ROYAL HIGHNESS

59. His POv

Amyardh pov

In the darkness of the car, with the noise of the party still echoing faintly in his head, he could feel her beside him… too close, too quiet. They weren’t talking. They hadn’t talked in weeks. Whatever existed between them was a silent ache now — sharp, unresolved, impossible to ignore.

And yet, here she was.
And here he was.
Acting like strangers, even after everything.

He kept his eyes on the road, but every breath of hers reached him. Every small movement. Every shift of her weight. Every reminder of the girl he had loved long before she ever knew.

He wanted to reach out, pull her into him, kiss her with all the hurt he had swallowed — to tell her she wasn’t the only one who had suffered. She wasn’t the only one carrying wounds. The moment he realized she had been referring to *him* in her poems, in her confessions to others, in all the things she never dared to say to his face… something inside him had broken open.

For the first time, he had understood that she felt something for him too — something real, something that wasn’t just in his head. But by then it was too late. Too much distance. Too much pride. Too much of their history standing like a wall between them.

He remembered that party — the one neither of them spoke about anymore. The night she had chased him through the crowd, a little drunk, breathless, eyes too honest to hide behind. That was the first time he had heard the truth from her lips. The first time he had realized she wasn’t just the girl he loved… she was the girl who loved him back.
But she didn’t remember everything.
Or maybe she pretended not to.
And he pretended it didn’t matter.

But sitting beside her now, in this car, in this unbearable silence… it mattered more than anything.

He had loved her for so long that it felt like a part of his existence.
And tonight, with her so close he could feel the warmth of her skin, he felt the old urge rise again — fierce, uncontrollable, almost painful — to pull her into his arms and kiss her so hard she would finally understand how much he’d endured too.

But he didn’t.
He just drove, pretending the road was more important than the girl who had once confessed to him under glittering party lights… and still had no idea how deeply she had carved herself into him.

He had thought the silence inside that car was the worst kind of punishment — the kind where two people who once belonged to each other now sat side by side like strangers, pretending they didn’t feel the tremor in the air, pretending the past wasn’t choking both of them.

But he was wrong.
There was a moment far worse.
And it came unexpectedly, on an ordinary afternoon, when he opened the pages of a novel without even knowing it would shatter him.

Until he read the first few lines.

Until he felt something in his chest drop, violently, as if his own memories had been wrote on the page without his permission.

At first, he thought he was imagining it — the descriptions too familiar, the emotions too precise, the ache too personal.
But then there was a scene…
a scene so specific, so painfully real, that only two people in this entire world could understand it.

Him.
And her.

That party.
The night she had followed him out of the crowd, breath uneven, eyes pleading for him to stop walking away.
The night she had confessed without meaning to.
The night he had pretended she was too drunk to know what she was saying.

And now it was all here… in her novel.

He froze.
His breath stuck somewhere between disbelief and heartbreak.
Because the author hadn’t written it as imagination.
She had written it as truth.
Raw, unfiltered, bleeding truth.