Beyond the Pages

Is this the afterlife?
The question echoed in my mind as I floated in a strange emptiness. Where am I? Is this heaven? Hell? The last thing I remembered was the truck crashing into me, the blurred faces of people trying to help. When I opened my eyes-
I was someone else.
Priya Kapoor. A name that wasn't mine, a life I didn't recognize. And then, the memories came-not mine, but hers. A tragic, fleeting existence as a cannon-fodder character in a novel I had once read. A girl who was saved by the heroine, only to spiral into jealousy and meet a miserable end.
But fate had other plans.
Because when I first entered this world, I didn't just become Priya Kapoor-I met him.
Vedant Rathore.
A boy more broken than I could have imagined. Tormented, autistic, confined to a wheelchair, with only two years left to live according to the original story. My conscience wouldn't let me walk away. So I stayed. I cared for him, even when he pushed me away, even when the world called him a lost cause.
Two years later, against all odds, he stood up. Not just on his feet-but for me.
I had read about Asperger's Syndrome once. A disorder that made love a foreign concept, an emotion some believed they could never truly grasp. Vedant was one of them-brilliant beyond measure, yet emotionally distant. He might protect me, cherish me, even need me... but he could never love me. Not the way a man loves a woman.
Or so I thought.
Because some said that when someone with Asperger's does learn to love, it's all-consuming. Obsessive. A force so fierce it borders on madness.
And Vedant Rathore?
He was the rarest kind.
The kind who would burn the world for me.
The kind whose love could either save me-or destroy us both.