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Your kitchen was stifling and filled with the aroma of chocolate and coffee as you stood at the counter, giving the scratch brownie batter you had been assembling one final fold for good measure. Your friends and family went crazy over the simple treat so you decided to share the recipe with your TikTok following, something they asked for every time you took a picture of the brownies to post. You had spent the last hour filming clips with the help of your friend, laying out a list of ingredients and those you preferred to use. It had taken you nearly three times as long to put the batter together than it usually did between filming and refilming.

You had opened the windows and the sliding glass door to try and let the ocean breeze dispel some of the overwhelming heat in the kitchen, but it hadn’t done much besides invite crawling insects in. You were also keeping tabs on a small lizard that had taken up sunbathing on the balcony railing, fearful it would make a break for the inside of your home.

It all would have been extremely tedious if not for the help of your best friend. She had been lured over by the promise of freshly baked treats, but really you had trapped her to help you set up the camera and wash all the dishes when you were done. The things people would do for a good brownie could not be underestimated.

She moved your phone that stood at attention on a tripod, angling it so she could catch a clip of you scraping the batter out of the silver mixing bowl and into a square baking tin lined with parchment paper. You slid the pan into the oven and closed the door.

She dismounted your phone from the tripod and handed it to you. You leaned with your back against the counter as she moved to the sink to hold up the other end of her deal. You methodically moved through your Instagram and TikTok, checking comments and likes. You had been semi-MIA for the past week, not posting much on your feed, but sharing a lot on your Insta stories.

It had been seven days since Joseph had posted a photo of the two of you on his Instagram. If you were being honest, it hadn’t been nearly as big of a deal as you had made out in your head. You had been so anxious about how people would react, what they would have to say about you, but in reality, the vast majority of the comments had been really supportive. Even the ones that had been jealous had been playful and funny, clearly happy for you and Jo even if it meant their chance with him was suddenly an absolute zero.

Every time you had scrolled social media the last several days, you checked to see if anyone had connected you to Joseph’s post, but it seemed no one had. Your connection to Jo was so private, there really was no way anyone would have guessed it was you in the photo. That had been the goal after all. After seeing the positive reaction in his comment section though, you were starting to feel the temptation to make a post of your own.

You had mentioned to your audience, in passing, that you had a boyfriend, but you had been mindful to never share much of Jo, not even a hand. Your followers had even developed a bit of a running joke that your boyfriend wasn’t real as they had never seen solid proof of him. The bit had made you laugh, so you hadn’t bothered to disprove their theory.

“I swear to god,” your friend said, noticing you on your phone. She rinsed soap from a measuring cup and set it in the drainer to dry. “You and Joseph are like the only thing I’ve seen people talking about.”

Your friend existed online in a weird space online where celebrity gossip, the Hunger Games, and niche micro-influencer overlapped. It all made her, for better or for worse, the target audience for just about any video talking about ‘Joseph Zada’s new girlfriend’. She had sent you videos of various people joking about their devastation, finding out Jo was taken. You had both laughed good-naturedly. It felt surreal to see people post about this boy you had known so much of your life, but especially when it was in tandem with you.

“It’s been a week. They’ll move on eventually,” you assured.

“It’s been a week and you have yet to post him yourself,” she mumbled. “I’m sure Jo’s punching the air right now.”

“You were just complaining that we’re all you’re seeing on your feed and now you’re scolding me for not posting my boyfriend?” you asked with a smile, crossing your arms over your chest.

“I’m not scolding you. You make it sound so dramatic,” she wouldn’t look up from the dishes as she worked. She asked, in a voice that said she was trying to be sly about it, “are you going to post him?”

You shrugged, looking down at your slippered feet. He had said you could if you wanted. It didn’t even have to be a soft launch. You could post a picture of the two of you kissing for all he cared. Your friend was closer to being right than you cared to admit. He was very clearly fiending to be posted, but trying not to push you.

“Oh, what?” your friend sighed, looking up at you finally, a rouge soap sud sticking to her cheek, “Does everything have to be a philosophical quandary for you?”

You stammered and blushed at her mocking, trying to find the words.

“Okay, well you date a famous person and tell me it’s not stressful to post about,” you mumbled.

“Girl,” she rolled her eyes. ‘Girl’ had become her newest overused phrase. She loved adding it to the beginning of any statement she thought was obvious, “if I was dating someone famous, I’d be posting them all day everyday. I’d be giggling and kicking my feet and going ‘you snooze, you lose’ to anyone being nasty and jealous.”

“That’s awful. You can’t say that,” you laughed, bumping her shoulder with yours as you moved to stand next to her. If she was washing the dishes, you supposed you could dry them.

“I’m just saying, I’d be, like, marking my territory," she explained. “Plus Joseph is like painfully in love with you and it’s way too cute to just keep to yourselves and, as your single friend, it’s way too sappy to keep being personally subjected to. You both make me sick,” she teased.

You fell into a thoughtful silence as you continued working through the small stack of dishes together. You didn’t speak again until everything was put back where it belonged.

“Help me pick a photo,” You relented, pulling your phone out of your back pocket and moving to stand next to her.

She helped you scroll through the dozens of photos you had taken of or with Jo in the last year. Finally, she settled on one from around Christmas. Him, in a white t-shirt, leaned over where you had been sitting on the couch as he talked to you about something you couldn’t remember now. In the background, the sliding glass door was open to let in the warm summer air, just as it was now. Your friend took your phone from your hands and cropped the image of Jo so that only his left shoulder and bicep along with a bit of his jaw and blond curls were visible. It could really be any blond curly-haired boy.

You favorited the image so you wouldn’t lose it as you traversed to the Instagram app. A pop up in the corner announced a new set of notifications, demanding your attention, but you ignored it, worried you’d lose your nerve if you took too long.

You stared at the blank space that awaited your caption, rolling over ideas in your head. Jo had posted you with your pet name as a caption, but you didn’t really have an especially unique pet name for him, always defaulting to ‘Jo’ or ‘Joey’, or in cases of extreme desperation, ‘babe’ and ‘baby’.

The photo was cast in a golden light from the afternoon sun. Jo’s curls like spun golden, like honey. It clicked briefly in your mind, an old song you had heard often when driving around with your grandparents.

‘Honey honey🐝🌷,’ You wrote finally. Your finger hovered over the post button. Your heart was suddenly in your throat as panic took its place in your chest. Your friend let out a dramatic, frustrated sigh and slapped your hand, forcing your thumb down. Into the void of the internet the post went, to collect the opinions of your followers. You locked your phone and set it face down on the counter.

“Why don’t we watch something while we wait?” You asked. You had meant while you waited for the brownies to be done, but maybe you also meant until you were mentally prepared to look at your phone again.

She laughed knowingly and led you to the living room, like you were a guest in your own home, where she turned on a show she was obsessed with and insisted you watch.

The egg timer on the counter went off thirty minutes later, pulling you away from the show that you had actually found yourself completely drawn into. You ignored the reflex to check your phone when you spotted it on the counter. You slipped on a pair of oven mitts and pulled the brownies out, setting them on a cooling rack before returning to the living room.

Another episode and then you were both back in the kitchen, cutting the brownies into nine roughly-the-same-size squares, each claiming a piece for yourselves. You both stood, leaning against the counter, eating in silence. Your friend because she was so lost in how good her brownie was and you because you couldn’t stop staring at your phone. It had become the new lizard on the railing, too tiny to be a real threat, but still something that had you acting a little skittish. You listened as it buzzed intermittently. The sound did nothing to calm your nerves. Once she had finished eating and wiped her fingers of any leftover chocolate, your friend snatched your phone off the counter.

“Okay, let’s see here,” She said, typing in your passcode, an open secret between you, her, and Jo, as she returned to your side.

The post had already garnered a lot of attention in the last couple of hours. The top comment with nearly as many likes as your post came from Jo, a simple ‘🌹’.

Between all the early comments from your own followers, some of which you recognized by their usernames, were newer ones from people who had put the pieces together. The first comment to sound the alarm came from day1user, ‘is that joseph fucking zada?’, left before Jo’s own comment. That made you and your friend laugh, such a simple question loaded with such emotion. You recognized day1, they had been a follower you and Jo shared, something that was no longer surprising now that he had gotten so big. Despite their keen observation skills, they surely had no idea that the two of you were connected. They were often in both of your comment sections and had probably just put the two soft launch posts together.

It was also clear that a lot of the newer comments had come from people who didn’t follow you and had come to check out the post as it circulated around with more and more people speculating on who the boy in the picture was.

Still clutching your phone, your friend unlocked her phone, moving to X, that cesspool of an app she used to keep up with fan update pages regarding you and Joseph. She let out a cackle as she loaded one for you first, spinning her phone around for you to see. It was a tweet, written like official news, “(y/n) soft launches boyfriend, suspected to be Joseph Zada” followed by a screenshot of your post and a cropped screenshot of Jo’s comment.

Back in your own comments, several people argued it wasn’t Joseph, just some blond guy. ‘How would she know Joseph Zada anyway?’, one asked as if forgetting before he had been Up-and-Coming-Actor Joseph Zada, he had been her perfectly-normal, childhood-friend-turned-lover Jo.

You took your phone from her and pulled down to view your notification center. Jo had sent several texts since seeing your post.

All things considered, the soft launch thing was kind of fun. Watching both of your fans interact in the comments, giggling, debating, and joking together, it was a little funny. Maybe you could keep up this soft launch thing, just a little longer before you let Jo finally post you with no restrictions. Even if it was just for your own amusement.