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A thin plaster wall was all that separated them.
To Aanya, it was just another room. Four walls, a soft bed, textbooks, a corkboard, a few photos, and one pastel-colored window that faced the quiet street.
To Aryan, it was a stage. And she was the only performer.
Their rooms in the school hostel were next to each other, Room 203 and 204. Gender-segregated wings had bent rules for scholarship students during renovations, and no one bothered to fix it. A mistake in the layout became the reason a monster could listen to his prey breathe every night.
Aanya sat at her desk, sleeves rolled up, ankles crossed beneath her chair. Her lamp cast a golden pool of light over her notebooks. Her pen scratched softly on the page as she revised chemistry formulas. Occasionally, she'd pause to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear or glance at the sticky notes on her wall.
In the adjacent room, Aryan sat too.
But his desk wasn't filled with textbooks.
It was filled with images. Drawings. Ink sketches of Aanya's face—dozens of them. Some smiling, some yawning, one of her biting her nail, another of her braiding her hair. Most were drawn from memory. A few were drawn from photographs taken with a hidden camera planted in the hollow pipe across her balcony window.
Aryan was talented. His strokes were confident, practiced. Every freckle on her cheek, every curve of her lips—he had memorized them all.
His ears were trained.
He could tell when she shifted her weight from one leg to another. He knew her walk—not just the rhythm, but the mood behind it. When she was tired, her steps dragged slightly. When she was happy, they bounced.
He had a spreadsheet where he logged the time she entered the bathroom, how long she stayed, and how many times she flushed.
He matched her footsteps with her moods. Mapped them to the hours of the day. Predicted when she'd feel vulnerable.
That night, as she wrote a short poem for her English assignment, Aryan pressed his ear to the wall. The plaster was old, and with the right pressure, he could almost hear her breathing.
Soft. Steady. Controlled.
He closed his eyes and slowed his own breath to match hers. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Like a duet.
Aanya paused her writing. Smiled to herself.
Earlier that day, she had confided in her best friend, Nidhi. They sat under the neem tree behind the library, where students whispered secrets and passed notes during lunch breaks.
"I don't know," Aanya had said, eyes flicking to the sky. "There's something about Aarav… He just listens. Like… really listens. Not in that flirty, creepy way. He just… gets it."
Nidhi had teased her, of course.
But Aryan—"Aarav" to her—had smiled the moment he heard her say it. He was close enough to hear. He had been tailing her since before the bell rang.
Every time she used the fake name he gave her, it gave him a thrill. Like watching a puppet unknowingly perform its role to perfection.
Aanya thought he was mysterious. Kind. Thoughtful.
She didn't know his real name.
She didn't know he had stolen a strand of her hair from her comb last week.
She didn't know he had a folder titled "203" hidden in the encrypted partition of his laptop, filled with audio files named after the time of day and tagged by emotion: Aanya_Laughing_10.43PM, Aanya_Crying_2.19AM, Aanya_TalkingToHerself_7.11PM.
Aryan wasn't falling in love.
He was documenting.
Archiving.
Feeding.
The more she liked him, the more she trusted him. And the more she trusted him, the more reckless she became with her privacy.
One day, she left her notebook outside while grabbing a snack from the mess hall. He picked it up, flipped to the last page, read a small paragraph she had scribbled about him:
"Aarav is like silence. Not empty. Just full of things he doesn't say."
He copied that line onto the back of one of her sketches. Framed it on his wall.
She thought it was poetry.
He thought it was prophecy.
That night, as lights in the hostel dimmed and the hall monitors passed by with flashlights, Aanya curled into bed, whispering her goodnights to no one in particular.
Aryan sat in his room with a single lamp glowing, her name written fifty times in the margin of his sketchbook.
He knew she was falling for him.
And he knew exactly what to do next.
Just one wall between them.
A wall thin enough to hear her sigh in her sleep.
A wall thin enough for obsession to seep through like poison in water.
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