Kairos and Ares decided to take a simple walk around campus, the walk was supposed to be about touching grass. A literal reset after hours of staring at screens, a quiet amble through the campus park to discuss the NexTech pull request and the state of the leaderboard (the flooded pathway had won, and a new contender about a broken elevator in the senate building was gaining rapid support).The conversation was easy, technical, safe. It was their native language. But as the sun began to dip, casting long shadows, the atmosphere shifted. A comfortable silence settled between them, the kind that had become familiar, but tonight it felt charged, expectant. Kairos could feel the unspoken thing between them humming like a live wire.Ares stopped by a bench overlooking a duck pond, her hands tucked into the pockets of her jacket. She wasn't looking at him; she was watching the ripples on the water."You know," she began, her voice casual in a way that felt deliberate, "I was reading something the other day. About something called the 'grey side.'"Kairos's brain, which had been comfortably idling in code-optimization mode, stuttered. "Grey side?""Yeah. G-R-E-Y. It's this... nebulous space. Not quite a friend. Not quite a girlfriend. Just... in the grey." She finally turned to look at him, her expression unreadable in the fading light. "The article was asking why guys seem so content to keep girls there. In that undefined space. Why it's so hard to get a clear signal."The world narrowed to the space between them. The ducks, the trees, the distant hum of traffic—all of it melted into a dull roar. He understood, with absolute, terrifying clarity, that she was no longer talking about an article. She was mapping a concept directly onto them. Friend. Girlfriend. Grey. And he had placed her squarely in the grey.His mouth went dry. He was a developer. He dealt in binaries. True/False. 1/0. Success/Failure. This amorphous, emotional "grey" was a runtime error he didn't know how to catch."Maybe..." he croaked, then cleared his throat. "Maybe the signal isn't unclear. Maybe the receiver... isn't set up right." It was a terrible, clumsy metaphor, but it was the best his paralyzed mind could produce. It's not you, it's me.Ares shook her head, a small, sad smile touching her lips. "No. The broadcast is clear. The signal is strong. It's the other party that keeps changing the frequency." Her gaze was direct, patient, and utterly devastating. "Why is it so hard to just... tune in?"He had no answer. Or he had a thousand, all jumbled together in a heap of fear and longing. He looked away, over the pond, anywhere but at her patient, waiting face. "I don't know," he murmured, the words feeling like a betrayal. "The system... it's more complex than it looks."The silence that followed was heavy, full of everything he couldn't say. After a moment, she said " the guy just decided to suffer someone's daughter right?" Then she simply nodded, as if she'd expected this, and started walking again. The rest of the walk back was quiet, the easy camaraderie replaced by a thick, awkward tension. The grey had been named, and it now felt like a wall.That night, Kairos's room, usually a place of logic, became a prison of recursive thought. He lay in bed, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling where the glow-in-the-dark stars (a relic from his first year) offered no guidance.Why couldn't he just say it? Why couldn't he just take the step?He dissected the problem as he would for a bug.1. Symptoms: Elevated heart rate around subject Ares. Desire for prolonged proximity. Irrational focus on her opinion. Disruption of normal sleep patterns.2. Possible Cause: Emotional attachment. Romantic interest.3. Debugging Attempt: Initiate confession protocol. -Error: Fear of irrevocable change. -Error: Fear of ruining existing optimal collaboration. -Error: Insufficient data on subject's true long-term compatibility. -Error: Core belief: Good things in my life are transient and prone to catastrophic failure(so real).The logic was a closed loop. He wanted the stability of their current state because every time he reached for something more, the universe conspired to dump a bucket of cold water on him. He is so familiar with the fact that the universe hates him and there has been multiple situations that proved that. A relationship wasn't a new feature to ship; it was migrating their entire database to a new, untested architecture with no rollback plan.He spent two days in a fog. He was useless in class. He stared at code without seeing it. He opened his chat with Ares a dozen times, typed half a sentence, and deleted it, spent hours admiring her pictures and videos just to end up feeling the pain of his indecisiveness. The silence from her side was polite, professional, and it screamed across the digital void.In a moment of pure desperation, he did what any modern day developer would do. He asked chatgpt."How do you know if you're ready for a relationship?" he typed into the chat box of a popular LLM.The response was a perfectly formatted, utterly meaningless listicle. "1. Know Yourself. 2. Be Emotionally Available. 3. Have Clear Intentions. 4. Be Ready for Compromise."It was garbage. Useless platitudes that had no bearing on the specific, terrifying, wonderful chaos that was Ares Peterson. No AI could quantify the way his chest tightened when she solved a problem he'd been stuck on, or the quiet peace of just existing in the same room as her, or the sheer terror that all of it would evaporate if he said the wrong thing.He didn't doubt her signal. He was paralyzed by the responsibility of his own receiver. What if he tuned in and his circuitry fried? What if he broke the best thing that had ever happened to him?(He definitely did not want that to happen).He lay there, the insomnia a physical weight. The grey side wasn't a place she was stuck. It was a fortress he had built, brick by anxious brick, and he was now a prisoner inside, watching her through a narrow window, wondering why he couldn't just open the door.He wanted her feelings to be genuine more than he had ever wanted anything. And that was precisely why he was so terrified to find out.
"I actually really love her".