ALMOST
Chapter 2: THE FIRST TEXT
The conversation that night lasted four hours and twelve minutes.
Later, when Adi tried to reconstruct it, he couldn't identify the exact moment it shifted from awkward to alive. The first twenty minutes were painful — him asking questions with the forced enthusiasm of a job interviewer, her answering with the clipped precision of someone who resented the interview.
You doing CA or CS?
Why are you asking so many questions?
Fair. He was asking too many questions. He knew he was asking too many questions. But the alternative was silence, and silence with this girl felt like losing ground he couldn't afford to lose.
So he deployed the nuclear option. The move he'd been workshopping for three days, the one excuse that was transparent enough to be charming and practical enough to be plausible:
Can you teach me business accounts please? 🥺
Her response:
Lamaooo 🤣🤣🤣
Three laughing emojis. The first crack in the wall. She saw through him — saw through the excuse, the transparent attempt at connection disguised as academic need — and instead of blocking him or ignoring him or giving him another one-word answer, she laughed.
He felt that laugh in his sternum. Not heard — felt. A vibration that started behind his ribs and spread outward through his chest cavity like a tuning fork struck against bone. The vibration of recognition that happens when someone sees your bullshit and finds it endearing instead of annoying. In the hierarchy of female responses to male pursuit, laughter ranked above tolerance and just below interest. It was the sound of a door being held ajar.
Then why would u even need help? she wrote.
And you owe me one! he typed, pivoting with the shamelessness of a man who understood that momentum was everything.
>_>
That face. That side-eye emoji-that-wasn't-an-emoji. He would come to know it as her signature — the visual equivalent of a raised eyebrow, a folded arm, a I see exactly what you're doing and I'm not impressed but I'm still here, aren't I?
He loved it immediately. He loved it because it was the opposite of the responses he was used to from women — the eager engagement, the matching energy, the immediate willingness to play the game at whatever tempo he set. This girl wasn't playing his game. She wasn't even acknowledging that a game was being played. She was standing at the edge of the field with her arms crossed, watching him run around like an idiot, occasionally deigning to comment on his form.
>_>
It meant: Try harder.
So he did.
The conversation got heated around 10 PM.
Not angry-heated. Alive-heated. The kind of heat that happens when two people stop performing politeness and start actually talking. She threatened to block him — casually, the way you threaten to leave a party you're secretly enjoying: Jaada bolega toh block kr dugi. He called her a "bad kitten" — the words left his fingers before his brain could approve them, driven by some instinct that recognized the energy she was giving off: small, fierce, capable of scratching.
Kitten? 😵
Yeah, you're like one of those kittens. Small yet fiery. 🫨
Stoppppp bitch 😒
And there it was. The word that would define them. Bitch. Thrown like a grenade, landing like a term of endearment. She called him bitch the way other people said I see you — with an irritation that was really just attention wearing a disguise.
Later that night — past midnight, into the hours when the world contracts to the size of a phone screen and the distance between two people becomes the distance between two glowing rectangles in the dark — she called him monkey for the first time.
Makad.
It emerged from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. He was being dramatic about something — he was always dramatic about something; he was a Pisces, and Pisces men treat every conversation like it's the climax of a Bollywood film — and she cut through the drama with a single word: Makad. Monkey. Said with the exasperated fondness of someone who has been watching a primate swing from branch to branch and has decided, against all better judgment, that the performance is entertaining.
You're a monkey,* she said. *Bye.
And you're a kitten,* he said. *Bye!
Neither of them said bye. The conversation continued for another two hours.
By the time she finally stopped responding — not a goodbye, just a gradual fade into sleep, her messages getting shorter, more typo-ridden, the words of someone whose eyes were closing against their will — they were makad and meow. The identities had crystallized in the space of a single evening, born from the chaos of two people who had no business talking to each other and couldn't seem to stop.
He lay in bed at 2:47 AM, phone on his chest — the residual warmth of the screen bleeding through his shirt into his skin, the faint smell of the charging cable's plastic mixing with the cotton of his pillow — and replayed the conversation in his head. Not the words — the rhythm. The way she'd resisted and then relented. Deflected and then engaged. Pushed him away with one hand and held the door open with the other. She was a contradiction wrapped in a kurti — a girl who said block kr dugi and never blocked, who said bye and never left, who called him bitch and kept talking.
He was hooked. Not attracted — not yet, not in the way that would come later, the physical want that would keep him awake in ways that 2 AM conversations couldn't. This was something earlier than attraction. Something more dangerous. This was curiosity, and curiosity in a Pisces man was a kind of gravity — once it locked onto something, it pulled with a force that physics couldn't explain and willpower couldn't resist.
She was the first person he'd met in years who didn't give him what he wanted. And he wanted to earn it. Whatever it was.
The next morning — February 16th — he texted again.
Not because he had something to say. Because he needed to confirm that last night was real, that the connection he'd felt wasn't the product of insomnia and wishful thinking, that she would still be there on the other side of the screen in the unforgiving clarity of daylight.
She was there. But different. Daylight Siya was clipped where nighttime Siya had been expansive. Her messages were shorter, more guarded, as if the darkness had been a room where she'd allowed herself to be unguarded and the sunrise had sent her back into her Capricorn armour.
If you could talk more normally then I suppose we could talk, she wrote.
Normally. She wanted him to be normal.
He stared at the word. Normal was the one thing he had never been and never intended to become. Normal was small talk about weather and careful opinions about films and the mutual pretence that every conversation didn't have an undercurrent of what-do-you-want-from-me. Normal was the death of everything he valued: intensity, honesty, the willingness to say the uncomfortable thing because the comfortable thing was boring.
But she'd said we could talk. Hidden inside the demand for normalcy was an invitation: I want to keep talking to you. I just need you to make it easier for me.
Challenge accepted.
Challenge rejected.
Because by 6:50 PM that same evening, normalcy had already become impossible.
He wrote:
"I'm not here for normal. I'm here for something special and I thought you were special. But clearly our definition of normal does not align. I will not forget the first time I saw you. It was something like a love at first sight. But clearly we're not compatible. It's sad that this will be nothing more than a happy memory when it could have been so much more. Good bye and take care champ ❤"
He sent it. The confession of a man who had known this girl for exactly twenty-four hours and had already decided she was the most important person he'd ever message on WhatsApp. Dramatic? Absolutely. Premature? By any sane metric, yes. But Adi had never operated on sane metrics. He operated on feeling, and the feeling was a tidal wave — the kind that drowns you while you're still admiring how beautiful the water looks.
Her response came after a pause that lasted long enough for him to die seven small deaths:
Yea sure.
Two words.
Not I feel the same. Not Let's meet. Not That was beautiful. Not even Are you okay?
Just: Yea sure.
The Capricorn response to a Pisces tsunami. Two words that should have extinguished the fire. Two words that, in any rational universe, would have made him delete her number and move on to someone who responded to emotional declarations with something other than the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
Instead, those two words made him want her more.
Because Yea sure wasn't rejection. Rejection was Don't text me again. Rejection was silence, or a block, or the cold formality of I think we should just be classmates. Yea sure was something else — something he recognized from years of reading people, years of understanding the gap between what people say and what they mean.
Yea sure* meant: *I heard you. I'm not going to give you what you want. But I'm not going to stop you from wanting it.
It was the most Capricorn response imaginable. No false hope. No encouragement. No cruelty. Just: I acknowledge your feelings. I cannot reciprocate them. And yet — I'm still here. I haven't blocked you. I haven't told you to leave. Make of that what you will.
He made of it everything.
She called him pagal and dramebaaz the next day. He wore both labels like badges. In Bollywood, the pagal was always the one who got the girl — or at the very least, the one who got the best songs. And dramebaaz? Every good love story needed someone willing to make a scene.
He would be the scene.
The days that followed established the pattern that would define them.
He would text. She would respond — sometimes quickly, sometimes after hours, always with an economy of language that made every word feel rationed. He would send paragraphs; she would send sentences. He would use emojis like punctuation; she would use >_> like a weapon.
He learned her rhythms. Mornings were bad — she was working, focused, unavailable. Afternoons were unpredictable. But evenings — evenings were when the Capricorn armour loosened. By 10 PM, she was a different person: warmer, funnier, more willing to engage with his nonsense. And by midnight, when the rest of the world had retreated into sleep and the phone screen was the only light left, she became the version of herself that he suspected was the truest: unguarded, sharp, capable of a tenderness she would deny in daylight.
They talked about everything and nothing. He learned she was pursuing her degree the way most people pursue dental appointments — as a necessary obligation to be completed with minimum time spent on campus. She came to college for exams and disappeared. The rest of her time was spent working — at a therapy centre, with autistic children, a job that required patience he couldn't fathom and kindness she didn't advertise.
He learned she was nineteen. The number landed with the weight of a decade — his decade, the ten years between her birth and his that contained everything he'd already lived through and she hadn't yet encountered. He was twenty-nine. He'd been her age when she was nine. The math was uncomfortable. He did it anyway, the way you press on a bruise to remind yourself it's there.
She learned he was a writer — or claimed to be. Three self-published books that had sold a combined total of "enough copies to fill a bookshelf, if the bookshelf was very small." She didn't ask to read them. He didn't offer. Some things were better left as credentials rather than evidence.
She learned he was experienced. Not because he said so directly — he wasn't that crude — but because the way he texted, the way he navigated conversation, the easy confidence with which he said things that would make most nineteen-year-olds uncomfortable, all pointed to a man who had been here before. Who had pursued before, been pursued before, had the casual relationship with intimacy that comes from having had enough of it to stop treating it as extraordinary.
She didn't ask about his past. He didn't volunteer it. But the asymmetry was there, unspoken — he had a history; she had a present. A present that included someone else.
He found out about the someone else on a Tuesday, at 11:43 PM, in the most casual, devastating way possible:
"I don't want you to build such feelings,"* she wrote. *"It will eventually hurt you."
There it was. The first warning. The first time she tried to save him from what they both knew was coming — the inevitable collision between his want and her unavailability. She cared enough to warn him. She didn't care enough — or wasn't free enough — to offer an alternative.
She likes someone else.
The knowledge settled into him like a stone dropping into water. Not a splash — a slow descent, the stone sinking through layers of hope and landing softly on the bottom, where it would stay. Permanent. Heavy. But not sharp enough to cut.
Because here was the thing about Pisces men: they don't listen to warnings. They swim toward the waterfall anyway, convinced that the fall will be beautiful. And Adi, true to his celestial programming, heard her warning and translated it in the private language of his own delusion:
She's warning me because she cares.* *She cares because she feels something.* *She feels something because this is real.
Flawed logic? Absolutely. But the heart doesn't traffic in logic. It traffics in pattern recognition, and the pattern Adi recognized was this: a girl who didn't care wouldn't bother to warn. A girl who was truly uninterested would have stopped responding. A girl who felt nothing would not be texting him at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday, telling him to protect his feelings — because the act of telling him to protect his feelings was, itself, a feeling.
Yea sure, he thought, echoing her words back at the universe.
And kept texting.
End of Chapter 2
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.