The Dreamer Who Reads My Heart: Dangerous Verses: Chapter 2

He writes my pain before I speak it

I don't come back the next day.

Or the day after that.

But I can't stop thinking about ink-stained fingers and the way Asher said my name like it meant something.

On the third day, I find his notebook on my doorstep.

No note. Just poetry.

Page after page of verses that read like he's been living inside my head, watching my thoughts, cataloguing my fears.

She carries silence like armor,
each unspoken word a shield
against the world that taught her
voices can kill.

[sharp intake of breath]

I sink onto my porch steps, rain-soaked notebook trembling in my hands.

How does he know?

Her father's ghost sits passenger-side
in every story she won't tell,
whispering that love is just
another word for letting go.

The poem blurs as tears fall onto the ink-stained pages.

He knows about the accident. About the guilt that follows me like a shadow, the way I wake up every morning and remember all over again that my words drove someone I loved away from the world.

But how?

Small towns keep their secrets
like pressed flowers—
beautiful, fragile,
easily crushed.

Of course. Google searches and local gossip and the kind of digital breadcrumbs that make privacy impossible in the age of information.

Clara Chen. Debut novelist. Literary sensation until she wasn't.

Until her father read her book—a thinly veiled memoir of growing up with an alcoholic parent—and couldn't live with seeing himself through his daughter's unforgiving eyes.

I close the notebook and walk to Saltwater Books.

Asher sits in his usual spot, another notebook open, pen moving across the page like he's conducting an orchestra only he can hear.

"You looked me up," I say, sliding into the chair across from him.

He doesn't look up from his writing. "I wanted to understand why someone who writes like you do would stop."

"I don't write anymore."

"These say otherwise." He turns his notebook around.

The page is filled with my words. Fragments of conversation from our first meeting, observations about my body language, direct quotes from things I said.

"I killed someone with words."
"I wasn't hiding."
"Before you came here."

He's been writing about me writing about me.

"This is—"

"Invasive? Creepy? Probably." He sets down his pen, finally meeting my eyes. "But also true. You're still writing, Clara. Just not on paper."

"I can't." The words come out smaller than I intended. "Every time I try, I see his face. Hear his voice the last time we talked."

"What did he say?"

The question I've been avoiding for two years.

"He said he was proud of me. Said the book was brave and honest and everything he'd raised me to be." My voice breaks. "Three days later he was dead."

[coffee shop sounds fade]

Asher reaches across the table, covers my hand with his ink-stained one.

"Clara. Look at me."

I don't want to. Don't want to see pity or disgust or the inevitable moment when he realizes I'm too broken to fix.

"Please."

I look.

His dark eyes are soft with understanding, but there's something else there. Something that looks like...

Wonder.

"You wrote truth so powerful it made a man face himself completely. That's not murder, Clara. That's magic."

"Magic that killed him."

"Magic that might have saved him if he'd let it."

The words hit like absolution I don't deserve.

"You don't understand—"

"I understand that you've been carrying a load that was never yours to bear." His thumb traces across my knuckles. "I understand that you're punishing yourself for having a gift."

"Gift?" The word tastes bitter. "I ruined his life."

"No." Asher's voice is firm. "His addiction ruined his life. His inability to face his demons ruined his life. Your book just held up a mirror he'd been avoiding for forty years."

[rain starting against windows]

I want to argue. Want to cling to the familiar weight of guilt because it's easier than hope.

But sitting here with his warm hand covering mine, watching rain streak down the café windows like tears, I feel something crack open in my chest.

Something that feels dangerously like possibility.

"I have a reading tonight," Asher says quietly. "At the community center. Local poetry group."

"I don't—"

"You don't have to speak. Just listen. Just remember what words can do when they're used to heal instead of hide."

He stands, leaving money on the table for coffee neither of us touched.

"Eight o'clock. I'll save you a seat."

"Asher—"

But he's already walking away, leaving me with his notebook and a choice that feels like standing on the edge of a cliff.

I flip through the pages, reading poems about lighthouse keepers and stormy seas and a girl who forgot she was made of stardust and stories.

The last entry is dated today. This morning.

She's coming back,
one word at a time.
I can see it in the way
she holds my pen—
like she's remembering
what home feels like.

My hands are shaking.

Because I did hold his pen this morning, when he wasn't looking. Just for a second, feeling the weight of it between my fingers like a prayer I'd forgotten how to say.

And for one impossible moment, it felt like coming home.

Eight o'clock suddenly feels like the most important appointment of my life.

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