HE WAS HANDSOME, I WAS UGLY.

Third year in the college, and I hardly had friends. If inanimate objects could be friends, I had a lot of them. I had come to believe that books were the only friends that would never leave your side. Once you cling on to them, they too, cling on to you, forever. 

Just as I was writing something in my daily journal sitting all alone in the library, Abhiraj Sharma sat across the table. He sat, writing something on bits of papers, crushing and throwing them after every four lines. Maybe, he was writing yet another story. I looked at him, but I don’t think he has noticed me even once in the past three years. 

After all, in contrast to him, I am just a normal girl, who is good for nothing other than academics and writing. Well, writing, I think I am. But unlike him, I am no author. And for those who don’t know him, he is the bestselling author of two campus novels. So, that explains his fan following. But I’ve never seen him mingle much with people, and in the past two years, although quite a lot of girls have tried hitting on him, he never responds to their flirty compliments. Maybe, he always felt that they were just trying to flatter him. 

As he sat, crushing the papers, I felt distracted. His rough hair, which he never combed never failed to turn me on. Biting his lower lip, he cursed himself for, maybe, not getting the right words, and that pulled me towards him. He was the only guy I’d been in love with, deeply, madly and truly since past three years, but then, I wasn’t even half as good looking as him, although I thought I wrote far better than him. It’s a different thing that he was a published author and I was a ‘nobody’. He was fair, the kind of fairness you see in the models who act in the advertisements of a fairness cream. My skin colour was in contradiction to his. And that often let me down. 

Leaving the papers on the table, he disappeared from the library frustrated over something, his displeasure clearly evident on his face. I waited for him to get back, but he didn’t. Finally, it was 6pm, and before leaving, I went up to his table, where the papers he had written and crushed were lying. I picked them up, and headed for my place. 

The moment I reached home, I sat in the balcony, reading what he’d written, and I jotted down point, and wrote something from the same. I went on writing, and wrote two pages, and completed the story he’d written. 

The next morning, as he was passing through me, I called him. It was the first time I called him by his name. I was nervous, yet I handed over the paper to him, and left as he asked what it was. 

As I know from what he told me later, he read it, and the moment he read it, he had fallen for me. He searched for me throughout the campus, only to find me in the library in the evening. 

“Hey Miss Writer,” he called out. 

“Lavanya. Lavanya Gupta, it is.” I replied. 

The librarian gestured us to keep quite, and he asked me if we could go for a coffee. And I was dumbstruck, standing in front of him, unable to reply, although it was a yes. Just then, he held my hand and took me along with him to the Cafeteria; it gave me heebie-jeebies. 

I ordered a black coffee. I’d know it to be his favourite drink as I’d seen him drinking the same everyday, almost ever hour since the past three years. I never really liked black coffee, but I’d gotten used to it drinking it for him since past one year.

“Make that two.” He said, as the waiter left. 

“So, you liked the story?” I asked talking to him, for the first time. 

“Liked it? I loved it, and here, I ask you if you’d want to accompany me in writing my next novel?” He questioned me leaving me speechless again. 

He asked me to be his co-author. Oh my god, I can’t believe it. 

“Why wouldn’t I?” I replied. 

He smiled. I smiled back. 

And the book titled ‘He was handsome, I was ugly’, we wrote together, turned out to be a bestseller. But what means more is in the course of writing the book, Abhiraj fell for me. And he is the best that has ever happened to me. 

So, never lose hope on something you believe in. May it be your passion, or your love. It may come true anytime.