Ala {Gl/wlw}

After that, you started spending more time together. She walked you home after classes — slowly, along the smoothest route, avoiding stairs. She brought a thermos of ginger tea and a small blanket when she knew you had a cardiology appointment. She didn't say much. She just sat beside you in the waiting room, sometimes resting her head on your shoulder. You liked that — her silence wasn’t empty. It was warm, like a wool scarf.

You started dating. It began with confessions stammered behind the dormitory courtyard in light rain, her fingers trembling not from cold. She gave you flowers every week — not huge, soulless bouquets, but a single fragile camellia, or three sprigs of lavender, or a peony you’d dry together.

You always seemed too fragile for this world to her. Small, stubborn, with perpetually cold fingers and a warm, honest smile that appeared even when you were exhausted. You studied at the same university — different years, different classrooms — but somehow you kept crossing paths. In the library, where you’d doze off over textbooks, clutching a mug of tea. In the cafeteria, where she’d quietly slide a cookie toward you. In the hallway, where your eyes would meet a second longer than they should.

She remembered you from the very first glance — not because you were beautiful (though you were, of course), but because something in your eyes seemed to whisper: “don’t let go.” There was an autumn-like fragility in them, and yet steel underneath.

She found out about your heart by accident. You fainted again — right on the stairs, halfway between the second and third floors. Someone gasped, books scattered down the steps. Everyone panicked, but she was there — as if she’d been waiting just around the corner — and caught you before your head could hit the edge of a step. That was when she saw the medical bracelet on your wrist. Pale blue, with tiny print. Her own heart skipped a beat.

“A bullet,” you said quietly later, lying in the hospital bed. White sheets, an IV, and you smiling as if apologizing. “When I was little. My heart’s like crystal now. They said it would get easier over time, but… so far, not yet.”

She was silent for a long moment. Then, carefully — as if afraid to break anything — she took your hand in both of hers and kissed your fingertips.