Chapter 4
1220 Words
Vincent's POV
The cold air outside the hospital stung more than it should have.
Vincent stood still for a moment, keys gripped tightly in his palm, knuckles white. The world moved on around him—cars, people, noise—but his thoughts stayed behind, in that pale hospital room where Nova had smiled at him like she wasn’t slowly disappearing.
She hated hospitals.
He remembered the way her fingers twitched when nurses touched her. How her smile dropped the moment they left. She didn’t show it to them—but he saw it.
She didn’t belong there. The white walls, the smell of antiseptic, the beeping machines—it was everything Nova wasn’t. She needed space, warmth, books stacked on her nightstand and her favorite music playing low in the background.
Not... this.
I’ll bring her home, he thought.
His mind was already racing. He could move her back to her own house—she hated being pitied, but she'd feel safer there. He could hire a private doctor. Get the equipment, whatever she needed. He’d do anything. Anything. As long as she didn’t fade away in a place like that.
His heart was thudding against his chest like a warning. Or a reminder.
This wasn’t supposed to happen to her.
Not his Nova.
Vincent leaned against his bike, fingers still trembling.
Then—almost like instinct—his thoughts drifted backward, like they always did when things got too heavy. Back to when it was easier.
Back to her.
To them.
He was eleven when he realized he didn’t want to be away from her. Not even by a year.
Victor had moved ahead a class, and Vincent was supposed to follow. But Nova... Nova wasn’t. She was still a year behind because she was one year younger than him. And the thought of not seeing her every day, of not walking her home after class or sharing lunch on the school rooftop—it felt wrong.
So he did something stupid.
He failed on purpose.
Not in everything—just enough to stay behind. To be in the same class. To stay by her side.
Victor had been furious. “Seriously? You want me to repeat a year too?! For her?”
Vincent had only shrugged. “You don’t have to.”
They both repeated the year anyway.
Nova never knew.
She just smiled when they showed up in her class, arms crossed, trying to act like it was all coincidence.
“Guess we’re stuck with each other,” she had said, and laughed like it meant nothing.
But to Vincent, it meant everything.
Holidays meant sleepovers and movie marathons. Vincent had watched her fall asleep on their living room couch a hundred times, her hand barely brushing his.
He never moved. Never woke her.
Just sat still in the dark, listening to her breathe.
Back then, she was full of life—mischievous, wild, fearless.
And now… she was fighting battles he couldn’t even touch.
He didn’t know how to fix this. But he would try.
Because if time was slipping from them, he wanted to steal every second back.
Most people thought Vincent was quiet because he had nothing to say.
They were wrong.
He simply had too much—too many thoughts, too many emotions, too many things he wanted to say but didn’t know how to. And Nova… Nova made that even worse.
Vincent's POV
She sat two benches ahead of me, swaying slightly to whatever soft music played through her earphones. She didn't look at anyone. Didn’t talk much. Didn’t try to be noticed.
But she was.
To me, she always had been.
Victor had asked me once—half-laughing, half-serious—if I was in love with her. I said nothing. Just looked away.
I didn’t know if it was love. But it was something heavier. Something that lived in my chest like a weight and a warmth at the same time. It burned when she laughed at Victor’s jokes, and it melted when she hugged me casually, like it didn’t mean anything .
I caught myself watching her now, the way I always did—like a quiet habit. She was sketching something on the last page of her notebook, brow furrowed, bottom lip caught between her teeth.
A constellation. Again.
I wondered if she even remembered the first one she drew—when she was eleven and told me she wanted to touch stars someday. I did. I remembered everything.
“Hey, Nova!”
I stiffened.
Two boys from the senior batch were leaning against the window, grinning too wide. Too loud.
Nova looked up, confused.
I was already halfway out of my seat before I even registered moving.
I walked past them slowly, deliberately. Their laughter faded when they caught me looking at them with a warning sign.
“She’s not interested,” I said flatly.
The boys backed off with nervous smirks, muttering something under their breath.
When I sat back down, Nova turned around. “Everything okay?”
I nodded once. “Yeah. Drink your water. You’ve barely touched it.”
She rolled her eyes, smiling. “You're worse than my mom sometimes.”
But she sipped it anyway.
It was easier this way—hiding behind care. Behind habit. Behind all the little things that didn’t look like love.
Because if I ever said what I felt— I was scared I’d lose her.
And losing her wasn’t something I could recover from.
__
He didn’t know when it stopped being just friendship—maybe it never was. Maybe it was love from the beginning, dressed up in the way he memorized her favorite book quotes or how he sat through hours of music just to find the songs she might like. Maybe it was the way her laughter made the noise in his mind quiet, or how her silence never felt uncomfortable. But he knew now—standing in the middle of his room, holding the pen he used to write her name over and over on the back of his notebooks—he knew. It wasn’t just that he cared for her. It wasn’t just that he would do anything to keep her safe. It was love. A love that had been growing quietly in his bones, so gentle and slow that he hadn’t noticed it until it filled every inch of him. And it hurt—not because she didn’t love him back, but because he had no idea how long he had been carrying this feeling without a name. It had been there when she leaned on his shoulder during late night movies, when she cried in front of him for the first time, when she gave him the last bite of her chocolate even though he knew she wanted it. It was there when she smiled like she didn’t know she was beautiful. It was there in every poem he wrote and never showed. It was there in his quiet longing, in his need to protect her, in the way he didn’t want to imagine a world where she didn’t exist beside him. And now—now that she was slipping away—he finally saw it clearly. He was in love with Nova. He had been, all along.
---
---
- Writer
