ME FOR YOU - YOU FOR ME

The marble floor of the bedroom felt freezing beneath Nitya’s bare feet.

The air smelled of expensive sandalwood, cold sweat, and the sharp, metallic tang of the weapon clutched in her right hand. The barrel was pressed firmly, deliberately against her own temple.

Just inches away, Nayam Bhardwaj lunged forward, his hands outstretched, his face entirely stripped of the cool, untouchable detachment the world saw on his streams.

“Nitya, stop—don’t!” Nayam yelled, his voice cracking, raw with a panic he had never experienced in his life. He lunged to grab the gun, his fingers grazing the cold steel just a split second too late.

BANG.

The deafening, ear-splitting crack of the gunshot ripped through the silent night, echoing off the high ceilings.

Nitya’s eyes fluttered shut as the sound swallowed everything.

Silence.

Three Years Earlier.

The noon sun beat down hard on the sprawling lawns of the Greater Kailash mansion in Delhi, but inside his air-conditioned studio, Nayam Bhardwaj was completely lost in his own world.

The room was a gamer’s sanctuary: custom liquid-cooled rigs glowing with a soft RGB purple, a high-end dual-monitor setup, and acoustic panels lining the walls. Nayam leaned back in his ergonomic leather chair, wearing an oversized black hoodie, a can of iced coffee in one hand while his other casually rested on his mechanical keyboard.

“Alright, chat,” Nayam murmured, his voice a smooth, rich baritone that effortlessly commanded attention. “We’re running one more ranked match, and then I’m logging off. My legs are stiff. Need to get some fresh air.”

After signing off his stream to a flood of spamming heart and laughing emojis, Nayam stretched his arms over his head. It was late evening now, the brutal Delhi heat finally softening into a breezy, star-lit night. Deciding to clear his head, he grabbed his matte-black hybrid mountain bike from the garage, pushing open the heavy iron gates of his colony and heading out onto the quieter, tree-lined residential lanes of South Delhi.

The streets were relatively calm, the glow of streetlights casting long shadows over the pavement. Nayam pedalled faster, letting the cool night air rush past his face, enjoying the rare moment of total anonymity.

Around a sharp blind turn near a quiet crossroad, disaster struck.

CRAASH.

A sudden blur of motion, a sharp screech of metal scraping against asphalt, and Nayam flew sideways off his bicycle, hitting the ground hard with a dull thud. His bike skidded across the road, tangled up with another.

“Ah—fuck,” Nayam hissed through his teeth, instinctively trying to brace his fall with his right hand.

A sharp, sickening crack echoed in the quiet street.

A few feet away, another bicycle lay overturned. Groaning softly, a young woman pushed herself up from the pavement, brushing dirt off her knees.

Under the amber glow of the overhead streetlamp, Nitya Shrivastav looked less like a casual passerby and more like a quiet painting caught in motion. She was wearing a simple, elegant chikonkari kurti paired with a faded denim jacket, but what immediately drew the eye was her glistening eyes. Her long hair tumbled down past her shoulders in thick, cascading waves of jet-black silk, catching the evening breeze and framing a face of striking, effortless beauty. Her sharp, expressive eyes, framed by long lashes, held an instinctive depth, and though she was wincing slightly from a bruised knee, her presence carried an undeniable, calming grace.

Despite wincing from her own scraped elbows, her eyes widened the second she saw Nayam clutching his right arm, his face twisted in sudden, sharp agony.

Even in pain and disheveled from the fall, Nayam Bhardwaj was undeniably striking. With his sharp, chiseled jawline, high cheekbones, and thick dark hair slightly damp from sweat falling over his forehead, he had the effortlessly studious, high-end aesthetic of a modern tech intellectual combined with the sharp edge of a professional athlete. His tall, lean frame, encased in the black hoodie, gave him an aura of quiet, untouchable confidence—even as he lay groaning on the asphalt.

“Oh god, are you okay?” Nitya rushed over, dropping to her knees beside him. Her long hair fell forward, creating a dark curtain around her face. “Don’t move. Let me see.”

“My arm...” Nayam gritted out, breaking into a cold sweat. The wrist was already swelling rapidly, hanging at an awkward, unnatural angle. It was a textbook fracture.

Instead of panicking, Nitya’s hands suddenly shifted. Her touch became instantly calm, clinical, and reassuring. Her fingers gently felt the bones of his forearm with practiced precision, tracing the radius and ulna without causing further trauma.

Nayam opened his eyes, staring up at her through the pain, confused by her sudden shift in demeanour. “Who... how do you know what to do?”

“I’m a doctor,” she said softly, keeping her voice steady as she held his arm in place. “I just finished my MBBS and I’m currently prepping for my post-graduation in General Medicine. You’ve got a clean transverse fracture of the distal radius. We need to immobilize this right now before you move it.”

She looked around the quiet, empty street, then looked back down at her modest rented apartment building just ten meters away. “My place is right here. Let’s go.”

Minutes later, Nayam found himself sitting on a clean, neatly arranged white-clothed chair inside Nitya’s small, organized study-cum-clinic room. The walls were lined with heavy medical textbooks, anatomical charts, and a small desk cluttered with stethoscope sets and prescription pads.

Nitya moved efficiently around the room. With swift, expert movements, she grabbed a light splint, some gauze, and medical tape, returning to his side.

“This is going to hurt a little,” she warned softly, her dark eyes looking straight into his. “I need to set the bone straight before I bandage it, or it will heal incorrectly.”

Nayam clenched his jaw, nodding stiffly. “Do it.”

With a swift, practiced yank and steady pressure, Nitya snapped the bone back into alignment. Nayam let out a sharp, involuntary gasp, his knuckles turning white as cold sweat broke out across his forehead. But almost instantly, her hands were gentle again, wrapping the sterile cotton and applying the rigid splint with absolute mastery.

“There,” she murmured, taping the final layer securely. “That will keep the radius from shifting. I’m going to write you a prescription for a mild analgesic and an anti-inflammatory to manage the swelling for the next forty-eight hours. Take them strictly on time.”

She turned to her wooden desk, pulling out a prescription pad and uncapping a pen. Her hair fell gracefully over her shoulder as she began writing in swift, sweeping cursive lines.

Nayam sat back, trying to steady his breathing. His right arm throbbed dully beneath the white gauze, but the sharp agony had subsided into a dull ache. Idly, his eyes drifted across the cluttered surface of her desk, scanning the open pages of her daily clinic register where she logged patient visits, medical history notes, and follow-up appointments.

His gaze snagged on a name written midway down the page.

Nayam froze. His eyebrows drew together in a sharp, sudden frown.

There, written in Nitya’s neat handwriting, was an entry dated two weeks ago: Aarti Bhardwaj – Chronic joint pain, lower limb mobility restriction. Prescribed physiotherapy.

Nayam looked up from the register, his dark eyes narrowing slightly with a sudden wave of suspicion. The casual, appreciative haze of the moment evaporated, replaced by the sharp, analytical instincts of an IIT engineer.

“Hey,” Nayam said, his voice cutting through the quiet room, laced with an abrupt edge.

Nitya stopped writing, her pen hovering just above the paper. She looked up slowly, her long eyelashes framing those deep, calm eyes. “Yes? Does the splint feel too tight?”

“No,” Nayam said, leaning forward slightly, pointing a finger at the open logbook on her desk. “How do you know my mom?”

Nitya blinked, her expression shifting into a mask of absolute, genuine confusion. She glanced down at the book, then back up at his face. “Who?”

“Aarti,” Nayam said, his tone turning sharp and interrogative. “Aarti Bhardwaj. That’s my mother. Her name is right there in your register. How do you know her?”

Nitya stared at him for a second, her brows knitting together in thought before a flicker of recognition crossed her face. “Oh. Aarti ji ? Oh, wow. I—I didn’t know she was your mother.”

“You didn’t know?” Nayam scoffed softly, leaning back with a cynical, disbelieving smirk. “Come on. People don’t just randomly treat billionaire tech moguls’ wives without knowing who they are. What is this? Some kind of setup?”

Nitya’s expression hardened just a fraction, a quiet dignity replacing her previous softness. She laid her pen down entirely, crossing her arms slightly.

“I’m a doctor, Nayam,” she said quietly, her voice steady and unyielding. “In my clinic, people aren’t corporate titles or billionaires. They are patients. I met her a couple of weeks ago when she came into a local community mandir near here. She had severe mobility issues with her leg—she was struggling to walk down the stone steps. I helped her sit down, examined her knee right there on the temple steps, and wrote down a few preliminary guidelines and stretches. She told me her name was Aarti, and she thanked me. She never mentioned her last name, and she certainly never mentioned she had a son who thinks the entire world revolves around him.”

Nayam stared at her, studying every micro-expression on her face. There was no stutter, no hesitation, no nervous shift of her eyes. Her story was completely, maddeningly ordinary.

He swallowed hard, feeling a sudden, uncharacteristic prick of embarrassment, though he quickly masked it behind his usual cold facade. He stood up slowly from the chair, testing the weight of his immobilized right arm against his chest.

“Right,” Nayam muttered, turning toward the door. “Whatever.”

He reached for the brass handle of the front door, pulling it slightly.

Nitya remained seated by her desk, watching him with an inscrutable expression in her dark eyes.

“You know me, right?” Nayam asked suddenly, pausing with his hand on the latch, looking back at her over his shoulder with a sharp, probing gaze. “You knew who I was the second I crashed my bike outside, didn’t you? With the hoodie, the gaming streams—you’ve seen me online.”

Nitya didn’t flinch. She didn’t smile. She simply looked at him, her long black hair catching the dim light of the study lamp, and gave a slow, completely neutral shake of her head.

“Sorry,” Nitya said softly, her voice smooth and entirely devoid of fan girl worship or artificial awe.

“I don’t watch gaming streams. But take the medicines I prescribed. I’m sure your arm will be alright.”

Nayam stared at her for one long, unresolved beat, feeling a strange, unsettling itch at the back of his mind—a glitch in his worldview that he couldn’t quite debug. Without another word, he turned and pulled the door open to leave.

As the heavy wooden door swung outward into the hallway, it let out a long, high-pitched, metallic screech that echoed sharply through the quiet apartment.