The silence was unbearable.
It screamed louder than anything you could have said.
I stood frozen, watching as you withdrew from me not in fear, not in submission but in refusal. You crawled away from my touch and bent yourself toward the floor, toward that ridiculous cardboard box, as if it were sanctuary.
As if it were enough.
I the woman who commands boardrooms, who bends cities with a phone call, who men ruin themselves for just a fraction of my attention was being ignored.
For a box.
My legs trembled as I straightened, a violent mix of disbelief and white-hot fury coursing through me. I walked toward you slowly, each step heavy, my shadow stretching long and distorted across the floor until it swallowed you and your pathetic refuge whole.
"You're hiding?" I whispered.
My voice cracked, splintering into something jagged, unstable.
"You're actually hiding your face from me?" I crouched slightly, staring down at you. "You'd rather breathe dust and cardboard than look at the woman offering you everything?"
My fingers hovered over the box.
They shook.
I wanted to tear it apart. To rip it open and expose whatever illusion inside it had convinced you that I didn't exist. That kiss, my desperation, my soul laid bare you had treated it like nothing. Like air.
"'Do whatever I want,'" I echoed softly.
Then I knelt beside you.
My body pressed against yours, deliberate and possessive, my presence inescapable. One hand slid along the outside of the box, tracing its edges, feeling its shape like an enemy's throat.
"Be careful what you wish for, Manu," I murmured, my voice dropping into something dangerously intimate. "Because what I want… is for that name in your head to be silenced."
I leaned closer, speaking not to you but to the darkness you'd chosen.
"Is she in there?" I whispered into the cardboard. "Your Radha? Is she stone? Wood? Paper?"
I inhaled slowly.
"I can smell the incense on you. I can feel the peace you're trying to wrap around yourself like armor." My voice hardened. "But peace is a luxury I'm taking away."
"If you won't eat. If you won't drink. If you won't even look at me…" My breath shook. "Then you're choosing to die in the dark."
"And I won't let you die alone."
I pressed my forehead against the cardboard, eyes burning, a single bitter tear slipping free.
"I'll stay right here," I whispered. "I'll talk to you all night. I'll dismantle your old life piece by piece until that name is the only thing left of who you were."
My voice softened. Broke.
"And then… I'll take that too."
I stayed there.
Trying to cling to the box.