Madeline

Four years ago, I fell in love for the first time. I was seventeen – just an ordinary girl with a hopeless crush on a famous boy.

He asked me to dance, and it felt like a fairy tale. I was Cinderella, dancing with the handsome prince at the ball. But then, the clock struck midnight. He walked away, right into the arms of another girl. He fell that night too, but he fell for someone else. Our story barely started before it ended.

I watched him from a distance. Wasting his heart on a girl who ended up crushing it. And it would be four long years before we'd meet again. I wasn't the same, innocent girl anymore. Just like he wasn't the same untainted guy either. Life had bent and broken us both a little. And just like that magical night when I was seventeen, he looked right through me again. Because that was the thing about fairy tales: they only existed in books.

But fate intervened and seemed to have other plans. I thought I was saving him, but it turned out that I was the one who needed saving all along. In the end, we both ended up becoming casualties in this game called love. Because while love sets the heart afire, it could also turn it to dust.