He was doing his trademark smolder-smirk; she could see it in her peripheral vision. It was 30 percent smirk and 70 percent smolder, and she didn’t even have fire protection in the car. She tried not to let her breath catch. “Of course I’ll come,” he said.
“Really?”
“Definitely. I want you guys to get new jerseys, come on. Plus, I heard about it already at Richmond and was planning to ask you if you wanted to go.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t help the grin that spread over her face. A bonus date-but-not-really with Ashish Patel. She liked that idea. A lot.
“So do you want to come to my house to go together?”
Sweetie licked her lips. “Uh, about that. Actually, I’m going to have to go a bit early. I’m sort of … in one of the bands.”
“Get out!” Ashish looked especially delighted. “What do you play?”
“I’m the lead singer.” Sweetie tried not to grimace at how pretentious that sounded. “Only because Kayla and the others twisted my arm.”
“You’re joking. Would you believe it if I told you I was the lead singer in my middle school band? We were the Burning Bow Ties.”
Sweetie gave him the side eye. “Oh yeah? How do I know you’re not just trying to steal my thunder?”
Ashish raised an eyebrow. “If I was trying to steal your thunder, would I do it with the Burning Bow Ties?”
She laughed. “Okay, but you’re going to have to convince me. Sing me something.”
“Right now?”
“Uh-huh. Why? Are you scared?”
“Okay, okay, I will. But only if you accompany me.”
Crap. Sweetie wished she’d kept her mouth shut. “No. I don’t want to.”
“Sweetie. You’re going to be singing in front of a bunch of people on Band Night.”
“Yeah, but I’ll have the girls to back me up, other bands will be there … it won’t be a one-on-one thing.”
“Come on. I’m backing you up now.”
She sighed. “Okay, fine. What should we sing?”
“You pick the song.”
“How’s your Hindi?”
“Passable. But Hindi songs? I slay them, not gonna lie.”
Sweetie took a deep breath. Then she began to sing.
CHAPTER 20
Ashish watched Sweetie openmouthed. She was singing that song “Meherbaan” from that movie, oh, what was it? Oh, yeah. Bang Bang!, with Hrithik Roshan. When he’d first heard the song in the movie, he’d liked it. It was a little sappy, but whatever. It was nice.
But now? It was like listening to music for the very first time. It was like warm gold being poured into the vessel of his soul.
He listened with every fiber of every muscle. He listened so intently, he forgot who he was.
Sweetie stopped abruptly and looked at Ashish, her heart racing. Why wasn’t he singing along? Oh God. What if he hated her voice? Most people liked it, but music was such a subjective thing.
Um. Why was he staring at her like that?
“Ashish?”
“Yeah?” His voice was slightly foggy or something, like he’d been daydreaming. He blinked. When he spoke, his voice was normal. “Uh, yeah?”
“You’re not singing with me.”
He shook his head, like he was trying to clear it. “Oh, y-yeah, right. I’ll … I’ll sing. Ready?”
She nodded and began her stanza again, and this time he joined in.
Maybe choosing a song about someone falling in love and trying to decipher what it all means wasn’t the slickest thing she could’ve done. But the song had just popped out and she’d gone with it without thinking about it too much. But even that was just at the back of her mind. What Sweetie fully noticed was how gorgeous Ashish’s baritone really was. His voice was smooth silk scraping against sandpaper. It was inarguably beautiful.
Sweetie smiled to herself as they sang together, their voices dipping and tangling, soaring and falling. This was pretty near perfect, and their date had only just begun. Listening to Ashish sing in Hindi, Sweetie realized something: This was no longer just about the Sassy Sweetie Project anymore. She was falling for this boy.
They pulled up to Oakley Field just as they finished the encore version of the song (which they pretended adoring fans had asked them to do).
“So, people,” Ashish said, holding an imaginary mic to his mouth as Sweetie put the car in park in the busy parking lot. “Who sang it better? Ashish Patel”—here he made a noise in the back of his throat like thousands of adoring fans cheering—“or Sweetie Nair?” The crowd in the back of Ashish’s throat went waaayyyy wild. He bowed his head, conceding defeat. “The crowd does not lie.” He looked up at her, doing his smolder-smirk. “Your voice is seriously koyal quality.”
Koyal was the Hindi word for a bird that sang the most melodious songs. Sweetie smiled down at her hands. “Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself.” She looked up at him. “You should sing at Band Night too.”
Ashish laughed and held up his hands. “I’d rather just come and drink all the half-price coffee, honestly. My singing days died with the Burning Bow Ties.”
They got out and walked past a booth where people were selling colored powders. Ashish insisted on paying, as usual, and they bought a packet of each color, ranging from a sizzling violet that almost made Sweetie’s eyes water to a rich bottle green to a brilliant mustard yellow.
“Do you think we have enough?” Sweetie laughed as they walked into the field proper, dodging streams of laughing, yelling people. Ashish was having trouble with the packets; as soon as he got his grip on one, another would begin to slip down. Sweetie reached out and snagged the peacock blue before it hit the ground.
“Always be overprepared, Nair,” Ashish said. “It’s the only way to survive one of these things. Look at them, milling around all innocently. But once the countdown is done, they’ll morph into brightly colored, merciless hit people.”
Sweetie raised an eyebrow and looked around at everyone, a mix of Indian people and people of other cultures. “I don’t know. … They look fairly innocuous to me.”
“Oh, you’ll see,” Ashish said darkly. “You may have been told Holi’s the festival of colors, the festival of love, the symbol of spring and new beginnings. But there’s a much more sinister side to Holi. At its heart, it’s a cutthroat, bloody competition that’s rarely talked about.”
Sweetie laughed. “Well, I like how blended it is. Look at all these people—there must be, like, at least ten different ethnicities here.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.” They walked forward, close to the stage where the emcee would count down to when people could start throwing powders at one another. “Five more minutes.”
Ashish’s phone rang. “Dang it.” He tried to get it, but his hands were full. Sighing, he dumped the powders on the ground. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled it out, and frowned at the screen. “Hello?”
Sweetie watched him go from confused to serious.
“Hi, Deepika auntie. … No, no, just at the Holi Festival … Right. I know. Yes, that’s right. … Well, you know, Samir doesn’t really make it easy to—” He listened for a few seconds, then sighed quietly. “Okay. I can come over and speak to him in a little bit. Maybe later this evening … No, I won’t tell him I’m coming. Okay, bye … You’re welcome. Bye.”
Sweetie watched as he picked up the Holi color packets in silence. “Samir’s mom?”
“Yeah. She wants me to go over there and talk to him. Apparently, he’s been moping around the past few days and she’s getting worried.” He rolled his eyes. “She seriously treats him like he’s a baby.”
Sweetie pursed her mouth but didn’t say anything.
“What?” Ashish sounded genuinely curious about what she had to say.
“I think when people act out of the ordinary like that, they usually have an important reason. Like, we might not see it, but to her … maybe there’s something she’s afraid of, you know?”
Ashish studi
ed her for a long moment. “She had cancer quite a few years ago,” he said quietly. “She beat it, obviously, but her diagnosis was when things really changed. Samir dropped out of fifth grade to be homeschooled by her.” He shook his head and stepped closer to her. Her heart raced. “You’re a really kind person, aren’t you? Like, deep down.”
Sweetie’s heart thudded even harder as she looked at him, their eyes meeting over packets of color.
“Damn,” he said, and chuckled.
“What?”
“I really wanted to smooth your hair away, but my hands are full. And dropping these things on the ground before doing it just didn’t seem that romantic.”
Sweetie laughed. “That’s okay. You still get romantic points.”
“Yeah?” He held her gaze and her smile faded.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, people! The time has come! The moment you’ve all been waiting for! It’s tiiiiime for the countdoooowwwwwn!!!!”
Ashish blinked and stepped away from her when the emcee’s voice filled the air. It was almost like he’d been in a trance or something and had shaken himself out of it. “I really don’t deserve any romantic points. Anyway, it’s time to start.”
His voice sounded a little duller now, and Sweetie frowned. What had just happened? They’d totally been having a moment, and now it was just … gone. And it wasn’t about being interrupted, either. There was something else.
“Five …,” the announcer said.
All around them there was the excited rustling of packets as people ripped theirs open. Ashish was working on his without looking at her. Sweetie opened her mouth to say something, to ask him what had happened, but closed it again. Had she totally misunderstood the vibe between them? But how was that possible? He’d said he was trying to be romantic, right? So he wanted this to go in the same direction she did.
“Four!”
Sweetie ripped open her packet of yellow powder. “Hey,” she said. “Everything okay?”
He looked at her and smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. It wasn’t the smirky smolder, just a garden-variety fake smile. “Yep.”
“Three!”
“Ashish.” She stepped closer. “You can tell me if something’s bothering you.”
“Two!”
But he just kept giving her that fake smile. “Nope, nothing’s bothering me.”
“One!”
She quirked her mouth to the side. “Okay, then. You asked for this.”
He frowned and cocked his head just as the emcee said, “Holi ayyyiiiiii! Powders ahoy!”
She took the entire packet of yellow and dumped it onto Ashish’s head. He stared at her for a moment, totally covered. His hair was yellow, his face was yellow, his clothes were hopelessly stained.
Oh, crap. Crap, crap, crap. He looked really mad. Had Sweetie totally miscalculated?
But then he began to guffaw. And before she knew what was happening, he’d dumped an entire packet of purple on her. “Hey!” She shrieked with laughter and began to tear open another packet. But he got there before her.
He rubbed red powder into her cheeks, yelling, “Have some blush, Sweetie!”
They were both laughing helplessly, both trying to tear open their mound of packets before the other one. Sweetie lunged at him with a handful of blue just as he lunged at her with a handful of green. They met in the middle and were wrestling so hard to get the colors on the other that they fell in a graceless heap to the ground. The people around them scattered, everyone laughing. The air was smoky with color.
Sweetie was under Ashish, and he pinned her with his arms, rubbing green powder into her hair, dabbing it onto her nose. She fought him off, laughing, and colored his neck with a vivid fuchsia. They were both squirming, trying to get away from the other, when slowly they stopped. Ashish had Sweetie’s hands in his, splayed out to the sides. His knees were on either side of her. It suddenly occurred to her that this was all very … sexy.
He leaned down, looking at her lips. He was a riot of color, a total mess, but even so, she didn’t mind when he pressed his lips to hers. She could taste the chalky cornstarch of the powder, but it didn’t dampen the heat of this moment. She moved her hands to lock around his neck, and in that screaming chaos of the Holi Festival, he gathered her to him and kissed her until they were both light-headed, breathless, smiling.
When they pulled apart, he put a hand to his lips. The smile was suddenly gone, winked out like an imploded star in the night. Ashish scrambled off her and walked a few paces away.
Dizzy and struggling to catch up, Sweetie stood and went over to him. “What … what just happened?”
He turned to look at her, and his eyes were pained. “Sweetie, I …”
She could barely hear him. Shaking her head, she motioned to the parking lot, which was empty. He nodded and followed her off the field, both of them dodging the yelling, hollering, boisterous crowd of grinning, multicolored people.
She turned to him once they were alone and waited.
He rubbed his hair, unleashing a flurry of purple and yellow. It drifted down between them as he met her eye. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be unpredictable and bizarre.”
“Okay. So what’s going on?”
“I have this theory,” he said in a rush. “You know how I said I’m basically incapable of connecting with anyone now because of … of Celia?”
Sweetie could see how it hurt him just to say Celia’s name, and her heart clenched, both in sympathy and in envy. “Yeah.”
“So it turns out I’m completely, irrefutably attracted to you.” He swallowed, his big Adam’s apple bobbing. He looked away and rubbed his jaw. “Um … physically attracted is what I mean.”
Sweetie felt the warmth spread through her cheeks. “That’s … I’m attracted to you, too, Ashish.” She wanted to sing, just belt out something happy and upbeat and celebratory. But obviously she didn’t. Ashish Patel, could-be GQ model, found her attractive. If she were Christian, she’d say “hallelujah.” This was good news. This was really, really good news.
This was bad news. This was really, really bad news. Just look at her face, all glowing and happy, her innocent eyes so guileless and shiny. She was going to hate him when he finished.
“But … don’t you see? That’s why it’s no good. Kissing you and holding you is great. …” He sighed, a trembling thing. “God, is it great. But … that’s not fair to you.” He seriously could not believe he was saying all this. Out loud. To a hot girl. But Sweetie wasn’t just a hot girl. She was … Sweetie. Ashish took a breath and put his ego aside. “The truth is, I can’t give you the other side of the relationship. The, ah, emotional stuff, the commitment you deserve.” He stepped forward and took her hands. “You should have that, Sweetie. Not just some guy who’s going to swap spit with you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Okay, first: ew. I’m taking back those romantic points. And secondly, we’ve already talked about this at Roast Me, remember? Seriously, I think you’re overthinking this a little bit.”
“I am?”
“We’ve literally been out on one and a half dates. Three weeks ago neither of us knew the other at all. I’m no relationship guru, but I imagine physical attraction comes easy, but emotional stuff takes time.” She shrugged. “And I’m willing to give it time. Are you?”
He stared at her. It couldn’t be that easy. Could it? “I … I don’t think it works that way.”
Sweetie shrugged again. “Why not?”
“Sweetie, I really like you. You’re cool. But—”
“Unless you’re planning on running back to Celia in the next couple of weeks, what have you got to lose?”
Ashish looked at her steadily. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t.” She smiled her serene smile. “I trust you. Anyway, let me worry about that, okay?”
“I … But … Are you sure?”
She squeezed his hands and her smile flourished into a grin. His heart sputtered and fla
pped around in his chest like a poor, frightened bird. “Yes. I’m sure. Ashish, you already think that I’m wise and kind. That’s what you said. Were you lying?”
“Well, no.” He didn’t say that thinking someone was wise or kind didn’t necessarily mean you were going to fall in love with them at some point. He thought Ma was those things too.
But then Sweetie went up on her tiptoes and kissed him, their hands pressed together between their bodies, and all logical, rational thought went flying out of his head.
There was seriously nothing like kissing Sweetie Nair. If everyone could kiss her, there would be no nuclear weapons. No arms races. People wouldn’t want to drop bombs or steal money because they’d be too busy trying to sneak in another kiss. Kissing her was the solution to world peace. Ashish was sure of it. Actually, maybe it was better that no one knew that. Less competition. He wrapped his hands in her rainbow hair and pulled her closer.
They sat sipping smoothies at one of the food trucks.
“How’s the vanilla avocado?” Sweetie asked.
He held out the cup so she could taste it. She made a face. “Not too bad for being vanilla avocado. Try my peanut butter chocolate banana.”
He did and screwed up his nose. “Oh God. Too. Sweet.”
She laughed. “Good thing you’re not dating someone named Sweetie or anything.”
He winked at her. “That’s different.”
She dropped her eyes in that shy way, and his heart trip-hammered. For someone who considered himself a bit of a player, Ashish realized he spent a lot of time being completely charmed by Sweetie. He told his heart to STFU immediately.
“So tell me something,” he said, crossing his legs and throwing one arm over the back of his chair to distract from the feeling. “Your parents have no idea? What do they think you’re doing?”
There's Something About Sweetie Page 17