Chapter Three: The Quiet Between Us Part 1

Neon didn’t speak for the first ten minutes.

We were sitting in the corner of a café that smelled like cinnamon and old vinyl records. The rain outside was soft, barely audible, like the sky was whispering instead of crying. He stirred his tea without drinking it, watching the steam rise like it was trying to escape.

I didn’t push him.

I’d learned that Neon’s silences weren’t empty. They were full of things he didn’t know how to say.

Finally, he looked up.

“I used to come here with my sister,” he said. “Before she stopped calling me.”

I blinked. “You never told me you had a sister.”

He shrugged. “I don’t. Not anymore.”

He didn’t mean she was dead.

He meant she was gone in a different way. The kind of gone that leaves no funeral, no closure, just a space where someone used to be.

“She was older,” he said. “Smart. Loud. She used to drag me here after school and make me try weird drinks. I hated all of them.”

He smiled faintly, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“She said I was too quiet. That I needed to learn how to take up space.”

I looked at him—curled into himself, black rings glinting under the café lights, voice barely above a whisper—and wondered if he’d ever learned.

“Do you miss her?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

The waitress came by and asked if we wanted anything else. Neon shook his head. I ordered a slice of lemon cake just to have something to do with my hands.

When it arrived, Neon stared at it like it was a memory.

“She used to order that,” he said.

I pushed the plate toward him.

He didn’t eat it. Just stared.

“I don’t know how to forgive people who leave,” he said.

I didn’t know if he meant her.

Or himself.

We left the café and walked in the rain.

Not heavy rain. Just the kind that makes everything feel like a movie. Neon didn’t have a hood, so his hair started to curl again, damp strands falling into his eyes. He didn’t push them away.

“I think I’m broken,” he said.

I stopped walking.

He kept going.

“Neon.”

He turned, slowly.

“You’re not broken.”

He laughed. “Then why do people keep leaving?”

I walked up to him, close enough to see the water on his lashes.

“Maybe they’re the broken ones.”

He didn’t respond.

But he didn’t walk away either.

We ended up at his apartment.

It was small. Bare. A mattress on the floor, a desk covered in papers, a cracked mirror leaning against the wall. The only decoration was a string of fairy lights that didn’t work.

He sat on the mattress and pulled off his rings, one by one, placing them in a line.

“I wear them so I don’t forget who I am,” he said.

I sat beside him.

“Who are you?”

He looked at the rings.

“Someone who’s trying.”

There was a photo on the desk.

I picked it up.

It was old. Faded. Neon and a girl with wild curls and a grin that could split the sky. She had her arm around him, and he looked younger. Softer.

“That’s her,” he said.

“She looks like she loved you.”

“She did,” he said. “Until I stopped being someone worth loving.”