by accident and both of you still for half a second like the contact sent a current through the wood.

“Sorry,” you both say at the same time, then laugh, and neither of you moves away as quickly as maybe you should.

You know the bar closes at eleven. You knew it when you got here because you checked the hours like a freak earlier, and now that fact has started ticking quietly in the back of your mind. Every time you glance at the clock behind the bar, your chest tightens just a little. The night is moving, time is not on your side. And because you are you and you have always been prone to wanting more of a good thing than is reasonable, you catch yourself having ridiculous thoughts. You hope Alysa doesn’t finish her beer too fast. You hope the bartender disappears for a while when you ask for another round. You hope somehow the night will forget to move forward if you just keep the conversation alive.

Alysa is telling you about some current pop news you’d both been laughing about over text earlier in the week, and she says something so stupid and perfectly timed that you laugh loud enough to turn a head at the next table.

“You’re really funny,” you tell her before you can stop yourself.

Alysa raises her brows. “Really?”

You nod, lower lip trapped by your teeth.

She glances down at her bottle, then back up at you. “You’re easy to make laugh.”

“That’s because you keep saying things.” “Should I stop?” “Please don't.”

Alysa smiles then, a real one that opens her face completely, and for a second you are so charmed by it you have to look down at your hands just to steady yourself.

Eventually there is nothing left to do but let the night end. The staff slowly start their closing time routine—wiping down sections too early, the music shifting lower as conversations begin to thin. Alysa does, in fact, finish her beer, and you hate how disappointed a tiny part of you feels watching the bottle go empty.

“Guess they’re kicking us out,” you say, trying for lightness.

Alysa looks around, then back at you. “Looks like it.”

Neither of you moves right away. The pause stretches, not awkward exactly, just heavy with the fact that both of you are aware of what ending the date means.

Finally Alysa slides out of the booth and you follow, gathering your jacket, smoothing your hands down your clothes.

The air outside hits cool after the warmth of the bar. The sidewalk is damp in places, somewhere down the block a couple is arguing softly, someone else is laughing too hard at something on their phone. The city hasn’t ended just because your date is technically over, but it feels quieter than before, narrowed down to you and Alysa standing just outside the door, neither quite ready to leave.

The bar behind you hums with the last of its life, and you can still feel the shape of the whole evening lingering on your skin like heat. You look at Alysa there under the streetlight, hair slightly mussed from the night, expression softer than when the date began, and the same thought returns with almost painful force: you do not want this to be over. Not yet. Not when everything has gone this well.

She glances at you, then down the street, then back, like she's thinking about her next move. You realize dimly that your own pulse has picked up again.

You tuck your jacket a little tighter around yourself and say, because you need to fill the space before you embarrass yourself by just staring at her, “I’m actually really glad I didn’t drive here. I probably shouldn’t be driving right now.”

Alysa looks at you as if checking the evidence, and her mouth twitches. “No shot you’re drunk off two Shirley Temples.”

Your jaw drops. “They were dirty.”

That gets her. She laughs, head tipping back slightly, the sound low and easy and stupidly satisfying to have caused. “Oh, sorry,” she says, still smiling. “Two dirty Shirleys. My bad.”

“Thank you,” you say, trying for dignity and failing because you’re smiling too hard. “That is an important distinction.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” The teasing settles over both of you so naturally that when you start walking, neither of you actually says where. You just fall into step together instinctively, like the night has not yet given either of you permission to stop.

Alysa’s car is parked a couple of blocks away because the street had been packed when she got there, and that becomes enough of a destination to keep moving toward without having to talk about the fact that you’re both clearly dragging this out.

Alysa says, “I can drop you off, by the way,” like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, like of course the night should not end at the curb outside a bar if there is still even a flimsy excuse to spend more time together.

“Yeah?” you ask, and then soften the eagerness in your voice with a little smile. “Okay. I’d like that. Thanks.”

Her hands are shoved in her pockets against the chill, shoulders relaxed, steps unhurried. Yours stay out, swinging lightly by your sides in a way that would be normal if you weren’t so aware of them. But you are aware of them. Painfully. Some embarrassingly transparent part of you is half hoping she’ll notice, half hoping she’ll decide for you. You hate how obvious your own body feels. So, to compensate, you talk.

You ask questions the way you have been all night, but now there’s something looser to it, something more deliberate in how you keep the conversation alive. You ask her if she’s ever been to Japan, because you remember something she mentioned earlier about competitions overseas and because it gives you another chance to hear her talk. Alysa answers earnestly, which you’ve learned is her default even when the questions are random. She tells you a little about the trip, about what she remembered most, about a snack she got weirdly obsessed with.

Then she throws it back at you and asks if you’ve ever taken the Eurostar to France, and you laugh because that is the sort of specific question you’d ask when you don’t want a conversation to die.

“No,” you say. “But now I kind of want to just so I can report back to you.”

“Please do,” she says. “I need a full review.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“Thank you,” she says dryly. “Honored.”

The whole walk becomes that. One silly question opening into another, one answer becoming a doorway to learning more about each other. Favorite city. Worst press interview.

The thing is, now that the date itself is technically over, your restraint has gotten a little sloppier. Not reckless, just more honest in the tiny ways that count. You let your laughter come easier, fuller. When Alysa says something particularly funny, you lightly shove her arm with the back of your hand, the gesture playful, casual, but you let your touch linger half a second longer than strictly necessary. Just enough to make it feel like a hint rather than an accident. Just enough that if she wanted to, she could do something with it.

Alysa glances at where your hand had been, then back at your face, and for one suspended beat you think maybe she understands exactly what you’re doing because her hand is out of her pocket now. That thought alone sends a bright rush straight through your chest. So you keep dropping little breadcrumbs because you are, at heart, a girl with poor impulse control when you like someone.

You tell her, maybe a little too softly, that you could listen to her talk about literally anything. You admit that the lowkey bar was a really good pick and that she had apparently judged you better than you’d judged yourself. It is all so stupidly nice. The city around you blurs at the edges and somehow the only thing that feels sharply in focus is her shoulder beside yours and the fact that your hands keep drifting a little too close.

Once your fingers brush by accident, and both of you keep talking. Then it happens again. And again. Each time, that tiny contact sparks up your arm like a dare. You start thinking about it too much, which is exactly when Alysa—finally, like she’s decided to stop pretending not to notice—lets her fingers slide between yours.

Your heart does something so dramatic it almost annoys you. For a second your whole body reacts before your face does: chest tightening, stomach dropping and lifting at the same time, some electric little shock running all the way down to your knees. You are glad it’s dark because you can feel your expression trying to betray you. There is a shit-eating grin clawing its way up your face and you have to fight to keep it from fully taking over.

You manage something like composure by looking down at your joined hands instead, then ahead, then finally at Alysa. She is looking straight ahead too, like this is no big deal, like she always takes girls’ hands on sidewalks after excellent first dates. But there is a softness at the corner of her mouth that gives her away. Your hand fits so naturally in hers it feels strangely like fate.

The conversation slows a little after that—not because it gets awkward, but because hand-holding changes the air. It makes everything quieter, more charged, less in need of constant filling. Still, neither of you fully lets the talking stop.

As you near her car, you reach into your bag and pull out a little pack of mint gum, more out of habit than plan, pop one into your own mouth, then hold the pack out to her.

“Want one?”

Alysa takes her hand back only long enough to grab a piece. “Thanks.”

“Blue’s the best one,” you say automatically as she peels the wrapper back.

Alysa looks at the pack. “Obviously.”

You blink. “You agree?”

“Yeah. Green’s fake.”

You stop mid-step to look at her. “Thank you, because nobody gets that.”

“It tastes too… sweet,” she says, like she’s really considered it. “Blue is better.”

“This is huge for us. I can tell we'll get along great,” you tell her gravely.

“I know,” she says. “I was hoping we had some shared values.”

And just like that you’re laughing again, starting an entirely unnecessary conversation about gum rankings as if it matters, as if this is not transparently just another way to avoid the end of the night.

Alysa’s car has little details inside that make your chest ache in that tender, nosy way that comes with being allowed into someone else’s personal space for the first time. A small photo tucked near the windshield—her siblings, you assume, because the affection in the picture feels too easy to be anything else. A ridiculous little dancing cactus wobbling on the dashboard every time she takes a turn. A hoodie thrown in the backseat. A charging cable that looks like it’s been through war. The whole thing makes her feel even more real, which somehow keeps not helping.

You keep talking because silence feels dangerous now, like if it settles for too long you might start saying things you mean too much. So you point at the cactus and ask, “Does he have a name?”

Alysa glances over and deadpans, “That’s my son.”

You laugh immediately. “No, seriously.”

“I am serious.”

“Alysa.”

“Okay, fine. He doesn’t have one.” She glances over at you for a brief second.

“That’s so sad.”

“You can name him if you want.”

You look at the cactus with comical focus. “I need time.”

“Take all the time you need.” Alysa’s looking over at you at red lights now and then, not long enough to be irresponsible, just enough that every time you catch it your face warms again.

You answer one of her questions while looking out the window, then turn back and ask another while tracing the outline of the photo with your eyes, careful not to pry too hard. She tells you a little about her siblings when you ask, easy and fond without going too deep. You tell her about some weird little object in your apartment she’ll laugh at, then immediately have to process the fact that you have just casually implied a future in which she sees your apartment.

The thought blooms so fast in your head it nearly makes you go quiet. Because that’s the problem, really. The speed of it. The way each small kindness from her seems to lodge somewhere permanent in you.

This is your first date, a few days after meeting, and already your brain has become reckless with possibilities. You’re not just thinking about how pretty and sweet she is. You are thinking about what it would mean if this lasted. If this became a thing. If there were more nights like this, more booths in corners, more car rides, more stupid debates about mint gum.

You are thinking, horrifyingly and sincerely, that you want to go steady. That you want to be able to introduce to people with this is Alysa and have everyone understand what that means. That you want to go out officially, not because the public part matters most, but because the private part already does and you want it to keep existing.

You want more. More conversation, more hand-holding, more of her looking over at you like she’s trying not to smile. And layered under all of that is the steadily growing thought of kissing her. Of what it would feel like. Of how good it would be and how, if you are being embarrassingly honest, the wanting does not stop there. The ideas of make outs turning into clothes tossed to the floor come in flashes and then pass, making you blush in the passenger seat like a teenager. You know it's insane but that doesn't make you want it any less.

When you pull into your building’s parking garage, the ride feels offensively short. The engine clicks softly as Alysa parks, and for a second neither of you moves to unbuckle. The lighting in the garage is harsher than outside, white and flat, but even here she manages to look unfairly good, one hand resting on the steering wheel, the other dropping to unclip her belt.

“I can walk you up,” she says, as if she has all night. As if she has not already given you more of it than you had any right to hope for.

“Okay,” you say again, because that is the only word left in your vocabulary when she offers you things you want.

The elevator ride up is quieter, but not uncomfortable. Your reflection in the mirrored wall shows your cheeks still faintly pink, your mouth curled in a smile you keep trying and failing to suppress. Alysa stands beside you with her hands back in her pockets, looking calm enough that if you didn’t know her a little better already, you might think none of this was affecting her.

But you do know better now. You notice the way she shifts her weight when you look at her too long. The way she glances at your mouth and then away. The way her jaw tightens once, subtly, like she’s managing something.

By the time you’re walking the short hall to your apartment door, your mind has become almost unusable. You are aware of the soft sound of your shoes against the carpet and this impossible, bright awareness of Alysa right next to you. She just looks so pretty and the line of her profile somehow makes your chest feel tight and weird in the best possible way.

Every step closer to your door now feels like a countdown. Your body feels full of feeling in a way that is almost ridiculous. You want to kiss her. The thought is so simple and so strong now that it stops feeling abstract. You want to kiss her, and once you let yourself say that much, everything else rushes in behind it again. You think of how good it would be to make out until you forgot how late it was. How easy it is, horrifyingly easy, to imagine wanting more than that if she wanted it too. You want her. You want this to last past one date and some cute texts. You want the thing after this. The part where you keep choosing each other and keep ending up this close.

At your door, the whole walk catches up to you. You stop, turn, and suddenly feel every single thought you’ve had pressing visible color into your face.

“Well,” you say, and immediately hate how breathless it sounds. You lift your keys a little, dumbly. “This is me.”

Alysa nods once, hands still in her pockets, expression softer now than it had been outside the bar. “Right.” There’s a brief pause, neither terrible nor easy. Then she says, “I had a really good time tonight.” And because she says it plainly, without trying to make it sound cooler than she means it, your whole chest goes warm again.

You nod quickly. “Me too.”

Alysa smiles at that, small and private. “Good.” Then, because life is cruel, she starts to angle away just enough that your body understands before your brain does that this is the part where she says goodnight and leaves. “Okay,” she says, and there’s gentleness in it, maybe even reluctance, but it still feels like a little drop under your ribs. “Goodnight.”

You nod because what else are you supposed to do, trying not to let the disappointment show too obviously. “Night.”

She turns, takes maybe two steps, and your heart sinks in that sudden, stupid way it does when something good ends a second before you were ready. You are already bracing yourself for the inevitable post-date spiral, you fumble with your keys, when Alysa stops. There’s a beat where her back is half turned to you, her shoulders rise with a breath, and then she looks over again. Something in her expression has shifted something more decided than before.

“I don’t know if this ruins my whole cool thing,” she says, and there’s the faintest self-conscious edge to it now, the kind she only shows when she’s being real on purpose, “but I really want to kiss you right now.”

Your eyes go wide. “Oh,” you say, because again, apparently your vocabulary has abandoned you entirely. But the sound is eager. Startled, yes, but eager in a way that makes Alysa’s face soften immediately.

Still, she misreads your shock just enough to start backpedaling. “It’s okay if you don’t want to,” she says quickly. “I know we just met and stuff. I just wanted to let you know—”

And because you are socially awkward in precisely the way that flares most under emotional pressure, because the thought of her finishing that sentence and walking away feels physically unbearable, you do the least graceful and most honest thing possible: you cut her off by kissing her.

You just step forward and close the space and put your mouth on hers because you cannot stand one more second of talking around it. And maybe because you moved first, or maybe because she had already decided she wanted this too, Alysa catches up instantly. Her hands come to your waist almost on reflex, warm and sure through the fabric of your clothes, pulling you just a little closer, while your own arms lift and settle around her neck.

The kiss itself is sweet before it is anything else. Soft, a little tentative for half a heartbeat, and then not tentative at all once both of you realize the other is really here, really kissing back. Alysa’s mouth is warm and tastes faintly like mint. Yours probably does too. Your whole body seems to go bright with sensation at once with the press of her hands at your waist, the careful angle of her head, the way your heart is beating so hard it borders on ridiculous.

It is exactly as good as you knew it would be and somehow still better, because no imagination had included the reality of her holding you like this, of her thumbs shifting lightly against your sides, of the tiny breath she lets out against your mouth halfway through like she’s relieved you did this.

When you pull apart, it is only by a few inches, both of you still in each other’s space, and both of you are blushing hard enough that if the hallway were brighter it would probably be humiliating. You can’t stop smiling. Alysa, annoyingly, also looks a little smug under her own blush.

“Wow,” she says softly, looking at your face. “Cut me off. Rude.”

You laugh, breathless. “You were talking too much.”

“That so?” Her hands are still on your waist.

You can feel how much she liked it despite the teasing. It’s in the way she hasn’t let go. It’s in the way her eyes keep dipping to your mouth before returning to your eyes. It’s in the pink high on her cheeks that makes her look younger, softer, and somehow even more unfairly pretty. So you’re not embarrassed, not really. Too dazed to be, too happy.

“I had to make a judgment call,” you say, trying for composure and sounding giddy anyway.

Alysa huffs a quiet laugh. “Good judgment then.”

The second goodbye is somehow even harder because now you know exactly what leaving feels like. But this time there’s no uncertainty sitting under it. Just the stunned, happy aftermath of having done the thing you’d been thinking about for the last couple of days like it might kill you.

Alysa finally lets her hands slide from your waist, slowly enough that you notice, and steps back just enough to make it real.

“Goodnight,” she says again, but now it sounds fond, a little wrecked at the edges, like she’s carrying the same buzz you are.

“Goodnight,” you answer, and your voice is still softer than usual, all your thoughts melted down into something warm and stupid and sincere.

She smiles one last time, then turns and actually walks away, and this time you let her because she kissed you and because you can still feel it like a live thing on your mouth. You wait until she disappears down the hall before unlocking your door, and the second you step inside your apartment the entire night comes crashing over you at once.

The quiet is almost violent after so much feeling. You lock the door behind you, drop your bag somewhere near the entry without even looking, and make it approximately three steps toward the couch before your knees stop being fully reliable. So you fall onto it in a graceless little collapse, tip sideways into the cushions, and cover your face with some pillow because there are simply too many emotions happening at once to process upright.

A sound comes out of you that is halfway between a squeal and a laugh and the beginning of a scream. Your whole body feels hot and floaty and charged, like you might actually combust from the force of your own happiness. You kick your feet once against the couch like a complete idiot, then bury your face deeper into the pillow and laugh again because there is no one here to witness the full extent of your humiliation.

She kissed you. No, worse—you kissed her. On the first date. After holding her hand on the sidewalk and talking about nonsense and thinking, in increasingly alarming detail, about kissing her and maybe kissing her a lot more than was responsible. And now that it’s happened, all you can do is lie there grinning helplessly, your lips still tingling, your chest so full it aches a little, and think with the kind of lovesick certainty anyone who knows you would roast you alive for:

You are already falling way too fast, and you do not care at all.

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the way im so down to tap into olivia rodrigo x reader but i dont think the market exists for that yet,,, UGHH,,, but im using drop dead to manifest a cute date for myself and yall should too

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tag list :P

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@eternalcitadeltotem @lyzsaphrodite @mrtwizz @petrolprettyplease @gaytrashgoblin @graceeeeeesblog @slippinthrumyfingers @aka-persephone @moltenessencepuppet @sani-sunny @mochi-nugs @yournextdooralien @bobthegoldfishhere @raiex @internetgurll @urwavvy @falleo4d @exclusivitymajor @fruitgirl329 @wintrjen @givewandahugspls @mannslvr @gimbapab @kozukenapplepi @blueslashephaim @ririhatesmen @jenxninja @mixxedup-once

#alysa liu x reader #alysa liu imagine #alysa liu x female reader #alysa liu #olivia rodrigo #olivia rodrigo imagine #drop dead

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