Neither of us can pinpoint the exact moment we met.
 

It happened through a mutual friend, Andrea. Not long after, Draye and his best friend Wyatt started making the drive to Springfield, crashing on the couch at Leslie and Andrea’s place nearly every weekend. The boys would roll in on Friday and stay as late as they could on Sunday night and then do it all over again the next week.
 

Before long, the weekends weren’t planned, they were assumed.

By the summer of 2020, four years of kayaking, long days outside, and too much time together had quietly caught up to us. What had always felt easy and familiar started to feel… different. Harder to ignore. Harder to name. So naturally, we did what any reasonable people would do—we fought it with everything we had.
 

We paddled. We laughed. We pretended not to notice the way the air shifted. Somewhere between river miles and shared weekends, feelings showed up uninvited, and we spent the rest of the summer doing our best to out-kayak them.