Rekindled | ✓

Chapter 37. Cooking

🎶 Home - Catie Turner

Published on 25.02.2023

❝ i miss you when i least expect it,
so when are you coming home? ❞

🥀

Ayansh couldn't even walk inside his penthouse. No sooner did the elevator open and he exited, his legs gave up as he fell on his knees and a strangled sob broke through him.

The world seemed to be closing on him and his lungs were struggling to draw in air. His throat felt tight and his hazel eyes couldn't stop the tears that were streaming down his face. He wanted to disappear, disappear to the point his body was nothing but a mosaic of cells, cells invisible to the naked eye, scattered and buried deep within the earth with no intention of getting found.

Ayansh stared at the closed door, weeping silently. Grief has a way of draping itself around you in the most excruciating way. His heart ached when he remembered the way Inaaya was curled up in his lap, cradled in his arms as if he was holding a broken piece of glass whose edges were piercing into him, drawing out blood, making him bled and he couldn't do anything except clung onto that broken shard for it would kill him to let it go. It was better to bleed than to be killed.

She would have been dead.

The woman who meant the most to him, the one who makes him want to see another day, who makes him hope, who isd his sun and his entire universe would've been dead if he didn't reach there. Another sharp pang of pain shot up his spine as if someone just burnt him with a hot iron rod and he let out an agonizing scream.

How could he be so oblivious? How could everyone who stayed with her, under the same roof be so oblivious?

How did nobody question her desperate pleas? The hints have been all there, around them, scattered, waiting to be connected and yet never did anyone try to pick on those hints. Even if she was too good at veiling her emotions, it's impossible to believe that she never cracked, never slipped, never let her facade break which made her scarred self surface.

But then, how do you imagine the worst scenario happening to the ones you love? You don't, you can't. Inaaya had been running her whole life, trying to escape but weren't everyone around her doing the same? How are they any different when they suppressed their doubts regarding the strangeness in her behaviour by trivial excuses? Was the only reason that he never forced her to say the truth was because he didn't want to make her uncomfortable or a part of him was scared for himself too that he wouldn't be able to handle it? That he wouldn't know how to deal with it, that words would fail him and actions would betray.

Maybe everyone was too scared to look beyond the closed door.

Because when the door would open, they wouldn't know if they had to cross it, loiter around it or simply avoid it.

And now, that the door has been opened, Ayansh finds himself in the same position.

He couldn't be a coward. For everything Inaaya had endured, not just for a day but years, facing her Dad daily and pretending nothing was wrong, keeping an ocean of pain within herself and never letting it pour out on anyone, justice was the bare minimum she deserved and for that, he had to cross the threshold and step in.

Ayansh sniffled and took a shaky breath as he stood on his unsteady legs. He unlocked the door of his penthouse and stepped in. He slid onto the chair and removed his phone, dialling the one number he ought to.

Inaaya struggled to open her eyes. Her eyelashes were adhered to each other due to her incessant crying earlier. She didn't realise when she fell asleep. She blinked, trying to adjust to the light and looked around, taking in her surroundings. Her eyes fell on Maya who was sitting beside her, staring at her with worry. Realisation dawns and she once again looks around, this time, more frantically.