Nobody Asked

Aanya did not text him first. She never texted anyone first, not because she didn't want to, but because reaching out felt like admitting she needed something, and needing things was not a category she had built room for. So when three days passed after the study hall and her phone stayed quiet, she told herself it was fine, that the conversation had been a strange, late night exception, the kind of thing that happens once and then gets filed away as a nice memory.

She was wrong about it being over. She was also wrong about being fine.

It was Kabir who texted, on the fourth day, a simple message. Are you eating properly or just running on caffeine and spite. She read it twice before she let herself smile.

Depends on the day, she wrote back.

Today.

Spite, mostly.

Come to the canteen. I'm buying you a real meal.

She almost said no. She had a study plan for the evening, blocked into forty minute segments with five minute breaks, and deviating from it felt like losing a small battle against her own chaos. But something about the plainness of his message, the lack of any performance in it, made her close her laptop and go.

He was already at a corner table when she arrived, two plates in front of him, and he had ordered for her without asking, the exact thing she usually got, which meant he had been paying attention longer than she realized.

"You remembered my order," she said, sitting down.

"I remember most things about people. It's not always a gift."

"Why not?"

"Because I remember things they'd rather I didn't notice. Like how you laughed off being tired the other night and then looked like you regretted saying it as much as you did."

Aanya put her fork down. "I didn't regret it."

"You did, a little. I watched you do the thing where you try to make a real feeling sound smaller so it's easier for the other person to carry."

She felt exposed in a way that wasn't entirely unpleasant. Most people took her words at face value. He didn't, and it unsettled her the same way it had in the study hall, like being handed a mirror she hadn't asked for but couldn't look away from.

"That's an oddly specific thing to notice," she said.

"I notice everyone like that. It's how I've always been. I can tell when someone's about to cry two sentences before they know it themselves. I can tell when a joke is covering something. It used to feel like a skill. Lately it feels more like a habit I can't turn off."

"Is that so bad? Being able to read people?"

Kabir turned his glass slowly, watching the condensation gather at the base. "It's not bad. It's just exhausting, being the person everyone assumes is fine because he's busy managing everyone else. Nobody asks the guy who's good at noticing things whether he's okay. They assume he already knows the answer for himself."

"Do you?"

"Not really, no."

There was an honesty in the way he said it, flat and unguarded, that made Aanya lean forward slightly. She recognized something in him, a shape she knew from the inside, though she couldn't yet name what it was.

"Why do you do it, then?" she asked. "Take care of everyone. My roommate. Priya. Half the floor, probably."

Kabir was quiet for a moment. "Because it's the only way I know how to matter to people. If I'm not solving something for someone, or holding space for their breakdown, I don't know what I'm offering. I don't have the internships or the five year plan. I don't have anything that looks impressive on paper. What I have is that I show up. So I show up a lot. Maybe too much."

"That's not nothing," Aanya said. "Showing up is not nothing."

"Try telling that to the part of me that panics a little when nobody needs anything from me. Like last night. My roommate finally slept through the night for once, nobody called, and I just sat in my room not knowing what to do with myself. It was almost worse than being needed. At least when I'm needed I know what I'm for."

Aanya sat with that sentence longer than she meant to, because it echoed something she had said to herself in different words a hundred times, just pointed in another direction. Her version was about performance. His was about usefulness. Different mechanisms, she realized, but the same fear underneath, the fear of discovering that without the function, there might be nothing left that people wanted.

"I think we might be the same kind of tired," she said slowly. "Just different flavors of it."

"How do you mean?"

"You're afraid of what happens if nobody needs you. I'm afraid of what happens if I stop achieving things. Both of us built an entire identity around being useful in some form, and neither of us knows what's underneath it. We just built it in different directions."

Kabir looked at her for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes, the particular quiet of a person hearing their own private fear said out loud by someone else for the first time.

"That's uncomfortably accurate," he said.

"I've had a lot of time to think about myself lately. Mostly at two in the morning, when I should be sleeping and I'm reorganizing my calendar instead."

"Does it help? The reorganizing?"

"For about ten minutes. Then I just find something else to fix."

"Sounds familiar," he said, and there was a small, rueful smile in it, the recognition of two people circling the same wound from opposite sides.

They sat there a while, plates half finished, the canteen noise fading into background hum. Aanya noticed she had stopped tracking the time, which almost never happened. She noticed too that she did not feel the urge to check her phone, to see who needed something from her, to make herself available. For a few minutes, she simply existed across the table from someone who wasn't asking her to be anything.

"Can I say something that might sound strange?" Kabir asked.

"Go ahead."

"I don't actually know what you need from me right now. Usually with people I can read that instantly. Comfort, advice, distraction. With you I genuinely don't know, and it's strange, because I don't hate not knowing. I think I just want to sit here. Not fix, not solve. Just sit."

Aanya felt something soften in her chest, a specific kind of relief that had nothing to do with being helped and everything to do with being simply accompanied. Nobody had ever framed not knowing what to do for her as a comfortable thing before. Usually people either tried too hard to solve her or gave up entirely.

"That might be exactly what I need," she admitted. "Someone who isn't trying to manage me."

"I'll try to keep failing at managing you, then."

She laughed, a real one this time, surprising herself with how easily it came. "Deal."

Outside the canteen window, the evening had gone soft and orange, students crossing the quad in twos and threes, none of them aware of the small, quiet shift happening at the corner table, two people who had spent years mistaking usefulness for worth, beginning, almost without noticing, to let themselves be simply present with each other instead.

Neither of them called it anything yet. But when Kabir walked her back toward the library afterward, he didn't check his phone once, and Aanya didn't open her calendar app, and both of them noticed the absence without mentioning it, filing it away as something to think about later, alone, in the particular silence that came right before sleep.