It was late afternoon.
I hadn’t slept the night before.

I was sitting in the co-passenger seat of a truck I had been on trial with since morning. Work notifications kept buzzing endlessly. Somewhere in between them, two messages stood out.

“Hayloo, are you awake?”

I replied, half-curious, half-irritated, asking why.
The response came almost instantly:

“Can’t I just text?”

That was it.

This person, someone I had initially written off as a snobby Bandra kid, had somehow found my number. Not too surprising in hindsight; she was HR after all. Still, the fact that she texted first caught me off guard.

She had joined our office as an interim HR back in March. She stayed for a week, then disappeared on a long leave, I honestly don’t remember for how long. The point is, we barely interacted during those initial months.

She sat in one corner of the bullpen.
I sat on the opposite end.
Our backs literally facing each other.

She mostly kept to herself, chatting with our then mutual friend P. They worked, whispered, occasionally glanced in my direction, and giggled. I noticed, but I was far too buried in my own work to care. Or so I told myself.

Then one day in April, purely to satisfy my daily caffeine and sugar quota, I ordered a couple of packets of Skittles.

She waddled over slowly to my desk.

“Can I have some?”

That “some” turned into both packets, finished over the course of a day or two.

And just like that, that’s where it started.

Not with a conversation.
Not with intent.
But with stolen Skittles and an unexpected text that simply asked:

Can’t I just text?