A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  His cheeks took on that incredibly hot deep red again. Who would have thought just talking about it would make her always stoic IPS officer blush? “You told her you were going to ask me to have sex with you?”

  “No, I asked her if I could have sex. Period.”

  “So she basically knows. Because who else would you ask?”

  She smacked him. “That is not true. I could actually ask any number of people!”

  More of that smugness oozed from his smile. “Okay.” He split the word in two the way he always did when he meant the opposite of it.

  “I could! I could call someone. There are escort services and stuff, y’know. You aren’t my only option.”

  “I’m honored. I think.”

  She giggled.

  “And now I’m totally turned on. Because who can resist a girl who picked him over—did you say escort services?”

  “If you keep making me laugh, how are we going to do it?”

  “You actually mean right now, don’t you?”

  “I leave next week.”

  He pulled her close. “Wow, you really know how to seduce a guy.” But he was holding her very tightly.

  She looked up at him, the back of her neck crinkling with the effort. The sight of his lips and eyes ignited that heat inside her again, pushing away all the other things that the fear in his embrace was bringing to the surface. She went up on her toes. Finally, she was going to kiss him.

  He put a finger on her lips. She’d been so wrong—the heat from a minute ago was nothing. She felt his finger everywhere. “No kissing.”

  What?

  He caressed her cheek. The rough pad of his thumb turning her soft. “No getting angry. My rules.”

  “How can we make love without kissing?”

  “No calling it that either. You want to do it. We’re going to do it.”

  “You make it sound like a hardship. I thought making . . . doing it . . . was supposed to be enjoyable.”

  He smiled, but for an instant he let all the things inside him loose in his eyes. “I’ll make it good for you, I promise. But, Kimi, I can’t, I have to . . .”

  “I know. Don’t say anything more. Please.” This might be their last memory together. He had to protect himself. He who had never forsaken the girl who came with the inevitability of loss.

  He tipped her chin up until she met his eyes. “Hey, the other rule is to tell me if you don’t like something.” He kissed her forehead and something vagrantly sexy flared through her, opening her up so fast and fierce, she wanted to wrap herself around him. Wanted to touch him with her entire body.

  “I like it. I’ll like everything.”

  He smiled against her forehead. “Go slow, tigress. We haven’t even started yet.” He dropped kisses on her lids, his breath turning her brows so erogenous she moaned.

  “I thought we weren’t kissing.”

  “Oh, there will be kissing. Just not on the mouth.”

  He got right to it. Her ears, her throat. Slow at first, tentative, then his breathing sped up, gathering up a storm. His lips dragged over her shirt, leaving wet heat on her skin. She was dying. She snuck a look at him. His eyes were closed, his face tight with something. Control? She didn’t care. This was Rahul, her Rahul, and that’s all that mattered. The only damn thing in the world that had any meaning at all.

  His fingers grasped her buttons, then pulled away. “Also, we’re going to leave our clothes on.”

  Wait, what?

  But his mouth touched her breasts and she lost her ability to think, to talk, to breathe. He could do this through metal armor and she wouldn’t care. “Just don’t stop,” she tried to say, but it came out gibberish and he smiled into her nipple. Seriously, like smiled around a part of her body that wanted to shove itself down his throat, and there was so much sensation, she might pass out from it. She grabbed his hair with both hands.

  He tried to pull away. “Kimi, you have to calm down. Breathe.”

  She panted. Nodded. Pulled him back.

  “I’m trying to go slow here.”

  Slow?

  He’d just tried to ingest her nipple whole. That was going slow on which planet?

  She climbed onto him, straddling his lap, and pushed him back on the bed.

  “That’s not going slow, Kimi.”

  “It’s slow, it’s slow,” she tried to say, but she was kissing his jaw so it basically came out as “Mphh miplmph.”

  A laugh started in his chest, but her teeth found a tendon in his neck and a shudder went through him. He rolled her over on her back and reached for her jeans. So, change of plans. Change of speed.

  “Breathe,” he said, cupping her down there.

  She bucked off the bed. Breathe? What was that?

  He looked like he was in pain, but he didn’t stop. His hands shook as he unbuttoned her jeans and slid them off.

  “I thought we weren’t removing clothing.” She lifted her hips for him.

  “I’m not a magician, Kimi.”

  “Oh, yes you are,” she wanted to tell him, but her jeans were off and his tongue was inside her—omurgodabove—navel. And things were exploding between her legs. Where he went next.

  As in really went.

  Okay, her heart definitely could not survive this.

  Could. Not.

  He licked her. One long, lapping lick. Then he went to work until she was thrashing her head like a crazed person and pulling out his hair. And making half-sobbing half-screaming sounds she couldn’t recognize as her own. A pulse was beating—with the force her stupid heart could never seem to muster—right between her legs. Where all her being had gathered and lit up like a bonfire. Her clitoris, her vagina, her entire darned reproductive system was saying hello to her. Hello! Here we are. Right here! Where were you all our lives?

  When she looked down at him he was smiling against her underwear. He looked almost as happy as her vagina, which kept on beating like wedding drums.

  “Who wears underwear with lollipops on it?”

  How could he talk?

  “Don’t be rude to that underwear. I’m framing it and putting it on my nightstand.”

  His smile widened. But by the time he had brought himself up to eye level, the laughter was gone from his eyes, intensity and arousal rising in its place. He stared at her lips. She’d never seen him like this before. So much hunger, so much pleasure and pain. Not the kind of pain she’d put him through so many times. This pain was new. This pleasure was new. The beating body parts, definitely new.

  I’ll make it up to you, she wanted to say. If she came home she would make it up to him every day of her life. For putting him through this. For giving her this.

  She sat up, her nether regions so aware and awake they clenched. He sat up too and she grabbed his face in her hands. She had never wanted anything as badly as she wanted to kiss him, and she had a rather spectacular list of things she wanted really badly. Like wanting to live. Right now wanting to kiss him was giving the wanting to live a run for its money. But she had promised.

  He pushed away from her. She grabbed his sleeve. His sleeve! She seriously needed to start acting like a grown-up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “We’re done, aren’t we?”

  “No, we’re not. You promised.”

  “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

  “You did not promise me enjoyment. You promised to have sex with me.”

  “That was definitely sex, Kimi.”

  She stuck her finger in his face. “Don’t patronize me, Rahul. I had an orgasm. It was spectacular. Better than anything I’ve ever given myself. But we are not done here.”

  He sank back into the bed, his eyes suddenly hot again. “You give yourself orgasms?”

  All by itself her voice dropped to a whisper. “Yes. Do you want me to tell you how?”

  He groaned, and she reached for his belt. Something about the way he groaned gave her the courage to unhook it.

  She expected h
im to pull away, but he just swallowed.

  “Stop being old-fashioned, Rahul. We’re both adults. You’re not taking my honor. My honor is not buried in my crotch. And if it were, you just made it explode out of there. It’s probably splattered across the ceiling.” She started unzipping his pants. “I want this and you promised.”

  He smiled. “Keep talking.” He removed her hands from his pants and kissed them. “But keep these up here.” He put her hands on his shoulders.

  “Are you saying my talking doesn’t turn you on?”

  “Most definitely.” He removed his jeans, then pulled off her underwear. His breathing changed.

  They lay back down on the bed, side by side.

  “That’s you not turned on?” she asked, looking down at him, and he dropped a kiss on her forehead and smiled again.

  “Say something about women’s rights or art or science.” He reached down and cupped her again, his fingers warm against her bare skin, and she would’ve given him anything.

  “The longest recorded male orgasm went on for ten seconds. The longest female orgasm lasted forty-five seconds.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and there it was again, that smile in his voice.

  “Only forty-five percent of women who are virgins experience pain during their first intercourse.”

  “This might hurt.” He rubbed a finger against her opening and she gasped. “I’m sorry.”

  “Just don’t stop,” she said, pressing into his hand. “I don’t think I’m in the forty-five percent.”

  He kissed her cheek, that smile nudging at her as his finger nudged elsewhere. She clenched without meaning to and his jaw worked. “You’re one of a kind, Kimi.”

  Pleasure was coursing through her, and joy. Seconds ago she had wanted to laugh. Now she wanted to cry, and then he touched his thumb to her clitoris and it all turned to sensation. Dear lord above! Another orgasm danced beneath his fingers. Two strokes and it exploded through her, completely without her permission.

  “Relax, sweetheart. Shh.” He removed his finger, leaving her bereft. “Please tell me you have condoms.”

  She leapt at the side table, almost knocking him off the bed. The bed started to shake. He was laughing. Right now he could guffaw like a hyena and she’d grab on to him and never let him go. She extracted a box. Her fingers were shaking so much she couldn’t get the blasted things to work. He took the box from her, heat and laughter dancing in his eyes. He extracted one and slid it on in a matter of seconds.

  She hadn’t seen too many penises that weren’t on a computer screen (okay she had seen none), but his was beautiful. Like, seriously beautiful. She reached for it. But he caught her hand. “You have to relax, Kimi. Please.”

  Relax? How could he use that word? She was panting. He pushed her back on the bed, and she grabbed him and wrapped her legs around him in a death grip as he slid into her. The fit so tight and slick and so bloody hot she couldn’t breathe.

  “Tell me what to do,” she said. “Tell me what you need.”

  But he had no instructions to give. His entire face was flushed, the furrow between his brows deeper than she’d ever seen it.

  “God, Kimi,” he said and then he was pumping into her. And she had no idea what pain was or pleasure. She had no bloody idea what anything was. Because everything inside her was soft and wet and clenching around him. She held on to his arms, his back, her fingers digging into rock-hard muscle and keeping her in place.

  Every inch of her turned to exhilarating, maddening tightness. Filled-up. Whole. Engulfed. She fell into herself, fell into him in another gush of pleasure. Not the hot blast from before but sparkling echoes of that explosion, reaching every cell that held her together as she held on and watched him come apart in long uncontrolled thrusts.

  He threw back his head and the sound that escaped him unraveled him entirely. A sob, a moan, a wild scream of release. His buttocks clenched and unclenched beneath her ankles, over and over until he sagged into her with such relief she pulled him to her, stroking him, his hair, his back, as sore, consuming pleasure throbbed where they joined.

  She wanted to go on holding him as though forever existed. In all the times that she had believed she didn’t care if she went on living there had been defeat and frustration. In this moment there was a belief that she was alive and, no matter what happened to her, this mattered. She mattered.

  He lifted his face off the crook of her neck where she knew she would find skin marked by his mouth. Where even as he pulled away, he left behind the pinpricks of razor burn. He didn’t meet her eyes, just extracted himself from her and moved away so fast it made her glad to have the cover of her blouse. He sat at the edge of the bed, his back to her, his head in his hands, his breathing labored. Despite his still buttoned shirt, he looked entirely naked, exposed to his bones.

  The silence between them labored to breathe too. She reached for her underwear and pulled it on. He reached for the tissue box and held it out to her, still not looking at her. “You okay?” he said finally, his voice hollow and full at once.

  She made a sound, envying him his ability to not look at her. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, couldn’t move again without throwing herself back in his arms, couldn’t speak without telling him everything in her heart.

  This heart had better be the real thing. Because she could not leave him this way. Could not let all the precious feelings inside her go unsaid. She could not give him up.

  “I have to go,” he said, pulling on his jeans as though the effort took everything he had left. “I’ll see you at the airport.”

  And with that he walked away from her.

  31

  Rahul

  A long time ago

  “Where the hell have you been?” The last thing Rahul needed was to deal with Jen’s wrath right now. But it was valid; all her damn anger was valid. She had been trying to call him for the past hour, but he had been too busy. “The bastard showed up! He pressed a gun to my belly. Do you know I’m pregnant? Are you aware?” Jen pointed at her protruding belly.

  Yes, he was aware. Of all the fucked-up things about this case, the fact that Jen was carrying a child was somehow the worst part. He had once tried to tell her to go slow when she’d been badgering him relentlessly to try and find two of her patients who had gone missing. She’d dragged him through the narrow lanes of Dharavi where the two sisters had lived, questioning all their neighbors about their whereabouts.

  “Should you really be racing around in the heat in your state?” he had asked her.

  She’d bitten his head off, lecturing him at such considerable length about how pregnancy doesn’t impede one’s ability for locomotion that he had learned his lesson and never referred to her pregnancy again.

  She wasn’t the kind of person you could try to be overprotective of. In fact, all attempts to get her to back off chasing these thugs who were stealing organs from undocumented slum dwellers and leaving them untraceable met with a: “You have a better plan, officer?”

  That had reminded him so much of Kimi.

  Suddenly, it was clear to him how everything reminded him of Kimi. He had refused to admit it, and now he had gone and made the biggest mistake of his life. The way her arms and legs had clutched him as he pumped into her, unable to stop. Blood rushed to his face.

  Here he was, on duty, with a pregnant woman telling him a psychopath they’d been trying to track down had pressed a gun to her belly, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the violent satisfaction of releasing inside his best friend. And the raging need to go back to her right now. He had left her, possibly lost and embarrassed and needing him. He imagined her now, her arms wrapped around her knees, wondering what she had done wrong to make him flee.

  Truth was, he wasn’t as worldly as she saw him. Sex had never been an enjoyable experience for him. It had always been a purely physical release, something that came tinged with self-loathing and the memory from long ago of his fourteen-year-old hand forcefully pressed ag
ainst a khaki-clad dick. But he hadn’t thought about that once today. He hadn’t even remembered it until he had tried to sit up and she had tried to hold him and he’d seen a wash of pleasure in her eyes so pure and untainted, all the self-loathing had descended on him like a wave that took you down too fast to outrun.

  “Hello, Rahul, are you even here?” Jen snapped her fingers in his face.

  “I came as soon as I got your message.” He just hadn’t seen it because he’d been too busy. “Tell me everything.”

  “First, I think my friend in Qatar might be able to get us the records for all the transplants performed across the Gulf in the past six months. He did say that there’s been an unusually rapid rise in numbers. For years there were no organs and now people are moving up the list as though it’s the Costco line on the day before Thanksgiving.”

  “Excuse me?” Usually, he got a lot of Jen’s American references because Kimi made him watch so much American TV and movies.

  “Never mind. I’m absolutely sure the organs are being pulled off our donor registry database.” Jen had worked like a madwoman over the past six months to compile a donor registry in Dharavi because the rate of organ failure was so high.

  One day, she had noticed two of her patients disappear suspiciously, and she hadn’t been able to let it go. She’d made his life hell until he had listened to her and finally found a few desecrated body parts buried in sewage. Then five more people had disappeared, and he had realized that she wasn’t a mad American charity junkie desperate to find the meaning of life in the slums of Mumbai. She was just a doctor who wanted to save lives.

  They had become friends and watched as the tally of people on her registry who disappeared rose and rose. Unfortunately, no more bodies ever showed up. This made the case impossibly hard because the victims were undocumented. And those who didn’t exist couldn’t disappear.

  Now the bastards who were wreaking this havoc had broken into Jen’s clinic. The place was completely trashed. Broken glass and papers strewn everywhere. A picture of Jen with her husband, Nikhil, slashed up. Rahul was careful not to touch anything until his forensics team arrived.