Chapter Nine - A House With Quiet Walls
634 Words
Third Person POV (Olivia’s Past)
Before the stolen glances.
Before the breathless kisses in empty hallways.
Before Nick Reed burned his name into her skin with nothing but a look—Olivia Blake lived in a house of mirrors. Beautiful on the outside. Fractured within.
Her childhood wasn’t filled with tragedy. No screaming matches. No bruises. No abandonment.
What haunted her was far more invisible.
Indifference.
Her parents had mastered the art of coexisting. Her mother, poised and polished, floated through life like a ghost in silk. Her father, consumed by business and bottom lines, treated affection like a forgotten language. They spoke in schedules and reminders. They moved past each other like strangers trapped in an endless loop of routine.
They never fought. They just didn’t feel.
And in the middle of that sterile silence, Olivia grew up.
A porcelain doll in a pristine house. Admired. Displayed. But never held.
Olivia’s mother kissed her forehead every morning but never looked her in the eyes. Her father asked about school but didn’t wait for the answer. They were people who believed good grades and a roof over her head were enough to raise a daughter. And maybe they were—for someone else. But not for Olivia.
Once, in middle school, seeing a classmate’s parents at pickup. The way her mother tucked the girl’s hair behind her ear, the way her father wrapped an arm around both of them like it was the most natural thing in the world. Olivia hadn’t been jealous. Not then. She’d just stood there, watching, trying to name the strange burn in her chest.
Years later, she still couldn’t name it. Not fully. But she carried it. That dull, aching emptiness. That constant question: What does it mean to be wanted?
She remembered birthday parties where the cake was perfect, the photos flawless—and the air, frozen. Her first period, dealt with alone. Her first heartbreak? There wasn’t one. No one had ever gotten close enough to break her.
The boys at school tried. Of course they did.
She was stunning. With eyes that made liars stumble and a walk that stopped conversations. But behind that beauty was a void. They flirted. She smiled politely. They touched—she felt nothing.
She wasn’t cold. She just didn’t know what warmth was supposed to feel like.
Love, s*x, even desire… were things she studied in books. Not things she felt.
Girls whispered behind her back, half in admiration, half in envy. But none of it mattered to her. She didn’t feel it. Didn’t want it. Compliments fell flat, like poems recited in a language she never learned.
She never craved romance. Never understood why her classmates scribbled boys’ names on notebooks or spent hours decoding the meaning behind a glance. She didn’t dream of prom or of first kisses. She dreamed of leaving. Of air that didn’t smell like loneliness. Of hands that didn’t just touch her forehead, but her soul.
The older she got, the more aware she became of how carefully she kept her distance from others. It wasn’t out of fear. It was a survival instinct. An invisible armor. Affection was foreign. Desire was theoretical. Love? That was something people wrote about in books. In her world, love was what you pretended to have to keep the walls from crumbling.
So when Olivia walked onto that college campus for the first time, she wasn’t searching for anything. Not friends. Not lovers. Just peace. A quiet classroom. A seat by the window. A life she could build on her own terms.
But peace, it turned out, didn’t look like she expected.
It looked like him.
And no matter how tightly she tried to hold onto the shell she’d spent years building…
It was already starting to crack.
- Writer
