Chapter 3: Breakfast and a Borrowed Shirt
The first thing Tanya became aware of was the solid, steady rhythm of a heartbeat under her ear. Then the smell—male skin, sleep, and the faint, lingering ghost of sex and weed. She opened her eyes. Pale morning light, the colour of weak tea, seeped around the edges of the window’s cheap blind. It fell across Divakar’s chest, illuminating a faint dusting of hair and the deep, red scratches she’d carved into his skin hours before.
She didn’t move. She listened to him breathe, watched the slow rise and fall. The frenetic, shattered pieces of last night—the bass, the bathroom mirror, the tequila rage—had settled into a deep, muscular ache between her thighs and a frighteningly profound calm in her core. Raj was a phantom, a blurred face in a strobe light. This man, this stranger with his unassuming face and impossible body, felt more real than anything had in months.
Carefully, she slid her arm from across his stomach and slipped out from under the thin sheet. The chill of the room raised goosebumps on her naked skin. She padded silently across the floor, her muscles protesting with a pleasurable stiffness. The clutter of the room seemed different in the daylight—not messy, just lived-in. The romance novels on the desk, the empty energy drink cans, a single dumbbell in the corner. She smiled.
His closet door was ajar. Inside, a neat row of button-downs and jeans, and on a shelf, a small pile of soft, worn cotton. She pulled out an old maroon t-shirt, faded lettering for some engineering college she’d never heard of. She brought it to her nose. It smelled of fabric softener and him. She pulled it over her head. It drowned her, falling to mid-thigh, the collar slipping off one shoulder.
The kitchenette was a countertop and a two-burner hotplate. She found a bowl, a fork, a pan. There were eggs, a half-used onion, a sad-looking tomato, and a loaf of bread. It felt like a puzzle, a quiet domestic mission. She chopped, whisked, buttered the pan. The sizzle of eggs hitting heat was a comforting, normal sound. The shirt rode up as she reached for plates, and she felt the cool air on her bare ass, a secret reminder of the night.
She was plating the slightly lopsided omelets when she heard the bed creak.
Divakar was propped on an elbow, watching her. His hair was a mess, his eyes soft with sleep. He didn’t speak for a long moment, just watched her move in his shirt, bathed in the gritty morning light.
“Hey,” he finally said, his voice raspy.
“Hey back,” she said, carrying the plates over. “Don’t get excited. It’s just eggs. I think I used your last tomato.”
“It’s the best last tomato I’ve ever seen,” he said, sitting up. The sheet pooled around his waist. She handed him a plate and a fork, then climbed back onto the bed, folding her legs beneath her. They ate cross-legged, knees touching.
“So,” she said around a mouthful of buttery toast. “Divakar. You listen. You fuck like a vengeful god. You have eggs. Who are you?”
He laughed, a warm, easy sound. “Just a guy. Seriously. I work in product support for a tech firm. I complain about the coffee. I kill houseplants with alarming consistency.”
“Product support,” she repeated, nodding. “That explains the patience. And the… stamina. All that troubleshooting.” She winked, and he nearly choked on his eggs.
They talked. He told her about growing up in Pune, the chaos of three older sisters, his doomed attempt to learn the saxophone. She told him about Dehradun, her stern father who was a retired army major, her mother’s magical garden, and how she’d coded her first simple game at fourteen just to piss off the boys in her computer class.
“You’re a goddess and a nerd,” he observed, stealing a corner of her toast. “A dangerous combination.”
“You have no idea,” she said, feeling a blush creep up her neck. She looked at his empty plate, then at the grey light outside. “I was supposed to go shopping with Priya today. For bridesmaid dresses. For her wedding. Which, ha.” The laugh was brittle. She pulled out her dead phone from her discarded clutch on the floor, stared at it. “I should probably charge this. Face the music.”
“Or,” he said slowly, placing his plate aside. “You could not. Just for today.”
She looked at him. “Not charge my phone?”
“Not face the music. Let it be silent. Stay here. Be a ghost with me.”
The offer was a warm hand in the cold space left by Raj’s betrayal. “What would two ghosts do?”
He leaned back against the wall, his grin lazy. “We could finish that last beer from the six-pack. We could see if my terrible WiFi can handle a movie. We could just… be.”
Tanya felt the decision click into place, a clean, simple lock. “Okay,” she said. “Ghosts.”
She texted Priya from his phone: Phone dead, feeling like death, raincheck, sorry! She plugged her own phone into his charger but left it face down, a dormant artifact of a past life.
The morning dissolved into a hazy, horizontal dream. They did finish the beer. They streamed an old comedy that kept buffering, and they laughed more at the pixelated faces than the jokes. They talked about everything and nothing—their favourite street food, the most embarrassing thing that ever happened in a meeting, whether dogs could feel jealousy. She told him about the bug that had plagued her all week, a persistent glitch in a payment gateway.
“It’s like a splinter in my brain,” she said, lying with her head in his lap, his fingers absently stroking her hair. “I can’t stop picking at it.”
“Describe it to me,” he said.
She did, in technical detail, the jargon flowing easily. He listened, asked a surprisingly insightful question about API call sequences. She sat up, excited, and used his laptop to sketch a bit of logic on a notepad app. He pointed to a line. “What if the failure is here, not in authentication but in the response handling? A timeout cascade.”
She stared at the diagram, then at him. “You’re not just product support.”
“I listen,” he said simply. “And I’ve seen a lot of weird failures.”
She kissed him then, a soft, grateful kiss that tasted of hops and lazy morning. It deepened slowly, a world away from the voracious hunger of the night before. This was exploration. This was liking. His hands slid under the old t-shirt, tracing the curve of her waist, the swell of her hip. They made love again, slowly, in the milky afternoon light. It was tender, almost reverent, a silent conversation of sighs and prolonged eye contact that left her feeling transparent and utterly seen.
After, as they lay catching their breath, he said, “I need air. And you need to see something that isn’t these four walls. There’s a park. It’s not much, but the samosa guy near the gate is a artist.”
The park was a scrap of green stitched between old buildings, its paths cracked and its single lawn dotted with families and couples. The samosas were, as promised, sublime—crisp, spiced potato heaven. They ate them walking, her hand in his, a simple, public tether that sent a thrill through her.
“This is weird, right?” she said, lpping grease from her thumb. “This is cosmically, horrifyingly fast.”
“The fastest,” he agreed, squeezing her hand. “But last night… that wasn’t a beginning. That was an explosion. This,” he gestured between them with their joined hands, “this is the quiet after. We’re just surveying the damage.”
She laughed. “You have a way with words. ‘Surveying the damage.’ It feels more like… finding salvage. Good salvage.”
They found an empty bench beneath a sprawling rain tree. The sun had broken through, dappling the ground. She leaned her head on his shoulder, watching a group of boys try to fly a kite in the inconsistent breeze.
“I should be a wreck,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “I should be crying into a pint of ice cream, burning his photos. But I just feel… light. It’s like I’ve been carrying this heavy, ugly box for years, and I finally just… put it down in a club bathroom and walked away.”
He kissed the top of her head. “He was the box. Not you.”
Tears pricked her eyes, sudden and hot. She blinked them away, swallowing hard. No one had ever reframed it like that. Raj had always made her feel like she was the problem—too demanding, too busy, too much. Divakar, in less than a day, had made her feel… just right.
Her phone, now charged and powered on in her bag, began to buzz. Not a call, but a rapid-fire sequence of message alerts. The real world, patient and persistent, was tapping on the window.
She sighed, the peaceful spell thinning. “The ghost is being summoned.”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“I do,” she said, sitting up. “I have to go home eventually. Face the empty apartment. Pack up his ugly gym shoes and his leftover protein powder.” She looked at him, her brow furrowed. “This was… I don’t even have a word for what this was.”
“A Saturday,” he offered, his smile gentle but his eyes holding a shadow she couldn’t decipher.
They walked back to his PG in comfortable silence. At his door, she changed back into her crumpled silver dress, a reverse Cinderella moment that felt absurd and poignant. She handed him his t-shirt.
“Keep it,” he said.
She folded it, held it to her chest. “I’ll wash it.”
“Don’t.” The word came out quickly, almost harsh. He softened it. “I mean, it’s fine. It smells like you now. I like it.”
She stepped into him, rising on her toes to kiss him, a long, slow kiss that held the entire day—the eggs, the laughter, the park, the quiet understanding. “I’ll see you,” she whispered against his lips. It wasn’t a question.
“You will,” he promised.
She walked down the stairs, the sequins of her dress catching the late afternoon light in cheap, brilliant flashes. She didn’t look back.
Divakar closed the door. The room was instantly louder with her absence. The silence hummed. He looked at the empty plates on the desk, the indent of her body on his sheets. He picked up his own phone from the charger. He had turned it off last night.
He powered it on.
It awoke with a convulsion. Dozens of notifications. A series of missed calls from Soumya. Five sweet, concerned texts asking if his headache was better. A forwarded funny meme from a cat account they followed.
The three strands of his life, each pulsing with genuine, urgent love, vibrated in the palm of his hand. The memory of Tanya’s weight on his chest, her laugh, the terrifying clarity in her eyes as she said You’re not what I expected, crashed into him.
He sat heavily on the bed, the scent of her on his t-shirt, now missing from his closet, clinging to the air. He had promised her. You will.
And he meant it. That was the worst part. He meant it with every fibre of his being, even as he opened his messages, took a steadying breath, and began to type a reply to Soumya.
Headache’s gone, darling. Sorry, phone died. That cat meme is us.