A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  “I don’t want there to be lies between us,” she said from behind him.

  “Not this again, Kimi, please. I didn’t kiss Jen and I didn’t know anything about the transplant. But whatever this is, I’m going to get to the bottom of it. I’ll get you your answers. I swear.”

  “Thanks,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “I need this, Rahul. I need to know. I need . . .” She trailed off, and he knew he should let it go. But he turned to her.

  “What do you need, Kimi?”

  Those huge, soft eyes blinked up at him, gauging how much to risk again. “I need you to not shut me out.”

  He thought about the Post-it note she’d left on Tina. “I’m not the one who shut you out.” She had told him she wanted nothing more to do with him. Over and over again.

  “Do you really want me to butt out of your life?”

  God, no. He had been so lost without her for the past year.

  “Can you please not shut me out today? Just for one day. Please?”

  He touched her cheek, her skin butter-soft against his fingers. How did she not know that he couldn’t shut her out? That there would be nothing left of him if she removed herself from him?

  “I didn’t ask your mother questions about you, I swear. I think she was just trying to warn me off.” She leaned into his hand, the afternoon sun catching all those blond highlights that she loved so much. That he loved so much. Because she did. Because they made her happy.

  He couldn’t not touch them, couldn’t not trace the golden lines radiating from her worry-creased forehead. “Everyone keeps warning you. Why don’t you listen?”

  “Because you’re you, Rahul.”

  “I’m not who you think I am, Kimi.” And yet he wanted to be everything she thought he was.

  Those soft lips parted in a smile. “Haven’t we had this conversation before?”

  That would be all their conversations. They were in a loop, bonded atoms, the positive and negative forces inside them perfectly balanced between attraction and repulsion to hold them in each other’s orbit.

  Her hand went to her scar again, rubbing it in those light strokes she seemed to crave when she was in turmoil. “Why do you do that?” he asked, touching the lightest finger to her hand on her chest. “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” she whispered. “Actually, the scar itself is numb. It’s like touching something with no nerve endings. When I touch it, I feel it on my fingers but not on the scar itself. Here, give me your hand.” She took his hand. “Stick out your index finger.” She did the same with her hand and lined up her index finger flush with his. “Now use your other hand to stroke our two fingers together.”

  He did as she asked. It was the oddest sensation. Like feeling only half a touch.

  “Strange, huh?”

  He stroked their joint fingers again, unable to stop touching her. Unable to fight that fight anymore. “I can’t feel things either,” he said. “Not the way people do. Not the way you do.” She was looking up at him, one side of her face lit up by the sun. “It’s just like this. Like a part of me is numb. Whatever Aie was warning you about, it’s true.”

  She turned her hand and intertwined their fingers, touching palm to palm, transforming one touch into another, transforming everything inside him. “Now that I think about it, maybe your aie wasn’t warning me away from you. I think she just wanted me to understand.”

  He couldn’t look away from their clasped hands, alive with a connection he felt all through his body. “Understand what?”

  She pulled his hand to her lips. “How deeply you hurt. So I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  He pulled his hand away and sat down on the bed. She followed him, looking down at him until he looked up at her. Her eyes were equal parts soft and fierce. “Will you tell me about her?”

  For the longest time he couldn’t speak, couldn’t feel anything. Then all at once, his throat constricted around his silence. The pain growing unbearable until he let it out.

  “Her name was Mona,” he said, and the sob that escaped him was the last thing he’d expected.

  She cupped his face, taking everything he was feeling into her hands. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, but trying to hold back the tears made his chest burn. “Just don’t stop touching me,” he wanted to say. Instead, he said, “Aie shouldn’t have told you.”

  Kimi sat down next to him without letting his face go, then she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her cheek against his chest. His heartbeat raced beneath her ear.

  It had been so long since he’d felt her arms around him like this. Since he’d thought about Mona, her sticky-sweet breath. Her chatterbox voice. It was terrifying to let it out like this, to feel it again. What if he lost it? What if he forgot?

  He didn’t know if he said those words out loud. But if Kimi heard them, there would be two people who would remember. And he knew Kimi would remember. “She was eight years old. And just so . . .” His voice scraped out of his tight, raw throat. “So beautiful and smart. And she never stopped talking. You would have been best friends, the two of you. If one of you ever stopped talking, that is.”

  She smiled through the rivers that were wetting his shirt. Why couldn’t he do that? Why couldn’t he cry like that. Because that’s exactly how he felt.

  She stroked his face, his chest. “It had been only two years since your baba died,” she said, looking up at him with those wet doe eyes.

  “Don’t, Kimi. Don’t pity me. Please.”

  She stood. For a moment he thought she was angry again, because her eyes blazed. If she walked away from him now, he was going after her. But she didn’t walk away. She climbed into his lap and took his face in both hands again. “Is that what you think I’m feeling for you right now, Rahul. Pity?”

  Her breath was sweet and warm, and too close to his lips. He should pull away.

  “You’re not?” he said into her lips. Fuck pulling away. Fuck ever letting her go. She was everything. Everything and he was nothing without her.

  “Not even close.”

  And then she did it. She bent down and he reached up and their lips met. Something electric sparked through his chest, through the room, through the entire bloody universe. Hot and bright. Bright and hot.

  She inhaled. A tiny gasp. And everything but her and her lips went up in flames.

  His hands cupped her head, her scalp warm and perfect in his hands, her hair silk between his fingers. He took her lips, her breath, sucking on the soft, lush sweetness, nudging for entrance. Pushing as she pushed back. Groaning as she groaned. Sounds, taste, breath, all of it becoming one thing. One huge, pulsing inferno. Fast, so fast. Head spinning, blood surging places, hands everywhere. Her fists in his hair, the pain of that pull everywhere, in his chest, his belly, his dick. All of him thrown wide open in hunger and need. Teeth against teeth, tongue against tongue. Breath, running short, until he had to pull away to suck one in, panting, unable to pull away even as he pulled away.

  “Why haven’t we ever done that before?” she said, just as breathless, just as tightly pressed into him. Pressure against pressure.

  A laugh escaped him, easing the inferno, coloring it in with joy. “Because—”

  “It was a rhetorical question,” she said, pressing a finger to his lips. Then she slid off his lap without removing her finger and straddled him. And then she kissed him again and again.

  When his hands had dug under her shirt and his brain didn’t have a single thought left in it except: Please don’t pull away from me, don’t ever pull away from me again, she pulled away. Just a little bit. Then in her most coquettish American movie accent she said, “Officer Savant, I think you should know that I’m not a virgin.”

  30

  Kimi

  A long time ago

  Kimi had never expected it to be easy, convincing Rahul to help her lose her virginity. But she hadn’t expected to hit a wall of such dogged determination either. One would think she had asked him to run his f
ingers (or even other long, tubular body parts) through a sugarcane juicer machine.

  “I’m not going to ‘do it’ with you, Kimi.” If his words weren’t brutal enough, his utterly stern look finished the job spectacularly.

  “Why?” Thankfully, being unfazed in the face of extreme hopelessness was her special skill.

  “Because I can’t.”

  “You can’t?” Her eyes must have reflected her shock because he gave her one of those arrogant looks she shouldn’t love so much but did. “You mean you won’t.”

  “I mean I’m not having this conversation with you.” He looked around her room as though it were a cage and he’d forgotten how he got here.

  “Why?” She wondered if she needed to lock the door.

  He narrowed his eyes at the door she was staring at. “Because it doesn’t work like that.”

  “By ‘it’ you mean making love?”

  He cringed.

  “So, you don’t like making love?”

  “God, Kimi, can you stop calling it that?”

  She looked at him, utterly confused. Although, in a perverse way, this was turning out to be more fun than she had expected. Rahul was never flustered by anything.

  Maybe there was something else wrong. Maybe he thought she should be entirely unaware of these things and it bothered him that she wasn’t. She actually had a really good idea of the mechanics of the thing. She had read all the books, watched all the porn. She had read the entire Kama Sutra online. It was weirdly acrobatic, even bordering on unsavory, unless you were double-jointed. Thank the heavens above that romance novels didn’t bring horses and elephants into the thing!

  He started pacing, as he was prone to do when faced with a challenge. She felt oddly comfortable talking to him about this, which pretty much summed up why she was doing it in the first place. She shot a quick glance at his, y’know, nether regions. Okay, so in this at least the novels were wrong. There wasn’t much movement. But she couldn’t be sure because it was a quick glance. It wasn’t like she could stare. Plus his shirt was covering things a bit. Evidently, not all men “became instantly hard as stone” when the woman of their dreams mentioned making love, which apparently wasn’t his favorite term. Good to know. She’d better find another term ASAP.

  “Then tell me how it works?” she asked because he was sliding fast into his broody, silent space from his problem-solving, pacing space, which truth be told she should have been better prepared for. Well, no matter, she was prepared now. She could call it “fucking.” But yuck. Maybe “having sex.” Yes, that should fix the cringing.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled. Mumbling was a step away from silence. A step in the right direction. Good.

  “You don’t know how it works?”

  Again that arrogant expression, laced with that look he got when he knew exactly what she was up to, and when he didn’t know how to say no to her, didn’t know how not to give her what she wanted. It was the hottest bloody thing in the world.

  She felt a warming in her own nether regions—very much like in the novels. And just like that she knew she would get her way.

  But first he would try all he could to steer her away from her goal. The one she knew she was going to reach.

  She played her ace. “I don’t want to die a virgin, Rahul.”

  He groaned. Who would have thought making him blush would be so much fun? It was terrible of her, but she loved it. Like anything that was near impossible to do, doing it made her feel like a goddess.

  She didn’t intend to die. Even so, the odds made it impossible to not give the option its due. The success rate for heart transplants was seventy-five percent.

  “Are you not feeling well?” he asked, tenderness dilating his eyes, even though he usually was spot-on about how she was feeling. Even better than Mamma and Papa. He always saw. Maybe because it was so easy to let him see.

  “Never better,” she said. This wasn’t exactly true, but her medications were doing their job. And her surgery seemed like it was going to happen. The donor was hooked up to machines in Hong Kong, and she was flying there next week to wait. Hence the need for speed.

  “You’re my friend, Kimi.”

  “Then you should care. You should care that I don’t die a virgin. Why can’t you help me? It’s even a thing—friends with benefits.”

  “You watch far too many Hollywood movies.”

  “And you don’t watch nearly enough, officer,” she said in her best American accent, trying to look petulant, but the tenderness in his eyes made it hard.

  He sat down on the bed next to her. He smelled of industrial-strength antibacterial soap—the smell of her life. But under that sharp medicinal tang she could smell him, the real him. His scent was surprisingly soft. Like sweet spices. Totally at odds with how he looked, like an outlaw who galloped on his stallion across mountains and ravines, meting out justice to peasants, rough-edged and vibrating with restless energy. His smell and his eyes were all that was soft in all that rugged armor. The combination had made her so breathless for so long, she had never had trouble believing those novels.

  Those tender, melting-tar eyes searched her. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  She didn’t want to talk about the surgery. It made all the heat gathering inside her freeze up.

  “It’s me, Kimi.” He touched the edge of her sleeve, caressing it the way she wanted him to caress the rest of her.

  “We found a donor match.”

  His eyes widened before he closed them. Good thing because she couldn’t bear to see the fear that flared bright there. Then he was shaking. Again, just for an instant. She caught all his responses even though they flashed by in fractions of moments, like intense cloudbursts that condensed time. It was their dance. Him blanketing his reactions and her registering them before he did, and both of them not acknowledging the thin ice she stood on as the temperature continued to rise.

  Yet again, he put it all away the way he always did with anything concerning her health. He was the only person in her life who made such a valiant effort to not burden her with her own brokenness, and she loved him for it.

  “I’m going to Hong Kong next week. This person is in a coma and unresponsive to treatment. The doctors aren’t hopeful for a recovery. Once it happens, things will go fast, so I have to be there when the family makes the call to pull the plug.”

  He reached out and plucked her fingers out of her lap where they fidgeted of their own accord. She grabbed his hand and placed it on her chest just below her collarbone. Her nipples peaked and pressed against her blouse at the touch. But what was hotter than the spark that zinged down her belly was the way his eyes darkened at the touch.

  “They’re going to cut it out and replace it,” she said. “Dr. Girija says my chances are—”

  “One hundred percent.” He cut her off. “You’re here for a reason, remember?”

  It’s what she always said to him. I’m here for a reason.

  “Yes, I’m here for a reason, and you are here for one too—so that your best friend does not die a virgin.”

  “You are not going to die.”

  “We don’t know that. All I know is that I’m not going anywhere until we do this.” She poked him in his chest. Anger surged through her. Because really, enough was enough!

  He grabbed her finger off his chest. “Fine. Lay down and take off your clothes.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Well, you want to do this. Let’s do this.”

  “Really?”

  “Less talk, more action, Ms. Patil.” He stood, stepping back, as though making space for her to get on with the undressing.

  “Why do I have to take off my clothes first?”

  “Because you’re the one who wants this.”

  She scowled and he tucked an errant lock of hair behind her ear, his eyes softening again. “How will things ever be the same if we do this, Kimi?”

  She grabbed his hand off her cheek and squeezed it. “I promise
nothing will change.” How could things between them ever change? He was all that connected her to the world. What made the world outside exist. He was her constant.

  And she was all that was unstable in his world.

  Maybe it was unfair of her to ask this of him when there was a chance that she’d leave him with a lifetime of memories to haunt him.

  She sagged into her disappointment. “It’s okay if you don’t want to. It’s okay if this is too much to ask.”

  He laughed. One breath of a laugh whooshing out of him against her ear, because he had moved so close to her.

  He wrapped both arms around her. “You always ask for too much, Kimi.”

  She melted into him. Not in the hot, melty sort of way but in the way that was all theirs. Their world.

  “You are too much.”

  “Thank you.” She looked up at him. Her cheek rubbing against the denim of his shirt. His smell, his feel, the texture of the air around him so familiar it was home.

  “For what?” Even his clove-scented breath was home.

  “I know you don’t mean it as a compliment when you say I’m too much. But I love it.”

  “Why?”

  She couldn’t answer. She knew he was only asking because he wanted her to verbalize it. So he could refute her words and tell her that she was wrong, that she was all the things she wanted to be. That she was not less. That she was too much.

  The best part was that he believed it. He had given her that. The belief in her wholeness. And because Rahul never lied and Rahul had more integrity than anyone she knew, that made it true.

  “So you’ll do it?”

  He stroked her back and in his eyes was the answer before he spoke it. “I have a few conditions.”

  “Oh, Rahul, thank you!” She squeezed her arms around him. Like a little girl. Definitely not sexy. Naturally, he pushed her away.

  “But not right now. I need to talk to the doctor first and make sure it’s okay.”

  She laughed. “Quite full of ourselves, aren’t we? I already talked to Girija Auntie. I’m stable, my medications are working, I’m good to go. We can’t get too acrobatic, that’s all.”