Did You Know Me? (Shubman Gill x Ishan Kishan)

First time Ishan realized something's not right

Five months before the World Cup

The first time Ishan realized something was wrong, he had been sprawled with Shubman in his hotel room on the evening before Qualifier 2, Mumbai Indians vs Gujarat Titans.

They were having their usual banter about who should lose for whom-

"You won last year, you have to leave it for us this year," Ishan insisted.

Shubman flicked a peanut at Ishan's head.

"You have already won twice," said Shubman. "And you have never lost a Qualifier 2 or a Final, and I have lost both with KKR."

"This is not KKR, this is GT. Don't play the KKR victim card."

"Not a word against my former team, Ishan," Shubman warned.

Ishan flicked back the peanut. Shubman's phone glowed.

"Sara messaged!" he exclaimed, sitting up.

Ishan leaned in, too.

'You won last year, let my brother win this time!'

Shubman smiled.

Ishan watched as he typed a reply, and soon, he'd forgotten all about where he was, in whose room he was, as he got engrossed in his phone, texting back and forth with Sara.

He wouldn't be sending his favourite crazy stickers to her, Ishan could bet.

Shubman, possibly, would never realize that Sara Tendulkar loved him like a friend and would never love him as more. So he would get perked up every time she messaged, even if it was always light and friendly, he would get all dressed up and sick with nerves every time they were to meet, even if it was always like a friend from Sara's end, and he would sleep with a million girls but never let himself love any of them, because they wouldn't be Sara.

It pissed Ishan off.

It had always pissed Ishan off.

Not Sara. She was a nice person. It wasn't her fault she saw her eternal lover only as a friend, and she wasn't the bitch type at all.

No, what pissed him off was Shubman's utter silliness. He'd been friends with Sara three years before he proposed and she turned him down nicely. Then he'd spent half a year Kabir-Singh-like. Then he started with the other girls.

But.

He still would not move on.

He refused to move on.

Nisha, Shubman's childhood neighbour and close friend, was pissed off with his silliness, too. She and Ishan had spent long hours berating at Shubman's deaf ears.

Anyway, this whole Sara business, as Ishan admitted, had always pissed him off.

That day, too, he was seriously annoyed. Like, very seriously annoyed, the kind he usually wasn't with anyone, specially Shubman.

But something was different.

It was Shubman's smile as he typed that annoyed him today.

Normally, it wouldn't be the smile. Normally it would just be the disappointment later on that would annoy him.

It was annoying that Sara had this power of making Shubman smile with a single, however ordinary text. And it was so annoying how Shubman forgot the world around him when he spoke to her.

Ishan watched for the entire thirty minutes as his best friend didn't look up from the phone.

Finally, he put it away, saying, "Oh, I wish her PG wasn't so strict about mess timings! Why should dinnertime end at nine?"

"What?"

"She always has to say bye at ten to nine," complained Shubman.

"I suppose you couldn't ask her to miss dinner for you," said Ishan, in a nastier voice than he had intended.

Shubman didn't seem to notice.

He grinned. "Nope, I can't."

But as he put his phone away, the sparkle in his eyes had faded, and he looked disappointed as he stretched down on the bed again.

Then, Ishan knew something was very different.

The disappointment didn't annoy him that much today.

In fact, maybe, just maybe, some part of him was happy at Sara disappointing Shubman.