The cappuccino foam had somehow ended up on Arya’s nose. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and stared at the screen again. Nothing. The cursor kept blinking at her. Once. Twice. Again. She had been looking at the same paragraph for almost twenty minutes. “Come on, brain,” she whispered. Nothing. The café was getting noisier. Someone at the next table was laughing too loudly. A chair scraped against the floor. Somewhere behind the counter, a cup fell and broke, followed by a hurried apology. Arya pushed her chair back. She needed air.
Outside, the night was cooler than she expected. She took a deep breath and immediately felt better. At least she could breathe here. The café had started to feel like a box full of smoke, coffee and unfinished sentences. She walked without thinking much about where she was going. The problem was Vikram Dante. More specifically, his heart. Vikram was supposed to be a ruthless old don, the kind of man people lowered their voices to talk about. Arya had spent weeks building him into a legend of the Mumbai underworld. He had money, power, enemies and enough bodies behind him to fill several chapters.
But now that she had reached the final showdown, something wasn’t working. She couldn’t make herself believe he was heartless. There was something in his eyes. Something she had noticed while writing him. A little regret, maybe. A little kindness that didn’t belong there. Every time she tried to make him cruel, he somehow became human again. And the worst part was that her writing showed it. On the screen, Vikram Dante didn’t feel dangerous anymore. He felt like a badly written cartoon of a gangster. “Great,” Arya muttered. “Just great.” She turned onto another street.
From one of the nearby houses, music was playing. Nuvole Bianche. She slowed down. She had heard the piece many times before, but tonight it sounded different. Sad, obviously, but not completely hopeless. There was something warm underneath it. Something that reminded her of a feeling she couldn’t quite name. And then she remembered a poem. It was old. One of the first things she had written when she was starting out. She could still remember the lines.
An older couple, hand in wrinkled hand, Love’s gentle flame, forever they withstand. Their smiles, a sunshine, warm and bright and true, A love that whispered, “Me and you, forever new.”
Arya smiled. She hadn’t thought about that poem in years. It wasn’t particularly brilliant. She knew that now. Some of the lines were embarrassingly sentimental. But she remembered why she’d written it. She had wanted to. There hadn’t been a deadline. Nobody had asked for it. Nobody was waiting for the next chapter. She had simply sat down and written. When had that stopped?
She walked another three blocks before finally turning back toward Dwam. The café looked exactly the same when she entered. Same lights. Same smell. Same people pretending not to listen to each other’s conversations. Arya sat down and opened her tablet. The document was still there. Vikram Dante stared back at her from the screen. She read the last few paragraphs again. Then she stopped.
Maybe this wasn’t really about Vikram. Maybe she had spent so much time writing stories for other people that she’d forgotten what it felt like to write something that belonged to her. Everything had become deadlines. Deadlines. Revisions. Other people’s characters. Other people’s expectations. She closed the document. For once, she didn’t feel guilty about it. “No,” she said quietly. She wasn’t going to force another chapter out tonight. She picked up her bag and stood.
As she turned to leave, something near the window caught her attention. Two roses. One pink. One white. They were sitting in a small glass bottle on the table beside where she’d been sitting earlier. A folded piece of paper rested next to them. Arya frowned. She looked around. Nobody seemed to be watching. She walked over and picked up the note. There were only three words written on it. Coffee sometime?
She read it again. Then once more. A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. She looked at the tablet. The blinking cursor suddenly didn’t seem important. For the first time that evening, she had no idea what was going to happen next. And strangely, she liked that. Maybe the story she had been looking for wasn’t waiting inside that document. Maybe it was sitting somewhere outside it. Maybe it was a stranger. Maybe it was another cup of coffee. Maybe it was nothing at all.
Arya folded the note and slipped it into her pocket. She smiled. Vikram Dante could wait until tomorrow. His story probably needed a little humanity anyway. Tonight, Arya had something else to write about. Or for once, she didn’t need to write anything.
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