by Sonali Dev
“Is she liking it?”
Worry tightened her mouth. “I hope so.”
“Haven’t you spoken to her?”
“I have.”
Okay. He knew he had earned the short answers. He deserved them. He should leave. “How’s Tara?”
She glared at him. “She’s going to be fine.”
“Were you able to figure out her health care bills?”
“Why are you here, Yash?”
Because I need to be.
“I wanted to know how you were, how Tara’s doing. I’ve been worried about her.”
“I’ve already told you. You don’t need to worry. I’ve got it.” But her voice wobbled and all his senses zeroed in on it.
“India, please tell me what’s wrong. Please tell me you weren’t serious about selling the studio.”
“I told you I don’t want to talk to you about it. I don’t need your help.”
“Why? Why won’t you let someone help? Your universe is not going to save your home. You shouldn’t have to lose it. This place is . . . it’s you. Let me help.”
“No. Help when you win the election, by changing things.”
He strode to her, finally, losing the battle against this magnet. “I want to help now.”
She didn’t move, didn’t back away. “No.”
He was close enough that her smell engulfed him. Her warmth stroked his senses. “Why not?”
Her body was tight as a bow. “Because I’m not yours to help.”
His hand went to his chest, because, man, that hurt. You are. He’d finally turned her into a liar, because that was a lie. “You’re my friend. I can help a friend if I want to.” His tone came out too harsh. Too filled with the things he couldn’t say.
Instead of stepping back, she stuck out her jaw. “If being my friend was the only reason you wanted to help, I’d let you.”
He leaned into her breath, letting his own mingle with it. Her body softened. His need to sink into her warmth came out in a sound that laid him bare.
That made her step back, put distance between them. “You have a girlfriend, Yash!” The fierceness of her tone didn’t cover her sob.
No, I don’t! But how could he say that without offering her more. Offering her everything. When he wasn’t at liberty to risk everything. Too many people were counting on him.
“A girlfriend you chose over me,” she whispered.
It was his turn to groan-sob. He was not someone who did that.
The back of her hand pressed into her mouth, like she wanted to stuff the words back inside.
“I’m sorry I said that,” she said. “Can you ignore that I said that? Can you just see Chutney and leave? I have class. I can’t—”
His hand cupped her cheek, and she gasped.
His thumb pressed against her lips. Her mouth was soft, softer than anything he’d ever experienced. Her lips yielded against his touch. They trembled against his skin. Trembled. The air around them trembled.
“I can’t do this, Yash.” But even as he pulled away she leaned into his hand, clinging as it left her, swaying into him, a wave of longing rolling from her into him.
“I’m sorry. I should not have come.”
“You should not have.”
“What if I said I need it? I need to come to you.”
Worry broke across her face. “Are you having panic attacks again?”
Only at the thought of not seeing you. “No.”
“I won’t do this, Yash. I don’t even know what this is.”
He knew what it was. He knew. He’d always known. Even at twenty-eight when he’d first touched her, when she’d melted in his arms, when he’d tasted joy and utter and complete connection with another human being for the first and only time in his life, when sparks had exploded where he had touched her, when she’d told him her hopes and dreams and heartbreaks. He’d known.
“You do know what this is. It’s . . . it’s magic.”
A sound of such frustration left her, he wished he hadn’t said the words.
But he’d said them, and she wasn’t someone who’d back away from that. “So what? So what if it is magic? It’s not like this is the first time we’re experiencing it. That night at Nisha’s wedding”—a million memories swam in her eyes—“this magic was there then. What good did it do? You chose something else over it. You tried to control it by walking away from it.” Her voice softened. “Don’t you see, it doesn’t matter that it’s still here. You’ve made it impossible for the universe to give it to us.”
“How do you do that? How do you see what it takes me so much longer to see?”
Her smile was the saddest thing. “It’s an occupational hazard.” Then she sobered again. “Trusting the universe is not code for compromise. It’s the opposite of not doing your part. It’s recognizing which part is yours to do.”
He’d always thought he was good at doing his part. How wrong he’d been. “I never meant for it to turn out this way,” he said, but she didn’t look up at him, her gaze was fixed on her hands. Her chest rose and fell with her breaths. “When I asked you to wait, I never meant to—”
“There was nothing to wait for.” This time she did look up, anger flashed in the dark centers of her eyes.
It wasn’t like she’d called him either. “Why did you never call me? Why didn’t you do your part? Why don’t you ever fight for what you want?”
She shoved him. And, man, he knew she was strong, but he literally had to put all his strength into not flying across the room. “Are you seriously asking me why I didn’t call you?”
“Ow. What happened to your peace and nonviolence thing?” he rubbed his chest.
She took a steadying breath and stuck one finger up in his face. “First, it’s not a thing. It’s who I am. I don’t like to hurt anyone. It feels like shit. So, I’m sorry.”
“India . . .”
“No. Don’t. Don’t, Yash. What is wrong with you? Why are you doing this? I’ll answer your question. I didn’t call you because you were with someone else and you never told me.”
“I was not with someone else when we met. I was not with Naina when we had that night.”
“Stop it. Stop with the loopholes and technicalities. Stop trying to Yudishtir this. The week after we met you were with her. How could you not have been with her when we met? You played with me, Yash. You hurt me. I didn’t believe other men after that. You talk about magic? You took away my faith in magic.”
“I’m sorry.” He knew the words changed nothing now, but he had to say them.
She met his gaze, letting him see how little his apology meant, letting him see it all. “How can you talk to me about not fighting for what I want? Did you really want me to come to you, come after you, when you professed your love for someone else days after we met?”
“It wasn’t like that. We were just . . . just spoken-for.”
“What does that even mean? You announced to the whole world that you’re with her.”
“Not the whole world. It was meant to stay just within our families. But my sisters told you.”
She looked like she wanted to shove him again. The right thing would have been to come to her and tell her himself. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t let himself think about it.
“Thank God your sisters told me. Because I might have just waited and waited for you if they hadn’t.”
“I thought you didn’t wait for me.”
“That’s not what I said. I said there was nothing to wait for, and I was right.”
“Now who’s Yudishtiring it?”
“Let’s not do this, Yash. There’s no reason to do this.”
But there was. There was every reason to do this. Why had it taken him so long to figure that out? “You were right. You were right when you said I’m already breaking my promise. I said that I didn’t know how to break it. But the truth is that I don’t know how to keep the promise anymore.”
The look she gave him gouged out every single thing he b
elieved about himself.
Maybe you take who you think you are too seriously.
Maybe those words Naina had said to him were true. Who he thought he was had fueled his choices. But not all of them had been right. Who he wanted to be was who he saw reflected in India’s eyes.
Chutney nudged his leg and he dropped down next to her, glad for the relief. The smell of incense mixing with her Chutney smell strummed his senses. The desire to let the truth out warred against all the reasons to hold it in.
If he told her the truth, if he told her what he wanted, he had to be willing to risk the campaign.
“Yash,” she said, standing over him, every bit of the kindness that set her apart filling that one word. “I’m not the person you made that promise to. I’m not the person who can help you if you don’t know how to keep it. But I will not be the person to help you break it.”
With that, she started moving around her kitchen, pulling things out of drawers and cabinets. “When you’re done seeing Chutney, please let yourself out. I have to take this up to Mom.” She walked past him across the dark wooden floors in her bare feet.
He sat there and watched her disappear up the stairs, her dog showering him with love as though she knew exactly how bad he was at it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
India paused on the landing outside the incense workshop. The need to go back to Yash was so strong she almost put the tray down and ran back down and after him. If she went back now, she wouldn’t be able to keep from wrapping her arms around him. His guilt was like a coat of thorns digging into him. All she wanted was to take it off so he could breathe.
She should hate him, she should be angry, and she was, but no one could call what was going on inside her hate. Very quietly, she let herself into the workshop.
Tara was lying on the mattress on the floor. Bamboo sticks, charcoal dust, and tree gum lay scattered across the machine tables. The heady scent of jasmine and oud filled the air from the freshly made sticks. Her grandfather had brought the composition with him. His family in India had been incense makers.
India set the tray with tea and cookies down on a table and unfolded a blanket. Knitted squares made from their old sweaters sat in a basket. Some finished, some still yarn. The past turning into a new future was always an unfinished project in the present. Through all her projects, Mom kept her focus on the present, without ever losing sight of the past or the future.
Spreading a blanket over her mother’s sleeping body, India sat down next to her. The regimen of drugs was brutal. It sedated her. She insisted on working on the incense even though she was obviously struggling to get through a cycle, and India had been finishing up for her. India had found her sleeping more often than bent over her work this past week, but she was healing. The fact that there was a treatment and that she would recover, at least from the hepatitis, was all that mattered for now.
India dropped a kiss on Tara’s head. Loneliness wrapped around her. She missed her mother’s vibrant presence. She missed China, worried about her incessantly. She missed the man she had just left in her kitchen.
All the people she loved were in pain and she wasn’t able to absorb it from them, no matter how hard she tried.
When Tara found out India was considering selling the studio to pay the bills, it was going to kill her in a whole different way, but preventing real death came first. India had checked the estimated price on Zillow and then felt queasy all day for having done it.
She hadn’t been able to do anything to protect her sister either. The last time they spoke, China had just landed in Seoul and checked into a hotel, but instead of sounding excited she’d sobbed incoherently.
Song hadn’t picked her up at the airport or even invited China to her home. China had been holed up in a hotel room, waiting for her. The idea of her sister by herself, hurting, made India livid.
Then there was Yash’s pain, which she couldn’t separate from her own. All the way down to her toes she knew there was more. He was not just a man who had tired of a relationship. She knew that was how anyone who had an affair with someone who was cheating justified it. But the way her entire self reacted to him was not a lie. She had spent her life staying in tune with her mind and body, being true to her whole self. It would never betray her that way.
Yash was not a liar.
He just couldn’t give her the truth. And without the truth, they had nothing. Much as she wanted to push him to tell her so she could understand, that trust had to come from him. Everything was his to lose, that part she understood. But why they had ended up here, where she could cause him to lose everything, that part she needed to understand.
Why don’t you ever fight for what you want?
She’d been sitting right here in this room, all of sixteen years old, when she’d asked Tara why Tara hadn’t saved any information about her birth parents. She thought she was fighting for what she wanted.
Tara had pulled her into her lap and insisted on holding her tight when she answered.
“I spent ten years searching for my father because he put a fake address on an envelope. At least your birth parents were kind enough to leave you with no breadcrumbs to follow.”
Fighting for something meant demanding a definitive answer, with no guarantee that you’d like the one you got.
“Did you choose us because we’d never be able to search for them?” India had asked.
“You chose me. Your eyes chose me,” Tara had said in her Tara way. “All I knew was that I’d never give you reason to want to search for them.”
Tucking the blanket around Tara, India made her way down the stairs, already dreading how empty her own home would feel with him gone.
When Chutney didn’t immediately waddle up to her, a flash of discomfort gripped her. Just as she was about to call out to her dog, her eyes fell on Yash sitting on the floor where she had left him, Chutney cuddled up in his lap, fast asleep.
When she walked to him, he pressed a finger to his lips, as though her pug were their baby, and he’d finally gotten her to fall asleep after half a night of sleeplessness. A spasm of yearning squeezed in her heart and sent heat spreading across her body.
There was new purpose in him. He studied her reactions like someone studying sacred texts. Was the man trying to kill her?
She pointed at Chutney, and when he looked down at her, she quickly dabbed her eyes on her flowy yoga shrug. “When she’s passed out on your lap like that, even screaming in her ear won’t wake her up.”
He smiled and scratched Chutney gently between the eyes. India sat down in front of him.
You’re still here, she wanted to say, but couldn’t without letting him see the tenderness flooding through her at seeing him, still here, on her living room floor.
“What if I told you it isn’t what everyone thinks?” he said finally.
The determination darkening his eyes, the resolve squaring his jaw . . . it was obvious that he’d decided to give her honesty, even when he knew exactly what it would cost him.
She stroked Chutney’s ear. “I know you, Yash. I know it isn’t what it appears to be. If it were, if she was someone you were in love with, ever had been in love with, you wouldn’t be here. If you were the kind of person who could be here after making a commitment to someone else, I wouldn’t be here.” He had made a commitment, but of course it wasn’t what everyone believed it to be.
His jaw worked as he tried to respond but couldn’t.
“But you are where you are and we can’t go anywhere from here. So let’s stop this.”
His look said the time to stop things was long gone. “You’re the only person in my life who demands nothing of me.”
“I can’t demand anything of you. I know that.”
“Do you want to?”
“Does it matter if I want to?”
“Yes.” Why did he need to hear it so badly? “I want you to want it. Because I want to give you everything.”
“But you can’t.” At least the
y were talking about it, and maybe understanding why would help her let him go.
“After Nisha’s wedding, when I disappeared like that I broke a promise. The first promise I broke was to you.”
“You didn’t actually promise to do anything more than try. I have no doubt that you did try.”
“Why are you not angrier with me?”
“Angrier than you are with yourself?”
Instead of answering, he leaned over and kissed Chutney.
Her fingers itched to stroke his bent head. “I was. I was very angry for a while. But something you said to me that night kept coming back to me. You said, ‘Sometimes I feel like my life isn’t my own.’ I knew something had happened that was outside your control.”
He straightened up again. “And you accepted it.”
“One part of it is what you think. That I don’t question the universe. But somewhere deep inside, I didn’t believe myself worthy of that magic. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it. For you. For all the things you made me feel.” Their knees were touching and it grounded her.
“And now?”
“And now it doesn’t matter.”
“Because none of that has changed? Because my life is still not my own?”
“No. Because you still feel like your life is not your own.”
“Aren’t those two the same?”
“No.” This time she leaned over and kissed Chutney. For a while they both sat there, showering her dog with the love aching in their hearts.
“Sometimes I wish I could tell you that I don’t care that your life isn’t your own. That I’ll take whatever I can get. But that’s not who I am.”
“I know. Because trusting the universe is not code for compromise. What you said earlier, you were right. You did make me feel out of control. My feelings scared me. I thought they would distract me from what I knew, what I had been trained to believe I wanted.” He waited for her to respond. But she knew he wasn’t done.
“It wasn’t just the loss of control making me a coward. I was definitely a coward to walk away from you, but there is more.” After that he went completely silent.
The resolve in his eyes was still strong, but it was laced with darkness. Whatever he wanted to say, digging it up wasn’t going to be easy.