Kiara didn't join the coding course because she loved coding. She joined because the silence in her room had started to feel louder than people. Every night the same loop — phone screen, ceiling, overthinking, sleep that never really came. So, when she saw the advertisement — "Learn Python in 3 months" — she clicked Enroll before she could talk herself out of it.
The classroom smelled of new notebooks and unfamiliar futures. People laughed in clusters, already forming friendships through shared confusion over syntax errors. Kiara smiled when needed. Nodded when spoken to. Survived. That was enough. Until the gossip gathering after class. Someone had dragged chairs into a loose circle. Loud conversations about teachers, assignments, bugs and who had the best laptop.
That was where she first noticed him. Sheyn- not because he spoke — he barely did — but because he listened as every word mattered. Calm eyes. Hands loosely folded. A quiet smile that appeared only when someone else was laughing.
He wasn't trying to belong. He just… existed. For a second, their eyes met. He gave a small, polite nod. No spark, curiosity.
Their second meeting happened on a day wrapped in dust and traffic. The bus was too full. Kiara stood, one hand gripping the metal rod, her bag pressed against strangers. Then she saw him. Sheyn. He looked up from his phone, surprised in the same quiet way he did everything.
For a moment they just stared at each other like two people trying to remember where they had seen the other before. Then came recognition — the silent kind that passes between two people who have seen each other somewhere under tube lights and unfinished code. He instantly offered her his own seat. She tried to refuse out of habit, out of politeness, out of the lifelong instinct to take up less space than she needed. But he was already standing, steadying himself against the sudden jerks of the bus as if the decision had never been optional. So, she sat.
In class the next day, she noticed him again. Not because she was looking. But because now, without realizing it, her mind had learned the shape of his presence.
The first time Kiara texted Sheyn, she rewrote the message six times. "Can you send me today's code?" Too formal. 'Hey, do you have the loop problem solution?' Too casual.
Finally, she sent: "Did you understand today's class? I'm stuck :)"
He replied after twelve minutes - "Yes. Sending." A file. No extra words. She stared at the screen for a long time, as if something else might arrive. Nothing did. That night she told herself it didn't matter. He was just a classmate.
A few days later she texted again. This time he asked, "Which line is showing error?" And she sent a screenshot. He explained it in small, careful messages — not too long, not too short. When she fixed it, she typed: "It worked!!!" Then: "Good. You learn fast."
It was such a simple sentence. But Kiara read it again and again, feeling something warm unfold inside her chest — like a window opening in a room she didn't know was suffocating.
After that, the conversations grew the way evening grows into night — slowly, without being noticed. From code to class. From class to bus routes. From bus routes to favorite music played while debugging. He used very few emojis. She used too many. He typed in short lines. She wrote in paragraphs and deleted half of them.
Kiara started waiting for his name to light up her screen. Loneliness didn't disappear. It changed shape.
The day he said it, the sky was unusually clear. "Kiara, I fell for a girl. Can you help me?"
Her heart didn't break. Not immediately. Because her first thought was — He trusts me. Her second thought was — It's me. Of course it was. The bus rides. The late-night debugging. The way he remembered she hated recursion. She smiled at her phone while typing: "Show me her pic."
His reply came instantly. "You know her. You've seen her."
Her pulse became a sound inside her ears. A photo arrived. And the world —the room —the air —everything —stopped. It was a girl from their class. Not Kiara.
There is a very specific kind of silence that comes when a heart realizes it misunderstood everything. Kiara experienced it in that moment. Her fingers felt cold.
"She's nice," she finally wrote. Each letter a betrayal of what she had believed.
"Do you think she'll say yes?" She swallowed the storm in her throat, "She would be lucky."
A long pause...
"You're the only one I could tell first."
And that —that was the sentence that broke her. Because, she had been special. Just not in the way she had dreamed.
That night Kiara didn't cry. She opened her laptop and stared at lines of code that blurred and reformed and blurred again. She realized something slowly, painfully- "All those bus rides — friendship. All those texts — comfort. All those silences — nothing more than silence."
The next day in class, Sheyn sat beside her like always. "Did you see my message?" he asked softly. Kiara nodded and smiled — the same steady, practiced smile she had worn on the first day of the course.
"Yes," she said. "I'll help you."
Their story had never started. Not for him. The love had lived entirely on her side of the screen.
And that was how their story ended.
Before it ever had a chance to begin.
The End