In His Custody ✎ | (MaNan)

✰ 61 - coming undone

This is probably the most emotionally heavy chapter you can expect to read in this entire book. 

There's both so much said, and unsaid, at the same time, and them at their rawest.

So please, please drop your thoughts and feedback as you go through it in the in-line comments, which can help me know whether the gravity of the problems between them have been conveyed or not. 

⭒

Nandini

For a handful of seconds, I could not even believe my ears, that Manik Malhotra had said something like that – something bordering... no, surrendering to an emotion as unarming as love. And he was... surprisingly doing okay. He hadn't broken down. It had not ripped his gut, and his pride, out to admit it.

I was still reeling in that shock when he calmly said, "I – I actually didn't come all the way here to tell you all this," as if it distracted from the intensity of a claim he tossed in so easily, and then he continued speaking, "Trust me, I'm not trying to dig up our past, have us pointing fingers again, or go in circles on this matter, bohot kar liya woh sab."

"Besides, look at you," He waved down as he marvelled, scanning 360 degrees around him, "You have a life now, Nandini. You have goals, you have dreams, you have a purpose in life bigger than you, bigger than us." That demarcation was emphasised to make it very clear. "You're fulfilling the vision we wanted, for Dhruv and Rishabh." And it seemed like he didn't want to spoil that... or take away from the meaning of it, so he simply made me the heroine of the day.

Even his genuine appreciation mercilessly stung my eyes, as memories of the blood, sweat and tears I put in to making all of this happen... building it brick by brick, out of absolutely nothing resurfaced. I deeply sighed, as a few tears of extreme exhaustion and bittersweet happiness blended in. Only I knew how incredibly hard it had all been, and how it had been my one tangible escape from all the suffering I was undergoing.

And it was all finally over.

He stepped into the space between us, gently collected my dupatta along with my elbows and hoisted my gaze up at him. "You have no idea how proud of you I am, Nandini Murthy!"

My shoulders convulsed as I broke into an agonising sob, coming undone in front of the one and only person who truly felt the impacts of my mission. I wove my arms through the gaps beside his torso, thumping a cheek on his broad frame. Amidst all my pain, I somehow found an escape to channel into... and now that too was finally gone. Done and dusted. He squeezed his grip around me tightly, feeling inexplicable relief in my arms himself as he took away all my difficult, unprocessed feelings with his physical strength.

Manik had locked my head in the crevice of his elbow, and was inhaling my scent deeply as one of his fingers cleaned his tear-duct, before he dropped a soft kiss on top of my head. "I love you," He repeated breathlessly against my partition, thoroughly imbibing the renewed strength of that phrase especially when said to someone else.

Finally processing the monumental confession, for which I would have done anything back in the day, I dropped my hands, brought them forward and squished them between us. The pads of my palm stubbed his chest with a pang, pushing him away with more force than I intended.

My heartbeats spiked, having succumbed to a moment of weakness. I breathlessly scanned my lab – which was my workplace – and at the man I so achingly loved. He was standing point blank, looking down upon himself where I hit him, and then at how far away he was from me.