Vodka on the rocks

Drabble - 3.1 [Ft. Raghav Rao]

"Pallavi rona band karo pehle toh... yes, stop crying. You look very ugly when you cry.."

Pallavi wiped her eyes, glaring at him from under those generously spiky wet lashes and he felt a massive pang in his chest. 

"Just tell me one thing, okay.. take a deep breath and forget about everyone and everything and tell me one simple thing."

She looked at him, her reddened gaze shuddering painfully and he steeled his body automatically for a gigantic impact. 

"Do you love him? Just say yes or no."

There was an ominous silence and he spied her entire slender frame getting arrested, freezing. She was looking at him like a deer caught in headlights, a rabbit caught in a night forest. 

"Yes."

Though he had braced for it, the sudden blood curdling agony which gutted him made his nerve endings ache in sheer despair. He had felt like someone had kicked him off the top of a skyscraper and he had landed face first, to become a bloody pancake on the pavement below. 

But Raghav Rao was nothing if not a master of maintaining composure when the situation calls for it. And right now, the situation cruelly demanded of him much more than he thought a normal human being should be capable of giving. 

But to his credit, none of that expressed on his chiselled face. The clock had struck one and the midnight breeze caressed his raven hair and her porcelain skin gently. 

"Toh bass. That's it. That is all that matters."

"What are you saying Raghav... I can't just.. I promised you... I promised that I won't leave.. I will never leave.. no matter what. Even if its my dead ex husband coming back to life all of a bloody second. I... do not give my word lightly.. I never have.."

Raghav sighed and kept the break in it repressed with a herculean effort. 

"Pallavi... the world is not going to label you as a promise breaker or fickle if you chose love over duty. In fact let the world say what it wants... you should always chose love over duty because... because your only duty should be towards your love."

"But Raghav.."

"Na.. let me speak. You told me once that I am your best friend. Didn't you? Or was that a lie?"

"Raghav! No! Don't be like that.. of course you are... you are my best friend. The one who has taught me so much.."

He smiled at her ruefully and saw her expression softening in the night lamp glowing softly in the dark of their bedroom. 

"So you say but you forgot the most essential thing I had endeavoured for you to learn. Compromise where you can. Where you can't, don't. Plant yourself like a tree and refuse to move, tell the other person.. even if its the entire world against you... to move instead."

Pallavi's hands trembled lightly in his warm but loose hold and she took a shaky breath in, looking down towards their entwined palms. His blood had begun freezing from kneeling on the ice marble flooring for too long. 

"But will it be the fair thing to do? Will it be fair....to you?"

She asked tremulously, sounding like a frightened child and he realised that in some ways she still is that in her heart... an innocent child who has been hurt one times too many by the world. He cracked a genuine smile, hoping that the shadows had been able to hide the lingering ache in his charcoal eyes....passably. 

"Oh my darling... if you love, everything is fair."

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