by Sonali Dev
“It’s great.” She wiggled her toes. “Yours?”
“My feet are fine. They’re very happy to meet yours.” He smiled. Not his usual movie-poster smolder, but his little-boy smile. Then he squatted next to her and before she could stop him he slipped her sandals onto her feet. Sparks ignited where his fingers brushed her skin. He pulled away with a jerk.
Her breath heated and stuck in her throat. Her face flamed.
Thank God he didn’t look up. Instead he turned to his own shoes and started lacing them up.
“Are your feet really a size fourteen?” she said, mostly to push the breath out of her lungs.
He looked up, surprised.
“You told me at the hospital, remember?”
“Oh yeah, that day.”
His shoes were still discolored from being washed, the brown leather a shade darker where she’d thrown up.
“I’m sorry I threw up on your shoes.”
He rose to his full height and she had to lean her head back to keep looking at him. “Don’t worry about it. My feet do get in the way, given their size.” He smiled again and relief washed through her.
“Seriously, fourteen is abnormal!”
“Abnormal?” He raised one eyebrow, then shrugged. “Guess you’d think that if your feet were too small to even hold you up.”
“At least mine don’t get in the way of throw-up.”
“At least no one can tip me over with one finger.” The hot-hero smile was back full force.
“No one can tip me over with—”
He tipped her over with one hand, then reached around and held her up with the other.
She glared at him. “You did not use one fing—”
He did it again. This time with one finger. Only this time when he held her up, he pulled her close.
She flattened her hands against his chest and pushed away, needing to put distance between them. “That was not funny, Samir.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” But he grinned from ear to ear. Little boy, hot hero, all those Samirs fused into one.
“It’s nice when you’re this agreeable. And rare.” How could she not smile back at him?
He sat down on the patio steps and helped her down next to him. “I thought you said I was the most decent guy you’d ever met.” He beckoned to a passing waiter and grabbed two glasses from his tray.
“You have your moments. You were wonderful in the kitchen, by the way. I think all the aunties are a little bit in love with you.”
“Not the grannies?” He held out both glasses to her, orange juice and burgundy wine.
“Oh, definitely the grannies.” She took the orange juice and smelled it, just to make sure there was no alcohol.
He didn’t tease her about it. He took a sip from his glass and watched her over the rim. “And?”
She’d never seen him like this. This wide open. “And you were amazing. Your mother is a really good teacher.”
He put his glass down, leaned back on his arms, and stared up at the sky. “The best.”
“You said you used to have a hard time leaving her when you were a child. Were you a shy child?”
“No, not shy. Terrified.”
“Of what?”
He continued to study the shimmering blanket of stars. “Of everything. Of the dark, of crowds, of being left alone.” He paused. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “My birth mother dropped me off on my grandparents’ doorstep and never looked back.”
“Oh God, Samir. I’m sorry.” She inched closer, but didn’t touch him.
“No. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Baiji took me in. In every way it is possible to take a child in. It was love at first sight, she always says.” He almost smiled.
“And your father?”
“He was Baiji’s husband. He left my older brother and Baiji to come to America to get his master’s degree and never went back home. He met my birth mother here, in America. They had me. And then he died in a car crash. After his death she no longer wanted me. She took me to India, handed me off to my grandparents, and came back here.”
Mili wrapped her arms around herself. “How old were you?”
“Five.”
Her throat constricted. “Do you remember her?”
He was quiet for so long, she didn’t think he’d answer, but then he spoke. “I remember her name. Sara. Sara Willis. And that we lived on some sort of farm with a big red barn in a place called Munroe, Michigan. Other than that I remember feelings. I remember how the house we lived in felt. How the open land around the house felt, and the open sky. I remember how she felt. You know, not how she looked, but how she felt.”
Her tears made his utterly still form wobble next to her. “How did she feel?”
“Wet. She felt sad and wet. Watery and light, like mist, like—” But he couldn’t say more. He reached out and wiped her tears.
She pushed her cheek into his palm. “I don’t remember anything.”
His thumb caressed her cheek.
“Not one thing. Not a smell, not a feeling, nothing. I’ve seen one picture. So, I don’t even have those fake photo-inspired memories all children are supposed to have of their own childhood.”
“How old?”
“I was two. My father had just got a job as a professor in Delhi University. My parents were coming home after the interview to pick me up from my grandmother’s house and take me back to Delhi. Their train ran off its track and into the Yamuna river. Not a single passenger survived.”
He wrapped his arm around her, gathered her into himself. She sidled into his warmth.
For a long time neither one of them spoke. They just sat there like that, pressed into each other, watching the dancing people under the endless foreign sky.
16
Mili got absolutely no sleep that night. She tossed and turned on the daybed in Ridhi’s room and listened to her snoring. It should’ve comforted her. Her naani was a veritable orchestra when it came to snoring. In fact, Naani’s melodic nighttime whistles had put Mili to sleep most nights of her childhood. Ridhi’s snoring was nowhere near as loud. Mili sent up silent thanks on Ravi’s behalf. And Ridhi didn’t usually snore. Tonight was probably from exhaustion. The way the girl had gyrated on the floor last night it would be a miracle if she even woke up on her wedding day. No blushing bride at this wedding.
Mili on the other hand was still blushing from the peck on the cheek Samir had given her before heading off to the hotel where Ridhi’s parents had put up their guests. The memory of that touch, the tenderness of it, made her blush again now. There was such tenderness to him. In the way he touched her, in the way he spoke to her. Even his gaze was tender, as if he were tracing the softest feather down her skin. Only when he wasn’t trying to mask it in that hot hero nonchalance of course.
Not that his hot and seductive gazes weren’t the stuff of legends. Another warm blush crept over her wide-awake body. Heat gathered in her throat, in her belly, and lower still between her legs. Her hand traced the heat, skimming over her body to her most private part and hovered there. She lowered her hand, letting the warmth of her own fingers mix with the warmth of her body’s response to the memory of his touch. Liquid fire slid wet and hot from secret places and moistened her innermost folds. She pulled her hand away, mortified.
Guilt buzzed like an electric current inside her. Guilt at the heat that swirled between her legs, guilt at the wild abandon he inspired inside her, guilt at how safe she had felt by his side. So safe, in fact, that she had shared something she had never let slip around anyone before.
I don’t remember anything.
It’s what she hated most about her life. Even more than being married at four. Even more than the endless wait her life had been, she hated that she remembered nothing about her parents. It had been a leaden burden on her heart, crushing something inside, until his arm had snaked around her and the words had finally freed themselves from her chokehold.
A friendship that
gave you that kind of freedom could never be wrong, could it? Their friendship was clean, pure, wasn’t it?
She tried not to think about where her hand had been seconds ago.
No. Despite that, she knew their friendship was something good. In the deepest part of her heart, in the clearest part of her brain, she knew without a doubt that Samir’s feelings for her were something good. His friendship was guileless, selfless, undemanding. Surely, friendship like that was a gift. She would not darken it just because her body was being a traitor. She would not turn it away because of its treacherous response to him.
Hypocrite, a tiny voice in her head said.
Hypocrite.
She rolled over under the thick comforter and pressed her face into the pillow. Oh God, what was wrong with her? She squeezed her eyes and tried to conjure up an image of Virat. The only image of him she had came from a picture his grandmother had framed from a newspaper clipping. How many hours had she spent secretly staring at that fading picture? A smiling, handsome man in pilot’s overalls surrounded by other smiling handsome men in overalls against the backdrop of a fighter plane. She strained to focus on his face, strained to hold his smile in her memory as she slid her hand between her legs again.
This time she let her fingers slip under the nightgown Ridhi had let her borrow. This time she let her fingers slip under her already damp panties. This time she found the swollen bud that throbbed in her sensitive mound. Crazed by her own body, she dug into it. Hunger hot and unbidden rose beneath her fingers, sensation clawed at her gut, jammed in her untouched folds, moistening her mouth, moistening her fingers. Her nipples hardened to darts and pushed into the mattress. Her breasts ached. All of her ached, stretched taut to breaking point, wanting, waiting to break free.
She strained to reach for it, but the strain of holding the black-and-white image in her mind pulled her away, pushed her back, tied her up. She struggled, bit her lip, and intensified her own caresses. The raw scent of her own need reached her, bringing with it the scent of the desert, of hot sand and warm rain. The memory of powerful arms, of her fingers digging into hard muscles made her fingers frantic. Eyes the color of honey, hair the color of chocolate, teeth white as snow. Warm lips on her cheek. His low gurgling laughter overpowered her, wrestled her resistance to the ground. She released. She shattered. She spasmed, then spasmed and spasmed again and bit into the pillow beneath her face, swallowing her screams, swallowing her guilt, swallowing everything except the sweet, sweet throbbing that continued to beat against her fingers.
Samir usually did a hundred pushups before breaking a sweat. But today he was already at two hundred, and nothing. He was still too on edge, still too wound up. What an idiot. He could not believe what a total fucking idiot he’d been. He had never told anyone about his parents. He had never even discussed it with Virat.
I remember feelings.
Fuck. Where had that even come from?
And she’d listened. Hell, she’d known exactly what he meant. He went down to another set of twenty. Then another. Then another. The carpet barely scraping his forehead, his nose, his chin, up again, down again. Then again, then again. Until his arms felt like they would explode and he collapsed onto his face on the carpet.
When was the last time he’d been this horny? He felt like a fucking teenager with his hands on a Playboy magazine, ready to explode. He needed to get nice and laid, fast. To have his brains fucked out of him because they had sunk down to his dick. Thanks a lot, Little Sam.
He flipped over and grabbed his head in his hands.
Her smell was stuck in his head. Her feel was stuck to his fingers. How the fuck had this happened?
Laid. He needed to get laid. And he needed some Alka Seltzer. His head pounded like a jackhammer. After coming back to the hotel, Ravi and some of Ridhi’s cousins had wanted to drink. And boy, could these guys drink. Samir hadn’t had a drink since, well, since the person he valued the most in the world had fallen out of the sky and ended up almost dead. Unless you counted the few sips of wine last night. The memory of the terror of believing his brother might die swirled in his head and intensified the headache. The words dead and Virat in the same sentence made it difficult to breathe. Fuck yeah, he’d needed to drink last night. He’d needed something to wash down his own incredible stupidity.
And no, he was not going to analyze why he hadn’t moved on the blonde who’d been giving him the breast lean and the hungry eyes all evening. Finally, she’d taken off with one of Ridhi’s cousins, but not without giving Samir a disappointed frown.
“Yeah, honey,” he’d wanted to tell her, “you think you’re disappointed?”
The phone rang. Samir sprang up and pulled it to his ear.
“Dude, you ready? You’re giving me a ride back to Ridhi’s house. Remember?” How Ravi could sound so rested, so wide awake after last night, he would never know.
“Be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks,” was all Ravi said before hanging up. The guy had questionable taste in women, but he wasn’t a total dumbass. For one, he didn’t blast off his mouth when there was nothing to say. Good for him, because if he liked talking he was marrying the wrong girl. Plus he’d completely held it together when Ridhi’s cousins had slapped last night’s impromptu bachelor party on him. He looked, had some fun, but never touched.
Samir dropped his boxers and jumped into the shower. It was time to take the lamb to slaughter.
Samir watched Mili come down the steps. He didn’t realize he’d changed his stance to catch her just in case she stumbled until she grabbed the railing and stuck her chin up in the air. He almost smiled, but curbed the stupid impulse fast enough. He had no intention of smiling at Mili today. In fact, his plan was to avoid her entirely. For one, he needed some distance until Little Sam settled down and stopped running his brain. For another, she looked far too calm, far too beautiful, far too—He just needed distance until he figured out how to get the upper hand in this again, fast. A plan that made him the hunter again, not the fucking hunted.
Mili put one deliberate foot on the hallway floor. “There. I can do this just fine by myself, thank you,” her expression said, and he had to channel all his anger at her to keep from smiling.
She was wearing another chiffony, snugly fitted concoction. It was a golden sort of yellow and it brought out the glowing richness of her skin. This one was also a strappy number, not many little strings like the one yesterday, but fewer, broader straps with some sort of traditional threadwork on them. But those incredible collarbones of hers were still on full display, flying out from the center of her delicate throat to her perfectly curved shoulders. An absurdly desperate desire to run his fingers over those winged lines had haunted him all night. He had copped one quick feel when she had sidled up to him on the patio. Really bad idea because his thumb still burned from the feel of the softest skin over delicate bone.
She touched her shoulders and self-consciously adjusted her strap, and he realized he was staring.
“You look beautiful,” he said without meaning to. Fuck. So much for the upper hand.
Her cheeks colored and her eyes went all wide and vulnerable. “Shut up,” she said predictably. “Samir, you have to stop saying things like that.”
“Okay.” That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.
She had pulled her hair back in a ponytail today. And her face was scrubbed clean, bare as the day she was born. This woman had the most beautiful skin he’d ever seen, the kind of skin that could bankrupt cosmetic companies. A hint of dark shadows circled her eyes and made her irises seem even larger. For some reason she was having a hard time meeting his eyes and it drove him crazier than it should’ve.
“Did you eat?” He was dying of lust and that was the first question she asked him.
He swallowed. “No.”
“Aren’t you hungry? It’s almost lunchtime. Can I get you something?”
“I’m ravenous.” Shit. Shit. Shit. He hadn’t meant to say that ei
ther and certainly not in that lusty tone.
She blushed some more.
“I can get my own food.” He took a few quick steps back, spun around and walked away from her.
Mili gnawed at her cuticles. Her fingers smelled like Ridhi’s sugary vanilla body wash. God knows how frantically she had scrubbed her fingers in the shower. Even as she watched Samir’s retreating back she wondered if he’d been able to tell what she’d done last night. Except that instead of his usual tenacious-as-a-rash self he’d been only too eager to run from her.
Even now his feet were walking but for some reason she knew he was running.
“Why’s Romeo in such a hurry today?” Ridhi asked, coming down the stairs. She was dressed in an ankle-length tie-dye skirt with a heavy embroidered border and a heavily embellished tube top.
“Wow, you look, um, stunning,” Mili said.
It wasn’t untrue, but it was kind of risqué for your wedding day, even for Ridhi.
“Look who’s talking.” Ridhi gave Mili a once-over and adjusted her shoulder strap. “Gold is definitely your color. And my clothes look really good on you. Who would’ve thought?”
Before Mili could respond, there was a loud gasp behind her.
“Ridhika. Sagar. Kapoor! Has your brain taken a complete trip to Timbuktu?”
“And good morning to you too, Mummy.” Ridhi took one step down and came to stand next to Mili. Her hearing must’ve abandoned her because she didn’t seem to register the volume of her mother’s voice.
“Good morning? Good morning nothing! Your in-laws are in the house. Don’t you have any brains at all?” Her powder-pink skin raged near violet. Spittle danced on her cherry-red mouth. She pulled off the duppata from around her own shoulders and draped it around her daughter, pushing Mili aside with such force she stumbled.
“Mummy!” Ridhi steadied Mili and glared at her mother.
“Sorry. Sorry, beta.” She gave Mili a quick apologetic pat on the head. “But your friend makes me completely crazy. I gave birth to a birdbrain. Not a girl, a flamingo she is. Dancing around on one foot.” She turned to Ridhi and smacked her soundly on her exposed shoulder.