Chapter 9: The Sound of a Voice
Part 1: The Inevitable Answer
Kapil's question wasn't a query. It was a key. It slid into a lock in my chest I never knew existed, turned, and the door to a sealed-off room in my own heart blew open.
"Dude. Do you love her?"
My breath hitched. The world, my bedroom, the phone pressed against my ear—it all dissolved. My mind, in a desperate, last-ditch effort to protect me from the truth, did the exact opposite. It played a movie. A supercut of the last seven years, projected onto the back of my eyelids.
There she was in eighth grade, poking me in the ribs, her eyes sparkling with a mischief that was both terrifying and magnetic.
There she was in tenth grade, rolling her eyes at one of my self-important rants, a small smile playing on her lips that told me she was listening to every word.
There she was in twelfth grade, on a video call late at night, her face illuminated by the glow of her laptop, laughing so hard she snorted at one of my stupid jokes. I saw her smile, a wide, genuine thing that could light up a room. I heard her laugh, a sound that felt like coming home. I could feel the phantom sting of her insults, the playful, vulgar cussing that was our secret handshake, our language of trust.
The memories weren't just pictures. They were feelings. The warmth of a shared joke. The comfort of an easy silence. The electric jolt of her attention.
And beneath it all, the constant, humming baseline of an emotion I had been too blind, too cowardly, too stupid to name.
The fourteen months of silence hadn't been the mourning of a friendship. It had been the agony of a phantom limb, the phantom of my own heart, which had been with her the whole time. The pain, the obsession, the sheer, soul-crushing weight of her absence—it all made a sudden, horrifying kind of sense.
My heart didn't stop. It felt like it started beating for the first time, a frantic, panicked rhythm that pounded in my ears. I was scared. I was terrified. The truth was a blinding light, and I had been living in the dark for so long.
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I took a breath.
"Yes," I whispered into the phone. The word was small, fragile, but it was the truest thing I had ever said.
On the other end of the line, Kapil didn't sound surprised. He sounded like a doctor who had just confirmed a diagnosis he'd long suspected.
"Right," he said, and the single word was filled with a terrifying, manic energy. "Okay. Right. Don't hang up."
"What are you doing?" I asked, my voice trembling.
"I'm fixing this," he said, his voice a little distant. I could hear the frantic tapping of his fingers on his phone screen. "You're both idiots, and you're going to talk. Conference call. Now."
Panic, pure and undiluted, shot through my veins like ice. "Kapil, no! Don't! I'm not ready!"
It was too late. I heard the soft, melodic chimes of a call being added. I heard the electronic pulse of a phone ringing, a sound that was suddenly the most terrifying noise in the world. Each ring was a hammer blow against my sanity. My carefully constructed walls, my years of quiet healing, my fragile peace—it was all about to be bulldozed.
I wanted to hang up. To throw my phone against the wall and shatter it into a million pieces. But I was frozen, a prisoner to the sound of that ringing.
And then, it stopped.
There was a click. And then, a voice.
"Hello?"
Fourteen months. 425 days. Over ten thousand hours of silence, all shattered by two syllables. It was her. Her voice. Not a memory, not a ghost in my head, but real, transmitted through satellites and wires, straight into my ear.
My heart stopped. My lungs forgot how to work. The blood in my veins turned to slush. I began to sweat, a cold film breaking out across my forehead. I was asphyxiating, drowning in the silence that followed that one, simple word.
"Hello?" she said again, a hint of confusion in her tone. "Kapil? Is someone there?"
Kapil, my friend, my tormentor, my savior, finally spoke. "Hey, Parveen. Yeah. Someone's here. I think it's about time you two talked."
A beat of silence. Then, my name. Spoken with a hesitant, questioning tone that held fourteen months of history within it.
"Arjun?"
Every pang of pain I had carried for over a year—the guilt, the loneliness, the regret, the ache of my unspoken love—it all just… washed away. The sound of her saying my name was an absolution. It was forgiveness. It was a key turning in a lock, releasing a pressure I didn't even know I was holding. The air rushed back into my lungs in a ragged gasp. I could breathe again.
"Hey," I managed to choke out. The word was a wreck, a pathetic, strangled sound, but it was a start.
"Hey," she replied, and her voice was soft.
What followed was not the tense, awkward, minefield-of-a-conversation I had dreaded. It wasn't a confrontation. It wasn't a negotiation.
It was a flood.
The words just came, a torrent of small talk and pointless observations that were suddenly the most important things in the world. We didn't talk about the fight. We didn't talk about the silence. We talked about everything else.
"Your third year is starting," she said. "Are you ready for your final project?"
"No," I laughed, a real laugh. "My professor is a sadist. He's assigned us something that I'm pretty sure violates the Geneva Conventions. How's yours?"
"Don't even get me started," she groaned, and I could hear the familiar, exasperated eye-roll in her voice. "I'm designing a low-power signal amplifier. It's the most boring thing in the universe. I think I fell asleep on my textbook yesterday and drooled on a schematic."
We just talked. We just talked, and oh lord, we talked. We talked for an hour, then two. Kapil stayed on the line for the first twenty minutes, a silent, smiling ghost, before quietly disconnecting and leaving us to it. We didn't even notice he was gone.
It was easy. Frighteningly, miraculously easy. The old rhythm was still there, buried under two years of pain, but intact. The insults, the teasing, the shared language of sarcasm—it all came back, as natural as breathing. We were rebuilding the bridge between us, plank by plank, joke by joke.
As the call was winding down, a comfortable silence settled between us. It wasn't the heavy, suffocating silence of the past year. It was the old silence. The one that didn't need to be filled.
But my mind was screaming. The love I had just admitted to myself was a roaring fire in my chest. Tell her, a voice in my head urged. Tell her now, while you have her. Don't lose her again.
My heart was pounding. I was on the verge of saying it, of derailing this beautiful, fragile peace with the weight of my confession.
My phone buzzed with a text. It was from Kapil.
Don't you dare.
I stared at the words. He knew. Of course he knew.
It will be a little early, he texted again. Just be friends for a while. Rebuild. Don't be an idiot.
He was right. He was infuriatingly, logically, absolutely right. To confess now would be an act of emotional terrorism. It would be selfish. I had just gotten my friend back. I couldn't bear the thought of scaring her away again.
"I should go," she said, her voice soft with sleep. "It's late."
"Yeah," I said, my heart a chaotic mix of ecstatic joy and agonizing restraint. "Me too."
"Talk to you tomorrow?" she asked, a slight, hopeful question in her voice.
"Definitely," I said, a grin spreading across my face. "Talk to you tomorrow."
We hung up. I fell back onto my bed, my phone clutched to my chest. The room was silent, but it was a different silence now. It was filled with the echo of her voice, with the promise of tomorrow.
I had her back. My best friend was back.
And I was in love with her. More than ever.
This was going to be impossible.