The wind had quieted.
Eastcliff, in its sleepy autumn hush, drifted beneath a pale moon, and above the town—inside the attic apartment—Alia stared at her reflection in the typewriter's glossy keys. Her fingers hovered over them, unmoving.
She wasn't sure what she wanted to write.
Because tonight, words felt too small.
Micah had started showing up in the mornings. Not always, not predictably—but just enough to feel like a rhythm was forming. Sometimes he brought her books he thought she'd love. Once, he brought her a pear and said, "I saw it and thought it looked like something you'd paint if you were a still life."
She still didn't know how to answer things like that.
Tonight, he knocked.
Not at midnight, but around seven—early enough that the town was still rustling with dinner and dim lights in windows. When she opened the door, he stood holding something in his hands.
A journal. Worn. Leather-bound. The kind that held secrets.
"I want you to read this," he said, voice low.
She blinked. "Is it yours?"
He nodded. "It's the last one I kept before I stopped writing completely. I haven't opened it since Claire died."
Alia looked down at it—at the faint ink stain on the corner, at the worn edges like a book that had been carried through storms.
"I don't want to read your pain," she said gently. "Not if it costs you too much."
Micah's smile was faint. "Then don't read it for the pain. Read it for what survived."
---
They sat on the attic floor, side by side, as she opened the journal.
He didn't look over her shoulder. He didn't say a word. He simply breathed, waiting.
Alia flipped through pages of scrawled verses. Some were sharp, angry. Some didn't rhyme at all. But every one felt like it had come from a boy learning how to bleed without breaking open.
She paused on one entry. It had no title.
> "There is a kind of love that doesn't ask for promises,
only presence.
The kind that sits with your grief in silence
and calls it beautiful."
Alia looked up. Her voice was soft. "This isn't just about Claire."
Micah met her gaze. "No. It isn't."
And the way he looked at her then—like he had waited years for her to say those exact words—made something in her chest fall loose.
Without thinking, she reached out and placed her hand over his.
It was quiet. Gentle. A simple touch.
But Micah froze.
Not because he didn't want it.
But because he did.
And wanting had always come with consequences.
His thumb brushed the back of her hand slowly. Carefully. Like a man testing the edge of light after living too long in the dark.
"I don't know what this is," he whispered. "Or what you want it to be."
Alia swallowed. "I don't know either. I just know that when I'm near you, I stop feeling like I'm waiting for something else."
He leaned forward, ever so slightly.
So did she.
Their faces were close now—too close for reason, too far for regret. His breath was warm. Hers hitched in her throat.
But neither moved that final inch.
Micah pulled back first.
Not in rejection—but in reverence.
"I don't want our first kiss to be half-certain," he said.
Alia's lips parted, but she didn't argue.
She just smiled.
"Then let's write our way to it."
And in that attic room full of ghosts, the almost-kiss felt more powerful than anything that might have followed.
Because the wanting was the story now.
And they were both finally brave enough to read it.