Priya tilts her head slightly. “You’re good at this.”
“At work?”
“At making people want to keep talking.”
Aalekh’s smile is slow enough to feel deliberate. “Is that a complaint?”
“For you?” She lets the word sit between them. “I haven’t decided yet.”
The conversation stops there, not because it must, but because something in both of them recognizes the edge.
The office clock shows 9:17 p.m.
Priya glances at it and exhales. “I should go.”
He nods and rises immediately, not too quickly. “I’ll send the revised deck in half an hour.”
“You should go home too.”
“After you.”
She gives him a look that is part exasperation, part amusement. “Aalekh.”
He says nothing.
Priya stands, collects her phone and files, and for a moment she is simply a woman in a quiet office at night, not a manager, not a fixed point in the chain of command. Her sari falls cleanly around her, the fabric catching a glint of light from the desk lamp. She looks composed again, though not entirely recovered from whatever the evening has done to her.
At the door, she pauses.
Without turning fully, she says, “You did good work today.”
It is a manager’s sentence. Measured. Proper.
But she does not leave it there.
“And you have an irritating habit of making people feel as though they’ve been waiting for you.”
Aalekh’s expression does not change much. Only the faintest lift at one corner of his mouth.
“Maybe they were.”
Priya turns then, looking at him directly. Her face is calm, but there is a breathlessness hidden somewhere under the calm that she would never admit to.
“For your own sake,” she says softly, “don’t become too comfortable here.”
He holds her gaze. “In Varnika?”
“In my office,” she says.
The words are quiet, but they land like a hand at the base of the throat.
Aalekh inclines his head, as though accepting advice from a senior. “Noted.”
Priya opens the door, steps out into the corridor, and the spell should break there.
It does not.
Because just before she disappears around the corner, she looks back once.
Not at the papers. Not at the lights. At him.
And the look is not managerial at all.
It is a pause. A question. A warning. Something that could become another thing if fed correctly.
Aalekh remains in the cabin until she is gone, then lets out one slow breath he had not realized he was holding.
He returns to his laptop, but the screen has become less important than the memory of her voice. The tiredness she tried to hide. The way her fingers had rested around the tea cup like she was borrowing steadiness from the porcelain. The small, private fracture in her composure when she admitted what strength had cost her.
He knows women like Priya.
Not fully. No man ever does.
But enough to understand the shape of the wound.
And enough to know that if he touches it carefully, she will feel it.
His phone buzzes with a message from the agency.
He ignores it for a moment.
On the desk beside him sits Priya’s pen, left behind in the rush of leaving. A silver thing, elegant and expensive, the cap engraved with initials too small to read from where he sits. He picks it up, rolls it once between his fingers, and smiles to himself.
It is absurd, how a woman’s forgotten pen can feel like a door left unlatched.
He places it in his shirt pocket.
Then he opens the deck and begins to polish the final version, because the work is real even when the tension around it is not. He sharpens the headline. Softens the visual language. Inserts one line that makes the entire campaign feel less like an instruction and more like a promise.
When he sends it at 9:47 p.m., Priya replies three minutes later.
Good. Present this tomorrow at 11.
Then, after a pause long enough to mean something:
And wear the navy shirt. It suits you.
Aalekh stares at the message for a second, then leans back in his chair and smiles into the dim light of the cabin.
Not because he is surprised.
Because he is being noticed exactly the way he intended.
And now, he thinks, there is no reason to stop.