“Tastes Like Home” - #Manvik - COMPLETED - Page 2

Chapter 9:What She Almost Said

She told him standing in his office a week later, the letter in her hand, her voice doing the flat, controlled thing it did whenever she was bracing

“I’m going to accept it,” Mannat said. “Singapore. A regional fusion-concepts post She said it like a decision already made, not one still open for argument. “I know what it costs me, Vikrant. My father, mostly. But here’s what it actually offers for the first time in my career, every decision would be mine. Not run past a partner who gets final say. Not handed to me with the actual authority sitting somewhere else, in someone else’s office, under someone else’s name. The menu, The mine. The numbers, mine. Who gets hired, who gets let go, what the concept actually is and isn’t — every single call, made by me, answerable to no one standing behind me waiting to override it if they disagree.

“I’ve spent my entire career building other people’s numbers, proving other people’s restaurants, signing my name to reports that belonged to someone else’s account, with someone else holding the pen that actually mattered. I trained the same way you did, kitchens before spreadsheets, knife before ledger, and I built both halves of myself on purpose :Singapore is the first place that’s offering me both halves and the actual authority to use them — not a seat at the table, the table itself. If I take this, I stop asking anyone for permission. That’s what I’d be saying yes to, not the title. The deciding.”

“It’s two years,” she went on, quieter now, the certainty in her voice thinning at the edges the way it only did when she was talking about her father. “Not a moment less, no matter how well I perform there — that’s the actual condition buried in the fine print. Two years, full term, no early transfer, no shortening it for good behavior. Only after that does the contract let me request a permanent posting back here I asked them. I asked very specifically if there was any way to come back sooner. There isn’t. Two years away from you them. That’s the price of never having to do this again.”

And there’s a payout attached to it, at the end, if I see it through. A completion bonus, large enough that it isn’t really a bonus at all large enough to actually start something here, properly, with my own capital behind it instead of someone else’s permission. Two years of building someone else’s regional concept, and at the end of it, enough put aside that whatever I came back to build in Chandigarh wouldn’t need anyone’s approval but mine.”

“And I’ll be—” She started again, voice catching somewhere she hadn’t expected it to, and stopped herself , the rest of it refusing to come. Away from you . She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t trust her own voice to get through it without breaking entirely,So she let it die there and reached for the letter again instead, smoothing a crease that didn’t need smoothing, anything to keep her hands busy and her eyes somewhere other than his face.

“And your parents.”

Papa’s better now, properly better, steady enough that the cardiologist actually used the word ‘miraculously good ‘ His brother and family came back home from Canada for good and stays in dadi’s home next to ours . So we have the entire family to take care of my papa and you .I just need to offer the security for him.

“And the rest of it.”

“The rest of it is that I don’t want to go, Vikrant. Not even slightly. I’m not doing this because some part of me is excited about Singapore, or because two years sounds like an adventure I’ve been waiting for. But I have be away from all of it for two years without something on the other end of it that’s permanent, something that means I never have to choose again and create something in my name

“You want something in your own name.”

“I want one thing in my own name. That’s all I’m asking the universe for at this point.” She folded the letter back along its creases, careful, final. “I can’t keep being someone else’s exception. I need to be the rule, somewhere, even if it’s four thousand kilometers from everyone I love.”

He didn’t react the way she’d braced for. There was no shock in his face at all, only the particular stillness of a man who’d been holding something back, waiting for exactly this moment to set it down — and underneath that stillness, where she couldn’t see it, something close to panic, carefully bricked over the way he bricked over everything that frightened him. He had rehearsed this. He had rehearsed it more times than he’d rehearsed anything in his life, including the London call, because London could only cost him a franchise. This could cost him her, and there was no version of that loss he’d found a way to plan around yet.

“Then I have something to show you before you send that letter,” he said, and kept his voice level by main force, the way he held a knife steady through a service he hadn’t slept properly for. “I’d like you to hear all of it before you decide anything’s already decided.”

“Vikrant—”

“The property on Sector 26. ” He reached into his coat slowly, deliberately, every motion measured because he didn’t trust himself to move any faster than that without his hands giving him away, and set a folded set of documents on the desk between them. “Fully fitted, fully licensed, kitchen built to your own drawings ; the ones you redid at my dining table and thought I’d thrown away. The redirection clause from the London deal. And it’s empty and ready waiting for someone to walk in and decide what it’s for.”

He watched her face the entire time she read, cataloguing every flicker of it the way he’d catalogue a ticket about to come back from the pass wrong, certain absolutely certain, that she was about to hand the documents back to him and walk straight onto a plane to Singapore rather than accept something this large from a man she hadn’t asked anything from.

She stared at the papers, then at him, the careful finality she’d built into her voice a moment ago coming apart at the edges. “You did this without telling me. Without me in the room.”

“On purpose.” His voice didn’t shake. He made sure of that, even as everything underneath it did. “You weren’t there when I asked for it, and you weren’t going to be, because I already knew exactly what would happen if you were.” He held her gaze, steady on the outside, bracing on the inside for the word no the way he braced for a burn he could see coming and still couldn’t quite get his hand out of the way of in time. “I’ve known you long enough to know you don’t take things, Mannat. You earn them, or you walk away from them, and you’d have walked away from this in that boardroom before the partner finished his sentence, just to prove you could. So I didn’t ask you. I asked for the building, on terms only I had to answer for, and decided I’d fight about it afterward, in private, where it was actually between the two of us and nobody else’s contract.”

For a long moment she didn’t say anything at all. Something had moved across her face that he’d never quite seen there before — not composure cracking, not the careful flatness she wore through crises, but something closer to wonder, undefended, the look of a woman watching a door open that she’d long since stopped checking.

“It’s beautiful,” she said finally, quietly, like the word had cost her something to say out loud. “It’s everything I would have built if anyone had ever let me build it for myself.

“And I’m not taking it like this , Vikrant ”

“~Lex

Originally posted by: Moor278

This is so good. Would like to read more. But I understand your situation

Thankyou so much . Noted . I will give this a proper ending . Couple or chapters more :)

Chapter 10 : A Debt With Better Lighting

The space on Sector 26 had floor-to-ceiling windows that caught the evening light the way the old city never bothered to, exposed brick that someone with better taste than money had clearly left alone on purpose, and a kitchen layout built exactly to the drawings she’d redone at his dining table, again and again, before she’d stopped pretending she wasn’t enjoying it.

“I told you already, Vikrant. I’m not taking it like this.” She pushed the documents back an inch, refusing the terms they currently implied. “Not as something you decided for me before I ever got a vote. You don’t get to hand me a building and call the conversation finished just because you went first.”

“I’m not asking you to take anything. I’m asking you to hear why it isn’t what you think it is.”

“You didn’t ask me anything at all, which is precisely the problem. A gift this size isn’t a gift, Vikrant, it’s a debt with better lighting.”

“You’d be buying back something that already exists because you wouldn’t lie for a company that didn’t deserve you. That’s not a debt. That’s restitution.”

“That’s a nice sentence. It’s still not an answer.”

“Fine. Let’s do the actual math, since you like math more than you like sentences.” He pulled the chair out across from her instead of arguing from where he stood, the way he always sat down properly when a thing mattered enough to him to lose if he handled it carelessly. “You’d have gotten here on your own. I never doubted that for a second, and neither did you, or you wouldn’t be arguing about terms instead of whether you deserve any of this at all. It would have taken you two years, maybe two and a half, of renting before any bank took you seriously for a loan against bricks instead of a lease.”

“That’s not the same as owning a building.”

“It’s the same building. I just moved the date.” He said it flatly, the way he priced a delivery. “I moved it earlier on purpose, Mannat. Two years is two years you don’t get back. Every one of them you spend running this place instead of waiting to afford it is a year it gets to succeed, not a year you spend saving toward the right to try. I’d rather watch you win starting now than watch you earn the chance to start winning later. That’s the whole argument.”

“That’s a very tidy story for a man who just happened to have a building free at exactly the right moment.”

“I didn’t have it free.” He didn’t flinch saying it. “I finalized it the week you lost the job. The same week, Mannat, not after. You sat with me through every one of those for reconstruction plans for Sarson before any of this had your name on it — you were the one of the major reasons who actually understood that extra angle London investors needed to see, what would make them trust putting more money behind it. They paid for what you and I built on paper. There is YOU in there . I just happened to be the one holding the contract.”

He let that sit a moment before he went on. “So when I say I won, I mean I won because of you, twice over — once when you walked away rather than lie for people who didn’t deserve you for Sarson , and once when you sat at my table helped the place Sarson with the funding. I wasn’t going to let the first cost you everything and the second profit only me.”

“I’m not offering you a future you wouldn’t have built yourself,” he went on, his voice softer now. “I’m just giving it to you about twenty-two months sooner than it would’ve arrived on its own. Be angry at me for the timing, if you need to — I’ll take that, I deserve it. But don’t tell me the building isn’t yours. By every number that matters, it already was. I was only able to take away any of that time because of London, and London happened because of you too. I just got to the building before your bank account could. It was always heading toward you, Mannat. I only took away the waiting.”

“Call it whatever helps you sleep.” Her voice caught, just for a second, and she looked away toward the window before she trusted herself to keep going. She would have done it again, the refusal, the boardroom, all of it, without a second’s hesitation, even knowing exactly where it led that wasn’t the part that undid her.

What undid her was this: someone had finally thought of her the exact same way she had always quietly thought of everyone she’d ever refused to betray, and she hadn’t known until this moment how starved she’d been for that.

She let herself feel all of it, just for a moment, and then she pulled back from it on purpose, because she knew exactly where that road went if she let it keep going — her hand on the pen, signing whatever he put in front of her, becoming someone who simply took what she was given. She wasn’t going to be that. Not even for him. “Fine. I’ll take the building.” Her voice had steadied by the time she said it, quieter than the argument had been, gentler, but no less certain. “But not as something you handed me, Vikrant. I told you — it’s everything I would have built, if anyone had ever let me build it for. So let me actually build it. Let it be mine, the way I would have made it. Not the way it landed in my lap.”

“Whatever you want.”

““Equal say. Starting today — I’m not waiting for the rest of it to catch up.” Her voice had gone quiet, but nothing in it bent. “The building, I earn back from you. Not as a debt — as a partnership finding its balance. Whatever this place makes, the part that’s mine goes right back into it, on a real schedule, until your name comes off the deed and there’s nothing left to argue about. Two years. The same twenty-two months you handed me — I’m just giving them back.” She held his eyes, calm, unshakeable. “Agreed ”?

“Agreed.” He said it the way he agreed to very little — fully, without negotiating further. Something in his chest finally let go, a tightness he hadn’t let himself name until it wasn’t there anymore.

~Lex

Chapter 11: Whatever We Owed One Another

Weeks went by in the particular blur that only ever happened during a buildout — contractors underfoot, paint samples taped to walls that hadn’t decided what color they wanted to be yet. Vikrant came by Sector 26 most evenings, no excuses whatsoever , sometimes with food she hadn’t asked for and always ate anyway. It became its own kind of ritual, the two of them picking through someone else’s half-finished work in the fading light.

After some discussion on numbers, he took out the takeout containers they’d brought from Sarson’s kitchen that morning — staff meal, packed quietly before the keys had even changed hands, because some habits weren’t going to stop just because her work address had changed. He pulled the lid off the saag himself, the way he always did, and held the first spoonful out to her like it was the most natural offering in the world, and it was his first time doing that .

She took it. Watched him watch her the way he always did, like the verdict mattered more than the dish.

“Well?” she asked.

He didn’t answer right away either, and when he finally did, there was no catch in it this time, no correcting himself mid-thought the way he had the very first week, when the words had arrived uninvited and he’d swallowed them back down before they could mean anything.

“You already know what I think of it,” he said quietly. “You’ve known for a while now. I just hadn’t said it properly.”

Something in her face went soft in a way he’d only seen once or twice, both times by accident, both times gone before he could be sure he’d seen it at all. This time she let it stay.

He set the container down on the unfinished counter, between them, and reached for her hand instead — not dramatically, not like a man building toward something rehearsed, just the way he reached for anything he’d already decided he wasn’t putting down again.

There was no question to ask. They both knew that. It had stopped being a question somewhere between the loading dock and the hospital corridor and all of it.

“Can my dadi come meet your dadi” he said. “Properly. With tea, and her good shawl, and at least forty minutes of pretending she isn’t sizing you up before she decides she adores you, which she will, because everyone eventually does

“That’s not a question.”

“It wasn’t meant to be one.” I’m telling you it’s already true, and I’d like the families to start catching up to what we already know.

She looked at him for a long moment, in the unfinished light, in the restaurant he’d built her out of refusing to let the world take something from her twice. Then she laughed — not at him, but at the sheer relief of not having to perform surprise at something she’d already decided weeks ago.

“Good,” she said simply. “Tell her Saturday works. I’ll make the tea.”

He pulled her into a hug instead of saying anything else, the kind that started simply enough — his arms closing around her, her face tucked into his shoulder, the unfinished room gone quiet around both of them — and then didn’t stay simple for long. She felt the moment it started to turn into something else, the way his hand stilled against her back, the way neither of them moved to end it when it would have made perfect sense to. He felt it too, the same instant, and instead of letting it go any further he eased back just enough to rest his forehead against hers, nothing more than that, his hands still at her waist, neither of them in any hurry to close the small distance again or open it any wider. They stood there a long moment, breathing the same unsteady air, content to let the stillness be the whole of it for now.

“There’s one more thing,” she said eventually, her forehead still against his, not quite ready to step back yet. “A test. Before anything else.”

“That tone is never good news.

“You’ve spent ages making fun of one of my fusion plates, Vikrant. Butter chicken,in a teacup- , you said . She was already pulling containers out of her bag, more than one, the absolute menace of her fully intact even now. “So before I show you anything I’m actually proud of, you’re going to taste what you’ve been asking for this whole time.

The first was, by design, an abomination: butter chicken reduced down and poured, lukewarm, into an actual china teacup, a sprig of mint balanced on the rim like a garnish at a tea party nobody had consented to attend.

“Mannat—”

“You named it. I simply built it.” She held the saucer out to him, utterly serene, the picture of a woman extracting long-overdue justice. “Drink your joke, Chef Saluja.”because retreat had never once an option , he did .

His face did nothing at all for a full second, which was somehow worse than any expression he could have chosen on purpose. Then his eyes went wide, his free hand flew to his chest, and he made a sound that was unmistakably, helplessly, the sound of a man regretting every joke he had ever told in his life.

“That is — “ He set the teacup down with the exaggerated care of someone defusing something live. “That is genuinely the worst thing that has ever entered my body, and I have eaten things off the floor of a commercial kitchen during a power cut.”

“There’s more.”

“Of course there’s more.”

“Open,” she said, already spooning a second bite toward him before he’d finished the first, laughing too hard to pretend she felt any guilt about it at all. “You don’t get to slow down now, Chef Saluja. Open.”

“Mannat, I require a moment to mourn—”

“No moments. Open.” She leaned in, spoon raised, a strand of hair falling loose across her face from whatever knot she’d tied it in that morning, and went to push another bite past his lips without waiting for permission.

He caught her wrist before the spoon got there — not hard, barely a grip at all, just enough to stop her, his fingers closing warm and sure around skin gone briefly still under his hand.

She didn’t pull her wrist back, and he didn’t let go of it either, and the loose strand of hair was still hanging across her cheek, catching the light from the window in a way that made it impossible to look anywhere else. She tried to blow it away sideways, a quick huff of breath that did nothing but make it flutter and resettle exactly where it had been, and tried again, equally uselessly, and somewhere in the absurd, ordinary smallness of that — a brilliant, infuriating woman losing an argument with a single strand of her own hair — something in his chest went very quiet.

He’d seen enough of her by now to know she’d never ask. Not for help, not for softness, not for the particular kind of being looked after that she handed out freely to everyone else and quietly went without herself. That was simply who she was — a woman who gave until there was nothing left to give and then figured out how to give a little more, never once turning to check if anyone was doing the same for her.

So he’d made up his mind the way he made up his mind about anything that actually counted — quietly, without announcement, with no intention of revisiting it. He would build empires for her if that’s what it came to, not because she asked for one and not because she’d ever want it, but because there was no ceiling he could find on what he was willing to do and he’d stopped looking for one. He’d go to the ends of the earth. He’d notice every small thing and act on it before she had time to need it. He’d make sure she felt chosen and protected exactly how she never asked for , because she deserved nothing less, and because leaving that to chance or convenience was something he simply wasn’t willing to .

Not for a year. Not for a season. For as long as he was standing.

“You’re still eating it,” she said, delighted and slightly alarmed in equal measure, laughing too hard to finish the sentence properly. “Vikrant, you can stop”.

He set the empty dish down, swallowed hard, and reached for the water she’d mercifully already poured. “I believe I’ve more than earned the right to taste whatever you’re actually proud of now.”

~Lex

“Updated the last part! Had to stretch it a bit because Dua needed to be in there, properly — my Vikrant actually gets to watch her grow up, unlike Mukta’s Vikrant. Thanks for reading! 🩷”

———————————————————

Chapter 12 : “Tastes like home”

Good.” She wiped her eyes, still laughing, and reached for the two containers she’d packed with real care — the ones tucked beneath the fresh menu copies, still faintly smelling of ink. “Because this part isn’t a joke.”

She opened the first herself and plated it without ceremony: gulab jamun soaked the traditional way in cardamom and rose syrup, then finished with a pour of condensed and evaporated milk, tres-leches style, until the milk-bread had gone soft and golden clean through.

“Gulab Jamun Tres Leches.” She watched his face the way she watched every dish leave her hands for the first time — as if the verdict mattered more than the compliment ever could. “Centerpiece of the dessert menu.”

He ate slowly at first, the way he ate anything that hadn’t yet earned his trust, and then he stopped being careful about it at all. The syrup hit, then the milk beneath it, sweetness folding into sweetness without ever losing the rose.

“That’s not fair,” he said, with real feeling. “You can’t hand a man something this good thirty seconds after the teacup. It defeats the entire purpose of being skeptical of fusion food on principle.”

“Then don’t be skeptical of the next one either.” She slid the second container across before he’d recovered — a saag, pale and bright in a way his dadi’s never was, lemongrass and ginger threaded through the mustard greens, finished with a curl of crisped curry leaf. “Saag Citra. The one I was too afraid to put my name on for years. I thought it would read as betrayal.”

He ate that slowly too, and this time there was no performance in the silence — only finally admitting that some reinventions can coexist . Including, apparently, the one now engaged to him.

He set the spoon down and looked at her. Really looked — the way he’d looked at her across a hospital parking lot once, across a corner table at midnight, across every version of this woman who had never let him love her the easy way.

“Tastes like home,” he said, and this time the words came out unhurried, certain, none of the bracing he’d needed the first time he’d almost said them and lost his nerve. Not the saag alone, and not the gulab jamun either — but everything underneath both. The ledgers she’d held without flinching. The building she’d refused to take for free. The woman who’d fed him something genuinely terrible just to make a point, then handed him something extraordinary right after, because that, in the end, was simply who she was. “It always has been”

She didn’t answer right away — just reached over and wiped a trace of syrup from the corner of his mouth with her thumb, an ordinary gesture that felt larger than it had any right to. There was no ledger for what she’d have done for him by now. No number she could show anyone to prove it, because she’d never once tried to keep one. The Singapore post would have given her everything she wanted - A city that didn’t know her by anyone else’s name, a version of the future that had once seemed like the only one worth chasing. She would have taken it. Worked every hour it demanded and found more besides, twenty-four hours folded into days that should only have held half that many — not to build a life there, but to finish whatever they needed from her as fast as a person possibly could, so the distance between them would shrink back down to nothing sooner rather than later. And if it had ever truly come to a choice — the post or this kitchen, that city or this man — she would have walked away from all of it without a single backward glance. Not because she owed him that. Not because anyone, least of all him, had ever asked it of her. She would have done it the same way she did everything that mattered: on her own terms, her own name still fully attached to the decision.She wasn’t interested in surviving an assignment. She was interested in ending one — quickly, completely — so she could come back and stand across this pass from him for good. And she already knew, with the same plain certainty he brought to everything, that he’d have spent the rest of his life arguing with her about it anyway, telling her in that flat, ledger-closing voice of his that he refused to be the reason a woman like her gave up a single thing she’d built with her own hands.

He would have lost that argument every time. Some choices had never been his to refuse in the first place.

She didn’t say any of that aloud. She simply leaned in and he kissed her — slow, unhurried, the kind of kiss that didn’t need explaining .

It was a long moment before either of them spoke again. When she finally pulled back, it wasn’t to argue — just to say the thing that had apparently been sitting underneath the kiss the whole time, waiting its turn.

“The buyout still stands, by the way.” Her words came out against his mouth, steadier than the moment had any right to let them. “I know we already settled it on paper. Two years, and this becomes mine to hold — sooner, if I have anything to say about it. You don’t get a vote in how fast I get there.”

“Mannat—”

“That wasn’t a request, Chef Saluja.” She pulled back just far enough to look at him properly, the menace from twenty minutes ago folded now into something steadier. “We said two years. I’m getting there sooner than that. Not because I owe you for as a promise to myself ,and Because I want to be the one who finished it.”

Whatever argument he’d been building seemed to lose its footing somewhere on the way out. “Fine,” he said finally. “On one condition.”

“The day this place turns a real profit — and it will, sooner than either of us is currently planning for — a part fixed share of that you plan to pay me it gets set aside every single month, right from the start. Not spent. Not touched. Saved, in its own account, until there’s enough to actually do something with it.”

“Like what?”

“A kitchen. Not this one.” He nodded toward the window, past the brick and glass and the dining room that already carried both their names, out at the street below where the lights were beginning to come on. “A real one. Open to anyone who walks in off that road hungry and can’t pay for it. No till, no menu, no Chef names over the door if I can help it. Just food .”

She didn’t answer right away, and when she did, her heart had lost the steadiness the proposal itself hadn’t .

It’s the only thing I’m asking either of us to do with the money once it exists — so you’d better make sure this place succeeds.” He took her hand again, the same unhurried certainty as before. “We’ll call it whatever you want. Put it on the menu copy,

“I already know what to call it.” For once there was no negotiation left in her voice at all — nothing held back, no ledger between them on either side. “Something that’s ours. Not yours, not mine. - DUA !

Months later , The Saag Citra went on to become the dish people drove across the city for — the one strangers asked about by name before they’d even sat down, the one food writers kept returning to photograph long after the opening had stopped being news. The Gulab Jamun Tres Leches sold out most nights before dessert service properly began.

The restaurant started turning real money within the first year, just as promised. From that very first month of profit, a a part of fixed share got set aside exactly as she said — saved, untouched, growing month after month in its own account, waiting. At eighteen months, six ahead of schedule, Mannat finished paying of the building . Sector 26 was entirely hers.

Only then did they open the second kitchen — the one funded by all those months of saved profit, the one with no till and no menu and no sign carrying either of their names. By the time its doors opened, there was already enough sitting in that account to run it properly from day one, no waiting, no scrambling. Just a room that stayed unlocked at mealtimes, and a line that never seemed to run short of people willing to ladle out one more plate.

Years later, when people asked Mannat how either dish, or the kitchen, had come to exist, she told them the truth, the same way every time: that some things only ever taste like that once, made by exactly two people, in exactly one kitchen, the week the rest of their lives had finally stopped being a question — and that everything after, the buyout finished early, the second kitchen, the line down the street, had simply been what two people who loved each other properly did with whatever they had left over once everything that actually mattered between them was already settled.

The teacup butter chicken, mercifully, never made it onto any menu at all — though Vikrant kept the recipe card anyway, no one knows why .

It survived exactly as long as it took their daughter to learn how doors worked. Dua found it on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, three years old and entirely too pleased with herself, in the one drawer in the flat nobody had ever bothered to lock because nobody had ever imagined a reason to. By the time Mannat found her, the card lay face-down on the kitchen floor beneath a small, determined fist, one corner already soft with glue, and what had once been Vikrant’s careful, mocking handwriting was vanishing under a thick, triumphant layer of poster paint and a genuinely heroic amount of glitter — applied with the total conviction only a toddler brings to vandalism.

Dua - She’d come screaming into the world just fifteen months after the wedding — a couple of years earlier than either of them had planned on paper. All because of one simple question Mannat had asked Vikrant on a rooftop, lol.

Vikrant didn’t reach for the card. He crouched down beside his daughter instead, inspected the wreckage with the same grave attention he gave a new delivery of greens, and asked her, perfectly seriously, what she’d made.

“Sparkle,” Dua informed him, with the confidence of someone who had never once doubted her own genius, and held the ruined, glittering thing up .

He told her it was, without question, the best thing that recipe card had ever been used for — and meant it completely.

And that was the story, as far as either of them ever bothered to tell it — not the buyout, not the ledgers, not even the two dishes that made their name. Just a kitchen with its doors unlocked, a daughter covered in glitter, and two people who had long since stopped counting what they owed each other.


-~Lex

Completed !

Chapter 11 and 12 updated

Amazing Lex... such a lovely read...

The last 2 chapters is exceptionally beautiful... warm cozy and 'home'

Thank you so much for writing this 👏👏👏👏👏

I am going to come back to this again and again 😍😍😍

It was such a beautiful read Lex...

Was transported to a different world of ManVik...

Sigh..i am a bit sad its over...

Looking forward to more ManVik stories if you are planning to write...

❤️

It's simple beautiful lex I loved it.

Want to read more from u but i understand.

Last two chaper are so nice.

Thanks for writing

Originally posted by: Moor278

Amazing Lex... such a lovely read...

The last 2 chapters is exceptionally beautiful... warm cozy and 'home'

Thank you so much for writing this 👏👏👏👏👏

I am going to come back to this again and again 😍😍😍

Thank you! I appreciate it a lot
9th and 10th were very heavily involved in logistics and less on emotional peaking. I kept it that to make sure Mannat’s agency remains intact.

11 & 12 were fun to put together with all the foods !