Page 112 of A Lab Rat's Guide to Fated Love
And so, every morning, she’d pick him up on the way to work. Between lectures, they’d have lunch together. And afterwards, she’d drop him home. More often than not, she’d stop by to meet Billie and give her all the chin scratches that her majesty demanded.
But that was all that was. It wasn’t like Nori was developing feelings for Vir. They were just friends. Nothing more.
However, if she had to be honest, at times she did suspect that maybehehad feelings forher. But then, the very next moment, he’d do something to convince her otherwise.
“I’ve been thinking about keeping a dream journal,” Vir told her one afternoon while they sat across from each other at the cafeteria. “Only problem is, I can’t remember my dreams lately. They used to be quite vivid before—”
While listening to him talk, she leaned over her bowl of noodles, and a stray curl swung loose across her face. Before she could swipe it away, Vir casually reached for the lock and tucked it behind her ear without a single break in his speech. As if it was something he was used to doing often.
Heat seeped into Nori’s cheeks. And a heartbeat later, Vir’s eyes widened with realization.
“I wasn’t thinking—out of habit—” He fumbled for words. “I’m sorry!”
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied in a flat tone, stabbing her fork into the noodles. “You were saying about the journal?”
Another time, while they were walking to her car together after work, her knuckles accidentally brushed against Vir’s, and before she could move her hand away, his soft, slender fingers closed around hers.
Her lips hadn’t even finished curving into a smile when he dropped her hand like it was a rotten, week-old rat carcass.
“Sorry, I—” he began, shifting an arm’s length away from her for good measure.
“Out of habit?” She kept her face blank while her insides twisted into knots, her eyes stinging from the blatant rejection.
She knew she’d fallen into a dumb one-sidedthingwith him. And she hated it.
Once she drove off after dropping him at his place, the hot moisture blurring her vision rolled freely down her cheeks. She swore loudly, swiping her sleeve across her face as she pulled into her driveway.
“Vir Varma, if you pull crap like that one more time, Iwillchoke-slam you faster than you can say the wordssorryorhabitagain.”
He clearly didn’t want her. There was no reason for him to know how badlyshewanted him.
Because Nori might have fallen, but she still had her pride.
Thirty
For the Record
January 2023:
Shoja, Himachal Pradesh
Vir
Nori followed Vir up to hisapartment for the first time in a week. He wasn’t sure whether it was Billie’s incessant meowing from her favorite spot on the windowsill, or him mentioning he was going to make pan fried pizzas from scratch, that had done it. But if he had to pick one, he’d bet everything that was bet-able and more on the cat.
He slipped Billie a couple of extra treats before starting on the dough.
“Did your mite redundancy ever slip below hundred over the years?” Nori asked once they’d settled on the couch with their plates.
“I don’t think so,” Vir replied. “But wouldn’t that mean the treatment actually failed?”
She shook her head. “I was recently developing a serum to flush out redundant mites, just to give people that option. But then a few cases came up where those seemed to have re-activated on their own after months of remainingdormant. In each case, it was because the patient’s condition had started declining for an entirely different issue than the one they’d just recovered from.
“I don’t remember programming this. And I couldn’t find anything about it in any of my unpublished notes, either. The Auckland team is currently testing this with a small batch of cancer patients in remission. Those with a higher chance of reoccurrence. Theoretically, the prognosis looks good. But it’s too early to disclose this publicly yet, so…” She made an exaggerated motion of zipping her lips shut.
Vir nodded, mimicking the action, while also suppressing the impulse to blurt out how proud he was of her.
His fingers twitched, and he balled his hands into fists, trying to keep them from acting out again. He’d been slipping too often. And his pathetic apologies only made Nori’s mood plummet every time that he did.
