Dating Vihaan felt like switching the world to airplane mode.
Not because he disconnected me from everything—but because with him, it was like the noise stopped. The pressure. The performance. I wasn't "Adhira the influencer." I was just me.
And weirdly, that was enough.
We didn't do candlelit dinners or helicopter dates.
We went for auto rides with bad suspension, cracked jokes in crowded bookshops, and split overpriced smoothies in places with terrible reviews.
Sometimes we'd be at his place editing pictures together, and sometimes he'd help me choose between two nearly identical nail shades for a brand reel.
Vihaan's idea of romance was showing up at my door with my favorite pani puri from the vendor outside my studio.
Mine was letting him use my expensive ring light for his photography blog.
It worked.
One day, I made a post captioned:
"he takes blurry pics of me and calls them art. i let him."
And though I didn't tag him, he replied with a reel of me mid-laugh, hair a mess, eyes squinting from the sun.
"this is what art looks like," he wrote in the caption.
My followers started guessing. DMs flooded. I didn't confirm anything.
Because this part? This bubble?
It was just ours.
There were little fights too.
Like when he accidentally liked a hate comment under one of my old videos.
Or when I forgot to wish him good luck before his photography competition and he didn't text back the whole day.
But we always circled back. Talked. Apologized. Grew.
And honestly?
This might've been the happiest I'd been in a while.