Driven to you - OP81

They were fourteen when it started, both of them too mature for their age in a way only kids from fractured homes seem to be.

Costanza — Cocco to her siblings, never to anyone at school — arrived with the sharp focus of someone who needed control to survive. She had learned early that life was full of things she couldn't stop — like the way her parents had shipped them all off to England like a solution, not a sacrifice. She didn't cry. She organized. She made lists. She knew her siblings' schedules by heart. She kept her sadness quiet and her grades perfect.

Oscar — Ossie only to her — was quieter, but not lost. He had a calm kind of gravity that made people want to sit near him, even when he didn't say much. His ambition didn't come with loud declarations — it was something he wore like a second skin. He didn't talk about missing home. But he flinched sometimes when people mentioned Australia, or when a heatwave reminded him of summers that now felt like another life.

They sat next to each other in English Literature, and that's how it began — not with a grand gesture, but with a quiet, constant companionship that neither of them had been expecting.

They didn't talk much in the beginning. It was a nod in the hallway. A shared glance during a particularly bad lunch. The casual way Cocco handed Oscar half her notes without being asked.

It was the comfort of knowing someone was near who wouldn't demand anything from you — someone who didn't flinch when you were quiet or tired or simply not at your best.

They found each other in stolen moments:

On rainy Saturdays in the school library when everyone else had gone out.
On walks after curfew, whispering down hidden paths in the school's back garden.
In the common room when Oscar couldn't sleep and Cocco would bring a book to read out loud, her voice soft and slow.

The Dreambook came out of one of those silences.

Cocco had pulled it from her bag without thinking — a soft red notebook she'd been carrying since Camilla gave it to her as a joke.
She tore out a page and wrote:

"Dream #1: Be fearless, even if only on paper."

She slid it across the table.
Oscar smirked, took the pen, and wrote underneath:

"Dream #2: Steal her pen."

They laughed.
And they kept writing.

....

The Dreambook became their own language — a conversation they could have when the real world was too heavy or too loud. There were rules:

No judging.
No editing each other.
Anything written was true, even if it was just a joke.

Some pages were messy, others methodical. They filled it in libraries, on train rides to London, during long study nights when one of them couldn't sleep.

Cocco's entries at fifteen:

"Pass my A-levels with distinction."
"Stop pretending I'm not scared of being left behind."
"Kiss Oscar without alway smiling"

Oscar's entries at fifteen:

"Get signed to a junior team. Get her to watch without panicking."
"Kiss her under real stars, not these cold ones."
"Win. Not just races. Her, too."

They never said "I love you" out loud. Not yet.
But they wrote it dozens of times in the margins.

......