💬 Text Me When You Love Me 📱❤️

Lena had always believed that love should feel like a spark. 🔥 But with Noah, it never felt like a sudden flame—it felt like warmth. Like something that had always been there, even when you weren't paying attention.

They met in college, two strangers thrown together during freshman orientation, paired up for a campus scavenger hunt. Lena forgot the list; Noah remembered all the clues. She laughed too loud; he barely spoke. Somehow, it worked. By the end of the day, they'd become inseparable. 💫

They were never "just friends," not really. It was always a little more. Friends with stolen glances. Friends with late-night confessions. Friends with that one moment—junior year—when they almost kissed under a string of fairy lights at a house party. Almost.

But timing was cruel. When Lena was ready, Noah was in a relationship. When he was finally single, she was moving away. So they stayed in that safe, aching space between friendship and something more—typing and deleting messages, overthinking every emoji.

Years later, now in their late twenties, they were still in touch. Daily texts. Voice notes. Sharing music. Jokes. Long paragraphs about nothing and everything.

One night, Lena found herself alone in her apartment, the city humming outside her window. She had just watched a romantic movie that left her in a haze of emotions. A little wine, a lot of memories, and Noah’s name on her screen.

She scrolled through their messages. All those years, all those conversations. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. And before she could talk herself out of it, she typed:

Text me when you love me. 💌

She hit send.

Her heart pounded. She stared at the screen, waiting for the three little dots to appear.

Nothing.

Minutes passed.

Then hours.

Still no reply.

The next morning, she woke up with a knot in her stomach and a message still unread. She laughed bitterly at herself. Why did I send that? she thought. He probably thinks I’m joking. Or worse—he knows I meant it.

But Noah had seen the message. He saw it the moment it came in. He stared at it in disbelief, rereading the words over and over.

He’d written responses.

“I always have.”

“Since the day I met you.”

“What took you so long?”

But he didn’t send any of them. He deleted every one. He told himself it wasn’t the right time. That Lena didn’t really mean it. That maybe she’d regret it if he replied.

So he said nothing.

And silence grew between them.

Weeks passed. Then months.

Their messages slowed. Then stopped completely. Not because they didn’t care, but because they both did—too much.

Lena moved cities, took a new job, surrounded herself with new people. But there was always an empty space where Noah had been. She didn’t date. She didn’t even try. How do you let someone else in when you're still waiting for one person to answer a text?

One rainy Sunday morning, nearly six months later, Lena was curled up in bed, scrolling mindlessly through her old photos. There he was again—Noah, smiling beside her at graduation, holding a sign he made that said “The world’s not ready for you.” She laughed softly, tears welling in her eyes.

Then her phone buzzed.

Noah: “I love you.” ❤️

No punctuation. No explanation. Just three words.

She sat up straight. Was it real? Was it a mistake? She stared, heart pounding, frozen in disbelief.

And then—another buzz.

Noah: “I’ve loved you for years. I was just waiting for the right time. But there’s no such thing, is there?”

Her breath caught. Before she could reply, there was a knock at her door. 🚪

She opened it slowly, heart racing.

There he was.

Noah. A little older. A little more nervous than she remembered. Soaked from the rain, holding his phone in one hand and flowers in the other 🌧️🌹.

“I figured… if I was finally going to say it, I should do it properly,” he said, voice soft but steady.

Lena didn’t speak. She just stepped forward and hugged him—tight. Like she’d been waiting her whole life to do it.

“I got your message,” he whispered in her ear. “I just didn’t know how to say it back without messing it up.”

“You didn’t,” she said. “You said it perfectly.”

And in that moment, under the gray sky and between two heartbeats finally in sync, the message that was once left on read found its reply.

The End. ✨