Page 18 of A Lab Rat's Guide to Fated Love
“Okay, okay.” She shook her head. “Guy’s an asshole. Stay away. I’m not five, Ryan. I can take care of myself. Go on now, Fehim’s waiting for you.”
He glared at her with his brow raised so high, it all but disappeared into his hairline. She crossed her arms, matching his expression. After all those years, how he still thought he could win at this against her was ridiculous.
“Fine.” He sniffed, squinting through a pair of watery brown eyes only moments later. “There’s a terrible draft in this room, by the way. Dried out my eyeballs.”
“Sure there is.”
It started drizzling as Ryan and Fehim drove off.
Back inside, Nori rummaged through her backpack for the infrared thermometer she’d packed earlier and pointed it at Vir’s temple. He still didn’t have a fever, so that was good. Satisfied, she brought out a blanket from the other room and watched his eyes flutter open as she draped it over him.
She scurried away from his quiet gaze and into the kitchen to open and close the cabinets one by one, pretending to look for food in the pantry. Therewasn’t any. She’d emptied the shelves before leaving for Delhi earlier. She wasn’t supposed to be back so soon. She wasn’t supposed to be back with aman.
Swallowing the rising panic in her chest, she sucked in a deep fill of air while her hand hovered over the cutlery drawer.
The cottage was her happy place. Her safe place. One she wasn’t too keen on sharing with a strange man. For weeks—months, likely. She’d been trying not to think about it throughout the drive, but now that they were there… the gravity of what she’d done—what she was about to do—was finally sinking in. Ryan was going to leave with Fehim in the morning. And then she’d be left alone with Vir. Her stomach churned painfully, and she slammed the drawer closed with a little more force than necessary.
A moment later, ignoring her thoughts and Vir’s eyes as they followed her around the room, she returned to the couch to perch stiffly at the other end with her laptop balanced on her thighs. Soon enough, her fingertips were flying across the keyboard, making notes, while her hands itched to work with some live human data sets. She’d waited patiently for far too long.
Vir’s soft snores pulled her out of her thoughts. She turned to look at him and his slightly parted mouth, and Ryan’s warnings from before started echoing in her head. She looked away, her thumb grazing the chunky vinyl zipper of her stolen sweatshirt.
A half hour later, her phone buzzed with Ryan’s name flashing on the screen.
“I was just about to call you!” she whispered into the phone, tiptoeing away from the couch. “Where are you guys?”
“We’re pretty far down, Nor,” Ryan replied. “It’s pouring here. They’ve just issued a land-slide warning and closed off the roads. We don’t know when they are going to re-open.”
“Oh.” She was safe. She had nothing to fear.
“Nori? Hello? You there?”
“Yes,” she answered after a pause. “You should go on then. There’s no point in waiting. The power should be back soon, anyway.”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay? What about food?” The sound of seatbelts clicking in the background accompanied his questions.
“I have ramen here. Don’t worry,” she lied. “My phone’s battery is about to die. Drive safely. I’ll call you once the power’s back on.” She tapped the end call button and half a second later, her screen went black.
She hadn’t factored death by starvation as a potential risk when she’d decided to sneak Vir out that morning.
Cursing under her breath, she noiselessly emptied their backpacks over the kitchen island. There was a small convenience store a couple of miles away. If it was still open, she could at least get some food there, if not fuel. She scribbled a quick note for Vir—BUYING FOOD, WATER. STAY HERE. BRB—and stuck it to the coffee table in front of him before leaving.
The door automatically locked behind her as she stepped outside, hoping the drizzle remained a drizzle. She couldn’t remember where her grandma’s old umbrellas were or if she even had those anymore. Ignoring the grumbling protests from her stomach, she pulled the hood of her sweatshirt up and sprinted out into the rain.
Fortunately, the store had a functional power backup and was still open by the time she reached there. Noticing a pharmacy section at the back, she grabbed a few extra emergency supplies with a week’s worth of men’s underwear, besides packaged snacks and two five-liter water bottles. She hauled one of the two backpacks on her back, the other on her front, and held the water bottles by their handles, one on each side, before starting the uphill climb back home.
The rain, no longer a drizzle, fell around her in thick sheets as she trudged ahead as fast as she could in the near total darkness. One wrong step and she might end up becoming a statistic on tomorrow’s news.
Buy umbrellas tomorrow,she added to her mental checklist, while trying, unsuccessfully, to keep herself from slipping on the slick road.And a bloody torch. A waterproof one.
Her foot slipped again, and she came to a frustrated halt. Setting the bottles down, she took off one bag to leave it on the side of the road. She could come back for it in the morning.
With the bottles dangling on each side, she started uphill again when the silhouette of a tall, hooded figure at the bend ahead made her stop in her tracks. He seemed to be headed in her direction.
The near-opaque rain and his blurry flashlight made it impossible to make out his features.
Just a local passing by.She lowered one bottle, setting it down on the asphalt while her fingers tightened around the other bottle’s handle, ready to swing it like a kettlebell if she had to.
You don’t want this in your face.Her jaw clenched.Go. Away.
