The Ache Between Us

6. Friday Night

It happened on Friday evening.

The office was nearly empty. David had left at six. Meera had waved goodbye an hour ago. Faisal was still at his desk somewhere, but I couldn’t hear his keyboard anymore, which probably meant he’d gone too. The cleaning crew was moving through the far end of the floor with a vacuum that hummed steadily and low.

I was deep in a refactoring problem, the kind that makes you forget what time it is and whether you’ve eaten and what day of the week it is, when I heard footsteps and looked up.

Kabir was standing at the edge of my alcove with his jacket over one arm and his bag on his shoulder, clearly on his way out for the day.

“You’re still here,” he said.

“I’m close to solving something. Another hour, maybe.”

He leaned against the glass partition. He wasn’t coming in, and he wasn’t leaving, and he was watching me the way he’d watched me in the conference room that first day, like he was reading something in me that I hadn’t put there on purpose.

“Have you eaten?”

I hadn’t. I’d completely forgotten. “I’ll grab something on the way back.”

“That’s not a yes.”

“It’s an I ’ll-handle-it.”

He was quiet for a moment and then said, “There’s a South Indian place two blocks down called Vaishali’s. They do a filter coffee that Meera says is the only reason she hasn’t quit.”

I looked at him, and he looked at me, and the office was quiet, and the vacuum had moved to another floor, and I was very aware of the fact that we were the only two people on the fourteenth floor of a glass building on a Friday night.

“Are you asking me to get coffee?”

“I’m telling you about a coffee place. What you do with that information is entirely up to you.”

I should have said no. I should have said I was busy or that I’d check it out sometime or done the safe, professional-boundaried thing that a woman in my position should do when the man who holds her partnership contract asks her, however indirectly, to get coffee on a Friday night. But I was tired and hungry, and I’d spent the whole week being so careful about everything that my jaw actually ached from clenching, and there was something in the way he was leaning against that partition, unhurried and undemanding, that made me believe he’d accept a no without making it strange.

“Give me ten minutes to save my work,” I said.

* * *

Vaishali’s was small and fluorescent and packed with people who clearly did not care about ambience, which I respected. We sat across from each other at a table that was slightly too small, which meant his knees were close to mine underneath it, which I was aware of in a way that I was pretending very hard not to be aware of.

He ordered a masala dosa. I ordered idlis and filter coffee. He asked for two coffees without asking me how I took mine.

“Black?” I said.

“You drink water in meetings, and you work until you forget to eat. You’re not someone who adds sugar.”

“That’s a lot of assumptions to make from a water order.”

“Am I wrong?”

He wasn’t wrong. I didn’t tell him that. I just looked at him across the table and let the silence answer for me, because sometimes not denying something is more honest than confirming it, and I was still rationing how much honesty I could afford to give him.

The food came fast, and we ate, and somewhere between the idli and the coffee, the conversation moved away from work and into the territory next to personal, the kind of conversation that happens when two people have been circling each other all week in an office and now the office walls are gone, and the only thing left between them is a table covered in sambar.

He told me he’d started Nexus after leaving a fund in Singapore because he’d gotten tired of writing cheques for ideas he didn’t believe in. He said it plainly, the way people talk about decisions that cost them something real, without performing the sacrifice or asking you to admire it. I asked what his family thought about him leaving Singapore, and he said his mother had called it reckless and his father had been dead since he was nineteen.

He said it just like that. In the same tone he’d use to tell you the coffee was good, or the traffic was bad. No bid for sympathy, no pause for me to fill with the right words. Just a fact about his life.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It was a long time ago.”

“That doesn't mean it stops hurting.”

He looked at me, and something moved behind his eyes, not pain, more like recognition, like I’d said something that landed in a place he didn’t usually let people reach.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

The restaurant was loud around us with plates clattering and a child shouting somewhere near the counter and the hiss of batter hitting a hot griddle, and inside all of that noise, there was a pocket of quiet between us that neither of us was in a hurry to leave.

* * *