Excerpts.

"Why must you always be so goddamned...." He said, sputtering as he rummaged through potential answers. "Impetuous?" He said finally, victorious in his quest, defeated in his demeanour. His hair, usually parted to one side, was now inappropriately angry-looking. He placed his arms on his hips, and looked downwards for a few seconds, revealing the slight bald patch that had encouraged his side-parting to come to fruition. When he looked back up at her face, he could trace no change in her expression. She stared stonily at him, chewing on her inner cheek, playing with one of her earrings. Her kajaal had now smudged into the brownness of her skin, giving her an air of tired madness, and as he tried to read her carefully callous actions, he realised that she was only trying to do to him what he had done to her. She finally looked away from him, but instead of leaving the room, she retired to a nearby chair, and closed her eyes. He kneeled on the floor next to her, his hand hovering over hers, struggling to find the courage to hold it. He stared at her left hand intently - veins stark against her dark skin, the remnants of an old mosquito bite, the slight hair on her knuckles - and desperately placed his forehead against her chest.

And where was she while he saw the future in the grooves of her hands? She was thinking about lingering glances in poorly lit stairwells, the impish grins of unexplored lust, about the mysterious familiarity of strangers. When they finally had an opportunity to introduce themselves, they both laughed nervously, fumbling over the simplest words in the euphoria of the inevitable. Just like that, two days after they had exchanged names like wedding vows, they were a couple. It took less than forty-eight hours to forge the requisite comfort level for having arms around each other’s waists, each kiss a finely honed art, as they flaunted their discovery of instinctive, cinematic love.