matched by destiny

Chapter 2: The Second Between

She still has his hand when the moment snaps and the city inhales.

The delivery van tears around the corner, a wrong note in a bright morning. Its side panel is a blur of silver and an orange sticker flapping like a frantic flag. A horn splits the air, then another—staggered, confused, too late. Meera’s fingers tighten on Jatin’s. He’s still looking toward the sound when the van fishtails, a crate slides inside with a bone-dull thud, and the driver wrenches the wheel.

“Jatin—” she says, and the word is small and useless.

He moves without thinking, a step half forward, half sideways, trying to tuck her behind him. Their hands slip. The curb is an inch too far. A cyclist shouts. Someone drops a cup. Time stretches like sugar pulled to a shining thread, thin and endless, until the thread snaps.

Impact.

It’s not the sound she expects. Not a cinematic crash, not glass symphonies. It is meat-and-metal, an ugly thump that lives under the ribs of the world. Jatin vanishes from her fingertips with a jolt that wrenches her shoulder. Then he is there again, but on the pavement, but wrong—his body curved around absence, his breath a gasp that won’t finish.

For a fraction, the city refuses to believe it. The bell over the café door rings as someone comes out with a croissant. A dog barks at a pigeon. The song on the radio inside is still insisting on invincibility.

Then everything tips.

“Call 911!” a woman screams, and Meera realizes the sound clawing out of her own throat is answering, is already the same word. She falls to her knees beside him, gravel biting through her jeans, palms hot with the scrape. Jatin’s eyes are open—thank God they’re open—wide and bewildered, as if he’s woken up on stage in the wrong play.

“Hey, hey,” she says, and the words tumble over each other, scrambling. “Jatin, I’m here, I’m here, baby—look at me.” She wants to assemble him with names, stitch him together with syllables. She touches his cheek and her fingers come away clean. That feels like a miracle. That feels like a lie.

He tries to sit and can’t. His breath catches on a hook. The world narrows to the white at the corners of his lips.

“Don’t move,” she says, because television taught her that. “Don’t—please—okay?” She shrugs off her scarf to tuck it under his head. The scarf still smells like his cologne. It is suddenly unbearable, the intimacy of it.

“I’m—” he starts, and stops, as if the sentence forgot its ending.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, we’re okay.” She is bargaining with the air.

The van is rammed up against the curb now, engine ticking in the shocked quiet. The driver staggers out, hands up, face paper-white. “I didn’t—he just—God—” He keeps looking at the skid marks like they’ll give him back the last ten seconds.

“Back up,” someone orders. “Give them space.” Footsteps stutter away and return; phones are up like lighthouses, and Meera wants to throw every last one into the gutter.

“Ma’am, I’m on with dispatch,” a voice says near her shoulder. “They’re two minutes out.”

Two minutes. She could live an entire life in two minutes. She could draw a bear crossing an ocean and write him home.

“Stay with me,” she whispers to Jatin, and cups his face in both hands. His lashes tremble. A small, ridiculous thought arrives and refuses to leave: he forgot to take the extra sugar packet this time. The jar by the register is still full. She wants to go back into the café and fix it. She wants to rewind the bell over the door.

“Meera,” he says at last, and it is her name, just her name, like he’s checking his inventory and relieved to find her still there. His mouth quirks at the corner, that almost-grin that always shows up half a beat before the joke. “Hey.”

She laughs, a sound already breaking. “Hi.”

“You okay?” he asks, insane, impossible.

“I’m fine,” she lies. “You’re the one on the ground, idiot.”

“Language,” he murmurs, and she wants to shake him, to hold him, to make the world sensible again. There’s a bloom of red at the edge of his shirt, low on his side, too bright. It is not dramatic—no gushing movie flood—just a steady insistence. Her hands press without thinking, too hard, not hard enough. He hisses.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says, and does not lift her hands.

A siren wakes in the distance and charges toward them, parting traffic into tidy lanes like a comb. The sound grows and grows until it is all there is. She breathes to its rhythm. In. Out. Don’t leave. Don’t you dare.

“Listen,” he says, and there are a thousand things she wants to refuse to listen to. “I had—” He swallows. “A thing to do. Later.”

“Truancy?” she tries.

“Worse.” He breathes shallow. “Dentist.”

She makes herself smile. “Cancel it,” she says. “I wrote them a letter. Your teeth are on sabbatical.”

“Good,” he says. The almost-grin again, this time thinner. “Silver lining.”

The siren stops like a sentence cut short. Doors fly open. Boots on pavement. A calm voice near her ear: “Ma’am, we’re going to take over.” Hands replace her hands with professional pressure. Questions pin her in place: name, age, time of impact, head injury, did he lose consciousness, any allergies. She knows almost all of it. She knows the exact number of freckles on his left shoulder. She knows he prefers his coffee scalding. She does not know how to contain the universe that is trying to move without him.

They collar his neck, slide a board, count to three. He groans once, low, like a protest swallowed. She follows as they lift him, walking and walking because if she stops, she will never start again. They feed him into the ambulance, and a paramedic holds out a hand without looking. “Family?”

“Girlfriend,” she says, and waits for the word to lift him, make him lighter. It does nothing. “I’m—” She gropes for his last name like a rope. “I’m with him.”

“Ride with us,” the medic says. “Strap in.”

Inside is white and stainless and a fierce bouquet of antiseptic. The world becomes four feet wide and eight feet long and hung with coiled lines like vipers sleeping. A blood pressure cuff blooms on his arm. An oxygen mask fogs with each breath. The monitor chirps a small, brave rhythm. She finds a sliver of his wrist between tape and tubing and holds it with a thumb and two fingers.

His eyes blink open at the jolt of acceleration. The city rolls sideways in the back window; a slice of sky, a traffic light, a billboard of a smiling couple selling mattresses that promise forever. He tracks nothing, then finds her.

“There you are,” he says, as if she’d been lost and climbed back into view. He reaches—barely—and his fingers catch hers where they already are.

“Always,” she says, and the word surprises her—how easily it leaves, how true it feels, how stupidly hopeful.

The medic leans close, voice steady. “Sir, can you tell me if the pain is sharp or dull?”

“Both,” he murmurs, then to Meera, softer, like it’s a separate conversation: “You… draw the puddle.”

“What?”

“The bear,” he says, breathy. “Different sky.”

“Okay,” she says. “I will.”

“Give him… gumboots,” he adds, and his mouth jerks as if at a private joke.

“Oh my God, I love you,” she says, not remembering if she’s ever said it like this, not a declaration but a fact placed on the table between them, as ordinary and enormous as morning. “I love you, I love you.”

His gaze fixes, and something inside it changes—focus sliding, then struggling to return. His fingers loosen. The monitor argues with itself, the chirp skipping beats, then racing to catch up.

“Jatin?” she says, and her voice goes thin.

“Ma’am,” the medic warns gently, one palm guiding her back as they work. Words multiply—BP dropping, IV in, hang fluids, prepare epi—and time reverts to that stretched sugar again, translucent and fragile, pulled and pulled.

“Stay,” she tells him. “Stay. We have trains to catch. We have… dentist appointments to miss.” She is sobbing now. It doesn’t sound like her. It sounds like a door slammed on an empty room.

He looks at her, and for a second everything clears. His eyes are brown and steady and twenty thousand Tuesdays. “Meera,” he says, and manages a smile that is a whole thesis on love compressed into breath. “Room… you choose.”

“Yes,” she says, shaking. “Yes, I choose you. I choose you.”

The monitor flattens into a single note, an accusation. The medic swears under his breath in a professional way and moves faster. Gel on paddles. Charge. Clear. Jatin’s body jumps, an obscene puppet jerk. Nothing. Again. Clear. The note wavers, teases a return, then straightens, merciless.

She is pressed into her seat by a second medic, their voice a metronome trying to keep her from shattering. “Breathe for me. In. Out. Keep your eyes on me.”

She keeps them on Jatin.

There is a moment—a long, small moment—when she thinks she sees him exhale some secret she wasn’t meant to hear, a goodbye the world isn’t built to hold. Then the medics stop moving. The ambulance keeps moving. The note doesn’t.

“We’re a minute out,” someone says. “Call it at bay one,” someone else replies.

Meera doesn’t know what “call it” means until the medic with the kind eyes looks at the clock and says a time that will live inside her forever.

The doors burst open into a white hallway that smells like lemon and conclusions. Hands take him away. A curtain swallows him. Someone asks her to sit and she sits, because instructions are easier than breathing.

She stares down at her palms. There is a crescent of grit embedded in her left hand, a stark half-moon of the city. There is a smear of pink on her wrist where her scarf bled when she wrapped it under his head. She rubs at it. It doesn’t lift.

A nurse kneels in front of her. Their mouth moves. The words are arranged kindly. The meaning is a cliff.

“Do you—” the nurse asks gently, “do you need to call someone?”

She thinks of Suzy; of her father’s stolen thumbs-up; of the bear in the puddle and the sky it reflected just this morning, so blue, so sure. She thinks of trains with funny names. She thinks of a foam heart on a cup drying into a pale mark no one will read.

Meera nods, a motion from far away. She reaches for her phone with hands that are no longer hers.

On the screen, the last text from Jatin sits open: Punishment: fifteen kisses.

She presses call.

Outside, the city exhales.