Rain had softened to a mist by morning, tracing foggy halos around the city's glass towers. The quiet hum of a world waking up felt oddly cinematic—like Yuki Aizawa was walking through the opening scene of a film she hadn't been told she was starring in. Umbrella tucked under her arm, she weaved through the crowd outside the station, her university's white facade peeking through the gloom.
She was twenty-one now. A final-year literature student at Komorebi University, commuting from the modest apartment she still shared with her parents. It wasn't glamorous, but it was safe. Predictable. And maybe that's why she filled her nights with ink-stained fantasies—because the daylight hours were a different kind of fiction, one where she had to play the diligent daughter, the silent classmate, the polite friend.
Komorebi University wasn't elite, but it had its charm. Trees lined the cobbled paths between buildings, blooming in spring, weeping in autumn. Students lounged on steps or raced between lectures. Boys with guitars, girls with iced coffee, late bloomers and early prodigies. It was a living poem Yuki never quite felt part of. She watched it from the edge, her earbuds in, her fingers perpetually curled around a notebook or phone.
And then there was Riku.
He walked beside her now, umbrella tilted slightly so she wouldn't get wet, even if it meant his shoulder soaked through. He always did things like that. Silently generous. Endlessly reliable. The kind of boy who stayed after class to carry your books and never made you feel like you owed him anything—except maybe your attention. And Yuki gave it, but in fragments.
Riku loved her. She knew.
He never said it outright, but she could feel it in how his voice softened around her name. In the way he never looked at other girls quite the same. In how he read the messy chapters of her stories and pretended he didn't see the bruises between the metaphors.
But Yuki didn't feel it back. Or rather, she refused to let herself.
Because if she acknowledged it, she'd have to respond. And that meant breaking the soft safety of their friendship, and she wasn't brave enough for that.
So she laughed at his jokes. Let him walk her to class. Let his presence wrap around her like a cardigan on rainy days. But she never reached for his hand. Never lingered too long. Never asked him what he really meant when he said, "I'm always here."
---
The lecture hall smelled of old books and coffee. Yuki's professor droned about narrative archetypes while she doodled flowers in the margin of her notes.
"Is it wrong to want to be wanted?" she scribbled under the petals.
The boy from last summer—the one who had kissed her fingertips like they were scripture and whispered lines from Rilke against her spine—he had wanted her. But he'd wanted her body more than her story. And once he'd read enough pages, he left.
So she stopped letting people turn her into chapters.
Now she wrote the kind of romance that made hearts ache. Lust soaked in vulnerability. Yearning tangled with guilt. Stories where kisses weren't clean and love wasn't safe.
At night, her room turned sacred. Laptop aglow, music low, hands flying over the keyboard. She crafted her alter ego: Velour, the pen name no one knew. Under it, she wrote serialized webnovels—smut-laced poetry and aching love confessions that readers devoured weekly.
Thousands read her. Cried for her characters. Messaged her in DMs asking if she was okay.
But none of them knew it was her.
Not her parents, who thought she was still stuck on that failed poetry anthology.
Not her classmates, who only knew Yuki as the quiet girl with the sad eyes and vintage tote bags.
Not even Riku.
And that made it feel all the more real.
---
That afternoon, as grey clouds hung heavy above the campus courtyard, she sat under the covered walkway writing on her phone. Her latest scene—her heroine pressed against a rain-slicked wall, breathless from a forbidden kiss—unfolded in rhythm with the storm's whisper.
"He tasted like the end of a promise," she typed. "Like the silence between thunder."
"Writing again?" Riku's voice was warm, a low hum beside her ear.
She blinked and tilted her screen away. "Just notes."
He smiled. "You always say that when it's not just notes."
Yuki smiled back, soft and guilty.
He passed her a warm can of coffee from the vending machine. "You looked cold."
"Thanks."
They sat together, silence settling in like an old friend. Rain splattered the concrete beyond the awning. Somewhere in the distance, someone laughed. She sipped. He watched the drizzle. Neither spoke of what lingered between them.
"Riku," she said suddenly, "do you believe in soulmates?"
He glanced at her, surprised. "I… I don't know. Maybe?"
"I think we write our soulmates into existence," she murmured. "Line by line. Like fiction that remembers us."
He smiled. But didn't reply.
She didn't expect him to.
---
That night, in her room, she wrote again. The story had twisted into something more intimate—an exploration of a girl who couldn't say no, even when love knocked politely.
Yuki paused, fingers trembling slightly over the keyboard.
Why do we want the ones who undo us?
Her breath caught. The music in her headphones swelled.
And then she typed:
> He leaned in. Not like a hero. Not like a villain. But like someone who had waited too long to lie anymore.
"I know you pretend not to see it," he whispered. "But I love you. Not in the way boys love. In the way ghosts haunt."
The air felt thick. Her room, once safe, now pulsed with tension.
She didn't realize she was crying until a tear slid onto the trackpad.
---
The next day, Riku met her at the campus gate like always.
But she didn't meet his eyes.
And she didn't tell him what she had written.
Because to speak it out loud would make it real.
And Yuki Aizawa—twenty-one, pretty, poetic, loved but uncertain—was still learning how to live between her lines.
---
"She wrote to feel seen. She kissed to feel erased."
---
The campus library was quiet that Thursday—too quiet for a girl whose thoughts never rested.
Yuki sat near the back, beneath an old stained-glass window where fractured light painted her notebook in trembling color. Around her, pages turned and pencils scratched and students whispered like ghosts in a cathedral. But her world narrowed to the cursor blinking on her screen.
She hadn't written since last night's confession.
Not publicly, not privately.
The line—"I love you. Not in the way boys love. In the way ghosts haunt."—still clung to her chest like damp silk. It had spilled out of her like blood, like memory. She hadn't expected it. Hadn't planned it.
But Velour had.
Velour always knew what to say. How to hurt just enough. How to make readers ache for someone they'd never meet.
And maybe that was the problem.
Yuki no longer knew where Velour ended and she began.
---
Outside, autumn finally announced itself. A golden hush draped across Komorebi University. Leaves flurried in slow spirals, and somewhere on the central lawn, a boy played an acoustic version of Plastic Love while a girl filmed him on her phone.
Yuki watched them from the library window. They looked simple. Like a scene that didn't need editing.
She closed her laptop and packed up.
Maybe words weren't enough anymore.
---
Later, in the stairwell beside the literature building, Riku found her.
He always did.
She didn't hear him at first. Her head was tilted back, eyes closed, earbuds playing some French jazz she'd found in a playlist labeled "For Girls Who Romanticize Breathing."
"Thought I'd lost you," he said gently, leaning against the wall.
"You never lose what waits," she replied without opening her eyes.
He didn't say anything to that. But when she looked at him—really looked—she noticed the dark circles under his eyes. The way his hand flexed nervously near his pocket, like he wanted to say something and kept putting it back.
"What is it?" she asked.
"I read something," he said, voice hesitant. "A webnovel. Someone linked it in the group chat. A few girls were talking about it in class. Said it was... different."
Her heart flipped.
"Oh?"
"It felt like you," he said, eyes soft. "The words. The loneliness between them. I don't know how else to explain it. It just... it felt like something you'd write."
Yuki swallowed.
She wanted to lie. To laugh it off. To say, 'That's a strange thing to say.'
But her throat locked.
"And if it was?" she whispered.
He smiled sadly. "Then I guess I'd say thank you. For being brave in places I can't reach."
The silence that followed was not awkward—it was sacred. And terrifying.
Because something unspoken had just cracked between them.
---
That night, Yuki didn't write.
Instead, she opened a blank document. Not for Velour. Not for anyone.
Just her.
She stared at the white screen and typed slowly:
> I think I keep you at a distance because I'm scared of what you might see when you get too close.
She paused.
Deleted it.
Typed again:
> I don't know how to be loved without folding into something smaller first.
Deleted it.
Finally, she wrote:
> You're not in my stories because you deserve more than fiction.
And saved the file as "untitled_poem_1.txt."
---
The next morning, she left her house early. The train was quiet, swaying gently through the city. The windows fogged at the edges, catching bits of rising sun and ghosting her reflection with light.
She watched herself—soft sweater, ribbon-tied bag, mouth pressed thin.
Yuki Aizawa.
Not Velour. Not the girl who wrote aching bedroom monologues or immortalized forgotten touches in verse.
Just Yuki. A girl with too many feelings and not enough courage to say them out loud.
But that might be changing.
---
Later, in the courtyard between classes, Riku approached her again. No umbrella this time. Just a quiet resolve in his step.
"I need to ask something," he said.
She nodded.
"If I asked you to be honest—with me, with yourself—would you say yes?"
Her throat tightened. She couldn't look away.
"I'm scared," she admitted.
"I know."
He stepped closer, just enough for her to hear the heartbeat in his voice.
"But I've waited long enough," he said. "And maybe you have too."
And then—
Only then—
She let herself whisper back:
"Okay."
---
They didn't kiss. Not yet.
But something shifted.
A page turned.
And for once, Yuki didn't feel like a spectator in her own life.
---
That night, her latest chapter ended differently.
No broken hearts. No shadowed metaphors.
Just two characters walking home together in silence, sharing warmth from the same can of coffee.
No confessions. No tragedy.
Just possibility.
And her readers still cried—but this time, it wasn't because of the pain.
It was because they finally saw a girl choosing to stay.
---
> "She didn't need saving. Just someone who stayed long enough to read the footnotes."
---