ONE LAST TIME (Discontinued)

CHAPTER 5

Song of the Chapter-

Love Me Like You Do - Ellie Goulding.

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I sat there, numb and cold in the passenger seat of Aryaman's car as he drove silently through the empty streets. My arms were tightly wrapped around me as I tried to desperately control the tremors going through my body.

It was no use. I shook and quivered violently as the two rings still haunted my conscious. It was past 8:00 PM now, and I was far away from college, far away from that dark room, but it felt like I was still there, trapped with Maddy, hearing those deathly rings again and again.

I dared to glance at Aryaman and saw that he was focusing dead ahead on the road but his expression was ghosted, his eyes were gaunt and he bore the look of a man who had been proven right but now was afraid of the consequences that would follow.

Looking at him made me remember the way I had snatched the phone from Maddy's grip and dashed through the empty hallways of S.P.A.C.E, with dread, fear, shock, confusion, a tiny bit of hope and Aryaman's words in my mind.

My palms were sweaty as I held the same phone that had called him and mustered up the courage to dial Aryaman's number instead. My voice was breathless, my words coming out in gasps but somehow he had understood and he had picked me up. I had sat horrified and shaking in his car as he dialled the number repeatedly but the line was gone. It was dead now.

However, it hadn't been before.

And that was what was making all the difference in the world. My phone lay there on the dashboard, its battery long drained out with our numerous and helpless attempts to call again and again, all of which had failed. We had given up at a point and were now driving through the streets of Mumbai, aimless and hopeless, both of us too consumed in our thoughts to form a coherent sentence.

"Are you sure you heard the rings?" Aryaman asked breaking the silence and asking the same question for what felt like the zillionth time. His voice still hadn't lost its tone of disbelief and was still laced with complete and absolute shock.

"I'm sure." My voice though? It was cracked and broken as I repeated the same thing to him. I was far from being composed, far from being okay, far from being anything but shaken to the core. And who would blame me? My phone was just used to place a call to my dead boyfriend's cell phone and it had connected through. The thought itself was enough to chill anybody to the bone.

"And there were two rings? Just two?" Aryaman interrogated, again with the same question that I had answered countless times before.

"Yes." I answered without batting an eyelid. It felt like by these repeated questions and answers, both of us were just convincing ourselves that the horrific event had indeed happened. That it was the stark reality. There was no escape from it. However shocking and confusing it might sound, it had occurred, there was no denying that and it had also most certainly thrown us headfirst into a murky web of finely spun lies that were trapping us alive.

"And it just got cut? Just like that?" He asked wariness evident in his voice.

"Yes." I answered fluidly, mechanically. My mind was still too cluttered. Still too clouded to form anything more than monosyllabic replies. The fact that I was still standing on my two feet and was sane enough to talk, was all down to Aryaman. I didn't know what I would have done if it wasn't for him.

I felt another tremor chase through my body as I wondered what would have happened to me if Aryaman hadn't told me earlier that I was being lied to. If that wouldn't have happened, then the shock of hearing that call being placed would have surely caused me to collapse. I glanced at Aryaman, gratefully, because now, after everything, one thing was for sure, we were caught in a swarm of lies and they were choking us every passing second but at least both of us had a head start now and I owed that to him. We weren't stumbling in the dark anymore. We had a path now. A trail to follow. Where it would lead us, I had no idea, but I was assured now that there was a different story at the end and it was starkly different from what I had been told.