Priya ❤️‍🔥🔞

Author's note:

This short story is a work of fiction and should be taken as such. Any resemblance to living or deceased people, events, names, or things is purely coincidental.

This is an erotic romance intended for adults only. Reader discretion is advised.

Lastly, this piece of work took a lot of time, creativity, and too much caffeine. Don’t copy it.

All rights reserved © Avinash, 2026.

Enjoy!

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The 9:47 from Mumbai to Pune left twelve minutes late that night, which was nothing new, but the delay felt different in July, when the rain turned the platform into a long grey smear and the announcement speakers crackled instead of speaking clearly.

Priya stood under the shelter near the second coach, her laptop bag slung across her body, water dripping off the edge of the shelter roof in a steady line that hit the concrete an inch from her shoes.

She had been taking this train for two months now. Long enough that she recognized the tea vendor by his limp, long enough that she knew which week the train usually delays, long enough that the ache in her lower back from six hours at a desk followed by two hours on a hard seat had become as familiar as breathing.

A sales job had never been glamorous, but nobody had told her at twenty-four that ten years in, it would mean spreadsheets in Mumbai on Monday and client meetings in Pune on Thursday, with a six-year-old at home asking why Mummy’s bag was always packed.

At thirty-four, Priya had built a life that looked, from the outside, entirely correct. A husband with a stable job at a private bank, a daughter who was doing well in school, a two-bedroom flat in Andheri that they had bought with both their names on the loan documents, proof of two people building something together.

Nobody looking at the photographs on her phone would have guessed that most evenings she felt like a woman running a household from a great distance, present in body and absent everywhere else.

Rohan was not unkind. He had never once raised his voice at her in six years of marriage. But somewhere between Anaya’s birth and the promotion that had chained him to his laptop until midnight most days, the two of them had stopped reaching for each other in any way that wasn’t logistical.

Groceries. School fees. Whose turn it was to attend the parent teacher meeting. She loved him in the way you love a house you’ve lived in for years, familiar and necessary and no longer something you look at twice.

She found her usual seat, third row, window side, and settled in before the train pulled away. The seat had a small tear near the armrest that she had watched grow slightly wider over the months, a private landmark that told her she was in the right place even when the coach number changed.

Around her, the regulars settled into their own rituals. The elderly man three rows back who always fell asleep before Kalyan and woke exactly at Pune, as if his body had memorized the route better than his mind ever could. The two college students who spent every journey arguing cheerfully about cricket. The woman near the door who sold homemade thepla out of a steel tin to anyone who asked, and to some who didn’t.

Across the aisle, one row up, sat the man she had started noticing without meaning to.

She did not know his name. She knew his habits. He always boarded at Mumbai and always got off at Pune, same as her, though she had never worked out what he did for a living.

He wore his shirts a size looser than fashionable and always had a book, not a phone, open on his lap. Tonight it looked like poetry, though she couldn’t be sure from this angle. Earphones in, not moving, not really reading either, just staring somewhere past the page.

She had clocked him for the first time back in early June, when the compartment was nearly empty and his voice, low and unhurried, had asked the chai vendor for extra sugar. Nothing about it should have stayed with her. But something about his voice and the way he said thank you, like he meant it and wasn’t just performing courtesy, had lodged itself somewhere and refused to leave.

Since then she noticed him the way you notice a streetlight that’s always on outside your window. Not something she thought about, until the night the power was gone.

That night came in July, on this delayed train, in this flickering coach.

The lights had gone twice already since Dadar, brief blackouts that made the whole compartment gasp and laugh nervously and then settle again once the bulbs sputtered back on. Around Lonavala the train slowed to a crawl, some signal fault ahead, and the lights died a third time and stayed dead.

In the dark, phones came out, small blue rectangles glowing across the coach. Priya reached for hers out of habit and then stopped, because in the seat across from her a voice said, quietly, not really to her, more to the general dark, “I think we might be here a while.”

“Do you know what time it is?” she asked. Her phone was somewhere at the bottom of her bag, and asking felt easier than digging for it.

“I think it will be till Ten forty. Give or take.” A pause. “My watch runs a bit fast.”

That should have been the end of it. Instead the lights stayed off for another eleven minutes, long enough that talking to the shape across the aisle stopped feeling strange and started feeling like the only sensible thing to do in a dark train stalled somewhere outside Lonavala with rain hammering the windows.

His name was Aditya. He told her that much during the conversation. He worked freelance, graphic design mostly, some brand identity work for small companies that couldn’t afford proper agencies. He lived alone in Pune, in a one bedroom near Kothrud that he’d taken over from a friend who moved to Bangalore. He liked the late train because the compartment was quieter and he could actually finish a chapter without someone’s elbow in his ribs.

“And you,” he asked, “what takes you back and forth every week?”

“Client meetings mostly. I work in sales, for a company that sells industrial packaging, which is not exactly as thrilling as it sounds.”

He laughed, a short surprised sound, like he hadn’t expected her to be funny. “Industrial packaging.”

“Boxes. Very serious boxes. I promise you no one has ever been more passionate about corrugated cardboard than the clients I sit across from on Thursdays.”

“That sounds worse than my job, and my job involves explaining to restaurant owners why their logo shouldn’t be Comic Sans.”

“That happens?”

“More than you’d think.”

The lights came back somewhere around Khandala, and the sudden brightness felt almost rude, like someone switching on the lamps at the end of a party neither of them wanted to end.

Priya blinked, adjusted, and found herself looking at Aditya properly for the first time. He wasn’t handsome in any obvious way. His face was ordinary, a little tired around the eyes, the kind of face you’d walk past on the street without a second look.

But there was something steady in the way he held her gaze that most men she knew didn’t bother with anymore, something that made her feel, for the length of one train delay, like she was being actually listened to instead of just heard.

They kept talking. About the rain, about how Mumbai monsoons made everyone secretly a little insane by August, about a restaurant near Deccan Gymkhana that did an unreasonably good misal pav. Nothing that mattered. Nothing that should have mattered.

But when the train finally pulled into Pune, forty minutes late, and the compartment emptied out around them, Priya realized she hadn’t checked her phone once in almost two hours. Rohan had texted her twice, both messages practical, asking if she’d eaten, telling her Anaya had finished her homework without a fight for once. She typed back a short reply standing on the platform, thumb moving automatically, her mind still half inside the conversation she’d just left.

“Same time next week?” Aditya asked, slinging his bag over one shoulder, already half turned toward the exit.

She hadn’t expected the question, and she answered before she’d properly decided how to answer it. “I take this train every Thursday.”

“Then I suppose I’ll see you.”

He walked off toward the auto stand without waiting for her to say anything else, and she stood there for a moment on the platform, rain still coming down in a fine mist under the station lights, feeling something she hadn’t felt in longer than she wanted to admit. Not excitement exactly. Something quieter than that. The simple, almost embarrassing relief of having had an ordinary conversation with someone who wasn’t asking anything of her.

She caught her own auto ten minutes later, the ride back to her hotel bumping over wet roads, and she found herself replaying small pieces of what he’d said. It was nothing. She told herself it was nothing the whole ride back, and again in the shower, and again lying in the hotel bed with the television playing something she wasn’t watching.

At home in Mumbai, six-year-old Anaya was already asleep, and Rohan was still up when Priya finally video called before bed, the screen small and a little pixelated on the hotel wifi. He looked tired in the particular way he’d looked tired for the last two years, present but somewhere else, a man who had learned to love his family through logistics rather than attention.

He told her about Anaya’s day, mentioned a work call that had run long, asked when she’d be back. Practical, kind, entirely without curiosity about her actual day.

“The train was delayed,” she said. “Power went out for a bit near Lonavala.”

“That sounds awful,” he said, not looking up from whatever he was doing on his laptop just off screen.

“It wasn’t, actually,” she said, and something in her own voice surprised her. “It was fine.”

She didn’t tell him about Aditya. There was nothing to tell, not really, just a conversation in the dark with a stranger on a train, the kind of thing that happened to thousands of commuters every day and meant nothing to any of them. She told herself that as she hung up the call and turned off the lamp, and she almost believed it.

The following Thursday, she found herself dressing a little more carefully than usual before leaving the office, and telling herself it had nothing to do with the train.

The week between had passed the way weeks always did, full of school runs and status meetings and the small grinding of running a household from two cities at once.

She had thought about the delayed train more than once, always catching herself and putting the thought away like something she’d accidentally left on the kitchen counter. It meant nothing. It was a conversation. People had conversations on trains every single day and never thought of them again.

And yet on Thursday evening, closing her laptop at the office, she had felt something close to anticipation settle in her chest, faint but unmistakable, and she had not examined it too closely because she suspected she already knew what she would find if she did.

He was there, same seat, same book, this time with a bookmark peeking out from somewhere near the middle instead of the front. He looked up when she sat down across the aisle, and something in his face, some small unguarded flicker of pleasure, told her he had been wondering if she would show up too.

“Industrial packaging,” he said, by way of greeting, and she laughed before she could stop herself, and the whole coach seemed a little brighter than it should have for a Thursday night in the rain.