The Distance Between Our Palms

Thousands of Miles and Seconds Apart

The phone buzzed against the wooden desk, a sharp, intrusive sound that shattered the quiet of my room.
I didn't need to look at the screen to know who it was. I hadn't needed to look for the last four days. In less than a hundred hours, Juno had managed to rewrite the entire map of my life.
We had met only days ago—a chance encounter, a few words exchanged, and then the inevitable shift to messaging. Four messages. That was all it took. Four tiny, glowing bubbles on a screen to turn my carefully structured world into a mess of nerves and anticipation.
I picked up the phone, my thumb hovering over the lock screen. My heart was doing that familiar, frantic stutter—the one that only happened when Juno's name lit up the display.
"I love you."
The words were typed out in simple, clean font, yet they seemed to vibrate with a weight that defied the thousands of miles between us. I read them once. Then twice. My breath hitched in my throat, a sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
How could she say that? How could she exist on the other side of the world, in a time zone I was barely tracking, and reach through the pixels to claim space in my chest?
We were just friends. That was the label we had silently agreed upon when we first started talking. We were two people who liked the same things, who shared the same midnight thoughts, who happened to be separated by an ocean. But "just friends" didn't usually say I love you after four days. "Just friends" didn't make me want to reach through the screen, press my palm against hers, and collapse the distance that kept us apart.
My fingers trembled as I hovered over the keyboard. I wanted to type it back—to let the words fly across the digital void and bridge the gap. But I stayed still, my hand hovering over the glass, measuring the agonizing distance between my palm and the cold surface of the screen.
If I said it back, the game changed. If I said it back, there would be no turning back from the wildfire.
"Just friends," I whispered to the empty room, but the words felt like a lie.
I typed one word, then deleted it. I typed another, and deleted that, too.
How do you tell someone you love them when you've never even held their hand?

(Based on true story but character names are fake)