: Sunglasses and Selective Memory
Some things survive the forgetting.
A voice. A silhouette.
The specific way someone says your name
before you remember you know them.
The breakfast table looked like a peace offering nobody had asked for.
Dish after dish after dish — arranged with the quiet efficiency of people who had been trained to anticipate hunger rather than wait for it to announce itself. I pulled out the nearest chair and dropped into it before anyone could choose one for me, which had become, in the past few days, something of a survival strategy.
Justin moved to sit beside me.
Adithya got there first.
No rush. No announcement. Just — there, settled into the seat with the complete ease of someone who had decided, somewhere before the moment was visible, that this was where he was going to be. His presence beside me rearranged the air in a way I was getting tired of noticing.
I stared at my plate.
I had a plan for this morning. The plan was simple, sensible, and had been constructed with considerable care between the hours of two and four AM: avoid the prince of hell, eat breakfast without incident, take the bus, and navigate the day without adding anything new to the growing list of things I didn't know how to process.
The plan lasted approximately forty-five seconds.
I could feel it — that gaze, low and steady, like a frequency that bypassed sound entirely and went straight to the nervous system. I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself I was tired and reading too much into the proximity of someone who was simply eating breakfast.
I turned my head.
He was already watching. One eyebrow lifted — not in surprise, not in question, but with the specific expression of someone who had known exactly when I would look and had simply been waiting for me to confirm it.
"Eat," he said.
Not a request. Not quite a command. Something between the two — the tone of a person who has decided that a thing is going to happen and is simply announcing the fact.
I picked up my fork.
The prince of hell, I thought, has opinions about my breakfast.
This was my life now.
After breakfast I took the bus.
Justin had offered to drive me — twice. I had declined both times with the polite firmness of someone who needed twenty minutes of public transport and the anonymous company of strangers before she was ready to be a person again. He had looked at me with that expression — the one I kept collecting and filing and not examining, the one that sat just slightly wrong on a face I had known forever — and let it go.
I was getting better at walking away from things I couldn't name yet.
Campus was locked when I arrived — some kind of strike, a scatter of students outside the entrance with the mild outrage of people whose inconvenience is real but not serious. I didn't stop to find out the details. I turned around, walked back through the gate, and dialed the number I had been putting off dialing.
There was one person who might know something about my missing past. One person who had been there — who had watched whatever had happened, happen — and who I had been avoiding calling because calling her meant admitting out loud how much was gone.
She picked up on the third ring.
We agreed to meet at Green Park Café.
On my way out I found Pierre near the campus gate, already in the middle of three conversations at once, and asked if I could stay at her place until Mom arrived. She said yes without pausing the other conversations. Mom said yes too — her voice doing that careful thing it did when she was more worried than she was letting on.
I didn't mention Justin.
Some things you don't say out loud because once you do, they become permanently, irreversibly real.
I was keeping a list of those things.
It was getting long.
Pierre was mid-sentence about logistics when the car appeared.
Sleek. Black. The particular kind of expensive that doesn't announce itself but simply exists — the way certain people exist, in a way that rearranges the space around them without apparent effort. It drifted to the curb with the ease of something that had never once considered the possibility of not having room.
That's Justin's car.
Except Justin was not driving it.
"So first we'll go to Adi's, grab your things, and then—"
"I need to stop at Green Park Café first," I said. "I'm meeting someone. I'll come straight to yours after."
Pierre's eyes lit up with the specific brightness that preceded chaos.
"Is it a date?"
Something shifted in the air beside me.
I didn't look. I was not going to look.
"An old friend," I said.
"What's his name?"
"It's not a date, Pierre."
"Green Park Café," she said, deploying the gravity of someone presenting evidence at trial, "has candles. At lunch."
"It's a friend—"
I had already started moving. The bus stop was twenty metres away. If I walked fast enough the conversation would end by default and I could get through the next three hours without adding anything new to the list of things I was not examining.
My feet found their rhythm.
The gate was right there.
Two hands caught me from behind — not roughly, which was somehow the most disorienting part. Just certain. The easy, absolute certainty of someone who had already decided where this was going and was simply executing the decision. I was pulled back and then I was pressed against a chest that felt like it had been architecturally designed to make pulling away seem beside the point.
My heart did something immediately inconvenient.
I tried to step away.
The arm at my waist declined the invitation.
"I'll drop you," he said. Low. Close. The words landing somewhere just below conscious thought.
I stopped trying to move.
"Okay," I said.
This was a tactical retreat. Not a surrender.
"Adithya."
"Mm." Not a word. Barely a sound. Somehow completely unreasonable in what it did to my ability to think clearly.
"People are watching. Can you please—"
He laughed. Low and private, the laugh of someone whose punchline only they can hear. Then he shifted his weight back against the car — unhurried, taking me with him like a detail he had decided to keep — and looked at the street with the calm of a person who has never once cared what anyone watching thought.
"Let them," he said.
I looked up.
I don't know why I looked up. I knew better than to look up.
His forefinger found my chin with the gentleness of something deliberate — the kind of gentle that is a choice, not a default. He tucked a few strands of hair behind my ear. Slowly. Without rushing. And then he pressed his lips to my forehead.
Brief. Soft.
My brain went somewhere quiet and stayed there for a moment.
When I came back, he had already let go and the car door was open.
"OKAY," Pierre said, from somewhere behind me, with the energy of someone who had just witnessed a significant natural event. "What. Was. That."
"Nothing," I said, getting into the car.
"Shreya—"
"Nothing." I stared at the headrest in front of me. "Nothing."
"Say it one more time," she said, climbing in after me, "and I'll genuinely believe you."
I said nothing for the rest of the drive.
He said nothing either.
But once — just once — I caught the reflection of the corner of his mouth in the window glass.
He didn't leave when we reached the café.
He parked and leaned against the car with his arms crossed and his sunglasses on, the very picture of someone with nowhere better to be, and I walked inside without acknowledging this because acknowledging it would require deciding how I felt about it.
I was not ready to decide how I felt about it.
Inside, the café was warm and low-lit — the kind of place that softened things slightly, made problems feel further away than they were. I wrapped both hands around a coffee cup and waited.
The door opened.
Stacy.
My ex-best friend walked in looking exactly as I remembered her — which meant the memories were returning faster than I'd been tracking, which was its own kind of information. She scanned the room before committing to entering it. Old habit. I had forgotten I remembered that.
"Good afternoon," she said.
"Hi." Smaller than intended. The word arrived like something that had been carried a long way.
We sat across from each other with the particular stiffness of people who once knew each other's secrets and are no longer certain which ones still apply.
I didn't waste time.
"I want to know what happened between me and Adithya."
Something moved across her face — recognition, or relief, or both.
"I can give you pieces," she said carefully. "Not everything, not today — I genuinely don't have that kind of time. But I'll tell you what I can, and I'll come back for the rest."
"Pieces are fine," I said.
Pieces were more than I had yesterday.
We talked for nearly half an hour.
She gave me fragments — careful ones, chosen with the specific precision of someone editing in real time, deciding what to include and what to hold back and hoping the line between them didn't show. And as she spoke, something began to happen that I had learned to recognise and never quite learned to brace for.
The memories started coming.
Not rushing in — seeping. The way water finds its way through old walls. Pressure without direction. Images without context. The feeling of a road I couldn't place, heat I couldn't locate in any specific summer, the sound of my own voice saying something I couldn't hear clearly yet.
My head began to feel heavy.
Then Stacy's phone rang.
She looked at it, looked at me, made the face of someone caught between two obligations.
"I have to—"
"Go," I said.
She went, apologies trailing behind her.
I sat alone with my coffee and the weight of the half-assembled past pressing gently against the inside of my skull.
The road.
The heat.
A car that was absolutely, definitively not my fault.
"Who do you think you are?"
My own voice. Younger. Angrier. Standing on the kind of certainty that belongs specifically to people who are entirely in the right and know it.
The truck door opened.
Black sunglasses. A jaw that had probably been sculpted by someone with a grudge against ordinary faces. The specific, unhurried exit from a vehicle of someone who had never once rushed for anything.
"The prince of hell," he said.
Like an introduction at a dinner party.
Like of course. Like naturally. Like where else.
"Fix the car. Or pay for it. Your choice — but we're not leaving until it's handled."
A smirk that had been practised into something that looked effortless.
And then, from behind me — a voice I knew:
"Justin?"
"Shreya? What are you doing here?"
I surfaced from the memory with a sound that was almost a laugh.
Prince of hell.
He had introduced himself as the prince of hell like it was a name on a business card. Like it was simply a fact about himself that he was making available, as a courtesy, to anyone who needed it.
I shook my head.
So I had met him on the trip. The same trip. The same road.
The same sunglasses.
My phone buzzed. Stella Ma'am — choreography, the academy, a time that required me to be somewhere. I drained my coffee, left a tip, pushed back my chair.
Outside, the afternoon had turned gold.
He was still there.
Of course he was.
Leaning against the car in that particular way — spine against the door, arms loose, weight distributed with the ease of someone who had never once found waiting inconvenient — wearing the sunglasses.
The same sunglasses.
The ones from the road. The ones from the memory. The ones he had been wearing the day he stepped out of a truck on a summer afternoon and introduced himself as the prince of hell with a smirk that had absolutely no business existing on a face that looked like that.
Something clicked into place in my chest. Small. Significant.
He looked up as I approached. Something moved in his expression — quickly, briefly — before the familiar ease settled back over it like a curtain drawn.
"Dance academy," he said. A small smile. "We have to go."
I looked at him.
At the sunglasses.
At the jaw and the stillness and the specific, unhurried quality of someone who has never once needed to announce himself because his presence announces itself without assistance.
The prince of hell.
Standing outside a café in the afternoon light like he had been there the whole time.
Like he had always been there.
"Where's Pierre?" I asked.
"Daniel came. She left with him."
I nodded. Got into the car. Said nothing about the sunglasses or the memory or the specific, persistent click of something almost connecting in the back of my mind.
He drove.
I watched him.
The line of his jaw. The way he held the wheel with the loose certainty of someone who had never learned to grip things tightly because things had never required it. The way he existed in a space — any space — like he had already been there when the space was built.
His ear.
I noticed it gradually — the slow, unmistakable progression of colour moving up the curve of his ear. Pink first. Then deeper. The kind of colour that arrives without permission and cannot be called back once it's started.
Something about it made my chest do a complicated thing.
My hand lifted before I had decided to move it — reaching, without consulting me, toward the warmth of that small involuntary colour—
He stopped the car.
I pulled my hand back immediately, suddenly and completely alarmed, the half-formed gesture evaporating before it could become anything more than an intention.
We had arrived.
The academy sat before us, ordinary and luminous, going about its business.
I stared at the building.
He stared at the building.
Neither of us acknowledged what had almost happened.
Neither of us acknowledged it for the entire walk inside.
But when I glanced at him in the doorway — just once, quickly — his ear was still red.
And he was very carefully not looking at me.
And I was beginning to understand, in the specific wordless way that bodies understand things long before minds catch up, that the summer I couldn't remember had left marks in places I hadn't thought to look.
I decided to stay at Pierre's place for the time being.
---
She was getting closer.
Not to the memory.
But to the feeling of it.
And feelings,
unlike memories,
don't wait to be found.
They find you.