The library, once a sanctuary, had become a minefield. Dakshin had started avoiding their old spot, but sometimes, the most painful paths are the ones you're forced to walk. A reserved study room for a group project left him with no choice but to pass by the familiar table by the window.
And there she was. Alone.
His breath hitched. It was the first time he'd seen her without the armor of friends or the weapon of another guy's company. She was just Anaya, hunched over a textbook, her brow furrowed in concentration. The sight was so normal, so intimately familiar, it was a physical ache.
He should have kept walking. But the memory of her coldness at the party, the sight of her with Leo, ignited a stubborn spark of defiance. He wouldn't beg. He would just… talk. Like a normal person.
He approached and slid into the chair opposite her. The very chair he'd sat in when he'd shattered everything.
She looked up, and the shutters immediately came down over her eyes. "This seat is taken," she said flatly, her gaze dropping back to her book.
"By who? The ghost of my poor decisions?" The attempt at humor fell flat, his voice strained.
She didn't smile. "What do you want, Dakshin?"
"I just… I wanted to see if you were okay." It was a pathetic, transparent lie.
"I'm fine." The words were final, clipped. She turned a page with a sharp flick of her wrist.
"Are you? Because you're sitting here alone, and at the party you were with…" He couldn't say the name. "You're just so different."
That got her attention. Her head snapped up, her eyes flashing with a fire he hadn't seen in weeks. It was better than the nothingness. It was alive.
"Different?" she repeated, her voice low and sharp. "What did you expect, Dakshin? That I'd stay the same naive girl who waited patiently on your shelf while you figured out your life? While your family tore mine apart?"
"That wasn't me!" he protested, his own voice rising, drawing a shush from a student across the room. He leaned in, whispering fiercely. "I had nothing to do with that!"
"You had everything to do with it!" she shot back, her whisper just as intense. "Your 'duty'? Your 'right way'? It's the same language your father used when he humiliated my father. It's the same cold blood. You're not separate from them, Dakshin. You're the product. I just didn't see it soon enough."
Her words were a direct hit, finding the core of his own secret fear. He was his father's son. He had prioritized family strategy over heart.
"So that's it?" he asked, the fight draining out of him, leaving only a hollowed-out exhaustion. "You're just going to pretend the last two years never happened? What we had… it meant nothing?"
Anaya looked at him, and for a fleeting moment, he saw a crack in her armor. A glimpse of the shared history, the inside jokes, the quiet understanding. But it was gone in an instant, replaced by a resolve that was terrifying in its certainty.
"It meant something," she said, her voice quiet but clear as ice. "It meant I learned my lesson. Don't confuse your delayed timing with my permanent closure, Dakshin. You had your chance. You gave your answer. Now, you have to live with it."
She gathered her things, her movements precise and final. "Don't follow me."
He didn't. He sat there, paralyzed, as she walked away. The words "delayed timing" and "permanent closure" echoed in the silent library, a verdict he had brought upon himself. She wasn't just building a wall anymore. She had just given him a detailed, brutal tour of the impenetrable fortress she had become. And he was left on the outside, with only the bitter pill of his own choices to swallow.