That Look He Had

I must have been fifteen. Maybe sixteen.
Somewhere between summer and school. That soft blur where nothing is expected to matter yet — but everything already does.

I was staying at my grandparents’ house in the countryside.
The kind of place where the air smells like wet stone in the morning and laundry soap in the afternoon.
I used to read by the window, legs folded on the sill, pretending I didn’t care when the neighbors passed by.

That’s when I noticed him.

He was new. Or maybe I had never looked before.
The boy from next door — two years older, taller, sun-warmed skin and a slow kind of silence.
He’d sit outside around five, shirt off, damp hair from the pool.
Sometimes he listened to music. Sometimes he watched the sky.
Sometimes he looked straight at me.
Not long. Just enough to make me forget what book I was pretending to read.

He had a scar on his left knee.
I used to imagine how he got it.
Falling from a bike, maybe. Or climbing something too high, too fast.

We never spoke.

Not once.
But he smiled at me once, crooked and lazy, like he knew I was looking — and didn’t mind.

It wasn’t a story.
It wasn’t a crush.
It wasn’t anything.

But sometimes, when I write a song now —
I think of that look he had.

And how it made me feel real.