"When Goodbyes Taste Like Rain"
1017 Words
The group was lounging in their usual corner on campus half sprawled across bean bags, half pretending to study. The air felt stale, as if someone had cracked a joke and no one laughed hard enough to revive it.
Kriti leaned in toward Arjun, her voice barely louder than a secret. “So… you really think Rahul and Aliya hooked up?”
He didn’t look at her right away. Just tapped his pen against the edge of his notebook, eyes fixed on nothing. “That’s what Krish said. He asked Aarav, and Aarav didn’t exactly deny it.”
Kriti gave a small nod, lips pursed like she wasn’t sure whether to believe it—or care. Across the room, Sarah stirred sugar into her coffee like it had offended her. With each clink of the spoon, her expression hardened.
Then, she spoke. Not loudly, but with the kind of weight that silences a room.
“You know what happened to my old gang?”
Heads turned.
“No?” she asked, already knowing the answer. “Of course not. Because we don’t talk about the friends who stopped being friends.”
Aliya blinked, confused. “Wait… what do you mean?”
Sarah leaned back, eyes distant. “We were tight. Tighter than this group. Family, practically. Two people started flirting nothing serious. Just messing around, a few kisses, shared beds. You know how it goes.”
Silence stretched, taut and uneasy.
“And then one day,” she continued, voice brittle, “they caught feelings. And then they didn’t. And the breakup came with sides. With drama. With choosing who you laughed with and who you avoided in hallways.”
Her eyes settled on Kriti for a breath too long.
“By the end of the semester, we weren’t a group anymore. We were ghosts. Ghosts with screenshots and ruined birthdays.”
The group exchanged nervous glances.
Sarah gave a tight smile. “You wanna hook up? Fine. Do it with someone outside this table. Because the second you bring feelings into this”—she waved a hand vaguely around the group—“you poison it.”
And with that, she took a sip of coffee and didn’t say another word.
---
Nothing felt right after that.
Arjun didn’t text her that night.
Didn’t even look at her the next day.
He was there, sitting with the group, laughing at Rahul’s dumb jokes, flipping through his notes like he hadn’t kissed her in the rain like it meant something. Like she hadn’t curled into his chest with trembling fingers and rain-soaked breath and made him believe—for one fragile moment—that he could be more than the version of himself everyone expected.
Kriti kept it cool. Or tried to.
But every time she saw the outline of his jaw tighten, every time his eyes flicked right past her like she wasn’t there, a part of her cracked in silence.
By the library steps, she finally stopped him.
He looked at her once. Briefly. Then looked away.
She waited. Hope swelling and breaking in her throat.
When he still said nothing, she found her voice—thin and fraying.
“I don’t care about what Sarah said. That was her story. Not ours.”
Still nothing.
Her lips parted, searching for something stronger to say, something that could cut through the silence, but all she managed was:
“You’re really just gonna pretend like none of it mattered?”
He finally met her eyes.
And she wished he hadn’t.
Because there, beneath the sharp lines of his face, she saw it.
The breaking.
And it shattered something in her too.
But he still didn’t speak.
He just walked away.
---
That night, Kriti lay in bed, staring at her ceiling like it held answers. Her phone rested on her chest, heavy as guilt. She opened her chat with him.
Typed.
Paused.
Deleted.
Typed again.
Then hit send.
Kriti (11:14 PM):
Maybe Sarah’s right.
Maybe this team is better without the drama.
So let’s not do that again.
It was a one-time thing. Nothing more. Probably.
---
Arjun read the message the second it arrived.
The words sat on his screen, cold and clean and cruel in their finality.
Nothing more. Probably.
He stared at them long after the screen dimmed. And then laughed. Once. A sharp, humorless thing that cracked under its own weight.
Because for the first time in his life, it hadn’t been just a moment.
That kiss—the one that happened under the sky, under a thousand hammering raindrops wasn’t just a kiss.
It was everything he’d never let himself want.
The way she pulled away, then came back.
The way her forehead had leaned into his like they shared the same storm.
The way he’d reached for a towel not to impress her, not to score points but because he genuinely wanted to take care of her.
And when she teased him, “Got a routine?” he’d smiled.
Because he didn’t.
He never had a routine for things like this.
Because this had never happened before.
He hadn’t just kissed her.
He’d fallen into something dangerous. Something warm and terrifying.
And now?
Now it was all reduced to a “one-time thing.”
Probably.
That one word—probably—hung in the air like smoke. She hadn’t even been sure. She’d left the door cracked, just enough to walk away but not close it fully.
But that was the worst kind of goodbye.
The kind you can’t slam shut.
The kind that whispers what if even after the lights go out.
---
He could’ve kissed ten girls tonight. It wouldn’t be hard.
He could’ve posted a story with some faceless stranger, captioned something dumb like “Moving on is an art”, just to prove he wasn’t breaking.
But he didn’t.
He sat there. In the dark. With the echo of her voice still ringing in his head.
And her name still sweet on his lips.
Except now?
It tasted like a goodbye.
To be continued
- Writer
