Dr Meera Saravana has been on the run for the last ten years due to a fatal misunderstanding. She ends up in New York, hoping that maybe this time everything will work out. But that's turning out to be impossible the more she gets involved with the...
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It's been a year since Nat has seen her brother.
She's torn between kicking him out of her bar and hugging him.
Ivan looked tired in her eyes. More tired than the day of dads funeral. Nat takes in the heavy set of his broad shoulders and the circles that seem glued underneath his eyes. He fiddled with the ring on his finger, waiting for her to say something. She wasn't sure what to say. Everything seemed to evaporate like mist. There was a tight feeling in her chest that persisted no matter how much Nat swallowed it down.
"Ok, you two are making this awkward." Nik rolled his eyes. "Say something before I order another drink."
Nat felt her eye twitch, more out of habit than annoyance. Sometimes she wondered why her twin was born with such a thick skull.
"What do you two want?" She asked, leaning back in her seat and crossing her leg over the other. "I doubt you're here for just a drink."
There was a phrase she followed ever since high school, If she didn't feel confident, then she could look confident. Nat had years of practice—from shitty ex-girlfriends to her slightly judgemental parents—it was easy for her. She could stare her oldest brother down without even flinching...even for hours if she felt petty and spiteful enough.
"I don't want anything," Nik said, nudging Ivan. "But this one wants to say something."
Nat grit her teeth, feeling more and more vexed as the long hand of the clock crept slowly to the end of her lunch break. If Ivan wanted something from her he could've just asked over the phone like a normal functioning human being. She didn't just sit on her ass all day and do invoices, there was a bar to run. Ivan caught the darkening look on her face and quickly shot Nik a look.
"I wanted to know if you were safe," Ivan said.
And wasn't that just peachy?
"As you can see," she said through grit teeth, gesturing to herself and the bar. "I'm fine. Thank you so very much for the wellness check."
"That's not what I meant." He said.
"Sometimes I wondered if you know what anything means, Ivan," Nat said, bitterness seeping into her tone. She had promised Meera that she would be well behaved and try to act polite in front of Ivan from now on but he was seriously testing what little patience she had managed to scrape from the bottom of the barrel. "You're such an oblivious asshole sometimes it makes me want to take a baseball bat to your head and fix your brain."
Ivan had the decency to look chastised. He started to twist the ring around his finger.
Good, Nat thought viciously, that's what you get for making my friend cry, you asshat.
