(Her POV)
They say stories can bring people closer. But sometimes… stories finish before the people do.
Ayan had stopped handing me pages.
No "read this."No "tell me what you think."No quiet pages slipped onto my desk like secrets.
It wasn't a fight. It wasn't coldness.It was drift.
After months of shared silences, morning coffee glances, and fictional memories passed like love letters, he had started pulling away — slowly, like low tide.
At first, I thought he was just busy. A deadline. A detour.
But then the detour became a pattern.
Lunch breaks came and went — he'd eat with the others, laughing a little louder than usual. Our Thursday coffee runs? Cancelled. Our late-night edits and shared music playlists? Ghosted.
I still edited his old drafts. Still lived inside the world he had built. But I wasn't part of his new pages anymore.
And it hurts.
Not because he owed me something, but because… we were building something. I felt it. In the way he listened. The way he smiled mid-sentence like I already knew the punchline.
But he stopped letting me in.
So I did what most people do when their place in someone's story fades — I convinced myself I was just a chapter. Temporary. Replaceable.
I even started avoiding his desk. Walking the long way around to avoid small talk. Staying late to miss the timing of his exit.
And still… I missed him.
Like you miss a song you never downloaded.
A few months later, the team planned a weekend trip — something light, relaxing. A writer's escape to break the block everyone was pretending not to have.
"Let's go to Rishikesh," someone suggested.
"Shimla?" another said.
And then someone half-joked, "Let's go to Kashmir. I want to write with snow around me."
Everyone laughed.
But Ayan?
He didn't.
He said quietly, "Let's go."
We locked eyes across the room.
I hadn't spoken to him in nearly a month — not properly.
But for some reason, in that one moment, I knew.
Something was still unwritten.
We arrived in Kashmir on a cold, blue-skied morning.
The snow blanketed the silence between us.
The first two days, we barely talked. Not because of awkwardness, but because... it felt fragile. Like speaking too loud might break something that had barely survived the distance.
Then, on the third evening, while everyone else was sipping kahwa near the guesthouse heater, Ayan asked if I wanted to walk.
I nodded. No questions. No hesitation.
We walked through a pine trail behind the lodge, boots crunching against snow, our breath floating in soft clouds.
"I'm sorry," he said after a while. "I don't know what happened."
"You stopped writing," I replied softly.
"I stopped feeling."
His voice broke just a little. Like his heart had been buffering for months, and only now the download of emotion was complete.
"Why?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I thought maybe... I was writing too much into something that wasn't there."
I paused.
And said the one thing I had wanted to say for so long.
"You weren't."
He looked at me — slowly, like the mountains themselves were holding their breath.
And for the first time in months, we stood close again. Not physically — but in a way that mattered more.
"Tell me a story," I whispered. "Any story."
He smiled, nervous.
Then began, "Once, a boy drifted away from the girl who inspired him — only to realize, stories aren't worth telling if she's not around to read them."
I smiled back.
And in the distance, the sun dipped behind the snowy peaks.
Maybe it wasn't a happy ending yet.
But it was a new beginning...