Chapter One: The Quiet Corner
There was a particular kind of silence that lived in her room. It wasn’t lonely — not to her, at least. It was the kind of hush that wrapped itself around the edges of her bookshelf and whispered stories between the pages. The outside world could be loud, but in here, time slowed down, and the only ticking that mattered was the turning of a page.
Her name was Aira, and she had long ago decided that reality was overrated.
While other girls chased likes on social media and met up in noisy cafés, Aira preferred the company of characters who lived in her imagination. She didn’t hate people — not exactly. But there was something exhausting about conversations that didn’t go anywhere and smiles that didn’t mean anything. Real life often felt like a party she hadn’t been invited to, and she was okay with that. Mostly.
Books were better company anyway.
Her room was her favorite kind of mess — soft blankets in tangled heaps, scattered notebooks with scribbled thoughts, and teetering stacks of novels she both loved and hadn’t yet opened. Fairy lights framed the corners of her window, casting a warm glow over her reading nook like it was its own little world — because to Aira, it was.
Her latest obsession was The Hollow Ink, a novel she’d picked up at a secondhand bookstore on a rainy afternoon. The cover was worn, the pages slightly yellowed, and it smelled like forgotten adventures — just the way she liked it. It told the story of a boy trapped between the unfinished lines of a manuscript, a character abandoned by his author and left to drift in the in-between. No name. No ending. Just longing.
He was unlike anyone Aira had ever met — in fiction or otherwise.
He was written with sorrow in his bones and laughter tucked under his tongue. He said things that stayed with her long after she’d closed the book, like "Maybe I'm not real, but the way you see me when you read — that’s the truest version of me."He was clever without arrogance, broken without drama, and funny in a way that made her laugh out loud, even when her heart was aching for him.
And somewhere between chapter eight and fifteen, Aira realized she was falling in love with someone made entirely of words.
And strangely… that didn’t bother her.
Because in books, hearts weren’t broken without reason. In books, even sad endings made sense. In books, you could close the cover and start again.
She pulled the blanket tighter around her, balancing the book in one hand and a half-empty cup of tea in the other. Outside, dusk folded itself into the corners of the sky, and the world kept spinning — cars passed, someone shouted, laughter echoed faintly — but none of it touched her here.
Here, it was just her… and the boy who lived in the ink.
And for now, that was enough.
