He smirked at her tease, looking back at the art. “Well… shit, Urvin. Yeh sach vich… bohot accha hai. Amazing, actually. It’s beautiful.” He relaxed deep into the couch, his face softening as he studied the strokes of paint.
Urvin smiled warmly to herself, a genuine blush touching her cheeks. “…and his heart grew three times that day…,” she whispered, just loud enough for him to hear.
He wanted to say something smart back, but let it drop.
Their first dinner was quiet. Vyom boiled a packet of Maggi, adding butter and extra spices. Urvin watched his unhealthy meal with visible disgust while she heated up the rich leftover Shahi Paneer she had brought from home.
Vyom ate his noodles on the couch.
“So,” she finally asked from the small dining table, breaking the silence. “Tu poora din karda ki hai yahan?”
“Padhai karda haan,” he replied bluntly.
“Fascinating.”
“Tune hi poocha si.”
“Main bas polite ban rahi si.”
“Tu bohot buri hai isme.”
She snorted a laugh at his snarkiness, shaking her head, and went back to eating.
Later, as he shut his bedroom door for the night, Vyom told himself that maybe this wouldn’t be a total disaster. I survived worse in the college dorms.
In her own room, Urvin lay awake in the dark. She already regretted letting her mother force her into this arrangement.
Yeh aisa kyu ban gaya hai? Purana Vyom kahan chala gaya? She wondered silently.
There was a time she completely adored him. Looked up to him. A time when she felt he actually cared about her. She had tried to stay close to him, but the more she tried to force it, the more distant and annoyed he became. Eventually, to protect her own feelings, she started treating him the exact same way. In retrospect, it only made things much worse. She wondered if they would ever be close again. Right now, she didn’t see a lot of hope for it.
The first sound Urvin heard the next morning wasn’t the soft chirping of birds. It was the loud, aggressive sound of the shower running through the thin wall… followed by the loud crash of half a dozen of her expensive shampoo bottles falling into the ceramic tub. Vyom had found a way to knock them over.
She blinked at the bright sunlight. For a second, she forgot where she was. Looking at the boxes and luggage, she remembered her new reality. And the boy currently making a massive mess in her bathroom.
“Siyappa,” she muttered angrily to herself.
Still half-asleep and burning with furious rage, she grabbed the nearest piece of clothing she could find—a very old, oversized cotton kurti she usually wore while painting. She threw it over her head in a rush. In her sleepy, blind anger, she completely skipped wearing her salwar or pajama pants, assuming the long kurti would cover her knees properly like a dress. But she forgot one crucial, terrifying detail: the deep side-slits (chaak) of the kurti went all the way up to her waist.
With every heavy, stomping step she took down the hallway, the front and back panels of the thin cotton flapped wide open. The long shirt stopped perilously high, the deep cuts completely exposing her bare, heavy thighs, riding up just past the pink lace edges of her panties.
