by Sonali Dev
“Would you call a dog Mustard or Relish?”
“I’m sure people do.” She sounded every bit as indignant as she felt. Although why she was feeling this indignant, she had no idea.
“But Chutney,” he said, and it made him laugh again, and then grimace.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. It just hurts to laugh.”
“I’m sorry.” It came out automatically, the apology for the fact that he was in pain.
“Why are you sorry?” Was there an edge to his voice? Not that she didn’t understand it. She’d be livid if someone shot her. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed. Sorry.” He spun his finger around his head. “Things have been a little weird up here.”
Which explained why he was here.
She spun a finger around her head. “Generally the only reason people seek me out.”
He’d have looked less like she’d kicked him if she’d kicked him.
“Is it okay if I ask you a question about the shooting?”
“Sure.” But he didn’t look at her, just stared at his hands.
“Is your bodyguard okay?”
Now he looked at her, guarded gray eyes not doing a damn thing to hide how he felt about a bodyguard taking a bullet for him. “He’s alive. But no, I would not say he’s okay.”
She was about to say, I’m sorry, again, but the look he threw her stopped her. “You said you needed my help,” she said instead. “How can I help you, Yash?”
Instead of answering, he started pacing. “I’m sorry we barged in on you. I’m sure you were busy.” It was the third apology between them, which was ironic, given their history. Or their lack of history.
“I didn’t have any appointments today, or classes.”
“You teach yoga.”
“Technically it isn’t teaching, it’s leading the practice. It’s a yoga studio. That’s what we do here.”
He looked around the room again. “Looks like you do a lot more here than teach—I mean, lead a yoga practice.”
She’d told him about her dream of running a holistic practice where she helped people with all aspects of wellness. He’d teased her about using the word holistic. How easy all the teasing had felt, how heady the laughter.
Perfect timing for every detail of their conversation from ten years ago to light up her memory. While he, on the other hand, barely seemed to remember that they’d ever even met.
“I believe that to truly heal you have to treat the whole individual. Yoga is one part of that.”
“What’s the other part?”
“Understanding yourself as a human being.”
“You mean therapy.”
“I mean digging into your emotions. Understanding yourself, who you are, how you function. Taking yourself apart like a machine and finding the rusty parts and oiling them.”
“Ashna says you helped her with panic attacks.”
Oh. “Would you like to sit down?”
“On your therapist’s couch?”
“If you’d like.”
He smiled at that, but she couldn’t tell if he was just amused or amused at her. “Psychiatrists really do that.”
“I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“Therapist, then. They really do act as though they’re putting every ball in your court.”
“I practice as a yoga therapist, actually, and a wellness coach.” If he was accusing her of something, she might as well live up to it. She left the ball in his court.
“Ashna thinks I’m having panic attacks and she thinks you can help me deal with them. Quickly.”
“Ashna thinks you’re having panic attacks?”
That seemed to annoy him, which was interesting. He paced the length of her office again. “I’m not sure this is a great idea. I don’t want to waste your time. You seem like a busy person.”
Was he mocking her again? Her office was only empty because she was supposed to be out of the country.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, and we’ll go from there?”
“The part where someone tried to kill me?”
“We can start there.”
“Let’s.” He looked at her as though she’d thrown him some sort of challenge and he was picking it up. “I was at a rally and some gun-toting asshole thought I’d lived long enough. And, well, when I tried to go out on a stage for another rally it didn’t go so well. And now my family thinks I can’t handle campaigning anymore. Which obviously means that I can’t win the election.” There, does that about sum it up? That last part, his set jaw and general stance finished for him.
Since he refused to sit, she sank into the chair across from the couch. “What happened when you went out onto the stage after you got out of the hospital?”
“Basically”—a pause for breath, a too shallow breath—“I thought my heart was going to explode in my chest.” His voice was flat again. “I had no control over my limbs.” He started pacing again, frustration coloring his aura in murky hues. Under the dull patina sitting over it, it was still as golden as ever. The only golden aura India had ever witnessed.
“You got shot at a rally. What were you doing trying to get on a stage and in front of a crowd so soon after that?”
“Campaign events are set up months in advance. And the election is less than three months away.”
“And that makes you a robot?”
“If you call fulfilling your responsibilities being a robot.”
“Your responsibility is to be whole so you can run a state. Not to cut out your feelings.”
He was standing over her. “You don’t follow a whole lot of politics, do you?” The smile he gave her was a travesty of smiling in general and it made her more angry than it should.
She stood, leaning her head back and facing him, eye-to-eye. “I thought you didn’t want to be a politician. I thought you wanted to be a public servant.”
He froze. They both did.
Those were words he’d said to her ten years ago.
Way to bring up that night, India.
His face went so steely and blank that suddenly India was absolutely certain he was not the same man she’d met that night. And she wasn’t at all sure there was anything she could do to help the man standing in front of her today.
Before he could respond, a scream sounded outside the window. India ran to it. Outside, China was facedown on the concrete pavement and Yash’s bodyguard was straddling her with China’s hands pinned behind her back.
AFTER THAT EVERYTHING moved really fast. India banged on the window and China and Brandy’s heads snapped up and looked at her. China’s eyes were filled with terror and Brandy’s with military-level focus.
Yash was already across the office trying to get outside. India ran past him and flew out the back door.
“Let her go!” she yelled, yanking at Brandy’s arm.
“That’s India’s sister. She lives here,” Yash said to Brandy, who was already pulling away.
China sprang to her feet, breathing heavily. “Get off me, you psycho! What the fuck is wrong with you?” she shouted into Brandy’s face, and shoved her with both hands. Not that it was easy to budge the woman, who was almost six feet tall and built like a tank.
“I’m sorry.” Brandy looked neither guilty nor apologetic. “But you shouldn’t have attacked me,” she said with deadly calm.
“Shouldn’t have attacked you? I caught you climbing the windowsill of my home. Why would I not pull you down? I thought you were trying to break in.” China dusted off her jeans, they were ripped at the knee. She picked up her cell phone. The case was cracked. “This was a limited edition case from the Laurel & Hardy museum,” she said with a sob.
India wiped China’s cheek, trying to remove the streak of gray from being pressed against the concrete.
Yash extracted a handkerchief, of all things, from his coat pocket and handed it to China before turning his attention back to Brandy. “Why were you climbing the windowsill?”
>
It was hard to tell if Brandy was embarrassed about any of this. The woman had the iciest blocked-off energy, a pale, almost white-gray aura. “I was checking if the windows were breachable.”
“Why the hell would you care if our windows are breachable?” China, in complete contrast to Brandy, was in full raging splendor. Flaming red fire to the bodyguard’s gray ice. “Who the hell are you, and what the hell are you even doing here?”
Suddenly she seemed to register Yash’s presence. “Yash? Oh my God. What’s going on?” Forgetting about everything else, China threw her arms around him. Since when were they this close? “I was dying of worry. Well, bad choice of words, not dying, just worried. I’m so glad you’re okay. What are you doing here? How are you up and about so soon after . . . well . . . Do you know this psychopath?”
“This is Brandy. She’s my new bodyguard.” He took the handkerchief from China and wiped a streak of dirt from her jaw. “I’m sorry.”
Before China could respond, Ashna ran out through the open door. “What’s going on? I heard shouting.” She was carrying Chutney in her arms, and the poor baby was doing a yelping thing that was half trauma and half excitement.
“Wow,” Yash said, staring at their admittedly unattractive dog. Chutney was slobbering all over herself and her usual undeniable smell engulfed them like a methane cloud.
India braced herself for disgust, the common, and quite frankly not entirely unwarranted, response to their drool girl. When, to India’s horror, Chutney reached for Yash and slurped a slobbery tongue across his hand.
With the kind of laugh that India had never expected to hear from him again, Yash reached for the bundle of skin folds. “And who do we have here?” Every bit of deliberate enunciation was gone from his voice. Instead his pitch jumped to that strange voice people reserved for babies. “Hey, there, beautiful baby!”
And, damn it, the sun chose that moment to shoot a bright ray through a tree at his face.
“This is Chutney,” Ashna said in a matching high pitch, presenting Yash with the pug as though she were a particularly delicious ice-cream sundae.
Chutney paused in her mouth-breathing to start lapping at Yash’s face.
Indian and China gasped. India reached out to take her away, but Yash was smiling into Chutney’s face. Not his politician smile, not even his you’ve-amused-me, peasant smile. This smile yanked her back through the years, eyes disappearing into slits, too much teeth and gums. An explosion of unadulterated joy. Tremors rippled low in her belly, high in her heart.
Meanwhile, a besotted Chutney went at his face with nothing held back. Most people scrunched up their noses when Chutney entered the room. Her kisses weren’t for the faint of heart, though India lived for them. They had named her Chutney because she smelled like a mix of too many things. None of them pleasant.
It’s how she had smelled from the day they had brought her home, an abandoned year-old puppy with balance issues. They had changed her diet several times, switched to feeding her homemade food, bathed her every day. Nothing worked. It was the slobber. There was just some sort of genetic thing that no vet could figure out how to mask. Tara had declared that there was something magical about having a dog with an odor problem living in a home that made incense.
Chutney was also not a fan of people, given how they usually reacted to her. This person, however, seemed to not have received that memo. Did the man not have a sense of smell?
The kiss fest continued and India found her hand pressed into the odd wobble in her chest. Brandy came up to Yash and put a hand on his shoulder, the unhurt one, she hoped, because that hand was not messing around.
“We need to go back inside,” the cause of all the trouble said with the calmness of someone who had not just pinned someone to the ground outside their own home.
China glared at her. “I’m sorry, who invited you inside? This is a place of peace. We keep violent psychopaths outside.”
“China,” India said. Because, to be fair, the woman had been doing her job.
“Why do you need a bodyguard to come to our home?” China asked Yash, who was scratching the exact spot behind Chutney’s ear that she loved having scratched.
“He was just shot,” Icy Brandy said. Did she think a single person here was unaware of that fact?
China slapped a hand to her chest and gasped. “No! When did this happen?”
Again, the mocking landed on the bodyguard like a torrential downpour against slick rock. “What I meant was that the election isn’t over yet, so the reason he was shot isn’t over either. He’s not going anywhere without security.”
Yash did not look happy with that declaration. “Let’s please not push people to the ground when they’re trying to enter their own home, okay?” he said, not unkindly, but with all the authority of someone used to giving orders.
Brandy’s face was still a brick wall, but her shoulders slumped by half an inch and it was hard not to feel sorry for her.
“Actually,” China said, a hint of sheepishness creeping into her face, “she didn’t push me down when I was trying to enter. I pulled her off the windowsill, and she flipped me onto the ground.”
Brandy swallowed, letting the first flash of emotion crack through her face. A tiny blue hue in the gray aura. “Thank you.”
China spun on her, hands on hips. “Don’t you dare thank me! Who flips someone in the air like a pancake? You could have broken my back. I need this damn back.”
“With all due respect, ma’am, if I wanted to break your back, your back would be broken.”
China threw her hands up in the air. “Wow, were you raised by wolves?” Then without waiting for an answer she took herself inside, muttering, “Who the fuck calls people ma’am?”
“I was just doing my job,” Brandy said, sounding so sincere that India’s anger died inside her. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
“She’ll be fine,” India said gently.
“I’ll go make sure she’s okay,” Ashna said, lobbing a look to Yash and then India. “How do you guys want to do this?”
“I’m not sure he needs my help,” India said, just as Yash said, “I want to give it a try.”
Oh.
“We can give it a try,” she said, just as Yash said, “Well, if you’d rather not do it.”
The awkward silence that followed was the most uncomfortable thing India had experienced in a long, long time.
Ashna studied them. Brandy studied the windows. Chutney licked Yash’s face.
This time they both opened their mouths and then waited and said nothing.
“Okay, then,” Ashna said verbalizing a shrug, if such a thing were possible. “Why don’t I check up on China and then head off home, and you two can decide what to do.” She spun her hands between them in a confused rolling gesture that was painfully accurate, then made a run for it.
“Let me take her.” Chutney had to be getting heavy in Yash’s arms and that shoulder had to be hurting.
Without argument he dropped a kiss on Chutney’s lopsided head and handed her off. “Why does she angle her head like that?”
“She was abandoned as a puppy. When the shelter got her, they found a maggot infestation inside her ear. Her right eardrum’s permanently damaged and it messes with her balance and makes her tilt her head like that.”
“Poor brave girl.” He leaned over and dropped another kiss on her head. Chutney let out one of her love-grunts. Okay, great, that sealed the deal. India was going to help the man. Even if he decided to fight her on it. She was going to help him and then she was going to kick him to the curb.
“Do you want to come inside?” she said.
Just as he said, “Sorry to have wasted your time.”
God, this was getting tiresome. They stepped back and away from each other at the exact same time, like a darned choreographed musical.
Mortification bloomed inside India at having done it again, at having invited him in, when all he wanted was to leave.
“Take care, Yash,” she said finally. She wouldn’t get to kick him to the curb after all.
“Take care, India,” he said, and with nothing more than that he walked away, his measured strides doing nothing to hide the fact that he couldn’t get away fast enough. Again.
Chapter Seven
Yash missed the solitude of his apartment, but expecting Ma to let him go home from the hospital to an empty apartment would have made him certifiably delusional. So Yash had been living at the Anchorage, their family’s estate in Woodside in his childhood room since leaving the hospital a week ago.
That morning he’d woken up too early. Okay, that was a lie. You could only claim waking up if you were able to fall asleep in the first place. After another night of tossing and turning, he’d gotten out of bed at four, paced restlessly around his room, and then made his way up to Esha’s suite on the uppermost floor.
Esha was the oldest of the Raje cousins, HRH’s oldest brother’s daughter. Like Ashna, who was his younger uncle’s daughter, Yash only ever thought of Esha as his sister too. Esha shared the suite with their grandmother. She and Aji had moved in after Esha had survived the plane crash her parents had been killed in along with every other passenger on board. Her miraculous survival had been followed by seizures and visions triggered by any human contact. The only way to control the seizures was to not expose Esha to human contact outside the family. Esha hadn’t left the five acres of the estate in decades.
As usual, she was up and waiting for Yash in the suite’s living room in her bright white pajamas. How she always knew when he was going to visit, he had no idea. When they were younger and he couldn’t sleep he’d always make his way up here, and she’d always be waiting for him on the couch. Back then they talked. About everything on Yash’s mind.
This past week they’d sat together in silence for hours, as though Esha could sense the emptiness inside him. Emptiness that had only eased in one harsh rush yesterday when he’d watched a face press to the glass of a mullioned door. Emptiness that had crawled back into him as he’d walked away, self-preservation pulling him away even as it pulled him back. Now the emptiness sat inside him again like dead weight.