“Either.” My head swam. “Pleated.”
“Non-pleated is more slimming.”
“Do it now,” I snarled.
“Yes, ma’am.” He hung up.
Chapter Six
I sank down on the toilet, limp with distress.
At least I hadn’t texted all that to him. He could show a text around the office if he was feeling droll. I was taking a terrible risk as it was, to ask him for help, but I had to trust someone, and in some indefinable way I felt I had the goods on Kama.
Probably that was illusory. What could I do to him? I couldn’t phone his parents in Bangalore and tell them what a fraud he was. Well, I could, I supposed, if I were persistent. How many chemists in Bangalore could there be?
I decided not to worry about it.
For twenty minutes I cleaned the runny makeup off my face, bundled up my ruined skirt and underthings, and tried, by climbing back up on the counter and contorting myself into a pretzel and looking over my shoulder into the mirror over the sink, to see if my hind end was actually burnt and blistered.
There were definitely puffy, bright red blisters on my flesh. They hurt to the touch. I checked the lock on the door and then refilled the sink with cold water, letting it run until it was icy. Ahhhhh.
The sound I’d been dreading came at last: a faint scratching on the restroom door. I held my breath. Then my phone rang.
I snatched it up and answered in a whisper, so the person outside wouldn’t hear it ring.
“What?”
“It’s me. Open the door. I have the pants.”
I blew out a huge sigh of relief, unlocked the door, yanked Kamadeva inside, shoved him behind the door, and locked it again. While he was still gaping at me, I grabbed the Field’s bag from him, used it to fig-leaf myself, and backed into the handicap stall, shutting it with a bang behind me.
“Um,” he began.
“Quiet,” I commanded from inside the stall. “Not a word. Not a sound.”
I saw his feet move over to the counter and heard him draw some paper towels from the dispenser. Then his feet vanished. I deduced that he had boosted himself onto the counter, first wiping it off, since I had left it wet.
Now I felt ready for the next step. I sighed.
The slacks…were perfect. Precisely what I had ordered. I shook them out, and as I did, something bright and silky fell to the floor.
Underpants. He’d brought me underpants, too! They were wildly flowery with peach, white, yellow, and hot coral mango blossoms, blue-and-pink lotus flowers, tiny white kota gandal flowers with their shiny leaves, and horticulturally perfect asoka blossoms. The panties were cut big, but with a loose, frilly, almost skirt-like hem, as if they could double for swim bottoms, if they weren’t so utterly flimsy and girly.
And they fit.
I slid into them and felt a spike of heat jump from my crotch up into my belly. The heat spiked clear up into my heart, and then sank back down. Oh, no.
I scrambled into the slacks. They fit perfectly, too. On with my sensible pumps, and I felt human again.
Now for the comedy hour. Surely Kamadeva would try to take this out of my hide somehow.
He was indeed sitting on the counter when I came out of the stall. He had not only mopped up the water I’d splashed about, but also drained the sinkful of cold water I’d been sitting in.
He glanced up from looking at his hands and then hopped down, as if I’d caught him sneaking pencils. His adorable, dimpled, boyish face looked anxious.
We stood looking at one another for a moment. Finally, I said, “Thank you. They’re perfect.” Under sober black Evan Picone, the panties felt cool and slick on my skin. “How did you—why did you—”
He hunched a shoulder. “Not the first time I’ve, uh, that is, in an emergency like this.” He glanced down at the Field’s bag where I’d stashed my ruined skirt and underthings and looked away, giving me a brief but reassuring little half smile.
I blinked. What could he mean? “Oh.” Then I realized. “Oh! One of your sisters? Did she get her—get—blood on her clothes?”
He looked at the bag again and gave a delicate sniff. “Not blood.”
I realized that the room still smelled smoky with a dark brown, angry, burnt-wool-and-lycra smoke. I felt myself flush. That heat still lurked in my lower parts.
“What do you mean, then?” My brows snapped together.
He met my gaze, still looking a little scared. “It’s the fire,” he said simply. “When it comes—if it’s late—” He shrugged.
The fire. Oh, I felt the fire. “Oh my God.” I put my hand to my throat.
Suddenly I couldn’t play lawyer-in-charge. I collapsed against the stall wall and covered my face with my hands. The burn…down there…was starting again. I thought wildly of sending him back to Field’s for more clothes while I locked myself in, to make the sink boil into steam again.
“Rathi,” he said quietly. “There is a way to bring it up.”
“Bring it up?” I said, laughing shakily. “I want to cool it down!” It was so difficult to meet his eyes.
“This cannot be done.” He looked sober and concerned.
“Well?” I couldn’t believe I was taking advice from this…this teen kewpie doll, this baby-faced boy. “What’s happening to me?”
“It has to come all the way up—out the top,” he said, gesturing to his scalp, making a parrot crest with his fingers.
I realized I was breathing shallowly, trying to keep the heat down, trying to stay cool. It wasn’t working.
I heaved a huge breath, then another. That only seemed to fan the flame. “What do I do? My god, what do I do?”
He looked really worried. “I dunno for sure. If it’s that hot, you must’ve choked it off somehow. You’ll have to follow your impulse. Maybe that’ll bring it up a level, maybe two levels.”
I pushed away from the stall wall. He took a step back.
I was breathing hard, as if I’d been doing chin-ups. “Impulse.” I felt steam rising up my spine, or possibly a streak of molten lava. “Follow my impulse.” My voice came out a growl. Before me, he seemed to waver in the heat.
I stepped toward him, grabbed a handful of his shirt, and shoved him hard against the wall. He felt surprisingly solid. His black puppy eyes grew round. In my sensible pumps I was the same height as he was. Fire seemed to shoot up into my navel. Oh god. Don’t let me burn up my beautiful new panties, was my last sane thought.
Then I kissed him.
The heat rose as our mouths met. He kissed back, but he let me take him. I had only been kissed twice before, in college, by such brutish morons that I had never invited the experience again. Apparently I had learned nothing but brutishness from them. I grabbed Kama’s arms in my hands—what lovely, strong, thickly muscled arms—and squeezed and pushed and ground myself against him. That growling sound came from my throat. The heat rose as high as my navel and began to soften. Oh, thank god. I snuggled closer to him, thrusting my thigh between his thighs, the way those boys had done to me, and opened my mouth to his. He responded just enough to spur me on. My eyes were clenched shut. All I knew was the feel of his firm mouth, his strong body against mine and the heat, rising slowly like red-hot lava filling a spiral stairway, one step at a time, filling my bowels, my stomach, my chest, my throat, cooling as it rose.
After a long moment, I realized I had stopped moving. The burning was gone, sinking, cooling now from my heart downward. My hands slackened on Kama’s arms and fell.
I caught my breath. I opened my eyes.
He still watched me with that worried, observant, almost guilty expression.
I swallowed. “You’re being very nice about all this.”
Light leaped into his eyes. He smiled a smile so full of hope, I caught my breath again. How could he be behaving so well? I had set down Kama as the jokester, the troublemaker, the youngest brother gone bad. He puzzled me.
As he watched my face, I saw a shadow cross his, as if
somehow I had disappointed him. Disappointed him! I blinked.
“I live to serve,” he said simply.
Before I knew what to say to that, he picked up the Field’s bag. “I’ll get rid of this. Oh.” He dug into the bag. I felt my shoulders tense as he pawed through my charred underthings. “You’ll want this.” He handed me my phone.
A sigh shuddered in my throat. I slid the phone into my pocket.
“Go, go,” he said, with a shooing motion. “Tell them I brought forty-one depositions for Sandsreicht and you have to get back to the office.”
I tried to hand him the restroom key on its orange plastic stick, but he shooed that away, too.
“Look—thank you,” I began.
“Go!”
I didn’t know what to say. “Forty-one depositions?”
His wicked-boy grin came back at last. He wiggled his eyebrows. He made a huge-stack-of-paper gesture with both hands. “They’re on your desk now.”
To my complete amazement, Irene and Davis gave me not a glance when I slunk back into Judge Green’s chambers to collect my briefcase and handbag. The settlement seemed to be proceeding nicely. Opposing counsel all had long faces, and their client looked like a thundercloud.
When I returned to the office, I braced myself for who-knew-what. But no one seemed to notice that I had left in a skirt and returned in slacks.
Kama was still, apparently, on his best behavior. I caught sight of him twice, once on my way to the lavatory to put makeup on, and once when he was delivering the last mail of the afternoon. He gave me his cheerful, cheeky grin. I could swear it was identical to the grins he gave everyone else.
Even if I’d known what to say to him, I couldn’t stop for conversation. There really were forty-one depositions on my desk…and a tiny plant in a pot. Two flowers bloomed on it. It looked like an asoka vine.
So now I was accepting two gifts from Kama.
I felt I had better make sure to pay him for the clothes from Field’s before he left, or at least promise to pay. But he didn’t give me a chance to do that, either. The Sandsreicht team assembled in our own conference room at six. Kama blew in fifteen minutes later under a mountain of pizza boxes and sacks of Italian food. Under cover of the hungry animal cries from teammates, I took the opportunity to talk to him.
“What do I owe you?” I said as he put a cardboard carton of lasagna in front of me.
“The firm pays,” he said, with that grin.
“Come on!” I said sternly. “You know what I mean.”
“Mmmm.” He seemed to speculate. “Coffee?” He held up the conference room pot next to his grin.
I knew what he wanted. I was to meet with him privately for coffee.
“All right,” I said. I wanted to talk more to him anyway. I refused to believe that a person’s underpants could catch fire because…well, why did they? He knew more than he had said. I’d been too rattled and frightened and rushed to ask before.
I sent him a look that promised coffee at the earliest possible date.
The Sandsreicht meeting lasted until midnight. First argument in front of the court would be at ten the next day.
Chapter Seven
I staggered home to my apartment, drank a cup of hot milk, showered, and collapsed in front of another pile of documents.
Instead of reading, however, I sat mooning out the living room window at my very expensive view of Lake Michigan. I could make no sense of the fire in my panties. Instead I thought about kissing Kamadeva. How could I have liked it so much? Why was he so gentle with me, and why was I so rough? Unfamiliar sensations chased across my skin. I felt his strong, hard arms under my hands, even now. I had actually pushed my leg between his! I blushed at the thought. I couldn’t think about it. Anyway, I wasn’t hot any more. Much. Just a little…slippery. I shied away from that thought, too, but I didn’t run to my briefcase to work, either.
Moonlight made a highway of golden ripples across the lake to my condo building. My milk got cold. Sandsreicht sat on my coffee table, ignored.
At one thirty my laptop alarm went off. Time to Skype home! I realized with a start that I’d been drifting off, staring out the window this whole time. I hadn’t read my documents. I hadn’t done any of the thinking I’d promised myself.
My mother pounced when I opened my laptop. “Good Lord, you look terrible. They are working you too hard!”
“What time is it there?”
“It is noon, as you well know. What way is this to treat a new employee? Keeping you up until all hours in your first week! How do they expect you to do your job without sleep? What do they think you are, a pediatrics resident? Although I have never approved of the way they make—”
“Mummy,” I interrupted, “I have a question for you. Are you alone?”
Her eyes lit up with alarm. “Yes.” She looked over her shoulder. Then she looked back and leaned closer to her computer. “What is it, beti? Is the new job too much for you to handle?”
I scowled. “Mummy, when you kissed my Baba for the first time, did you—did it make you feel, uh, warm all over?”
“Beti, what is wrong with you? How can you ask your mother such a thing? It is entirely inappropriate!”
My gaze fell to my fingers in my lap. “Mummy, I’m thirty-four years old. I don’t see why I can’t speak to my mother about kissing. It seems to me I’m behind schedule.”
Choked off, Kama had said. As if I were a fire hose with a blockage. I felt like that.
My mother made a sound like an angry chicken. “Don’t forget you are engaged. You have a responsibility to your betrothed.”
“What betrothed? I told you when I was seventeen, Mom,” I said, going all American on her, “I’m not marrying somebody you betrothed me to when I was born. I thought we are a progressive family!”
Mummy sniffed. “You have been told and told. The priests advised it. It was done for your own good.”
I raised my eyes and tried to glare, but I felt too out of sorts. “I just want to know what to expect. You’re a gynecologist, Mummy! Can’t you be professional about this?”
“Professional! You want me to be professional about my daughter running around, sullying herself when she’s promised to another man?” Her outraged face relaxed. “But you are being theoretical, I see.”
“I’m not!” I felt like a teenager again.
Her eyes narrowed. “Did you make a mistake in college after all? Those coeducational dormitories are full of sluts. I knew we should never have allowed it! But I won’t allow you to show up at your wedding all sullied.”
My face went hot. What was the matter with me? Except for two brief, hectic years in my teens, I had always had the upper hand with my mother. Yet here I was, reverting to the one time in my life when she could reduce me to—
“Mummy, forget I asked!”
But she wasn’t done. “You can kiss Minister Mukherjee all you want once you’re married. Kissing and so forth are the business of married women. When you are married, I will tell you all you need to know.”
“Mummy, I met someone,” I blurted. I had to stop her in her tracks before she got me to slam my fist down on the keyboard.
She sucked in a long breath. Her eyes swelled to the size of golf balls.
I shrugged. “He’s just this boy. I don’t think it’s serious. And yes, he’s Indian. He’s from Bangalore. His father is a chemist.” None of this seemed to comfort my mother. She was turning purple now. “His name is Kamadeva and he’s very sweet—”
I never finished my sentence. At Kama’s name, she made a choking sound, pounded her chest, rolled her eyes, gaped wordlessly—all the melodrama of one of her faked heart attacks.
I saw her paw at the keyboard. The screen went dark.
I got up and poured the glass of milk into the sink in a state of seething teenager resentment. I had meant to throw away the silk flowered underpants, or at least launder them and bury them in my dresser drawer. But now that Mummy was being so foolish abou
t Kama, I washed them carefully in the shower and hung them on a hanger over the tub to dry. The tiled bathroom rang with all the things I could have said to her.
I also noticed that not only were the blisters on my female parts gone, but so was the white scar that had been on the inside of my right thigh since I fell down the stairs when I was seven.
Hm.
As I lay down, I took inventory of my most pressing concerns. How could I have burned so hot? Why did kissing Kama cool me? What did it mean? Would it happen again? I rolled my face on my pillow and sniffed anxiously at my still-wet hair. No, it no longer stank of smoke. The mango scent of my shampoo reassured me.
I remembered what the mad high-priestess girl, Lolly Laura Lotus Bride, had said as we stood in line at the coffee shop—so long ago—only this afternoon! You’re a virgin, aren’t you? You could use some horizontal liberation.
It occurred to me now that she was right. For all my high-octane job, my big salary plus percentage of billable hours and settlements, so rich that I could throw away a hundred dollar skirt and pay the mail-room boy to buy me three hundred dollars’ worth of new clothes in an emergency—
My thoughts became involved with Kama.
He had behaved beautifully in my emergency today. What did he know that I didn’t know? If it was about sex, I had to concede that the answer must be, everything.
Lolly was right. A thirty-four-year-old partner in a major law firm could not call herself liberated until she had, well, liberated herself.
All of herself.
Kama knew things I needed to know. I would ask him. He also—I remembered with a guilty thrill how I had thrust him against the wall and mauled him and mouthed him and shoved him and he had been really so very nice about it—he also—I slid my hand between my legs, pressed once—another thrill!—what else did Kama know? Mummy would shriek if she could see me. Guiltily I pulled my hand away. I lay still, fingers twitching in time with the insidious music between my legs, wondering what Kama knew, until my imaginings became the stuff of dream.
I was buried in the Sandsreicht case all day Thursday, and when I came up for air, I realized two things.
Dancing With Cupid Page 5