The next morning the campus felt too loud.
Every laugh in the courtyard sounded like a comment. Every glance felt like an accusation. Meera moved through the day with the careful choreography of someone avoiding broken glass—steps measured, eyes skimming, voice clipped. Everything averted toward normality only widened the hollow where her freedom used to be.
Priya watched her with growing worry. "You look terrible," she said bluntly over a shared coffee, brows creased. "You barely slept. What happened to the girl who sleeps through alarm clocks and eats cold pizza at midnight?"
Meera tried to laugh. It came out thin. "Busy," she muttered, folding her hands around the paper cup like it would keep her upright.
Priya didn't believe it. "You're hiding something. Is it Malhotra?" Her tone was half-accusation, half-entreaty.
Meera opened her mouth, then closed it. What could she say that wouldn't sound like madness? He's everywhere. He reads my files. He stole my project. He calls my life his. The words had an absurd ring in the sunlight. Who would even believe that a single person could quiet a whole campus?
"Don't be dramatic," she said instead, and the lie tasted like ash.
The small rebellions had been the only thing keeping her sane: sneaking out for an early morning shoot, leaving her phone on silent for an hour, stepping into the crowd just to feel anonymous for a moment. That morning she tried to stitch one of those small freedoms together. A quick walk to the riverbank, camera in hand, to capture the light when it was honest and hers.
She thought she'd be alone. She thought the river would be a place where she could breathe without his presence bending the air.
When she rounded the bend of the path that overlooked the water, her chest dropped. He was there.
Aarav stood with his back to the railing, hands tucked into his pockets, overseeing the river as if it were another case file. The distance between them that used to feel like an invitation to walk away now felt like a line she had crossed and could not uncross.
"You're persistent," she said, voice brittle with something close to pleading. "Don't you ever get tired of being everywhere I go?"
He turned as if she had merely called his name across a classroom. Up close, the effect was almost hypnotic—stillness, bone-quiet composure. "I get tired of lots of things," he said, "but not of you."
She hated how that sentence landed with more tenderness than threat. It made the nausea in her throat claw harder. "You have to stop," she said. "You're suffocating me."
"Am I?" he asked, taking a step closer that she hadn't invited and couldn't step back from. "Or am I the only thing that reminds you how to breathe?"
It was impossible to tell which was cruelty and which was confession.
Her hands found the camera strap and squeezed until her fingers ached. "You can't make choices for me. You can't decide what's mine."
He tracked the motion, eyes flicking to the camera, then back to her. "You called your folder Freedom," he said quietly. "It was careless to name it that and then hide it. Freedom and secrecy don't belong together."
"You're missing the point," Meera snapped, heat rising. "Freedom isn't a name you get to define."
"Maybe not," he admitted. "But I don't like pretending there are parts of you I can't reach."
His words felt like a scalpel and a salve at once. The river murmured below, untroubled, and Meera envied its oblivion.
The hours scraped by. She tried to work; the photography lab felt smaller, the walls closer. Screens flickered. Her edits blurred into a smear of color. Even focusing on the grain of a print could not keep her from the sense of being watched.
By late afternoon her composure cracked. She called in sick to the evening shift she'd promised at the magazine, but the thought of sitting alone in her room while the world moved on without her was worse than facing him. She needed people—faces that were not his. She needed noise.
She found Priya in the café, tapping out a message. The moment Meera sat, Priya's face softened with sympathy and impatience. "Okay, spill," she said. "What are you going to do about him?"
Meera considered all the possible answers and rejected them. No plan seemed big enough, and no rebellion small enough. "I don't know," she admitted. "I thought I did. I thought getting my work done in secret would be enough. But he—" She stopped. Saying his name aloud felt like giving him another piece of her.
Priya reached for her hand. "Then let's do something together. We'll plan. We'll call people out. We'll—"
"We'll what?" Meera finished bitterly. "Tell the dean that the man who rescued my career is actually—what? A stalker? You think they'll believe that? They love him. He's polished the whole department's image."
Priya's fingers faltered. Her eyes were honest and scared. "So what do we do? Do we keep pretending you like this? Or do we—"
Meera didn't have an answer.
That night she sat at her desk and watched the city lights spike and soften beyond the window. Her phone lay face-down on the wood like a sleeping thing, the screen dark and mute. For one minute she imagined taking a train out of town, anywhere, and never looking back. She pictured herself with a different name, a different routine, a life where a photograph was only a photograph, not the beginning of a war.
Her thumb brushed the phone and it buzzed almost like reflex. A message.
Aarav: Don't go anywhere yet. I need to see you.
The words were simple, the punctuation precise. Not an order, not a threat—yet an expectation that carved out a space in her evening.
She almost threw the phone against the wall. Instead, she stared at it until the message blurred. Why did he get to set the tempo of her life? Why did the sound of his name make her pulse like a trapped bird?
She left the dorm anyway. Not to meet him. Not to run. She wandered, letting the cool air gather around her, the city's monotone hum a small mercy. She needed to move, to prove to herself she could, that the night wouldn't fold into his plans by default.
At the gate she saw him. Of course she did. He'd been there the whole time, as if he'd known what a plan she'd make without him and had decided to be its inevitable companion.
"You keep following me," she accused, voice small in the open.
"I keep finding you," he corrected, and added, softly: "Because you keep looking like you might leave."
There it was—the truth and the trap wrapped into one. The distance between them collapsed not with a violent shove but with the patient, unrelenting close-in of an ocean tide. She was not swept; she was simply left standing on the wet sand, aware that the shore had moved without asking for permission.
Meera could feel the collapse of distance like a physical ache. She wanted to fight it with all the cleverness and sarcasm that had once been her armor. Instead, she felt tired to the bone. The worn-out parts of her wanted quiet, and the other parts—dizzy, traitorous—wanted the way his steady presence made the world rational and anxious at once.
She walked past him, not looking back. He did not call her. He did not need to.
She knew, with a clarity that frightened her, that the only things changing now were how much she could deny and how much of herself she was willing to trade to keep breathing under the weight of him.
Outside, the river kept moving, indifferent. Inside, something in Meera began to give way—not in a dramatic collapse, but in a slow, inevitable loosening, like a seam finally coming apart under long strain.