It started with a misfiled book.
They were back in the library not as punishment this time, but by choice, or at least by the kind of quiet gravitational pull that doesn't announce itself as a choice until you're already sitting down and reaching for a book.
It had been Ishani's idea, technically. After Professor Deshpande's class that morning which had gone forty minutes over time because he had gotten passionately sidetracked on the subject of unreliable narrators and nobody had wanted to stop him she had mentioned, almost to herself, that she needed to find a reference book for the essay that had been assigned.
Vijay had said he needed to look something up too.
This was not entirely true. But it was not entirely false either, and he had decided that was close enough.
So they had come to the library in the free period after lunch just the two of them, because Sara had a meeting for some cultural committee she had joined with aggressive enthusiasm, and Aryan and Priya had gone to the canteen with the specific intention of doing nothing productive for one full hour.
The library in the afternoon felt different from the library during punishment hours. Quieter, somehow, despite having more people in it. More settled. The light came through the tall windows at a different angle now, less gold and more soft white, the kind of light that makes everything look like the inside of a book.
They had split up when they came in Ishani to the reference section, Vijay to the general stacks to find something on narrative theory that Professor Deshpande had mentioned in passing. They had not discussed this split. It had just happened, naturally, the way things between them seemed to happen without negotiation, without awkwardness, as if some part of them had already quietly agreed on the rules of how they moved around each other.
Vijay found his book within ten minutes a slim, slightly battered volume on narrative structure that had clearly been read many times by many people, its margins filled with penciled annotations in at least four different handwritings. He found a reading table near the window, sat down, and opened it.
He read for perhaps twenty minutes.
And then he heard footsteps unhurried, familiar and looked up.
Ishani was standing at the end of the shelf closest to him, and she had a book in her hands.
Not the reference book she had come for. That was tucked under her arm, spine out, clearly found and set aside. The book in her hands was something else a paperback, medium-sized, with a soft cover in shades of blue and white. She was holding it with both hands, looking at the cover with an expression Vijay had not seen on her before.
It was a fond expression. That was the only word for it. The expression of someone who has found something they loved and thought they had lost.
He watched her for a moment without saying anything.
She turned the book over. Read the back. Turned it to the front again. Ran her thumb along the edge of the cover the way people do with things that are familiar and dear.
Then she looked up and found him watching her.
She didn't look embarrassed exactly. But something in her expression shifted a quick recalibration, the instinct to compose herself. And then and this was the part that caught him she stopped recalibrating. She let the fond expression stay. She walked over to his table and sat down across from him, setting the reference book to the side and keeping the paperback in her hands.
She put it on the table between them.
Me Before You.... Jojo Moyes.
Vijay looked at the cover. A couple, faces close, the suggestion of something tender and devastating in the image.
"Have you read it?" Ishani asked.