I still remember the first time I heard him speak.
Not just speak — tell a story.
It was an evening I wasn't supposed to be at. My cousin had fallen sick and begged me to take her place at a novel award event in Noida. I wasn't really into romance books. I had never cared much for stories where boys cried over girls and called it depth.
But then he walked up to the mic.
Ayan.
He wasn't loud. He wasn't trying to impress anyone. He didn't even carry a printed excerpt like the other authors. Just a notebook and a quiet confidence, like he didn't need anything else.
"This is a chapter from my story Rain Between Us," he said, "about a boy who once met a girl in the rain and thought… that was something."
That was all it took.
I didn't blink.I didn't shift in my seat.It felt like the air had paused to listen.
He didn't read his story like the others. He told it like it had lived inside him too long and needed to breathe. His voice wasn't polished or trained, but it was real. Every word felt like a memory he'd bled onto paper.
Something in me stirred.
I went home and searched for him that night. I found fragments of his older work — some unfinished blogs, a few poems, drafts that looked more like confessions than fiction. I messaged him. He never replied. I tried again. Nothing. I even mailed his publisher once — applied as an intern.
No reply there either.
But something had already begun inside me. A pull I couldn't explain.
Three months later, I joined a small editorial agency that worked with ghostwriters and new authors.
And there he was.
Ayan.
When I saw his name on the client list, my heart skipped. I thought he might recognize me, but of course he didn't. Why would he? I wasn't a character in his life yet. Just someone who had been sitting quietly in the back row, listening too closely.
But fate, I guess, had a slow burn of its own.
They gave me a desk outside his cabin.
And that's how I slowly stepped into the corners of his world.
One Monday, he walked past and asked, "You're new?"
"Sort of," I smiled. "I edit stories."
He looked at me like he'd heard that line a thousand times before, then said casually, "You should read mine. But be warned… it's messy."
"I like messy," I replied — too fast, too honest.
That Friday, he placed a folded page on my desk. No name, no greeting. Just one handwritten line at the top:
"I once laughed so hard in class I got punished twice. But that's not the funny part."
That's how it began.
Every week after that, he gave me another story. Real pieces of his past — unfiltered, painful, stupid, honest. And I read every single one like it mattered more than anything I had ever edited before.
I didn't know it yet, but I was already falling.
Not for his stories.
But for the boy behind them.
The one who laughed too loud, loved too quietly, and wrote like memory still hurt.
And with every chapter he gave me, I kept whispering one thing in my heart:
Tell me a story I can stay in…
Not just as a reader.
But as someone who could be his last page.