Besabriyaan

Chapter 52

M A N I K

As she watched the sun set, studying the sky as it faded from orange to coral and pink to lavender, I was studying her. Her big brown eyes, her soft pink lips, her perfect supple skin. I watched her gingerly, astonished to have found someone more beautiful than the sunset.

"Ten minutes more and the sunset shot will be ready." The set designer informed me while my eyes were still on her face which was oblivious.

Inattentively, I nodded vaguely watching how her brown eyes were no longer brown under the touch of exquisite pinks and burning oranges. The colours started melting in her eyes in golden rays, circling an eclipse. Violet glazed-maroon tinged, all the colors of enamorment pirouetting across the cotton candy sky brought an ethereal glow to her pale face. Her expression was hollow with eyes that shone no more but I could tell, the sight was aesthetically pleasing to her tired vision.

"She's gorgeous, isn't she?" Someone whispered softly in my ear and like I mentioned, being vague, I kept observing her cherry blossoms like lips being poked and tingled by the strands flying on her face and how unmindfully, she was budging them away.

Faster than a falling star, a soft smile curved my lips. Sketchily, I began to nod my head until my eyes fell on Aryaman's crooked smile and turned ice cold.

"Stop being a creep for a change." My face probably was harder than a drying cement.

"Forever guilty!" Raising hands in surrender, he chuckled testing my patience. "It's just you know, I never ever saw you looking at a girl like that."

"What on earth do you mean?" I had no intention of getting down from the bonnet of this jeep they were using for shooting and move away just because this mental wouldn't stop bullshitting me.

"No offence but this look, you know..." His index finger swayed between my eyes. "This..lust-free stuff. Screaming something...I don't know, maybe, platonic?"

Reading him with frequent blinking, I kept my unreadable eyes on him. "Disappointment comes in many shapes and sizes and mine comes when you open that mouth." My index finger circled over his lips. "Get your mouth to do something interesting sometimes, you know."

Exhaling deeply, he hooked his left shoe to the bumper bracket above the numberplate, bending his spinal cord. "Behind this sturdiness, there is some softness when you watch her move around and even for a minute, some magic dances in you and you just forget that you are the cause for her fire."

Infected with an instant emptiness, my eyes slowly crawled towards the way where unaware of the technicians quarrelling behind her, Murthy was drinking in the soft rays of the bidding sun keeping those brown eyes closed.

"...I am." Palely, I smiled and nodded my head to myself.

Aryaman wasn't wholly incorrect though. It had been five days since she started working with this douchebag and it didn't matter how I threw the challenge towards Aryaman to drive her away when the reality was something else. I didn't want to hurt her anymore than I already did. Truly speaking, I tried doing a couple of things to her in these five days like, make her stand the whole day under the Sun, cause her a great deal of embarrassment before everyone, tricking her into coming to a shut down film studio at four in the morning when the actual call time was at eight in the evening, or, manoeuvring to make a joke out of her before people but any of that neither helped me get a reaction out of her dead features nor it brought me the satisfaction. I tried being way too hard on her but it got me nowhere. So, I gave up. I decided to let her be on her own, work wherever she wanted, be with anyone she liked.