Aleah's POV
The ache for something more hummed beneath my skin like background static—constant, irritating, and familiar. I wanted anything to break the cycle. It was just another normal day. Same old longing, same old feelings, same old me. Wake up, drag myself to school, drag myself back home, replay the same scenes, speak the same lines. It was a quiet sort of suffocation. The kind that doesn't scream—it sighs. I wanted a change. I needed one.Then I met her. Yasmin.She didn't enter my life gently; she crashed into it like a thunderstorm in the middle of a drought. Wild, unexpected, and impossible to ignore. There was a fire in her eyes, the kind that made you want to lean closer even if you knew you might get burned. Her presence was magnetic, fierce and untamed, as if she carried a secret wind inside her that swept through every room she entered. Yasmin was sunlight breaking through a cloudy sky—radiant and unapologetically alive. Her laughter was loud and unfiltered, pulling you in, making you want to be near it, to understand it. She spoke as if she had lived a hundred lives before this one. And when she looked at me, it felt like she saw right through the shell I built, straight to everything I was trying to hide. I was completely undone.