Write About A Secret Someone Is Keeping From The One They Love: The Secret She Won’t Let Herself Say Out Loud

She keeps the secret tucked under her tongue like a spell that might break if she speaks too loudly. He thinks he knows her—thinks he’s read every line on her skin, every micro-expression, every inhale she tries to hide when his fingertips graze the inside of her wrist. But he doesn’t know this.

He doesn’t know she dreams of him. Not the innocent kind. The kind where she wakes with her heart racing and her thighs trembling and her own name sounds foreign in her mouth because she whispered his into the dark.

She hides that from him.

He doesn’t know the other part either—the truth she’s terrified will matter more: She’s already in love with him.

It didn’t happen gently. There was no soft fade-in. It hit her like a door blown open in a storm, wind roaring through her. She felt it the moment he looked at her like she wasn’t someone he could simply pass by, like she was someone he had questions about. Dangerous ones.

She kept pretending she didn’t notice the way his eyes warmed when he laughed, the way he always positioned himself between her and the world, the way he listened—really listened—when she talked. She swallowed all of it, told herself it wasn’t happening.

Because he’d told her once, in that offhand way people do when they think it’s no big thing, that he wasn’t looking for anything serious.

That people who fell for him usually regretted it.That he didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s heart.

So she built a lockbox inside herself and shoved the truth in. She learned to smile around it. Learned to act normal when he brushed her hair behind her ear with the gentlest goddamn touch she’d ever felt.

The secret is heavy, but she carries it anyway.

She tells herself she’s protecting him. Protecting them.Protecting the fragile reality where he’s still in her life.

Because if she says it—If she tells him she wants him, not casually, not maybe-someday, but in every possible way—She risks losing what little she has.

So she lets him hug her too long and pretends her breath doesn’t catch. She lets him walk her home at night and pretends she’s not memorizing the way he moves in the streetlights. She lets him sit too close and pretends it doesn’t undo her.

Her secret burns. But she keeps it. Because loving him out loud might mean losing him for good.

And she would rather ache quietly than live in a world where he doesn’t stay.

Writing Prompt #1: Write about a secret someone is keeping from the one they love.

Author Note: This one hit harder than I expected. There’s something brutally relatable about loving someone in silence, about holding your breath because the truth feels too big to survive daylight. If you write your own version of this prompt, tag me or send it my way — I love seeing how a single line blooms differently in every writer’s hands.

B.A.R