It was a quiet Wednesday night when Aaravi Sharma, 29, freelance designer and part-time romantic cynic, typed a message she wasn’t supposed to send.
“I can still feel your hands. I shouldn't, but I do. Sometimes I wish you hadn't stopped.”
She stared at the words. Intended for her on-again-off-again ex, Karan. Drunk texting. A cliché.
She sighed, hit send, and immediately regretted it.
But when the message delivered, she froze.
It wasn’t Karan’s chat window.
It was someone else.
“Aarav (Editor Guy)”
She blinked.
Aarav Malhotra.
That name sat like a punctuation mark in her life.
Her editor from a recent coffee-table book project, who had a penchant for sarcastic comments, cuffed shirts, and unreadable eyes. They had only met once—in a café in Bandra—for final proofs. No flirting. No hints.
But she remembered his voice—husky, deliberate, just a shade too calm.
And now she had sent him a message soaked in unspoken heat.
“Oh. God. No.”
She stared at her screen in horror.
And then, the three dots appeared.
Typing...
Aarav’s reply came after an excruciating minute.
“That’s… quite an evocative sentence to land in the middle of my editing notes.”
Aaravi wanted to die.
She typed fast:
“I’m SO sorry. That wasn’t meant for you. Please forget it. Ignore. Delete. Burn your phone.”
“Should I also forget the part about your skin remembering someone’s hands?”
She covered her face with her palms. Why did this man type like he was reading poetry?
“Again, NOT for you.”
“Pity. Because now I’m curious. Shouldn’t have stopped doing… what?”
She hesitated.
Then something inside her shifted.
Maybe it was the gentle teasing. Maybe it was the loneliness. Maybe it was just his voice she remembered in that café. Slow. Unrushed.
“If I told you, would you stop editing me?”
“On the contrary,” he replied, “I might start.”
Over the next few days, the texts deepened.
Their rhythm changed.
What started as damage control evolved into something else—a flirtation that walked the line between confessional and forbidden.
They spoke of touch without names, of desire without shame, of how the body stores memory the mind pretends to forget.
One night, she texted:
“Sometimes I feel his hands again when I button my shirt. Is that madness?”
His reply was instant:
“Not madness. Muscle memory. Or longing. Or both.”
“What do you feel?” she typed.
“Your message,” he said. “And now, a want I hadn’t expected to feel for someone I’ve only met once.”
“You want me?”
“I want to unbutton that memory. Gently. Completely. Word by word.”
They met again.
A week later. Late evening. Cafe Irani Chaii, their halfway point.
He wore dark jeans, rolled sleeves, and his usual restraint.
She wore a dark green kurta, soft against her skin, no makeup except for that hint of clove-scented lip balm.
He didn’t touch her.
But his eyes did.
They talked. Not of work. Not of the message. Not directly.
But it sat between them like a secret flame neither wanted to extinguish.
As they walked out into the evening rain, she said softly:
“You haven’t edited that message yet.”
He turned to her, face closer than it had the right to be.
“Some words don’t need editing. They just need… to be said again. In person.”
She whispered, “Say it, then.”
He did not say it.
He kissed her instead.
His fingers slid against her waist like they were reading Braille. Her breath caught as he pulled her gently toward him in the lift—again, no words. Just a gaze that asked “Are you sure?” and her nod that answered “Yes.”
In his apartment—warm, minimal, full of books—she stood in front of him, letting him look at her like an artwork he hadn’t been allowed to touch until now.
He reached out and slowly undid the first button of her kurta.
Not rushed.
Measured. Reverent.
“Still remember my hands?” he asked, voice like a violin string pulled tight.
She nodded.
He slid the fabric from her shoulder.
“Then let’s make your skin remember something new.”
Their intimacy wasn’t hurried. It unfolded like a slow poem.
He didn’t ravage. He read.
Her.
Every inch.
Every reaction.
Every flutter of her breath.
When he traced her spine with his tongue, she arched not from lust, but from the shock of being understood so physically, so non-verbally.
There was no dominance, no performance. Just exploration.
And when he finally entered her, it wasn’t a conquest.
It was a conversation.
One in which her moan became his reply.
One where her nails in his back whispered:
“Don’t stop. Please... don’t stop.”
She lay in his bed, shirtless under his cotton sheets, her legs tangled with his.
No guilt. No awkwardness.
Just clarity.
He stirred beside her.
“You know,” he murmured, “you sent a message to the wrong person.”
She turned to him. Smiled sleepily.
“No,” she whispered, kissing his jaw.
“I think my body knew exactly who it was meant for.”
Aaravi sat across from Aarav at her window seat, Mumbai’s skyline stretching like a lover’s back beneath twilight.
Two weeks had passed since that night.
And yet, his hands still haunted her—not for what they did, but for what they healed.
Tonight, though, something hung between them. Not lust.
But a question.
He handed her a small envelope.
She looked at him, puzzled.
“I edited your message,” he said quietly. “The one you sent me by mistake.”
She opened the envelope.
Inside was a handwritten note. Familiar words—her own—but now surrounded by his replies in red ink, like the copy he once marked up in her book project.
Her original message:
“I can still feel your hands. I shouldn't, but I do. Sometimes I wish you hadn't stopped.”
He had written beneath it:
“What if I didn’t stop because I never started?”
Another scribble below:
“What if this isn’t a mistake… but the start of your rewrite?”
She looked up at him, eyes glossy.
He continued, voice soft:
“You weren’t just remembering someone else’s touch.
You were aching to feel something real. Yours. Now.”
“And maybe... you pressed send to the only person who would read it fully.”
She walked toward him.
Kissed him—not urgently this time, but deeply.
Their bodies met again, not in heat but in understanding.
No moans, no urgency.
Just quiet knowing.
This time, their lovemaking wasn’t a flame burning in the dark.
It was a sunrise.
Slow.
Certain.
Healing.
As she lay in his arms, tracing his collarbone with sleepy fingers, Aaravi whispered:
“You weren’t the wrong person.”
“You were the right mistake I had to make... to find the right touch.”
React
