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The Brownie Trap

3. The Brownie Trap

Wrapping up her work for the day, Khushi folded her laptop and crammed it inside her backpack before popping the chiming reminder off, on her phone's display.

Dosa batter, it read—it was a reminder she'd set to jog her memory to soak rice and urad dhal in order to get the week's batch of dosa batter ready. Had she been home at the time of her reminder, she'd have gleefully plugged away, doing the chore. Time was five-twenty five, on a Friday evening and she was still in office.

There hadn't been a smallish interval for her to leave her seat to even take restroom breaks from the morning—she had to finish drafting the project she was working on at the moment, the weekly column that she'd been flourishingly alive in for the past three months and an instalment of other article that she'd been laying over for a long time.

She had eaten her lunch in her seat, jabbing the food in her mouth in between the relentless drumming of keyboard, oblivious to what she was gobbling in.

The past week had been crazy busy for her—for Dev too.

Despite the light being mild and cheering for the morning—for one to open eyes to; and the tree that'd branched near by the balcony window swaying with its scrunching noise, counting the cuckoos singing smoothly along the faint crack of dawn, Khushi did not have a good morning.

There were quite a few things about her project that had a lot of home works to be done and that alone hurtled her through the week.

Well, this morning itself had started with the stick note that Dev had jotted and left at the bedside table, telling her that he'd to leave home early. It was the least shocking for her, when he did that because both of them knew what they were up to—with his job or hers. Regardless of the physical distance separating them, which they had been through in the recent years it felt odd and lifeless to be at home without him.

When Khushi had reached her apartment parking, the scan of unfilled space next to hers hampered her of all the hopes she'd been saving from that morning. She'd thought Dev would be here­—spending the evening with her, before leaving out of station to that goddamned training camp of his.

He wasn't here—or that's what the empty parking space implied her. She stepped inside the elevator; her face writhed in grim about the uninflected time she was fated to have that evening. It'd been a week since both of them had sat down to have their dinner together—let alone having a cup of coffee.

It was not as though she needed to be with Dev all the time, but she needed quite some time with him every day, stripping out their lines of work.

And Dev was more meticulous about it than she'd ever been.

Exiting the elevator, Khushi ambled down the narrow aisle, veering into the semi buckled backpack, frisking for her keys.

Forking her crocs out and putting them on the rack she happened upon a pair of brown, leather shoes in their habitual berth and at the stark sight of it relieved her of all the strain. A moony smile grazing over her lips, Khushi felt her face sweeping away with the tautness that'd kept her brows rigid and rucked up.

Whirling left on heels and standing on her tippy toes, she pulled the wooden framed window open which gave her an immense view of her fixed up kitchen, rapturous smell of freshly brewing coffee decoction—a scrumptious looking man—tall, tranquil and homey, towering over to check on it.

There was prompt looming of good cheer gushing in her heart; and a perfection of smile unfurling to the fullest on her creased lips at what she saw from the other side of the half-opened window.