Sameer froze at the doorway.

The pantry glowed in that post-lunch lull-half-lit by sunlight filtering through rain-streaked windows, half-alive with the hum of gossip and overworked appliances. The air was thick with the scent of masala chai, cardamom, and the faint hiss of the coffee machine refusing to retire quietly.

But all of that faded the instant he saw her.

Radha Naidu, he couldn't be sure it was her, not yet but something about the woman standing by the window, sipping coffee with the kind of concentration most people reserved for debugging at 3 a.m., drew his attention. She was mid-conversation with Priya, smiling in that sharp, amused way that perfectly matched every dry, devastating comment she'd ever left on Jira.

He recognized her tone before he recognized her face.

And that realization hit harder than he'd expected.

Beside him, Dev elbowed him like a nosy notification. "Bro. That's QA Radha. Go say hi."

Sameer blinked, heart doing something inconvenient. "How do you even know that?"

"She literally just shook hands with Priya," Dev whispered, grinning. "The whole pantry heard. Congratulations, your mysterious Slack crush now has a face. You're welcome."

Sameer's pulse jumped. "Nope. Not happening. Not doing this."

Dev leaned closer, voice full of mischief. "Why not?"

Sameer hesitated. "Because this is not how I pictured it. It's... weird, okay? She doesn't know what I look like. I don't even know if she wants to."

Dev smirked. "You've exchanged, what, 200 Jira comments? 50 Slack DMs? And one very emotional midnight debugging session? You're basically engaged in tech terms."

Sameer groaned. "You're aware that's the most HR-violation version of encouragement ever, right?"

"Hey," Dev said, raising his hands, "I'm just saying your code and her test cases are clearly compatible."

"Stop," Sameer muttered, running a hand through his hair.

Dev grinned wider. "Come on, man. You can't hide behind a keyboard forever. Worst case, she files a bug report about your social skills."

Sameer let out a long, quiet sigh. He looked back toward the window, toward her. She laughed at something Priya said, the kind of laugh that softened the entire room.

He didn't move. Not yet. But for the first time, the idea of stepping forward didn't feel entirely impossible.

Sameer took a deep breath, his heart doing a nervous little sprint inside his chest. In a perfectly executed act of workplace camouflage, he picked up a paper cup and pretended to pour himself chai, as though caffeine might suddenly grant him courage.

Across the pantry, Radha had absolutely no idea. Priya was midway through an animated story about the HR intern who accidentally sent a meme about "corporate slavery" to the entire leadership team. Radha laughed in the right places, but her mind was still half upstairs, mentally reviewing her test cases and the Slack thread she'd left hanging before lunch.

Sameer's latest code push had been flawless; a rare planetary alignment in the history of QA and she'd dropped him a quick message before stepping out.

QA approves. You may now brag responsibly.

No reply. Probably deep in some build, she figured. Or maybe writing another function named "final_final_v2."

Priya's elbow broke her train of thought. "That's him, by the way."

Radha blinked. "Who?"

Priya's grin widened. "Sameer. Developer boy. Tall, hoodie, pretending to pour chai like it's rocket fuel."

Radha's grip tightened around her mug. "That's... Sameer?"

"Confirmed," Priya said, clearly enjoying herself. "Dev just announced it to the whole pantry. You're living in a real-time Slack update."

Radha groaned softly. "I can't just walk up to him and say, 'Hey, I'm your QA nemesis-slash-occasional therapist from Jira.'"

Priya gasped dramatically. "Why not? It's romantic! Classic enemies-to-lovers but with CI/CD pipelines."

Radha rolled her eyes. "This is not a K-drama, Priya. It's a pantry with bad lighting."

Still, her gaze betrayed her. It drifted toward the vending machine.

He was taller than she'd imagined. A hoodie, of course. Slightly messy hair, like he'd been negotiating with both deadlines and humidity. His focus was quiet, grounded, the kind that made everything else fade for a second. He was mid-laugh at something Dev said, and that laugh - warm, easy, familiar landed squarely in her chest.

Her stomach fluttered, and she immediately decided that was corporate burnout, not attraction. Definitely burnout.

And then, as if pulled by some invisible Wi-Fi signal, he looked up.

For half a second, their eyes met. Not long enough for certainty just long enough for a spark. The kind of spark that feels exactly like watching your code compile successfully after twelve soul-crushing attempts.

He smiled politely. She nodded, aiming for casual, which probably came off as "mildly malfunctioning robot."

And then Dev, ever the chaos engine, decided to make it worse.

"Radha, right? You're QA lead on Scorpio?" he called out cheerfully, like announcing raffle winners.

She blinked. "Uh, yeah."

Dev's grin widened. "Sameer here's been your partner in crime for months."

Radha's gaze flicked toward Sameer. He looked like he wanted to Ctrl+Z himself out of existence.

"Oh," she said, smiling lightly. "Right. The infamous backend magician."

Sameer rubbed the back of his neck. "Magician's generous. More like occasional fire-starter."

"Accurate," she said, taking a sip of her chai.

For a moment, the air between them settled into a quiet hum neither awkward nor easy. Just... charged.

Priya, sensing that HR might soon have to file this under "emotional bandwidth escalation," decided to intervene. "Anyway," she chirped, "we were heading up to the terrace for chai break 2.0. You two coming?"

Sameer opened his mouth, but before he could respond, Rohit's unmistakable voice thundered from the corridor.

"Sameer! Dev! Client call in five!"

Sameer sighed, half-relieved, half-deflated. "Saved by corporate," he said with a crooked smile.

"Always the hero," Radha teased.

As he turned to leave, Radha found herself watching him longer than she meant to, the corner of her mouth curving upward despite her best effort.

Somewhere in the background, the coffee machine hissed, like it, too, was judging her.

Back at his desk, Sameer tried to look busy. His code editor was open, his IDE blinking like an expectant puppy but his brain had clearly gone on a coffee break without him. The words blurred, Slack pings went ignored, and his cursor blinked in silent judgment.

Across the desk, Dev was still smirking like someone who'd just deployed chaos to production.

"So?"

Sameer didn't look up. "So what?"

Dev swiveled his chair dramatically. "Don't play dumb. You met her."

"Barely," Sameer muttered, pretending to scroll through lines of code he'd already read five times.

"Barely still counts," Dev said, leaning back like a podcast host about to drop gossip. "You two looked like characters in a Bollywood cute-meet sponsored by Jira and powered by unresolved merge conflicts."

Sameer dropped his head into his hands. "Please don't ever say that sentence again."

"Too late," Dev grinned. "I'm putting it on a T-shirt. 'Bollywood cute-meet, brought to you by Jira.' It's poetic and billable."

Sameer reached for the nearest weapon, his stress ball and launched it at him. Dev caught it midair like a man who'd survived too many sprint reviews.

"Admit it," Dev teased. "You're smiling."

"I'm not," Sameer said automatically.

He was. Just a little.

His monitor reflected it back at him a faint, reluctant grin he couldn't quite suppress. He cleared his throat, clicked aimlessly around his screen, and muttered, "Focus, Kapoor. Focus. You have real bugs to fix."

From across the aisle, Dev called out, "Yeah, but none as interesting as this one."

Sameer groaned. "I hate this company."

"Liar," Dev said. "You love it when HR doesn't catch feelings, and QA does."

Sameer threw another stress ball.

It missed, but the grin stayed.

Upstairs, Radha dropped into her chair, still half-flustered from the pantry encounter and pretending she wasn't. Her laptop pinged with a new Slack notification.

Sameer K: so... pantry QA spotted. nice to finally meet—kind of.

A smile tugged at her lips before she could stop it. She cracked her knuckles and typed back.

Radha N: likewise. next time, I'll bring a bug report for you to autograph.

Sameer K: deal. also, Dev says our 'cute-meet' deserves a movie deal.

Radha N: fire him immediately.

Sameer K: on it. right after client call. priorities.

She chuckled softly, the sound getting lost in the low hum of ACs and the endless clicking of keyboards around her. The storm outside had returned with fat raindrops streaking the glass, thunder rolling in lazy intervals like background music for an overworked city. Mumbai, ever the drama queen.

She leaned back, watching the rain blur the skyline, feeling the tension of the day melt just a little. For the first time in weeks, she wasn't dreading the next sprint, or the next Jira ticket, or the next round of "urgent" requests from Rohit that were neither urgent nor requests.

Something about this felt different.

Maybe it was the coffee. Maybe it was the banter. Or maybe, just maybe this project wasn't going to be just another sprint.

Maybe, against all agile principles, something was actually beginning.