Page 139 - The World's Best Boyfriend
P. 139

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               Sanchit had never had a girlfriend, which gave him ample time to analyse girls

               and relationships deeply and intensely, be it through porn or books which he did
               out in the open, or through glossy magazines which he downloaded on his phone
               and read while on the shit pot every morning.
                  It was the tenth year since he hit puberty and he had researched enough to

               know that Ritika and Dhruv’s relationship was a sham, there was no love, maybe
               a psychological warfare of a different kind but definitely not love. Dhruv wanted

               to possess her and then unwittingly suffocate her with his overbearing
               possessiveness and destroy her, and Ritika who was an intelligent girl had turned
               into a bumbling idiot in love. But then girls love to be destroyed by men who
               take them on a bad trip, make them feel loved and despised, keep them

               constantly on tenterhooks, and ruin them for everyone else. Dhruv was that mad
               love that forty-year-old women write about in their books while they are married

               to sedate office-goers with paunches and white patches on their wrists from
               wearing the same watch for decades.
                  But he loved Dhruv because Dhruv lived. He was always too angry, too
               happy, too agitated, too alive, too sad, like living four lives at once, like he was

               made of nerve endings. While the entire world was like a sleepy, herbivorous,
               gigantic argentinosaurus, ambling slowly, target in sight, the lush leaves on the

               top of a tree, Dhruv was an angry tryannosaurus rex, a complete fucking bastard
               with no sense of fear, absolutely aimless, ripping out trees and dinosaurs far
               bigger than his size and soaking in the glory of it all, remorseless.

                  For the past two weeks Dhruv had been chasing him and a near-impossible
               dream to top the mid-semester examination, an honour reserved for the nerds,
               the half-humans like Sanchit.

                  Dhruv had fumbled with the reason why he wanted to top the examination,
               concocting stories, but Sanchit wasn’t Ritika and he didn’t buy his shit. He
               would have pretended to be too drunk, too busy, too stoned to teach him but he

               had relented for Dhruv had some inherent niceness in him, you could sense it
               and you were sure it existed, but you couldn’t get to it, and he respected that. It
               was also the reason why girls made him a project and fell in love with him.

                  Sanchit saw through the stories Dhruv tried to sell him but he knew all too
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