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Chapter 1: You Still Smell Like Rain
They say you only return to the places that hurt you.
That's why Aarav came back — not for forgiveness, not for peace… but because he didn't have time to keep running.
The train stopped.
So did his heart.
Across the platform, half-hidden in the crowd, stood the girl he used to love from a distance — and now, he was dying in silence just a few steps away from her.
Meher.
She hadn't changed in the ways that mattered. Her hair was longer now, curled at the ends, and she wore the kind of sadness you only collect after too many years of pretending you're okay. But her eyes… they were still the color of thunderstorms — wild, wondering, and always just a little too full.
He could've turned around.
He didn't.
And then she saw him.
Time tripped.
"Aarav?" she said, like someone remembering a dream they weren't sure was real.
He nodded once.
"Hi."
Just that. No apology. No explanation. Just that single, breathless syllable. Like the past eleven years hadn't wrapped themselves around both their throats.
She stepped forward. Not too close. Not close enough to hear the heart monitor ticking inside his chest.
"You came back."
He wanted to say a hundred things:
I missed you.
You look tired.
I don't have much time.
Instead, he said, "Only for a little while."
Her smile thinned. "How long is a little while?"
Aarav blinked at the question. It shouldn't have hit that hard.
"…Not long," he said.
Her eyes flickered with something unreadable. "You still talk like a riddle."
"You still smell like rain."
That made her stop. Something in her face softened — just slightly, but enough.
The last time they stood this close, she had a scraped knee and was crying over a lost notebook. He had taken her hand without a word and said, "The sky will remember where you dropped it." She had laughed through the tears. He remembered the exact sound.
Now, she looked like she didn't believe in skies anymore.
They walked together without meaning to — through the parking lot, past the familiar rusted bike racks near the bookstore they used to haunt. The silence between them wasn't awkward. It was ancient.
"You didn't say goodbye," she said after a while, her voice barely above the wind.
"I couldn't."
"You could've written. I sent you letters. Every week. For almost a year."
"I know."
"Then why didn't you reply?"
Aarav looked down at his shoes. "Because I didn't know how to say 'I'm breaking' in a way that wouldn't break you too."
Meher stopped walking.
He turned to her slowly.
"You were my best friend," she said. "You were more than that."
His breath caught.
Were.
Not are.
He nodded again, eyes wet but holding.
"I know."
They parted at the corner near the old chapel — the one where they used to lie on the grass and make up constellations.
Meher hesitated before leaving. "Are you staying long?"
"No."
"Will I see you again?"
Aarav forced a smile. "I'll be around."
He didn't say he had eleven months.
He didn't say the doctors had used words like irreversible, progressive, and unfair.
He didn't say that he was here to die quietly in the town he once lived loudly in.
Some truths are better left unsaid until they bleed through your ribs.
That night, Aarav sat on the edge of his motel bed, legs shaking from a walk that used to be easy. He coughed into a tissue, then stared at the red streak in the middle of the white.
It looked like someone had signed a goodbye in his lungs.
The lights were dim. The TV played static.
He pulled out his notebook — the same one he used to draw silly comics in during English class, just to make Meher laugh.
He flipped to a blank page and wrote:
Saw her today.
She still smells like rain.
Her eyes haven't forgiven me. I don't blame them.
If I had told her the truth today, would she have cried? Or stayed?
No… not yet. Not yet.
He closed the book, pressed it to his chest, and leaned back on the bed.
The ceiling above him didn't offer comfort. Just silence.
And in that silence, he whispered her name once more, like a prayer he didn't believe would ever be answered.
Meher lay awake in her apartment, fingers twitching with the urge to write.
But she didn't.
She just stared at the ceiling and whispered, "You looked tired, Aarav."
As if he could hear her.
As if he hadn't always carried the kind of sadness that made people afraid to ask what was wrong.
She remembered the boy who once promised her he'd never leave.
She remembered the night he did.
And now, here he was again. Soft-spoken. Mysterious. Ghostlike.
Back for a little while.
Whatever that meant.
In another timeline, they might've had more time.
In this one, time was already slipping through the cracks they were too scared to patch.
And in that quiet place between memory and truth, something long-buried began to wake again.
A heart.
End of Chapter 1