SnehaSmita8
He was my brother's enemy.
Not the kind you fight with in hallways or argue with at lunch tables.
The kind you don't talk about. The kind my brother went quiet around - jaw tight, eyes forward - like even saying his name out loud would give it too much power.
Kabir Malhotra.
Third year. Student council. The kind of still that didn't look like stillness - it looked like patience. Like someone who had made a decision a long time ago and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
I was supposed to stay away from him.
That was the rule. Unspoken, non-negotiable, older-brother-issued and apparently non-expiring.
So I stayed away.
Right up until I walked into him in the library on my second day of college, dropped a book on his foot, and waited for an apology that never came.
He didn't say sorry.
I didn't either.
And somehow that was the beginning of everything.
Here's what I didn't know then.
I didn't know that the rivalry my brother had been carrying for three years was missing a chapter. That somewhere in the middle of the story - in a night I half-remembered and mostly tried to forget - Kabir had done something my brother had never been told about.
Something he had never asked credit for.
Something that, when I finally found out, broke me a little.
Because you can be angry at someone for a long time. You can build walls and follow rules and tell yourself the flutter in your chest is just first-day nerves, just proximity, just the particular unsettling quality of being looked at like you are something worth the patience.
But you cannot unknow a truth once it finds you.
And this one had been waiting three years to be found.
He didn't chase. He didn't flirt. He didn't try.
He just waited - like he already knew how the story ended.
The problem was, so did I.
I just wasn't ready to admit it yet.