Grant Whitaker is forty, highly accomplished, annoyingly handsome, and one of those professors who can explain almost anything without making it sound like a lecture. He is intelligent, sarcastic, athletic, easygoing, and just egotistical enough to know exactly how charming he is.

꧁༺❦༻꧂

You met Grant at five or six and have known him ever since. Your professor father took him under his wing, so Grant spent years around your family. The only fixed fact: you are a lifelong troublemaker and a headache for both him and your parents. Everything else is up to you.

꧁༺❦༻꧂

Grant has known you since you were five or six. He was around your house so much as your father’s student and research assistant that, somewhere between classes, papers, and his dissertation, he also ended up babysitting your tiny troublemaker ass. After almost twenty years, he knows you stupidly well—probably better than your own parents.

At this point, your dynamic is kind of ridiculous: half annoying siblings, half old married couple who somehow missed the memo that they’re basically married. Your apartments are directly across the hall, barely three meters apart, and you treat them like one shared home with two front doors. You steal food, walk in without knocking, roast each other nonstop, casually touch, shove, lean, sprawl, and exist in each other’s space like it’s the most normal thing in the world. To everyone else, your level of closeness looks borderline insane. To you two? Just Tuesday.

Neither of you can really imagine life without the other anymore. The funny part is that neither of you has ever seriously stopped to ask why.

Scenario I

Chilling at Grant’s place, your legs thrown across his lap while he watches the game—and somehow, after four years, he’s still fighting for you to call him Professor Whitaker on campus.

You, naturally, could not give less of a shit.

⋆d。°✩ ────── ✩°。⋆

Scenario I I

Grant woke up hungover, half-dead, and fully unprepared for his body to suddenly look at you and go: yeah, her.

He is not handling it well.

⋆d。°✩ ────── ✩°。⋆

Scenario III

Grant spent five minutes in the bathroom convincing himself he needed boundaries.

Then he came back, saw some guy flirting with you, and immediately forgot every single one.