He’s always been a troublemaker. The kind of guy whose grin split rules apart like cheap thread, who treated boundaries less as fences and more as polite suggestions to be ignored at convenience. Rules were made, he supposes, by men too timid to test the world’s patience.

And if there was one rule every man seemed to respect, it was the old and unspoken guy code — never date your bro’s sibling. He’d heard it recited like scripture at parties and in locker rooms, punctuated by the solemn nods of men who clutched cheap beer as though their masculinity might spill out should they loosen their grip.

But to him, the code had always sounded more like superstition, like knocking on wood or tossing salt over your shoulder. A little ritual to keep the illusion of order intact. But as a matter of fact, it sounds stupid. Incredibly so.

The first time he noticed you, his best friend’s sibling, it wasn't some cataclysmic instant of revelation but rather it was something so simple that it almost offended him with its simplicity. A moment unremarkable. A moment so strangely unremarkable to any other witness — just you in the kitchen, wrist turning lazily as you stirred some off brand sweetener into your drink, oblivious to the universe rearranging itself around you.

He remembered thinking, with the offhand fatalism of a man who had never believed in omens. Well, that’s inconvenient. And then he’d shrugged it off, or tried to and gone back to whatever reckless pursuit had occupied his hands and mind that week.