Chapter Two – Salt on My Tongue

Chapter Two – Salt on My Tongue

The morning after the alley, Navya woke as if she’d been pushed into consciousness by a memory she could not shake. Aarav’s words buzzed under her skin like a fever: You want a taste of what ruins you slowly. She rinsed her face with cold water, as if freezing the feeling would dull it. It didn’t. The cold only made the ache more precise — a carved-out space behind her ribs where curiosity and something more dangerous had moved in.

College felt different that day. The corridors hummed with the usual low-grade hurricane of gossip, deadlines, and student politics, but for Navya it was a minefield. She kept her head down, books pressed to her chest, avoiding the goods-and-bads map of the campus where Aarav’s name lived in red and her own in neat, sensible black. People looked at her with a new curiosity that prickled, as if she were marked by proximity to a flame.

“Hey, Nav?” Priya’s voice pulled her into the canteen. Priya, with her loud laugh and dyed hair, was the kind of friend who could make a rainy day feel like a party. She slid into the seat opposite and eyed Navya with a grin that tried to be casual but failed.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” Priya said, fork hovering above a plate of idli.

“Just tired,” Navya lied. Her mouth tasted like pennies. The alley, the cigarette smoke, the way he’d smelled of rain and leather — it clung to her imagination.

Priya fiddled with her phone. “Heard Rathore got into a fight last night. Corner of Jhandewalan. Someone said he broke a guy’s nose and then left like he owned the street.” She laughed, but there was a shadow under it.

Navya’s stomach dropped. She should have felt vindicated — the rumors, the danger, the proof that he was only what everyone said. Instead, a strange relief washed through her. If he was violent, if he walked on the edge of tanks and knives, then maybe he was the place she had no business stepping into. The rational part of her brain clung to that thought like rescue.

“Why do you care?” Priya asked, softening. “You barely know him.”

“Because he looked at me,” Navya said, louder than she meant to. Heads turned. She felt exposed, as if she’d confessed to something shameful. Priya’s expression softened further, like someone watching a bird with a broken wing.

“He looked at me too,” Priya said, surprising her. “From the rooftops once, during ragging week. Creepy. Don’t go near him. He’s trouble.”

Navya nodded, the pieces falling into place: everyone’s warnings, their sideways glances, the way he’d said princess in that knowing tone. The path ahead should’ve been clear. Avoid. Steer away. Keep the neat life intact.

But life didn’t always take directions you gave it. Sometimes it pushed and pulled until you slipped into something you never meant to touch.

---

Aarav woke with a headache that felt like someone had wrapped his skull in wire. His world was always after the night: the fights, the music, the deals (if deals was the right word); it left stains. He liked the stains. They were honest. He slammed his fist into the mattress once just to feel something sharp and real.

He thought about the girl with the tied hair and the neat backpack all through the night. Not in any sentimental way — he didn’t do sentiment. He thought about how she froze in the alley, how she’d tried to be brave and failed, as everyone did when faced with something raw. There was a softness to her that would make any man want to break a rule to know her. He tasted the memory like salt: clean, sharp, impossible to swallow correctly.

He moved through the morning like a ghost who had learned to ignore his own footsteps. The college was a predictable beat in his life, a place full of people pretending they were more than their mistakes. He didn’t belong there, and he liked it that way. But the universe — or some cruel joke of his own — had put both of them on the same path more than once. Small crossings. A glance through the chemistry lab window. A shared parking slot near the auditorium. Coincidences that piled into a pattern.

That afternoon, he saw her again. Not by design. Not by plan. She stood by the notice board, scanning scholarship lists and seminars with the intense concentration of someone making lists and crossing out what they couldn’t have. Aarav leaned against a pillar, cigarette forgotten between his fingers, watching her as if studying a painting that had been left in the rain.

She was more beautiful up close, he thought, and the thought pricked at him — not in a soft way, but like a splinter pushed deeper. When she looked up, their eyes met and something electric tightened between them. He stepped forward.

“Still running?” he asked, voice low.

Navya’s lips pressed into a line. “I’m not running.”

“You were last time.” He took another drag and squinted at her. “You’re brave when you’re hiding behind books.”

“And you’re cruel when you’re bored,” she said, fists tightening around her folder.

He smiled, no warmth in it. “You could be nice — the kind of nice that makes people trust you even when they shouldn’t. Dangerous.”

“Don’t tell me what I am,” she snapped. It surprised both of them. Her voice wasn’t the timid whisper he’d expected. It had an edge now, a blade she’d sharpened in the quiet.

He liked that. He liked the fact that she could bite back. He had never been easily satisfied by easy prey. He wanted the fight. He wanted the unpretentious honesty of someone who might make him feel naked.

“Fine,” he said. “I won’t. Tell me instead — what’s your name? Or is your name one of those things you put on application forms and never claim?”

“Navya Sharma,” she said.

“A name with rules,” he mused. He flicked ash and watched it fall like a tiny surrender. “I’m Aarav Rathore. Try not to make me regret introducing myself.”

She looked at his name and then at him, as if tasting it mentally. “I won’t.”

He could have left. He could have walked away and let the curiosity that pulled at him remain a dull ache. But Aarav didn’t do that either. Instead, he surprised himself by asking, “Coffee. Tonight. Midnight. Corner café. Say yes, and I’ll let you go in peace. Say no, and I’ll still ask again.”

Her jaw worked. The whole world narrowed to the motion of her lips. She could have said no. She should have said no. Logic, family, future — all of them buzzed in her head like fluorescent lights.

She said yes.

---

The café was a dirty half-lunchroom that came alive at night with the college crowd and the loners who preferred the hum of neon to the muttered lies at home. Aarav liked it because it was honest. People here traded comfort for truth, and truth was a commodity he dealt in.

Navya arrived with a wary breath, each step measured. She could’ve been dressed for a library: a simple kurta, jeans, hair twisted into a practical bun. She looked fragile and fierce all at once, like a candle in a wind tunnel.

He was already there, a corner seat guarding him like a throne. He stood when she came in, casual, as if standing to greet her was no big thing. It was a small gesture, but it mattered.

“You came,” he said, and there was no surprise, only an observation.

“You asked,” she replied. Her fingers were wrapped around the rim of her cup like it was an anchor.

They talked at first like two strangers tasting the edges of one another. Small things: professors they hated, tuition fees, the oppressive smell of summer in the lecture halls. Then the conversation turned, subtly, into shards. Aarav spoke in fragments about the city at night, about fights, about music that made him feel human. Navya listened, sometimes filling in the silence with a shy quip or a question that made him watch her face more than hear his own words.

Hours passed and the café thinned. The waiter, tired and indifferent, wiped the table beside them like he was erasing a scene from a play.

At some point, the talk slowed and the air between them settled into stillness. Navya’s hand lay near his on the table — not touching, not daring — and it felt like two tectonic plates nearly shifting.

“You don’t belong in my world,” she said suddenly. It was a whisper, but it trembled with something close to fear.

“And you don’t belong in mine,” he countered. “But boundaries are overrated.”

She looked at him, eyes wide and troubled. “I have plans. I have—”

“You have plans,” he finished. He set his palm flat on the table. The distance between them so small it was maddening. “Plans change.”

The threat in his voice was as soft as a caress. Navya’s breath hitched. For the first time, the words you ruin me slowly were not only from his mouth in the alley, but they pulsed in the room as promise and warning both.

She stood up, not because she had to, but because standing felt safer than staying. “I should go,” she said.

He didn’t move to stop her. He didn’t need to. She stopped at the door and turned back once, only once.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said. The smile he offered was both dangerous and rueful.

Her reply was almost inaudible. “I like storms.” She stepped out into the night.

He watched her go — the small, brave figure in the doorway — and felt something in his chest contract with the first stitch of want. It was a shape that might become affection, or it might become ruin. Either way, it would be interesting.

As the café light swallowed her, Aarav crushed his cigarette under the heel of his shoe and left. The rain had started by then, soft at first, then harder, as if the sky had decided to sweep away whatever small illusions the night had promised.

Navya walked home through streets glistening with rain, the city reflecting neon like broken stained glass. Her phone vibrated with messages from her mother — simple check-ins — but the alley’s words circled in her head and wouldn’t leave. You’ll come back. You want a taste. She had come back. She had tasted.

And the taste lingered like salt on her tongue.

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