Chapter 34
Samaira
I’m not sure if I should tell him. Should I? I mean, I do trust him. Completely. And if this is going to come out anyway, I’d rather he hear it from me than stumble upon it in some half-baked headline on a gossip site.
“We were just hanging out with our friends, I hadn’t seen any of them in weeks, hadn’t seen him in days.
I missed being around them, missed him too.
Aria and I decided to grab coffee from the Starbucks five minutes away.
When we went to let the guys know, he got mad.
Said I should’ve waited for him. He fought with me, in front of everyone .
I got pissed too, obviously, and left with Aria. But that wasn’t the end of it.
He followed me, made a whole scene right there on the road. Made me beg . Made me cry . And even then, he had the audacity to say, ‘I see anger in your eyes.’ That’s when something in me gave out.
Can you believe that? Like sir, my mascara is halfway down my cheeks, and that’s your analysis?
Not the fact that your girlfriend is sobbing in public?
That was the moment something in me snapped.
Maybe I’d been emotionally checking out for a while, but that day, I knew for sure, my tears meant nothing to him.
Because when you truly love someone, watching them cry like that, on the street, completely shattered, it should do something to you. It should make you want to stop arguing and just hold them. But he didn’t. He didn’t even flinch. He wanted to win the fight, not find peace.”
I looked over at Kartik, scared of what he must be thinking. And what he says, makes me thank my stars that I found him.
Kartik
I didn’t realise I was holding my breath until she stopped speaking.
She was sitting right there, shoulders stiff, voice low, like she was trying not to crack all over again, and somehow, I could still see it.
That version of her from a memory I wasn’t even part of.
Crying in the middle of a road. Begging some man-child not to be mad at her… for getting a damn coffee?
I could feel it, anger pooling slow and deep in my chest. Not the loud kind. The dangerous kind. The kind that simmers just beneath the surface and waits.
didn’t even realise my hands were clenched into fists until she looked down at them.
She sat across from me, spine straight but voice cracking, like she was trying to hold herself together with invisible tape.
And still…still she managed to downplay it.
To just tell me like it was a memory she’d filed away.
Like it didn’t shatter something inside her.
Like it wasn’t shattering something inside me right now.
“You begged him?” I asked, my voice low, too steady to be safe. “He made you beg on the street?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
I shook my head, jaw tight. “I don’t know what pisses me off more. That he let you cry on a public road like your feelings were up for debate, or that he watched and said something as stupid as ‘I see anger in your eyes’ like he was Gandhi and not a walking red flag.”
She blinked. I caught the hint of a smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Not yet.
The image was already carved in my head like some goddamn nightmare: Samaira, my Samaira, crying on a public road, trying to soothe the bruised ego of some overgrown boy who thought her tears were an inconvenience.
I inhaled sharply, jaw locking so tight it hurt. “What kind of man lets the woman he loves fall apart like that and doesn't fall apart with her?”
My voice was shaking now, barely held together by the thinnest thread of control. “No. You know what? Scratch that. What kind of man watches you cry like that and still thinks he’s the one being wronged?”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, looking at her like she was air and I was trying to breathe again.
“I don’t care how long ago this happened. I want to rip the pavement up from where it happened and set it on fire. He doesn’t get to make you feel like that and just exist peacefully in this world.”
She opened her mouth to speak, maybe to calm me down, maybe to say it wasn’t worth it, but I wasn’t done.
“If I had seen you crying like that, I wouldn’t have asked why. I wouldn’t have waited for an apology. I would have dropped to my knees right there with you until you could breathe again. I would have held you until the world stopped spinning. Because that’s what you do when you love someone.”
I reached for her hand, not gently, but desperately. Like I needed to remind her that this was the bare minimum. That love doesn’t humiliate you and call it passion. That this , her sitting here, raw and real and hurting, deserved reverence, not punishment.
“You didn’t lose that fight, Samaira. You survived it. And there’s a very big difference.”
She looked at me like she didn’t know whether to cry harder or fall apart in a different way.
And I meant every word when I said, “He should’ve wept just seeing you cry.”
“You deserved so much better than that scene. And that boy. I don’t care how long ago it was, I’m still furious for you.” She looked at me then. Really looked.
Not because I’d said something extraordinary. But because I meant every word.
And maybe—just maybe—that mattered more than anything else right now.