CHAPTER 21: FEAR OF LOVE

It’s 2028 after all.

Richard watched her sleep as though the slightest movement might shatter the peace around them. The soft rhythm of her breathing filled the dim room, gentle, steady, the kind of sound that threaded itself into a man’s bones and made them loosen.

I wish time could slow down and let me stay by her side longer.

Thin slices of city light slipped through the curtains and traced pale lines across her face, illuminating the stillness she rarely allowed herself while awake. Peaceful. Unburdened. Almost untouched by the storms she carried within.

From his spot beside her, memories rose in him like ghosts, uninvited at first, then painfully vivid.

He had been sixteen the first time he met Ahce.

Back then, she was nothing like the woman lying beside him now, calm, restrained, enigmatic. The girl he had known was bright in a way that felt almost dangerous. Sunlight intense enough to make a boy blink, brilliance sharp enough to make him feel small.

I never thought admiration could turn into something more... beyond the boundaries of friendship.

She moved with a purpose most adults barely found, each gesture infused with confidence and a strange grace that made her impossible to overlook. She was kind, too. Fiercely so. Always guarding others, always giving pieces of herself until it hurt.

I never thought I would develop feelings deeper than admiration for her.

I never thought she’d become someone so important in my life.

I never thought I would love her this way...

Richard used to watch her from a distance, pretending indifference while secretly taking in the way she lit up a room simply by being in it. He never understood the warmth she stirred in him. At sixteen, he only knew it was new, startling, and strangely comforting, admiration tangled with something far more dangerous, though he had been too young to name it.

His own home had known no such warmth. Dinners were silent, a ritual of metallic clinks and unspoken demands. His parents loved each other the way people follow instructions, precise, distant, dutiful, without the softness that made affection real.

He thought that was normal until he stepped into Ahce’s house at seventeen and became her mother’s student. For the first time, he witnessed a love that breathed. Her parents disagreed, yes, but never cruelly. Even their silences were threaded with trust. Their laughter filled the room like sunlight through an open window.

I never thought I would see a family and wished to be part of them.

I never thought I was comparable to those people who feel insecure when she is around them.

I never thought I would envy her life so much.

Richard wanted that kind of life. A home that felt alive. A love that wasn’t a cold obligation. And somewhere along the line, Ahce became the embodiment of those longings, warmth, hope, something permanent in a world that rarely offered anything lasting.

Meeting her had been like glimpsing light in a place he never realized was dark. He wanted to be near it. He wanted to be the reason behind it. But she had always felt too far above him, too bright, too unreachable. So he buried the feelings, told himself it was nothing, that it would fade.

It didn’t.

Years passed, marked by distance, silence, and unspoken words. Fate, always amused by fools, suddenly placed her back in his life, no longer the girl he had admired from afar, but the woman now sleeping inches away from him. And somehow, he still looked at her the way he had as a boy. Like she was a star he should never touch, yet could never stop reaching for.

At his lowest, she became his light.

Richard had been drowning then, lost in doubt, stripped of direction, afraid of the man he was becoming. Every path felt like a cliff’s edge. Every day, a silent battle against the weight inside his chest. He trusted no one. Not the world. Not the people who offered help. Not himself.

Fear built a home in him and whispered that he would never be enough. That failure waited patiently at every turn. But Ahce stepped into that darkness without hesitation.

She didn’t drag him out. She didn’t demand that he heal. Instead, she sat with him, quiet, patient, unafraid. She showed him that pain was not a curse, that change was not a doom, that brokenness did not make him unlovable. She taught him how to breathe again, how to stay afloat when everything in him wanted to sink. She became his strength when he had none left.

She loved him through his silence, his anger, his distance. Through the walls he built and the coldness he hid behind. Every harsh edge he showed her, she met with warmth. Every time he pushed her away, she stayed, steadfast, unwavering, gentle in a way he didn’t think anyone knew how to be.

She went to lengths no one ever had for him. And in the end, he repaid her devotion with fear.

He broke her.

I was a coward.

I was unworthy.

I was...

Not through betrayal or cruelty, but through the quiet, devastating ways people destroy what they think they don’t deserve. He convinced himself that love was weakness, that the world would only use it against him. He believed that pushing her away was mercy.

But his silence cut deeper than any goodbye.

He saw it in her eyes, the unspoken heartbreak, the way her smile slowly wilted as though each day drained a little more color from it. She never confronted him. She simply... dimmed.

Their relationship didn’t collapse in a dramatic instant. It unraveled gradually, like fabric wearing thin. Their laughter faded first, then their conversations thinned, and finally their messages shortened to polite fragments. No arguments, no slammed doors, just a quiet erosion neither of them named.

He hated himself for it. For what he did. For what he allowed to die between them.

And now, as Richard watched her sleep, he wondered, achingly, if she had ever forgiven him. Or if the distance that once grew between them still lingered in the spaces where light touched her face.

He wondered if he would ever be worthy of the warmth he once turned away.