This is about Samir

It had been two months now. March 13th, 2027. Friday. 33, 34, 35. I counted through strained breath, each number leaving my mouth rough and low as I pulled myself up again. My shoulders burned. My muscles tightened and swelled with every rep. The bar trembled faintly beneath my grip. Sweat rolled down from my temple, ran along the edge of my jaw, and disappeared into the collar of my shirt. The room smelled of iron, rubber, and effort. Morning light came through the blinds in thin pale lines and stretched across the floor. Two months had changed me. I was leaner now. Harder in every visible way. My body looked better than before, as if discipline, repetition, and anger had quietly built something sharper inside me. My jawline had grown more defined. My curly hair had gotten longer, falling near my cheekbones now, and whenever I parted it down the middle, it softened my face just enough to make the rest of me look even more striking. In the office, girls noticed me more than before. If I had to say what did the most, it was probably the subtle beard, the shoulders, and the silence I had learned to carry with confidence. I dropped down from the bar, chest rising and falling hard. For a few seconds I just stood there, palms open, letting the ache settle into my arms. Then I reached for my bottle, took a long drink of water, and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked different. Not just stronger. More put together. More dangerous in a quiet kind of way. By the time I left the gym, the morning had fully opened. The city outside was already moving in its usual rhythm, ordinary and indifferent, like it had no idea what I carried inside me. I drove home, showered, and let the hot water run over my sore shoulders while steam swallowed the mirror. Then came the routine that had slowly become part of who I was. I dried my hair and parted it carefully down the middle. I shaped my beard just enough to keep it clean. Skincare. Deodorant. A pressed office shirt. Trousers that fit the way they were supposed to. Watch on my wrist. Cologne at my neck. One last look in the mirror. Ready. By the time I got to the office, I already knew how I looked. Like the kind of man people watched when he walked in, even if they pretended not to. That was where Kaitlyn asked me. “Aarav, me and Jessica are planning to bar-hop today in Austin. Do you wanna go?” Kaitlyn was blonde, model-shaped, the kind of woman who always seemed aware of the effect she had on a room. She looked twenty-four even though she was thirty-one. Her office shirts always looked one movement away from becoming a problem. Jessica, according to Hassan, had always been interested in me. She was a single mom who literally looked like Jessica from Suits—middle thirties, blonde, a normal Texan lady with that natural American pride in the way she talked and carried herself. “Well, sure,” I said. “OK, I will tell ya and meet me in my apartment and we will go from there,” Kaitlyn replied. By 5:00 o’clock, the office was over. The whole day passed with that strange lightness people carry when they already know they are not going home to an ordinary evening. Before leaving, I texted my coach that I was taking an off today. I typed: “Sorry Coach, got caught in the middle of something.” A lie that Coach probably would not believe too. I drove home with the feeling of the night already waiting somewhere ahead of me. At home, I changed carefully. I wore my newly bought long sleeve from Ralph Lauren. I stood in front of the mirror longer than usual, fixing my hair, adjusting my sleeves, choosing what version of myself I wanted to take into the night. Then I sprayed on my favorite perfume—Azzaro The Most Wanted. That scent changed the mood immediately. Darker. Sharper. More deliberate. Then I got into the car and drove toward Kaitlyn’s apartment through the busy streets of Dallas. I picked up both Kaitlyn and Jessica, and after four long hours beneath the black stretch of the Texas sky, we finally reached Austin’s 6th Street. What a busy street it was. Even before we stepped fully into it, the place announced itself. Neon signs glowed over crowded sidewalks. Music spilled out of open bars and collided with music from the next one over. Headlights swept over faces, heels, leather jackets, dresses, cigarette smoke, and spilled drinks shining on the pavement. Groups of drunk strangers laughed too loudly. Bouncers stood at doors like part of the architecture. Ubers kept pulling up and disappearing. The whole street looked restless, loud, and alive in a way that almost felt predatory. We had booked an Airbnb because everyone knew people would get drunk and there would be no point trying to drive back. The Airbnb was in downtown Austin, and from the moment we walked in, it felt like the kind of place built for nights that would go too far. The city view was perfect. The master bedroom had a ceiling-top window, and from the 15th floor, Austin looked glittering and distant, beautiful in that cold way cities often do from above. By 11:25 PM, we left the Airbnb and stepped out to hop bars. Mala Vida. One of the best and most crowded bars in Austin. Lights flashed over bodies in red, blue, and violet streaks. The dance floor shook under too many feet. Drinks moved through the room like extensions of people’s hands. Smoke and perfume thickened the air. Bass hit through the walls and into my ribs until conversation felt like something people only attempted out of necessity. “One more Green Tea,” Kaitlyn said. After seven rounds of tequila, Kaitlyn was uncontrolled. Her words blurred together. Her balance came and went. Her laugh got louder and less attached to anything real. At some point, the chaos of Mala Vida became too much, and when she got a little bit sober, we moved to Speakeasy. Speakeasy felt different the moment I walked in. The noise was still there, but it sat lower, heavier, beneath dim golden lighting and dark walls. The place felt older than the bars outside, like it wanted to be taken more seriously. The wood was darker. The booths felt more private. There was a mood to it—half elegant, half dangerous. Bottles glowed behind the bar like stained glass. People leaned closer to hear each other. Laughter came in shorter bursts. The music was not softer, but it felt deeper somehow, less chaotic and more intimate, like the whole place was built for secrets, bad decisions, and conversations people would deny later. Kaitlyn ordered some pasta there, still laughing in that loose, unsteady way, and then a couple more shots. The food came warm and heavy, steam rising from the plate under low amber light. Glasses clinked. Ice shifted. Someone behind us was celebrating too loudly. Someone else looked like they were about to cry into a drink. The whole place felt like a room full of lives slipping just a little off track. By the time we stepped back outside, the street had changed again. The night had thickened. The sidewalks looked more crowded now, but less stable. Girls walked barefoot holding their heels in one hand. Men shouted across the street like they had known each other for years. A police car rolled by slowly, blue light washing over the pavement without sirens. Smoke drifted out from alley corners. Music escaped from every doorway and mixed above the street into one loud, shapeless pulse. Drunk laughter rose and vanished. Somewhere glass broke. Somewhere someone was kissing against a wall like the rest of the city had disappeared. And then the night changed. “Ma’am, please control yourself. Hey, Meckenzie, call an Uber for her,” said the manager from one of the sports bars on 6th Street. “I am so sorry, I am so sorry.” That voice. It cut through everything. The same voice I had heard a month ago. The same voice I had carried inside me without admitting it. The same voice I had wanted to hear again far more than I should have. I turned. And even through the smoke, the lights, the blur of people and alcohol and movement, I knew her instantly. From her eyes. From her hair. From the ache that rose in me the second I saw her. It was Prekshya. “Prekshya, are you okay?” She looked at me and hugged me out of nowhere. And in that moment, Samir disappeared. He did not enter my mind. He did not exist. There was only the warmth of her body against mine, the softness of her sudden trust, the strange stillness that can happen even in the middle of a loud street when one person becomes the entire center of the moment. I had so many things to tell her that none of them came out. Time slowed around us in a way that felt almost cruel. It felt like fifteen minutes. In reality, maybe it was thirty seconds. Maybe a little more. But it stayed. Still, I had to ask. As a gentleman, I did. “Where is Samir?” Prekshya went silent. She did not reply. All she said, in the most drunk way possible, was: “How are you Aarav?” That answer settled somewhere dark inside me. Not because she forgot the question. Because she heard it and answered everything except that. “Sir, can you please take care of her?” the manager said. So I took her to the Airbnb. She was mumbling about Samir the whole trip back, and every time his name left her mouth, it sounded bruised. The city lights flashed across her face through the car window—red, white, gold, blue—making her look half here and half lost somewhere else. Kaitlyn was barely holding herself together by then. Jessica had gone quieter, watching everything with that calm, knowing expression people wear when they understand more than they are saying. When we all got there, Jessica made hot lemon for both Kaitlyn and Prekshya. Inside, the Airbnb had gone soft with exhaustion. Outside, Austin was still alive and reckless, but inside everything had slowed. The smell of warm lemon moved gently through the room. The lights were dim. The silence had weight now. For the first time in my life, I was making drinks for a girl like she was a baby, and Prekshya drank in the cutest way possible—small careful sips, her fingers curled around the cup, her eyes heavy, her whole softness undoing something in me. Then I took her to the master room. She was hugging me like a baby, trusting me in that careless drunken way that only made me more careful with her. When I finally laid her down on the bed, I pulled an extra blanket over her and was just about to step outside, because it would have been totally inappropriate to stay there. Then she said my name. “Aarav.” Softly. Not loud enough for the room. Just enough for me. She told me to come near her. She needed water. I went to the kitchen and got her a cup of water. When I came back, I stood beside her bed and looked at her. The room was dim. The city lights from the 15th floor came in through the glass and stretched across the bed in pale broken patterns. Shadows moved across her face whenever traffic passed below. Even drunk, she looked beautiful. Not in a harmless way. In the kind of way that makes a man forget his better instincts and then remember them too late. Now she was looking at me. I took the cup from her hand. And then she pulled my hand toward her. That was it. No warning. No clean space left for thought. No distance between what should happen and what already had. We kissed each other. We kissed each other. And the whole night seemed to close around that one moment. There is something I need to tell you. Maybe I do not need to. But I feel like I should but I think I shouldn’t because that might be the best thing I have ever done for me and this is about Samir. Maybe his name should have stood between us. Maybe it should have stopped everything. Maybe it should have made this feel wrong the moment it happened. But it did not. And that was the darkest part of all. Because the kiss did not feel stolen. It did not feel hesitant. It felt inevitable. Like something that had already been moving toward us long before this night, long before Austin, long before the street, long before she looked at me like I was the only safe place left where she could fall. I can never explain how her lips tasted, how soft they were, or how it felt when she kissed me like it was all meant to be. There was something ruinous in it. Something tender enough to feel holy and dangerous enough to destroy whatever came after. The kind of moment that does not ask permission. The kind of moment that changes the shape of your conscience while it is still happening. And even now, when I think about that night, I do not remember the music first. I do not remember the bars. I do not remember the lights spilling across 6th Street. I remember her voice. I remember her arms around me. I remember the way she said my name from the bed. And I remember the kiss.