Ishq Factors

by Suleikha Snyder

  What did one say to a woman who ran from their bed after a bout of phenomenal sex? Nothing. Vince could say nothing. All he could do was cross the room and pull her into his arms.

  ***

  Anu didn’t want him to be kind to her. She wanted the bastard who’d slammed on her door and barreled into her apartment like he had a right to be there. She wanted the prick with a God complex she’d always thought he was. Not this man with welcoming arms and a hard chest and lips that brushed across her hair in a gesture that was meant to soothe. She shoved at him, but he was unyielding. He didn’t move. He just held her closer, tighter…and it felt amazing.

  For the past five days, she hadn’t let herself feel anything. She’d compartmentalized, tucking everything that had happened between the Subtle Knife and leaving the Grand into a little, locked box. She’d charted the passing of hours by how many times she changed her scrubs, focusing on nothing but patients and reports and getting through assisting on a triple bypass without screwing up. But he’d still been there, of course. Under her skin, in her blind spot, caught in that split second between awake and asleep. Vince McHenry had seeped into her very marrow.

  She wanted him more than ever. Worse, she wanted him more than anything. That was completely unacceptable. But, oh, did it feel completely attainable when she was threading her fingers through his silky dark hair and breathing in the subtle scene of his expensive cologne.

  “It’s okay,” he murmured against her cheek. “It’s okay to want this. To take it. To keep it.”

  “No, it’s not.” She closed her eyes, shutting herself away from the power of him as she forced herself to speak. To say all the honest things that he seemed to value so much. “Because I’m some silly resident with a crush, and that’s going to get old for you really, really fast. You’re going to move on, and I’m going to be Meredith goddamn Grey, mooning over you until I transfer somewhere else. I don’t want to be a soap opera, Dr. McHenry. I want to be a healer. I came here to be a doctor, not a conquest.”

  “Who says you’re the conquest?” He was pressing the lightest, barest of kisses to her temple, her cheek, her jaw. It was nearly brutal in its sweetness. “There is another option, you know.”

  She pulled back and looked up at him. “Really? And what would that be, adjoining rooms in the psych ward? Don’t worry; I already have mine all picked out.”

  “No. It’s a little less drastic than that,” he smiled. “It’s a regular course of treatment involving dinner and movies, telling me about your day, hearing about my truly stellar surgical skills, and you reading The Return of the King while I lie next to you in bed looking over research notes.” Just like before, he loosened her hair from its ponytail, tossing aside the rubber band and tangling his fingers in the strands. Just like before, he was effortlessly mastering her. With his hands, with his eyes, with his words. “It’s simple, Anushka. Simple and perfect. You let yourself fall in love with me, and I let myself fall in love with you, and we turn into the best pair of doctors who are crazy in love with each other that our hospital has ever seen.”

  Yes. She wanted to shout, “Yes. Yes, let’s do it.” The words wouldn’t come. She wasn’t that reckless. She wasn’t that stupid. She wasn’t the only woman who’d entertained foolish notions about Vince McHenry, and she didn’t need a Facebook group to prove it. She fisted her hands in the soft material of his shirt, shaking her head. “How do you know that would even work, Vince? How do you know it’s not better, safer, to just leave me alone and write this off?”

  “What can I say? I’m taking an informed, educated risk.” He cradled her face in his palms; thumb stroking over her lower lip. “Think about it,” he urged, huskily. “That’s all I’m asking. Look at all the angles, all the arguments, and think about it.” Then, he bent to kiss her. Once. Twice. Hot, drugging kisses that she would feel for hours. “Take two of these and call me in the morning.”

  ***

  If you looked up “god complex” in the dictionary, ahead of any other brilliant medical mind in the country there would be a picture of him, or so he’d frequently been told. According to some, he was a nurse whisperer, a magician in the OR, and a neuroscience pioneer. Still others said that he acted like he walked on water and raised the dead.

  Vince was happy to take credit for all of it. You didn’t get to be the best in your field by trading in humility. But, to tell the truth, he was more human than god. He had flaws like anyone else, weaknesses like any other man, and he was just as vulnerable when a maddening, bold, stubborn young woman didn’t call him when he’d hoped she would. At the ripe old age of forty-three, you’d think a day wouldn’t feel like an eternity, but after the twenty-four-hour mark, Vince had to take a brisk walk around the floor, thundering at a few orderlies and an unwitting scrub nurse just to feel remotely normal. Then, he went in and sat with Mrs. Stevens and listened to a few halting stories about her grandchildren, gently prodding her and helping her through her aphasia. Only when she began to fall asleep did he finally leave her side. He pulled the door shut behind him before stepping into the hallway.

  “Hey, you.” A voice stopped him in his tracks just outside 206. Feminine, commanding. So very, very welcome. “What are you doing just standing there?”

  “Waiting,” he said, turning to look across the hall. He expected to see Anu in her uniform of scrubs, ponytail, and fresh face. Glaring at him. He’d begun to crave being glared at, knowing that, underneath, it meant “I wish I could kiss you.”

  But she wasn’t glaring—no, her eyes were soft, and her glossed lips were curved into a gorgeous smile—and she wasn’t wearing scrubs. Under her open lab coat, she wore an honest-to-goodness dress. It was short and red and the skirt swung, showing off a perfect length of thigh as she moved toward him. Vince nearly stumbled back a step. “Be still my heart.”

  “It’s a good thing I’m going to be a heart specialist. We’ll get that started right back up again.” She reached out, put her palms on his chest like the paddles of a crash cart. “Clear!” Sure enough, he felt a jolt. All the way down to his toes.

  “All right, doctor, I’ve been anticipating your report all day.” Vince covered her hands with his, squeezing her fingers. “Tell me, what’s your diagnosis?”

  She took a deep breath, but her gaze didn’t waver from his. It was steady and sure. “Patient is a South Asian female in her mid-twenties, suffering from heart murmurs, shortness of breath, and occasional dizzy spells,” she recited in a perfectly clinical tone. “She frequently complains of an inability to concentrate. It all adds up to the classic signs of infatuation. Patient is apprehensive about the prescribed protocol but understands that it may be the best option to keep her symptoms in check.”

  Thank you. Vince was suddenly feeling a little dizzy and short of breath himself. “And what’s the prognosis, Anushka?” he prompted, quietly.

  Here, she smiled again. Not clinical, not removed. Just completely and totally engaged. “I…I think I’ll survive.”

  ***

  “I think I’ll survive.” No, I think I’ll thrive.

  Anu didn’t do anything as stupid as hug him. She didn’t even reach for his hand, knowing that her little crash cart gesture—and the big romantic speech disguised as medical jargon—had been intimate enough for an open hallway. But the current flowing between them made it feel like they were already stripping each other bare. In tacit agreement, they stumbled, one after the other, into the first open on-call room they could find, barely making it until the door shut before they were kissing.

  Vince McHenry was hers. He was really hers. He tasted like want and need and desperation, like days of denial, which she’d inflicted on them both. No more, Anu thought. Not if they could have this and have everything else.

  He called her Anushka, which was beginning to become her favorite sound in the world, and when he chased it with the word mercy, it wasn’t to beg, but to tease. “I don’t need mercy, Anushka. I need you.”

  His hands
shoved up the skirt of her dress, cradling her hips, fingers stroking her flesh so gingerly that she had to whisper “more” and “I’m not going to break.” It was only then that he pressed harder, making her gasp. She surged upward, clinging to him and meeting his absurdly sweet—no one would ever believe it, but no one else had to—mouth. He locked her legs around him, moved with her to the bunk beds, and…

  Suddenly, something was buzzing. Vibrating, too. They both tensed, and she pulled away, still breathless and winded from his kisses. “Is that your pager? I think you should—”

  “No. Not yet.” Vince stopped her from reaching for it, catching her hand and tugging her close once more. “Five minutes, doctor.” He grinned against her lips. “Trust me, just this once, it’ll wait.”

  Just this once, it did.

  And just this once—and every day afterwards—Dr. Anu Gupta was utterly and totally Vincible.

  Spice and Sand

  Dear Reader,

  When I learned of Winter Rain, a wonderful Pink Kayak Press anthology project benefiting RAINN, my thoughts immediately flew to the stories from Hindu mythology that I grew up with. Violence against women is a central theme in both The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, the oldest known epic poems in the world. A pretty sad statement on how the more things change, the more they stay the same, right?

  But I wanted to address perseverance and devotion and dedication, and how tragedy does not stop a life and love in its tracks. So, I took the story of a married nymph named Rambha, who was attacked by a famous mythological monster king, and brought it into the present. Curses and gods and a touch of the bizarre abound, but so does a simple contemporary message of fighting for what you want.

  Sexual assault is alluded to in Spice and Sand, but not described in graphic detail. Please skip this read if this may trigger you. As for those of you who do take a chance on Rambha and Nicky’s story, I hope you enjoy it.

  Suleikha Snyder

  Chapter One

  Rock music blared across the throne room, the thumping, grinding beat the very essence of thunder and lightning. Every day—a day that often went on for years—the opulent audience hall of Amarvati’s golden palace was transformed into a club. Guitars wailed, drums pounded. It was un-Indian, un-Hindu, and it was Lord Indra’s favorite. The Doors begged the heavenly court to come and light their fire. The Rolling Stones ached for satisfaction that would never be found here, in this sensual way-station between mortality and salvation. A Def Leppard asked to be doused in sugar when all those who made their home in Swargha’s capital city knew that nectar tasted so much more sublime. And the apsaras danced, their voluptuous curves adapting the ancient rhythms of their bodies to the young, mortal music.

  Urvashi, the most beauteous of them, moved like a tempest. Menaka, still lush from motherhood though her daughter had been born and reborn a thousand years ago, was a spring rainstorm. And Rambha, queen of them all … when she danced, the very earth was said to quake. But not today. Today, the earth stood still.

  “What is it, my dear?” whispered her lord, his silken voice slipping effortlessly between the raw strains of Jim Morrison’s. Though he was seated above them all, on a raised dais, it was as though he spoke in her ear. A tender caress and a cruel pinch all at once.

  Alone in the middle of the tiled marble dance floor, an oasis of stillness, she looked at him with stricken, lotus-like eyes. “My husband,” she murmured. “Is it not time for him to return to us?”

  The hall went instantly silent. Indra’s soma-flushed face grew dangerously impassive as his apsaras abruptly halted their gyrations and their gandharva counterparts scrambled to shut off the music. But Rambha held her ground. For she already knew what it was to be cursed. To be tormented. To be stripped of her clothes and her dignity. There was nothing Lord Indra could do to her for this impudence that she had not already suffered.

  Indra stroked his smooth jaw, sprawled in his throne like one of Rome’s insouciant emperors—but his reign had lasted far longer. Thunder and lightning bent to his whims. “It was not I who meted out Nalakuvara’s punishment,” he reminded her. “I cannot rescind it, no matter how prettily you weep.”

  “I know, my lord.” She had angered one of the seven sages. Again. They handed out curses like candy to children, particularly when an apsara dared tempt their lusts. And so, yes, they’d cursed her once more—taking from her the only thing she’d ever cared for. As if ten thousand years spent as stone had not been enough punishment for man’s failings. As if she had not already learned the harshest lesson at the hands of Ravana, the demon king of Lanka.

  This king, her king and the king of all the demigods, studied her with a narrowed gaze, as flinty with self-interest as it was brimming with indulgence. “Will you be able to dance for me so long as he is beyond the veil of Swargha?”

  “No. Not anymore.” Rambha bowed her head, the movement shaking the tiny bells she had plaited into her hair. “My feet now mirror the lack of beats in my heart. I do not have it within me to dance the cosmic dance.”

  Urvashi gasped. Menaka shifted in a whisper of satin and denim. Their many sisters in art traded fearful glances. For an apsara, the celestial dance was everything. If Rambha could not dance … then what was she? Who was she?

  The court seemed frozen, awaiting a show of either Indra’s wrath or his benevolence. But he displayed neither. He only gazed upon Rambha until she raised her eyes, lifted her chin. Returned his curiosity with a spark of defiance. Do your worst, my lord. It cannot be worse than that which I have already borne.

  Moments ticked by. Centuries on the Earth below, gone in a blink. And still Indra’s subjects waited. He tilted his noble head just slightly, as though listening to advice only he could hear, and gave no consideration at all to the tension that hushed the room.

  When he waved his hand and brought forth the music, they all released a collective breath of relief. “If he may not come to you, you must go to him,” the lord of the sky intoned as Aerosmith swelled up around them in a cacophony of crashing guitars and drums. “A wife’s place is at her husband’s side.”

  Rambha had the barest of moments to offer thankful prayers—not to Indra, but to those above him who had perhaps guided his decision—before she was vanished from the realm.

  Chapter Two

  The notes scattered across the lined staff paper like angry black ants. They were just as musically proficient, too.

  “Shit,” Nicky swore, throwing his pen across the room. It bounced off the decorative bamboo screen and hit the floor, where it lay as a glaring reminder of his inadequacy. It felt like ages since he’d written a decent song. It had been at least six months. Of course, if you asked critics, they would say Nicky Kohli hadn’t had a hit since two soundtracks and one solo album ago. He was, for lack of a better word, over. Musically castrated. Limp. Inspirationally impotent.

  He growled his frustration, sounding like the whining motor of an auto-rickshaw, and dragged his hands through his hair. Uncombed, the curly dark mass caught his fingers like fishermen’s nets. He was unshaven, too. He looked a fright. Not only were national awards and Grammies out of his reach, but he wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests either.

  Nicky frowned, stopping his instinctive working of the knots in his hair. Vanity had never been one of his sins, had it? Pride? Haan. Sloth? Judging by the empty Gold Spot and Kingfisher bottles littering the room, definitely. But worrying about what he looked like after four nights on holiday? Shit, he really was beginning to lose his mind.

  “Nicky, beta, go get some rest,” his manager had clucked, patting his cheek like he was a child. “Take some sea air. You will be as fresh as new.” Bunty had even offered the use of his brother’s small bungalow in Cox’s Bazar. Burnt out, red-eyed from lack of sleep, and sweating the film contract he’d just signed, Nicky had agreed that a trip to Bangladesh, far from the hustle and bustle of Mumbai, was a brilliant idea. As brilliant as tooth extraction, it now seemed.

  He stalked ou
t to the veranda, which looked out on an endless stretch of beach and the rolling waves beyond. At 125 kilometers, the tourist propaganda said it was the longest natural beach in the world. To him, in this moment, it was nothing more than an endless sand trap. Yet he couldn’t help but kick off his worn leather chappals and step down into it, barefoot. The beach was faintly wet from the rains and the damp sand looked like brown sugar.

  Something drew him out towards the water. Likely the same aggravation that was driving everything else. As he neared the foam of the evening tide, he could see a woman swimming close to shore. Strange, as he was far from the tourist hubs.

  Bunty and his brother Tintu had promised him absolutely privacy. Besides the thakur who cooked for him, and Meera who came to sweep, he was very much alone. Alone with his inability to create, his idiosyncracies, his deadlines … and this stranger. He watched her slim, brown arms cut through the waves, and then she was body surfing to shore. She rose up from the depths like a goddess.

  It wasn’t an exaggeration, merely a cliché. Because all he could deliver these days were clichés.

  Her wet, black hair clung to her body like climbing vines. Her eyes were green like lotus leaves, huge in her heart-shaped face. She wore a short, village-style sari, but it was no more modest than a string bikini. It hid nothing, and revealed everything, of her lush curves.

  Nicky was suddenly, painfully, aware that he was not impotent. His every sense blazed to life. One part of him, in particular, more prominently than the rest. The woman paid it no notice, her gaze fixed solely on his face. She looked at him with something like recognition, which he could only return with an addled, “Do I know you?”

  He asked it in Hindi, and then repeated himself in halting Bengali.

  Instead of answering, she tossed a length of her sodden hair over her shoulder and squeezed some of the damp from the hem of her sari. Only when she was done wringing herself out did she address him. “How long have you been on holiday, saab?” Her low, husky voice was just as shocking as the English it delivered.