Okay, maybe my mind exaggerated that. Kian wasn't knocked out due to the force of the flying glass, but he did stumble backwards because of it. The back of his sneakers got caught in the slightly upturned carpet and he almost went down flying, his back meeting the covered floor with a loud yet muffled thud.

Radhika rushed forward, one hand clasped tightly over her mouth and eyes wide with horror. Vivaan was ahead of her, and was already bent over as he examined his, our, friend. Though I could spot the tiny curve of his mouth, he was amused.

As much as I hated to admit, even I was torn between my urge to laugh and my concern.

But when Kian continued to lie there, unmoving, any traces of a snigger that was building inside me disappeared and I instinctively dropped to my knees, pushing Viv out of the way, and leaned over. My heart was in my throat. Obviously I was aware that the worst thing for him might be a concussion, but still an irrational dread was coiling in my stomach, leaving the feeling of a nasty aftertaste in my mouth.

I checked his pulse, which turned out to be normal. That was a relief. He wasn't going to be unconscious for long.

And sure enough, he stirred moments later, a pained groan escaping his lips. There were beginnings of a bruise developing on his forehead, but it didn't seem as if it'll turn into a bump.

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod Kian, are you okay? No I mean of course you're not. Shit shit shit fuuuck I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to hurt you! I—"

"It's okay Rads," Kian croaked out, his voice coming out scratchy as he squeezed his eyes shut, gingerly touching the part of his forehead which had collided with the metal glass. "Though next time when you're flinging deadly objects around a room, make sure your target is not in front of the door. It's a recipe for disasters."

She blushed guiltily but didn't reply to that. I was thankful that he still had enough senses working to make sarcastic comments. It should mean that there wasn't any lasting damage right?

"Can you sit up?" I asked him, murmuring gently.

It was as if he noticed me for the first time, for he jerked in surprise despite my soft tone, squinting at my face, before his lips stretched into a lazy grin. "Oh I don't know. This is a vulnerable position for me. Mind kissing some life into me eh Sleeping Ugly?"

That confirmed it, he was perfectly fine.

Giving in and smiling a bit, I played along. "Really? Wasn't it the other way round? The Prince saved the helpless Princess by molesting her in her sleep."

"What can I say?" He shrugged. "I'm a feminist, the classical kind."

The loud clearing of a throat brought us back from our short reverie. I was thankful my complexion was on the duskier side. Otherwise I would've resembled a ripe Kashmiri apple, given how hot my face felt. Instead, I focused on Kian as Vivaan and I helped him up. He swayed a little when he was finally upright before getting steady on his feet again.

Radhika kept muttering frantic apologies which Kian waved away good-naturedly, slowly making his way towards his room. I wordlessly followed, taking his hand, not only because I wanted to make sure he would be okay but also because I was in no mood to witness the resumption of the lovers' spat.

Barring some soft music playing in the background, the hallway was quiet, naturally, since it was nearly midnight. Kian was slightly leaning against my side, perhaps still feeling a bit dizzy. Facing me once we reached his room, he rested his back towards the door. "So that was embarrassing, talk about bad luck. I was so confident about my plan."

Puzzled, I repeated dumbly. "Plan? What plan?"

He shrugged, clearly uncomfortable, and pushed his hands deep into his khaki pockets. "Umm...you know, being all chivalrous and dropping you on your doorstep, ending a date properly...but never mind that now... "

"Oh...yeah okay. Better luck next time I guess." I said, there was a ringing in my head and my face suddenly felt warm. "I should get going..."

"Right...goodnight then."

"Goodnight," I mumbled, watching him swipe his key card to quickly slip inside. His haste to escape me would've been offensive if I didn't understand how awkward this conversation was.

My conscious was practically howling in my head whilst I started walking back. I wanted to kick my own backside. Better luck next time? Which girl in her right mind says that? He was clearly giving me the most obvious hint possible but I acted like a bloody doe-eyed coward, too nervous to take the juicy bait.

Juicy? What is the matter with you?

Too lost in my thoughts, I blinked when I reached my room, disoriented. It was completely silent and I assumed Vivaan had left. I hesitated for a split second before spinning on my heels and jogging back. It was pure instinct, since I had no idea what I'd do after reaching my destination.

Swallowing the constricting sensation once I faced his door again, I tried, fruitlessly, to calm my furiously pumping heart. The ringing sensation was back in my head yet I managed to fight through it and firmly rapped on the door three times.

Twenty seven seconds later — yes I counted — it was pulled open from inside, revealing a pyjama-clad Karan, holding a toothbrush in his froth-filled mouth.

Yuck!

Trying to hide my disgust, I began, after slight hesitation, "umm...I wanted to talk to—"

"Ash?" a voice came from behind Karan.

"Kian, hey!" I was ashamed at the out-of-breath way I uttered those words.

"An thas m cue th leave," Karan managed to say, struggling to balance his brush between his teeth and still somehow managing to shoot a knowing smirk in my direction.

"What's up?" Kian said when his roommate had slammed the bathroom door behind him.

"I uh...I don't know..."

There goes one beautiful eyebrow, touching that equally beautiful hairline.

"Oh okay."

We stood there, mute, staring at each other.

This was the stupidest thing I could've done! Gah! Why do they make it look so effortless in the movies?

"So, goodnight I guess..." Kian said finally, turning around painfully slowly, though I spotted the hint of a smile on his features which felt almost mocking.

Maybe that expression was solely a figment of my imagination, but it gave me enough courage.

"Wait!"

He whipped around in less than one tenth of a second and I moved forward in half that time. Reaching out and grabbing his face beneath my fingers, I pulled his mouth down and brought our lips together, only just catching the widening of his eyes as mine squeezed shut a moment later.

Eons passed before I finally felt him coming out of his initial shock at the contact. The warm sensation of his hands against the thin fabric of my t-shirt was so good I almost sighed out loud as he pushed our forms together. My fingers never left his slightly prickly cheeks as he kissed me harder.

Panting for breath once we broke apart, I giggled.

Ew ew ew! Why a damn giggle?

To my utter mortification, Kian let out a laugh at the ridiculous sound I still couldn't believe had passed my lips.

"Shut up!" I snapped lazily, nuzzling his throat while trying to not enjoy myself too much in his loose embrace.

"I didn't say anything," he muttered defensively, though I picked up the laughter that was present in his tone.

"You're making fun of me!"

"Well, you can't blame me. I never could've imagined you jumping my bones after acting unbearably awkward at the very idea." He chuckled again.

"I did no such thing! You were the one sending suggestive signals like a whore!" I shot back.

"I won't deny that," he said, still amused. "But you've got to admit that we both resembled over-enthusiastic teens, making out in the hallway and everything."

"We were over-enthusiastic teens making out in the hallway, God!" I groaned, closing my eyes briefly as a fresh wave of embarrassment hit me. "I can't believe I just acted exactly like those desperate horny adolescents I've spent my entire life making fun of!"

"Maybe you were always jealous of them," he suggested, chewing the inside of his cheek to prevent that irritating grin from resurfacing.

"You're not helping, at all!" I started to pull away.

Acting quickly, Kian bent slightly and pressed a chaste kiss against my mouth, making me deliciously lightheaded all over again.

"Okay, goodnight for real this time and don't you dare regret what happened right now!"

"This one or the one before it?"

"Both."

Unable to stop myself, I smiled giddily up at him and nodded. He grinned back as I turned away from him and started walking. I didn't look back until after he was out of my periphery, even when I could feel his gaze on me.

Swiping my key-card against the lock, I pushed the door open only to find a red-eyed Radhika glaring at the TV, as if annoyed at the movie playing on it. My smile dropped as I fully took in her state. One glance at the screen confirmed that Insurgent was the target of her clearly misplaced anger.

"Are you alright?" I asked her, after I was seated on the bed beside her.

Without a word, she enveloped her arms around my shoulders and started shaking uncontrollably, sobbing.

Guess she's not alright then.

I didn't say anything in response, just stroked her hair until her tears dried down. This seemed bad and while concern at her apparent distress was making me curious about its cause, I figured that right now, probing questions was the last thing she needed.

"I hate him. I really, really hate him."

I had a fairly certain idea who "him" was. All this sounded worse than I had initially anticipated. Had they broken up? But I couldn't bring myself to ask her anything, yet.

Once she stopped shaking and calmed down, she hopped off the bed and dashed into the en-suite, leaving me more worried than ever. I picked up my phone from the bedside table and quickly typed a message to Vivaan.

"What did you do?"

I waited for his text and meanwhile replied to my other unseen texts, which were from my parents, Alia and Kian. When after five minutes there was still no response, I opened Vivaan's chat box again, wanting to check his last seen only to see that he'd blocked me seconds after receiving my text.

Prick.

The sound of a door slamming shut brought my attention back to Radhika, who had just emerged from the bathroom, looking like she'd washed her face. It didn't make much difference honestly, for she still looked miserable, although her eyes appeared less swollen now.

"Feeling better?" I questioned tentatively, hoping that she was.

"Yeah, much. Sorry about acting like a baby before." Her voice came out thick.

"Don't worry about that, what are friends for?" When she didn't say anything I continued, "what happened though?"

Radhika sighed and approached the TV, moving like a zombie. She paused the movie and sunk down, sitting cross legged on the floor. I joined her silently.

"Well...where do I begin?" she mumbled, mostly to herself. I wanted to say "from the beginning" but held my tongue.

She started talking a while later, more loudly this time. "Well...I suppose I never told you this, but I have a...how shall I put this? A passion for stories I guess. I'm mostly into writing screenplays but I also sometimes research about filmmaking in general y'know? Like the job of a movie director I guess?"

"Oh...yeah you've never told me that." I didn't know where she was going with this.

"I mean I hadn't told anyone, but I've been writing screenplays since ninth grade I think. And all that while, I never put much thought into it, like in terms of making it an actual career." She fidgeted, letting out a humourless chuckle as she continued, "like an idiot, I decided to take whatever subjects seemed nice and whatever you guys were taking. That's right; my decision about the selection of my core stream was based on the desire of staying in the same class as y'all."

I opened my mouth and closed it again, stopping myself from saying how insane that was. What if she had failed? Had become depressed like Adi and taken her own life? And to think that unlike him, who was forced, she made this childish decision for herself!

"I know you want to say that it was stupid, I agree it was, but what is done is done, I can't change anything now. Besides, unlike Aditya, I was mostly fond of my subjects, so it wasn't all that bad," Radhika said, correctly interpreting the direction of my thoughts.

I ignored the familiar pang that went up my chest at hearing his name out loud. My phone was burning a hole in my pocket and I pushed back the guilt of not having read his e-mail even after five months.

"I you say so," I muttered instead.

She gave me a rueful smile at that. "Thanks for not judging me outright."

"Oh I'm totally judging you! But don't worry about that, I judge everybody," I told her, half teasing, half serious.

"Of course, that is you trademark Ashiana." She visibly relaxed after that, even laughing at her little remark. "So anyway, I made a hasty choice and decided to stick to it nonetheless. I became aware of my ill-judgement when I saw everyone around me, when I saw you all, talking about life after school. You guys knew what you wanted, I didn't. And it was frustrating, so much so that I started hating all conversations revolving around college."

Understanding dawned on me suddenly. "Was that why you acted so...morose? Crying in bathrooms and everything?"

She nodded. "I can't believe you remember that! I told you it was silly, you needn't have worried about me acting irrational."

"It wasn't silly," I said automatically. "Quite the opposite in fact. You could've confided with me." It was like a hard punch in the gut. Here was another thing she couldn't, or rather, didn't share with me. That spoke volumes about my qualities as a good friend.

On second thoughts, scratch the "good" from that.

"Stop beating yourself. I didn't tell anyone. It wasn't your fault," she said, cutting off my chain of thoughts. It was getting really unnerving; her knack of correctly guessing whatever went through my head.

"I guess...but I can't understand how all this is related to your fight with Viv."

Her face darkened. "Oh it was more than a fight. I wasn't lying when I said I hate him. You see, I started posting my stuff online. And in the process, I somehow ended up joining Insta, planning to start a blog on there, posting self-composed quotes and stuff. I now have one point five thousand followers—"

One more thing I didn't know.

"—but that's not relevant. And don't make that face. I was, still am, anonymous. Nobody knew about it, except Vivaan though he is a nobody so whatever."

"Oooh burn!" I whistled lowly.

She chuckled and playfully flipped her hair. I could sense her inner bitch rising to the surface as she was full on ranting now. "To cut the long story short, I eventually found out that he was cheating. Okay no, not cheating but flirting with other girls, Instagram models as they call themselves. What a joke! Although I won't lie, they made me question my confidence from the minute I joined that site, I learned to live with it however, even followed some classy accounts. But never mind that now, I'm digressing." She stopped for a minute to refill her lungs.

This was getting too much take in at once.

"What I mean is," she started again. "I was starting to accept their existence, even though I was still insanely jealous. Plus, my own following was growing huge so that was enough to distract me. Everything was well and dandy for a while. I even told Vivaan about my mini stardom on the internet a couple of months ago, and to my delight," she clenched her teeth as she spat the word. "I found out that he was also an anonymous photographer on Insta, with a far less impressive presence, a miserly following of about three hundred losers."

My jaw hung open at that. "Vivaan? A photographer? But he's so..."

"Boring? Yeah I had the same thought at first, though my stupid, love-struck brain, refused to dwell on that. I gotta admit his pictures were pretty good. He mostly captured nature and sometimes the occasional animal, a cute dog or cat, and all his shots were insanely beautiful abstracts."

"You're still missing the point Rads. How did you come to know that he cheated?"

"What do you think?" She was seething again. "I caught him red-handed. Imagine my surprise when on one fine day, the day before yesterday, I checked my feed and found pictures of a random pretty girl on the profile of my fucking boyfriend!"

I gaped at her.

"That's right." She was now wiping angry tears, "he had a fucking photo shoot with a barely-dressed so-called model a week ago and failed to inform me. What's more? He was shamelessly flirting with her on all her pictures, since she commented on every single one."

"You're joking! Are you sure he was flirting?"

"Well, what does, 'thanks baby' and 'I love you for agreeing to this' accompanied by red hearts sound to you?"

"Well, there is a possibility that you might've interpreted it wrongly. People say all kinds of stuff on social media that they don't really mean."

"Calling a half-naked girl 'baby' comes under my definition of flirting. Besides, what truly enraged me was that when I confronted him, he acted as if what he did was not a big deal, told me that it would be best for us—as if there were any us left by that point—to do our B-tech from Mumbai so that we could try our luck with Bollywood. He said that he had laid out a whole plan for me, as if my opinion didn't matter, rudely commenting, several times, that I didn't know any better, given my lack of planning before for my stream selection. By the time we came back from Gopi Talav, I knew I've had enough, and the volcano burst and, well, I ended up hurting Kian in my rage," she finished, looking exhausted.

"Wow, okay, you were right, he is an asshole." It was a relief that I was slowly getting better with physical contact for I figured she needed another hug and pulled her into one. "I'm sorry about everything, really. Regardless of my mild dislike for your boyfriend, even I couldn't have imagined that he would've done something like this."

"Ex-boyfriend," she corrected, her words muffled by my shirt. "I officially broke up with him almost an hour ago." She shifted back after a while and resumed the movie again, silently asking me to shut up.

I did as exactly that and moved to lean back at the foot of the bed, watching Tobias talk to his mother in barely-suppressed anger. After a while, Radhika spoke up again.

"This guy is hot, this movie is crap."

I tilted my head. "Everyone loves it though I don't understand the hype."

"This guy is waaay too good-looking for this girl."

I frowned. "Now you're being mean."

"Whatever! This actress is too far away to get hurt by my honesty."

"By your careless remark, not honesty," I muttered quietly, though she paid me no heed, still recovering from her sour mood.

"I wish I was more beautiful, maybe then Vivaan wouldn't have cheated," she moaned after a while, and I realised that her little outburst had nothing to do with the movie.

"You know," I began, afraid that she'll ignore my words again. "It won't have mattered anyway. Like I said he is an ass."

Rads looked at me tearfully, self-loathing evident on her features. "It would've at least made me feel better about myself."

"Think of it this way." I tried to give her my best get-yourself-together smile while pulling her into a side-hug, "it may feel good to be pretty, but the problem with being beautiful is that there are thousands of people who look like you. Ugliness, however, is unique."

Radhika rolled her eyes. "Why do you have to be so wise all the time?"

I shrugged. "I was born a grandmother."

"Whatever."

I shook my head. "You're obsessed with that word."

She smiled softly, looking straight ahead. "Whatever."

                                                                                 {[]}

Hola from the other side of the screen!

I have nothing to say right now except that I hope y'all liked this chapter. 

One down, four more to go. That's right, this book is slowly coming to an end. *cue happy tears*

Have a nice day!

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