“…progress in the development of a continuous insulin monitor…”

Cyrus is cut off by the ringing of his phone, still connected to the car’s audio system. Without thinking, Anushka reacts and reflexively presses the answer button on her steering wheel. She immediately wishes she hadn’t.

The voice that fills the car is an unwelcome one. Krish Kapadia, their roommate, and a source of both of their varied turmoils, speaks piercingly and shatters whatever spell of contentment they had only just discovered a scant few moments ago.

“How is My Girlfriend?” No greeting, no pleasantry. No pleasantness.

She hates the way Krish speaks to Cyrus, dismissive and entitled. Like Cyrus, his supposed best friend, owes him something. Her anger surges over her head when she sees the conflicted, upset and hesitant look on Cyrus’ face.

“Your girlfriend is driving and shouldn’t be distracted.” Anushka disregards Cyrus’ twitch at her short, sharp tone, and she unceremoniously cuts the call before Krish can put on his most pathetic voice and start pleading with her.

She’s in no mood for Krish’s nonsense. Not today. Not after how he acted.

She hears Cyrus’s phone beep three times in quick succession a few seconds later, and the look on his face when he glances at the message notifications does nothing to quell her rage.

She clenches her jaw, and tries very, very hard to keep her voice as gentle as she can manage. After all, it’s not Cyrus she’s pissed off at.

“Turn the phone off.” From the way Cyrus uncharacteristically fumbles while doing as she bid, Anushka doesn’t think that she succeeded.

The silence in the car with the phone off and music gone is oppressive. None of the camaraderie and lightness she had felt just a minute ago remains, and she feels its loss keenly, a bit like grief. The thought of that brings her back to the nature and purpose of this trip, and Anushka finds herself feeling frozen again.

The pounding in her skull that she had nearly forgotten about reasserts its presence with a viciousness and spite that has her hands shaking, the steering wheel momentarily shifting out from under her grasp. It startles a quiet shriek from Cyrus, but he clamps it back as she quickly straightens the wheel that had listed to one side.

Four minutes now. Four minutes to the rest stop. She can make it four more minutes.

Just four measly minutes and they’ll get to the rest stop and then… what? She has no idea. Maybe she’ll let Cyrus decide. Maybe that’s what she needs; someone who isn’t a fuck up to tell her what to do, how to run her ramshackle life. The idea of burdening her friend sits heavy on her though, and she knows she couldn’t do that to him.

Cyrus doesn’t deserve her mess.

Anushka sneaks a cautious glance towards him, and her gaze recoils almost immediately. The momentary lapse in her ‘Driving School Valedictorian’ routine had left Cyrus white knuckled, his impeccable posture more rigid and on edge, face just a little paler. Guilt ambushes her bodily, and shame dogs its footsteps. The very idea of warmth vanishes from her ken, despite the sweltering summer afternoon.

She doesn’t know where to begin apologising, or how exactly she could ever stop apologising if she got started. So she fixes her eyes on the road instead, hands steadied with a costly effort, and just focuses on getting through the next four, no three, minutes.

It’s threatening to be a chilled, silent drive, and for a fleeting second, Anushka contemplates turning on the radio to fill the din. But Cyrus had been playing DJ for her for the past three hours, whether she’d noticed it or not. His own way of attempting to comfort her. Substituting that feels wrong somehow.

She glances to her left again, and she can see that, while his posture is still more strained than she would prefer, Cyrus seems to be coming back to himself. Good. A bit of the pain in her own head recedes, and she only absently acknowledges that it was because she had unclenched her jaw.

It takes the space of a missing song for the tension in Cyrus’ form to fade out, and by the time she’s pulled into the rest stop, she can tell that he has gathered himself from the momentary fright of her loss of control over the car. Guilt sits heavily in her stomach still, and she’s careful to slow down gently, not allowing the brake to jerk the car or cause him to lurch. Aware of why Cyrus is as panicked in vehicles as he is, she’s just as careful with him right now. She parks the car to the side of the service station, in front of the on premises eatery.

“We’ll get fuel on the way out,” she turns to him with what she hopes is a soothing smile. “How about that extended break?”

“I think that would be wise.” Proper, and verging on supercilious, Cyrus sounds exactly like himself. His posture has his usual shoulders back refinement, none of that awful rigor from before. The slightest smile and the clarity of his eyes indicate that he doesn’t seem to harbour any ill will towards her, and Anushka just barely keeps herself from sagging in relief. “You are slightly more tolerable when you’re properly caffeinated, and it has been eleven hours since your last cup of tea.” He spits the word tea out as if it was the drink itself.

“I’ll convert you someday.”

“You sound like my mother…”

Cyrus awkwardly clears his throat and she picks her smile up from where it fell on the floor. He looks at her, looks away, looks back at her again and tentatively reaches out to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Order me your favourite. Dekhte hain, shayad kuch badal gaya ho.” Who knows, maybe something has changed.

His voice has a soft, gentle cadence to it that’s just too much for her to deal with right now. Retreat, something in her head warns, when all she wants to do is accept the comfort he’s offering. But to accept that would mean thinking about the why of this trip and she can’t do that right now. Not if they’re going to get to where she needs to drive them to.

Anushka shrugs his hand off with a deliberately melodramatic flair. Sniffs haughtily like a cartoon villain, voice high with the Queen’s English, “I’d rather not waste a perfectly good cup of tea, thank you very much.”

“…Ye of little faith.” It took a second, but Cyrus had accepted her deflection. She’s grateful.

“Ye of even less hope,” she banters, hoping she doesn’t sound breathless.

“Kuch bhi.” Whatever. His voice is still fond.

“Waise bhi,” besides. She eyes the building they’re parked in front of speculatively, and not at all to avoid looking at him. “I don’t think having tea from this place could convince anyone of anything.”

Cyrus gives the building a hairy eyeball. “You have a point.”

“I’ll get you a coffee. It’s disgusting anyway. Bura bhi ho, tab bhi koi farak nahi padne waala.” You won’t be able to tell even if it’s worse.

“I will convince you someday.”

“I think we’ve been here before.”

They reach for their door handles simultaneously, getting out of the car with a graceful synchronicity. It’s often bewildered their friends for all that it’s entirely unrehearsed, and even more unlikely considering the improbability of people like them getting along. But that’s only because the others don’t know them. Not like they know each other.

Cyrus reaches into the backseat and gathers up his emergency cleaning kit. “I need to use the washroom,” he nods at the little freestanding building to the side of the eatery. “I will meet you in the restaurant.”

With that, he hangs the cleaning supply backpack on his shoulder, and takes determined steps towards the outbuilding like he’s expecting to battle a dragon. As far as Anushka knows Cyrus, he would definitely prefer facing down a dragon to whatever state the gent’s facilities must be in. She smiles at his back, noting with relief that the tension from a few minutes ago is now entirely absent from his gait, and then makes her way into the restaurant.

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