We Fell in Love Between the Pages

It began, as the best stories often do, in a bookstore.

I had just moved to the city, the kind of move you make when you're not sure what you're running from or chasing. A fresh start, I told myself. I wandered into a little secondhand bookstore tucked between a laundromat and a coffee shop. It wasn’t anything special at first glance—dusty shelves, faint smell of paper and cinnamon—but something about it felt like home.

I didn’t know then that he would be there. That he always came on Saturdays. That he had a favorite spot, tucked in the back corner beneath the poetry section, where he’d sit on the floor with a stack of books like he was building a fortress made of words.

I noticed him before he noticed me.

He had messy dark hair that refused to stay put and glasses that kept sliding down his nose. He was completely absorbed in his book, lips moving slightly as he read—Shakespeare, I think. Something about sonnets and stars. I didn’t say anything, just watched for a moment longer than I should have, then found a book of my own and curled up on the armchair near the window.

The second time we crossed paths, I was the one reading Neruda. He glanced at the spine of my book as he passed by and said, “That’s my favorite poem.”

I looked up, startled. “Which one?”

“Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines,” he said. Then, without asking, sat across from me and quoted the first line. “‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’” He smiled, as if the words were his own.

I smiled back, despite myself.

We didn’t exchange names that day. But after that, we kept meeting there. Saturdays turned into habit. We began talking about books, always books—Tolstoy, Angelou, Plath, Márquez. He’d recommend something, and I’d come back the next week with thoughts scrawled in the margins. I’d lend him my copies, and he’d return them with pressed flowers tucked between the pages and underlined phrases like hidden confessions.

Eventually, it became more than literature. He told me about his late nights writing poetry and the dog he missed back home. I told him about my childhood in a small town where stories were the only escape, how my parents used to fight in the next room and I’d bury myself in novels to drown it out.

Still, we never met outside the bookstore.

It was like we had built our own little world between the pages—untouched by reality, suspended in ink and time.

I wasn’t sure when it turned into something more. Maybe it was the way he looked at me when I laughed at a line from Austen. Or the way he always remembered how I took my coffee—black with one sugar, no cream. Or maybe it was the note he left inside a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre.

“If we’re both fiction, I’m glad you’re the chapter I got to live in.”

I didn’t say anything that day. I read the note, closed the book, and walked out of the store with my heart louder than the city traffic.

The following Saturday, I didn’t go.

I was afraid, I think. Of what it meant. Of what we were outside of that space. But he showed up at my door that evening, holding the book and looking like he’d read a sad ending.

“How did you find me?” I asked, breathless.

“I asked the bookstore owner. He said you left your number on your membership form.”

I stood there, unsure of what to say.

He handed me the book. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I opened it. There was a new note inside.

“Love is not limited to chapters. It spills over margins, scribbles into the real world. Maybe we can, too.”

I looked at him. “What if the real world ruins us?”

He smiled. “Then we rewrite.”

And just like that, I fell in love with him again—not between the pages, but in the space beyond them. In the way he waited. In the way he hoped. In the way he believed that stories didn’t have to end where the book closes.

Now, years later, our apartment is filled with books—some old, some new, some with scribbles in the margins and little drawings only we understand. On our wedding day, he read from Neruda again, and I finally underlined the lines that had defined us all along.

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving.”

And so we keep reading. Keep writing.
We fell in love between the pages—
and built a life in the lines that followed.