The storm came like a sudden decision.
By late afternoon the sky had knotted into bruised clouds, the kind that made the campus seem like a painting someone had smeared with charcoal. Wind shrugged whole branches against the walkways. Someone joked that the weather matched Meera's life and the laughter sounded brittle.
They were finishing hangings when the electricity hiccupped and went out altogether. First the lights in the corridor flickered, then the whole gallery swallowed itself into a soft, surprised dark. People cursed, the generator choked, and someone muttered about the festival committee's budget. Then the rain arrived: a curtain of it, hard and fast, so the air smelled sharp and clean and a little wild.
"Perfect timing," a volunteer said, voice pitched to cut through the sudden hush. The shouts became a hurried, inefficient movement of feet and flashlights. Meera moved by muscle memory—she could place a print in half a breath, could judge a margin by the feel of the paper—but the dark made everything treacherous. Shadows acquired weight. Silence acquired teeth.
"Everybody out," the organizer called. "We'll finish tomorrow. The streets are flooded."
They stepped toward the doors, clutching rods and rolled canvases, when a section of the gallery door jammed. The wind shoved against it. The handle stuck, a stubborn thing refusing to turn.
"Give me a second," Aarav said, his voice steady in the chaotic hush. He planted both hands and hauled, the muscles at his neck flexing in the white light of a phone. The door fought back. Another attempt sailed wide and the latch stuck more.
People muttered and pushed, rain starting to reach in past the threshold like an impatient animal. Finally, someone shrugged and said, "We can't risk the prints—get out through the side door." But the side door stuck too; the gallery's old bones had never seen a storm like this.
"I'll get help," a volunteer called, and in the next minute there were no more volunteers. The rain outside had turned the cobbled square into a mirror. The campus guard radioed an annoyed reply and promised to send someone, but it would be slow. The rain made everything slow.
"So we wait," Priya said, trying for chirp and landing somewhere between brave and brittle.
They moved deeper into the gallery, a small troop of shivering people. Someone lit candles—first one, then a careful dozen—until the space smelled of wax and wet linen and the small smoky sweetness that somehow softened the air. The world shrank to panels and paper and the wavering of small flames.
Meera's breath fogged in the cold. She rubbed her arms and forced a laugh at the absurdity of being trapped in the very place that felt like a stage for her life. The joke tasted thin.
Aarav was unfazed. He had that look on his face like someone who anticipated events before they happened: composed, a touch amused by the theater of it all. He picked a candle up with long fingers and handed it to her with a practiced courtesy.
"Keep it," he said. "You like light." His voice was quiet, private; for the first time since the photo, his tone didn't feel like a claim. It felt like an offer.
She accepted and watched the flame tremble between her fingers, catching and releasing shadows. For a moment they both stood in the small circle of light, a private island in a gallery full of ghost-prints. The rest of the crew clustered in groups, murmuring and trying to keep their voices level.
It was Aarav who found the framed photograph.
It lay propped on a temporary table, the glass face clouded a little by the humidity. At first Meera thought it must be one of her prints, misplaced among the display mock-ups. Then she saw the small round face and the way the eyes caught the candlelight like two wet stones. Her throat closed.
Her chest remembered things she had tried not to name aloud: the old house in the city, the way her father had tilted her chin when he taught her how to wait until the light was right. The photograph was of her as a child—one knee on the ground, hair in unruly knots, a grin too big for a small face. She had taken that picture once when visiting her aunt—no, she hadn't taken it; someone had given her a printed set. She hadn't brought it to campus. She hadn't framed it.
"How—" she began, but the words stalled like a brittle thing.
Aarav's hand rested on the corner of the frame, gentle enough that she felt it against the pad of her palm when she moved closer. He lifted the glass and turned it in his hands as though turning a page in a book he'd read a dozen times.
"It's yours," he said softly. "You kept it."
Meera snatched the frame like a hot thing, heat and cold mixing in an odd rush. "I didn't give this to the gallery." She could feel her pulse in her teeth. "You had no right—"
"I had every right," he said, watching her with slow, intent eyes. "You've been losing yourself in public. I thought you might like to remember who you were."
The line blurred. Who's memory was this? His hand on the frame had been kind. His rationale sounded like tenderness. But tenderness from him tasted of chains.
"Don't—" Meera said. "Don't try to soften this."
He stepped closer and the space between them narrowed until it felt like one breath instead of two. Rain hammered the gallery walls; the candlelight threw their shadows long and grainy, like film stills.
"You're shaking," Aarav murmured. He didn't reach for her shoulders; he reached for her jaw instead, a careful motion, his thumb barely brushing the soft place beneath her ear. "Breathe."
The touch steadied her more than it should have. The sound of his voice—low, coaxing—was the same human temperature she'd heard the night he'd first forced her to confront what he was: someone who cared in a way that broke borders. The steadiness felt like a lifeline. It felt like a trap.
She wanted to yank away, to scream that she didn't need his help, that the photograph was theft under any name. Instead she let the candle tremble between her fingers and watched his mouth move when he spoke.
"Do you remember that day?" he asked.
She swallowed what protested. "A little."
"It was honest," he said. "You were honest."
His praise landed like a small bruise: part petition, part dividend. She hated that it mattered. She hated, more, that it did.
The storm became a soft percussion. They sat on the floor against a wall, shoulders almost touching though neither said so aloud. The rest of the gallery was a wash of murmurs and the quiet scraping of chairs. Meera could see the candles in reflections: rows of tiny suns in the dark.
A silence lodged between them—full, significant, like the held breath before a diver drops. Aarav's face softened and the guardedness faded for a flicker, exposing something bare. He looked like someone surprised by his own tenderness.
"Why do you keep doing this?" Meera asked finally, not the accusatory snap she'd planned but a small, weary thing.
He didn't answer at once. His gaze landed on her face, the outline of it softened by candlelight; then he reached slowly, and his fingers brushed the hair off her forehead. The motion was unguarded, paternal, intimate in a way that made her toes curl with protest and something like longing all at once.
She knew the gestures of possession: a hand at the waist, a claim in public. This wasn't a claim. It was a repair, quiet and very private.
Their faces were inches apart. The world blinked. Her breath hitched. He tilted his head, and for a breath—only a breath—their mouths were an inch apart, and the room had contracted to the measurement of a kiss.
Meera shut her eyes. She had a thousand reasons to pull away: the photographs he'd taken, the files he had accessed, the life he'd reshaped to include her. She had reasons, iron and correct.
But in the center of the dark gallery, with rain writing a steady rhythm on the glass, she felt the soft press of something that had nothing to do with rightness. The sound of her own heart became loud enough to hear.
His mouth descended slowly, careful as if asking permission he thought he already had. Pain and want tangled up in a knot under her sternum. And then—she stopped him.
She moved her chin away with a quick, defiant flick. It was a refusal, a reclamation, and it echoed louder than the storm.
Aarav froze, not startled so much as considerate. It was an odd expression on him—respect that didn't revert to anger. "Not tonight," she whispered. "Not like that."
He nodded as if she'd given an order, a stranger's obedience that both warmed and hollowed her. He sat back on his heels, the candle between them a small, trembling sun.
For the rest of the night they sat next to each other in silence, two people who had breached one another's boundaries and found themselves newly naked. The photograph lay between them like a truce.
Someone finally found the latch on the door well after midnight—an apologetic guard with a soggy radio and a face too tired to be stern. People streamed out, shivering and loud with relief. The gallery had been emptied of its rush; only the small group remained for cleanup and a few awkward goodbyes.
Outside the rain had softened to something intimate and light, like confetti. Meera walked home with the photograph wrapped in tissue paper. Her hands were steady; her skin still felt tingly from the touch at her jaw.
She had not given the kiss. She had, however, let the space between them shrink and not shoved him entirely away. That, somehow, felt worse than any single rebellion. She was tired in a way that made choices harder to hold.
She slept that night with the photograph turned to face the wall, the little smile of the child inside it a private, impossible thing—an echo she wasn't yet ready to listen to.