beta
Personally, I really like the friendship as a friendship and wouldn't have minded that it stayed that way IF the story wasn't relying heavily on classic BL tropes especially in those last few chapters. Escpailly the takeout girlfriend.
The ending only felt abrupt to me because they were setting up a confession that never came. If the author never intended this to be a romance... I guess you could still argue it is, but because every romance story has a confession, not having one or at least an equivalent act becomes disqualifying...
Anyway. After centuries of romance coding everything, we've all been trained or hardwired to read romance into everything. It's why characters that dont remotely interest or genuinely despise each other get shipped. People are just like this.
Authors have to actively counterbalance tropes that are romantically coded to temper their readers expectations, not lean into them. At least half of us shouldn't be expecting a BL when it's a story about friendship. I prefer platonic relationships and think it's a shame that intimate male platonic relationships are so rare in stories of all mediums. I would've love this story if it was clearly about that.
But it wasn't. This was just bait ╥﹏╥