Chapter 3: Lipstick and Lies
The sun was a hammer on the back of Samarth’s neck. He stood in the shadow of the library archway, watching her. Ankita was perched on the wide, cracked marble edge of the courtyard fountain, one leg tucked under her, a textbook open but ignored on her lap. She looked like a statue of casual indifference. The way she held her shoulders, too straight. The way her eyes stared right through the pages.
He’d been carrying the lipstick since yesterday—a cheap, drugstore bullet of deep red he’d seen roll from her bag after she’d stormed from the washroom. He’d pocketed it without a thought. A trophy. A promise.
He crossed the scorching plaza, the heat rising in visible waves from the concrete. The fountain’s pathetic trickle was a sad soundtrack. A few students lounged under distant palms, too sleepy in the heat to pay attention.
He stopped in front of her, blocking the sun. She didn’t look up.
“You look tired,” he said, his voice carrying easily in the quiet courtyard. “Rough night?”
Her fingers tightened on the textbook’s spine. She slowly lifted her gaze. The fire was there, banked behind a wall of impressive, icy control. “What do you want, Samarth?”
He held up the lipstick, rolling it between his fingers so the gold casing caught the light. “You dropped this.” He said it loudly, cheerfully, a friend returning a lost item. “Figured you might need it. Wouldn’t want to look… unprepared.”
A muscle twitched in her jaw. She snatched it from his hand, her fingers brushing his. A static jolt. Her cheeks flooded with a betraying, crimson heat. “Stay away from me.”
“Or what?” He took a half-step closer, invading the bubble of her pretended peace. The smell of her—jasmine shampoo and sunscreen and pure, seething Ankita—hit him. He leaned down, his mouth near her ear, his voice dropping to a whisper that was somehow more obscene than a shout. “You were louder than this fucking fountain last night. I could hear you echoing in my sleep.”
Her control shattered.
The textbook hit the water with a soggy slap. Her hand fisted in the front of his shirt, yanking him off-balance. Her eyes were pure, unadulterated blaze. “You arrogant piece of shit.”
“Prove it,” he breathed, a challenge and an invitation.
She pulled. He let her. She dragged him across the hot pavement, away from the fountain’s glare, toward the rusted, green metal door of the old maintenance shed tucked behind a screen of sickly palms. Her grip was iron. No one seemed to notice, or if they did, they looked away. It was just Samarth and Ankita, at it again.
She shoved the door open. The interior was a dim oven, smelling of gasoline, cut grass, and decay. Lawnmowers, broken sprinkler heads, stacks of cracked terra cotta pots. A single, grimy window high up let in bars of dusty light full of floating motes.
The door slammed shut behind them, plunging them into hot, claustrophobic semi-darkness.
She turned on him, pushing him back against a workbench. A wrench clattered to the concrete floor. “You think one fuck in a disgusting bathroom gives you permission to talk to me? To smirk at me in public?”
“It wasn’t just a fuck,” he said, the words out before he could cage them. He saw the shock in her eyes, mirrored his own. He covered it with aggression. “It was a demolition. And you loved it.”
Her answer was to reach for his belt, her fingers fumbling with the buckle. Not with tenderness, but with a furious, practical urgency. “Shut up. Just shut up and finish what you started.”
“What did I start?” He grabbed her wrists, stopping her. He needed to hear it. Needed the fracture in her voice.
She struggled, but his hold was firm. Her chest heaved, her breasts straining against the thin cotton of her tank top. In the striped light, her face was all angles and shadows, her lips parted. The fury was still there, but beneath it, thrumming like a live wire, was the same desperate hunger from the day before. The admission she’d rather die than voice.
“You started this!” she finally spat, gesturing wildly between them with her head since her hands were trapped. “This… thing! I didn’t want it! I don’t want it!”
“Liar.” He released one wrist and his hand went to her hair, wrapping the thick, black length of it around his fist. He didn’t pull yet. Just held. A threat and a caress. “Your body doesn’t lie. It’s the only honest part of you.”
A tremor went through her. She stopped fighting his grip. Her free hand came up and gripped his shoulder, her nails digging into the fabric of his shirt. “Then let my body say it for me.”
He kissed her. It wasn’t romantic. It was a collision of teeth and tongue and shared, bitter breath. She kissed him back just as violently, biting his lip, a coppery tang flooding their mouths. It was a war, and a ceasefire, and a treaty written in blood all at once.
He spun her around, bending her over the dusty workbench. He yanked her shorts and underwear down in one rough motion. She braced her hands on the rough wood, her head dropped forward. He freed himself, painfully hard, and positioned himself. She was already wet, her heat evident. He pushed inside without ceremony, a single, deep, claiming stroke that made them both gasp.
The shed was an echo chamber. Their breathing, the soft, slick sounds of their joining, the creak of the bench under their weight—it all amplified in the hot, tool-scented dark.
He set a punishing rhythm immediately, each thrust jolting her forward. He kept his fist wrapped in her hair, controlling the arch of her back. “This what you needed?” he grunted, pounding into her. “Another fight? Another fucking scene?”
“Yes,” she hissed, the word torn from her. “God, yes.”
Her honesty undid him more than any curse. He let go of her hair, his hands instead sliding around to grip her hips, holding her steady as he drove into her, deeper, trying to reach something neither of them could name. The bench scraped against the floor with their momentum.
She was louder here, maybe because the shed trapped the sound, maybe because the last pretense was gone. Her moans were unfiltered, raw, building in volume until she was crying out with every drive of his hips. “There… right there…”
He knew he wouldn’t last. The fever-dream intensity of it, of her, was too much. He felt the familiar, coiling tension, but a new, sharper edge was there—a possessiveness that had nothing to do with conquest and everything to do with the way her body clamped around his, as if it was trying to keep him.
“Ankita,” he growled, a warning and a plea.
“Don’t you stop,” she commanded, her voice ragged. “Don’t you fucking stop.”
He didn’t. He pushed her to the very edge, feeling her inner muscles begin their frantic fluttering. When her climax hit, it was silent for one shocking second—her whole body rigid—before the sound broke loose. A long, shattered wail that echoed off the metal walls, absolutely unconcerned with who might hear.
The sound triggered his own release. He buried himself to the hilt, grinding deep as he came, a harsh, gutteral sound ripped from his throat. He pulsed inside her, the heat of his release merging with the devastating warmth of her, a fact that felt more intimate than anything they’d done.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their ragged breaths mingling with the distant hum of the campus.
Slowly, he softened and slipped out. He rested his forehead against the sweat-damp fabric between her shoulder blades, his body trembling with a strange, post-battle exhaustion.
She pushed herself upright, not looking at him, and pulled her clothing back into place with quick, efficient motions. The silence now was different from the bathroom. It wasn’t shocked. It was loaded, heavy with things spoken by their bodies that their mouths refused to say.
She turned, her face unreadable in the dim light. She smoothed her hair, her eyes finding his. There was no hatred there. No clear love either. Just a deep, complicated reckoning.
Without a word, she walked to the shed door, pulled it open, and stepped back into the blinding afternoon sun, leaving him alone in the smell of sex and gasoline.
Samarth straightened up, fixing his clothes. He looked at the workbench, at the faint smudge where her palms had been. He pulled the stolen lipstick from his own pocket—he’d palmed it back from her when she’d dragged him across the courtyard.
He placed it carefully on the bench, right where her hand had been.
Then he walked out, the sun hitting him like a physical blow. She was already gone, vanished into the shimmering heat haze of the campus. The fountain continued its useless, whispering trickle.
He knew, with a cold, sinking certainty, that this was now a pattern. A cycle. And he had no idea how to break it, or if he even wanted to.