The gallery smelled like varnish and promises.
Lights washed the white walls in a soft warmth that made every print look like a confession. People moved through the space in small, reverent clusters: students in mismatched coats, professors with practised curiosity, a scattering of alumni who liked to say they remembered Meera from first-year critiques. The hum of voices rose and fell like a tide. Her photographs hung in neat rows, each frame steady and deliberate—the faces she'd caught, the moments she'd kept, finally someone else's to witness.
Meera felt detached, as if the room belonged to a version of her built from a different life. She had spent nights in this studio that smelled like chemicals and rain, sharpening truth into images. Tonight, truth had been unmoored from the private workbench and set under glass. A small knot of terror lived under her ribs: what if the world read what she meant wrong? What if the crowd loved only the little cage Aarav had quietly furnished for her?
Aarav was already there when she arrived, as inevitable as the doorway. He stood near the entrance—not fawning, not intrusive—just composed, like a man who had arranged the furniture of the evening in his head and now approved how others sat in it. He wore a dark blazer that made the light gather on his cheekbones, and when he saw her his face softened, not with triumph but with a calm that felt almost tender.
"You look nervous," he said when she reached him.
"Or maybe I don't like my life being shared," she muttered, because honesty was a brittle thing and sometimes it tasted better cold.
He watched her for a beat, like someone reading a caption he already knew by heart. "You did this," he reminded her quietly. "You made these images."
"And you made sure they were seen," she answered. The sentence hung between them like a photograph left to dry.
They moved through the crowd together, an unspoken pair that drew attention like a magnet. Some faces lit up with admiration, others angled with curiosity. People introduced themselves—editors, a visiting journalist with a crisp badge, a curator from a nearby gallery who liked to use the word voice when praising young artists. Compliments rolled against her like warm water; she smiled with the practiced muscles of someone trained to keep up appearances.
At one of the walls, a cluster gathered around a large print of a boy laughing in a rain-slick street. The caption beneath read something Meera had chosen carefully: Open Windows. A woman with a press lanyard leaned in, eyes bright.
"This is honest," the woman said aloud, voice theatrical in that way journalists sometimes used to make notes come true. "There's a claustrophobia and a tenderness at once. It feels like—" she searched for a metaphor, then landed on one with a small, knowing smile—"captivity that's somehow beautiful."
The words struck Meera like a cold hand. Captivity. The word tasted wrong and accurate in the same breath. She swallowed. Behind her, Aarav's presence felt like a shadow shaped to her profile—always there, always belonging.
The visiting journalist turned and saw Meera. "The photographer?" she asked, and Meera stepped forward, helpless and proud at once.
"Yes," Meera answered. Her voice sounded smaller than she expected.
The journalist smiled as if she'd found a key. "Your work is very intimate. Some might say it feels… held. Like the subjects are framed as if they're under watch."
Meera opened her mouth to explain, to say no, that the point was freedom not framing, but words scattered like ash when they hit the light. Aarav stepped closer, and the journalist's tone softened further.
"Who's your supporter?" the woman asked, not unkindly, and people leaned toward the pair as if they were waiting for a reveal.
Aarav's hand came to the small of Meera's back in a movement that announced proximity without speech. The gesture was not possessive enough to be theatrical; it was quiet and claiming—his thumb resting, guiding her forward gently, as one might steer someone through an unfamiliar crowd.
"He's a patron of the arts," the journalist said, nodding at Aarav and smiling like she had reached a tidy conclusion. "You must be grateful."
Meera felt the room tilt under her feet. Grateful. The word was an instrument in someone else's hands. She could have corrected the narrative—said the arrangement had layers she preferred to keep private—but she didn't. There was a cost to telling the truth in the middle of other people's applause.
A camera flashed to their left, and a ripple of attention moved across the room. Someone snapped a photo of Meera and Aarav, framed side-by-side, the moment caught and flattened into a single image. The instant felt obscene and inevitable.
After the journalist moved on and questions slid to other artworks, Aarav stayed near, patient and steady as the sea. He watched her as if memorizing her contours; it made her uneasy in a way that thrummed under the applause.
Later, when a professor offered a short speech praising "fresh voices that confront truth," Meera listened with the odd sensation of watching herself being turned into a character in someone else's sentence. For the first time since the exhibit began, a woman Meera respected walked up to her with the frankness that older women often own.
"You have a clear eye," the woman said, squeezing Meera's hand. "You capture the edges. Keep choosing the edges."
Meera nodded, throat tight. The compliment was balm and blade.
When the crowd began to thin and the initial excitement cooled into small conversations and clusters, Meera stepped outside onto the gallery balcony to breathe. Evening air slid cool against her skin, and the city hummed below like a private record.
Aarav joined her a heartbeat later, as unobtrusive as the moon. He didn't reach for her hand and didn't need to; the absence of his touch felt like permission and its presence like ownership. For the first time in a long while, they stood in companionable silence—two figures outlined against the light.
"You did well," he said finally. Not a praise for the crowd, but a recognition for the long nights, the edits, the choices she'd made pixel by pixel.
She wanted to hate him for the way his voice warmed the word. Instead she folded the chill of the night into her answer. "It's messy," she said. "And some people will call it beautiful because they like the shape of the thing, not the thing itself."
He considered that, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. "Beauty doesn't require consent," he murmured, almost to himself.
The phrase landed with a strange reverberation. She thought of the journalist's words—captivity never looked so beautiful—and the way the crowd had framed her life for applause. Was she a woman making art, or an object repurposed for spectacle?
Aarav's hand found her shoulder, gentle, supportive. "They see what I see," he said simply. The sentence wasn't boastful; it was factual, a quiet admission that thrilled and repelled her.
Meera let the night fold over them. Her heartbeat was an irregular drum—part pride for what she'd made, part fear for why it had needed helping to be seen. She didn't know if the applause was for her photographs or for the narrative the campus had chosen to weave around them.
As they stepped back inside, Meera felt a pocket of photocopied heat shaped like a small, threatening certainty: that even success could be woven into a trap if someone else decided how it should look. She would celebrate tonight. Tomorrow, she would have to name what margins she wanted to keep to herself.
For now, applause still hummed in the gallery and her photographs looked luminous against the white walls. She let herself stand tall in the glow, because survival sometimes required borrowing a light that felt stolen.