by Sonali Dev
When she didn’t answer, he backed away again. Their new dance. “Were you serious about that ride?”
If she had even a whit of sense, she should refuse, but there was something in his eyes, a deep eagerness. She had to find out what it was.
It didn’t help that Shobi was at home, waiting for her, suddenly inexplicably patient. Last week, Shobi had even started to come into the restaurant. She’d sensed Ashna’s discomfort with having her in the kitchen and chosen to help at the register. Given how busy they both were, they had barely seen each other at home. But in the few moments they did get, they’d fallen into a pattern of eating varan bhaat and trying out one of Ashna’s chai blends. Any time Shobi brought up the past, everything inside Ashna shut down. Shobi seemed to sense that and with her usual strategic determination avoided it.
Rico had the same strategic determination in his eyes as he waited for Ashna to answer. What was he up to?
“Of course, I’ll give you a ride. Wait here, I’ll bring the car to the front.”
That made him laugh. “I’m not in pain, Ashna. Trisha’s meds are working well.”
“Fine.” Hiking her bag up her shoulder, she started walking to the car without waiting for him to follow her.
They walked silently across the parking lot to the Employee of the Month spot, exchanging glances when they saw the sign. She opened the passenger door for him, but held back from helping him in.
When she got in next to him, he gave her another one of those looks. The one that made her wonder what he was up to and made her want to bounce in her seat like a child.
“I’m not going to the hotel. You don’t mind, do you?”
It was ridiculous to have to suppress a smile with all the things she was feeling. “Where are we going?”
“Washington Square.”
That was just a couple of miles away, which was unnecessarily disappointing.
They rode in silence that would have been companionable if not for the electricity arcing between their bodies. Too soon they turned into a sports complex and pulled under a portico. A valet jogged up to them.
“I’m not staying,” Ashna said to the eager young man, who did a double take when he saw Rico and ran to open his door.
Rico thanked Ashna and walked away as the boy chattered to him. There was almost no limp in his step, and something about that made her heart twist in her chest.
Circling the driveway, she went down the palm-lined road, and was almost out the gate when a phone rang in her passenger seat. It wasn’t her phone.
Just like that, it was clear what that look on Rico’s face had meant.
She pulled over and answered.
“Ashna?” Rico said with all the casualness of a bad actor. “Sorry, I forgot my phone in your car. You don’t mind bringing it back, do you? Oh, and could you bring it inside, please?”
Her heart skipped as she maneuvered the car back to the parking lot and went inside. What oh what was the man up to?
The receptionist led her through the lobby and in through a door. The smell was the first thing that hit her. Leathery sweat and turf. The too-bright lights of the indoor soccer pitch made her blink. The smell, the lights, all of it spun together, making her stumble.
A woman’s soccer team seemed to be practicing. Or mobbing Rico. Suddenly they parted from around him and someone tossed him a ball. Rico spiked it up on his good knee, then made a header right into the goal. The cheer that went up was deafening.
His gaze sought her over the cheering heads, not a doubt in his eyes that she was watching. It would have been easy enough for her to hand the phone off to someone outside, but he’d asked her to come inside and known that she would do as he asked. He waved her over, but her feet wouldn’t move. It had been too long since she had set foot on turf.
He waited. Everyone turned to her and she found her feet moving.
“Your phone.”
He ignored the phone she held out. “Their keeper has the flu.”
The air in her lungs contracted. What did he think he was doing?
He held up his hand and someone threw him a ball. He offered it to her.
Her hands trembled to reach for it. Her feet trembled to step back.
“It’s this one time.”
“Your phone.” She picked up his hand—the one not holding the ball—and pushed the phone into it. The spark that shot up her arm as their fingers touched didn’t surprise her. Being around him was being submerged in sensation, there was no point fighting it.
“They can’t practice without a keeper. Can you help out? Please?” He didn’t say it loudly, but she felt the weight of the team’s focus.
She took the ball, hands fitting around it like second skin, lungs filling out. “I’m not dressed for it.” She looked down at herself in the jeans and peasant top she’d changed into.
He looked over at a redheaded woman and she brought him a duffel bag. “A clean uniform. There’s shoes in there too. Seven and a half.”
He remembered her shoe size.
“I don’t think I could even if I tried. I’ve forgotten how.”
“It’s like riding a bike,” he said with a smile from long ago, and just like that she passed the ball to him, spinning it into the air.
And the bag was in her hands.
And she was in the changing room.
And then on the pitch at the goal line.
And the world outside her box ceased to exist.
At first everything was a blur. Every inch of her skin tingled, blood rushing into vessels after being choked out. Pins and needles, numbing her. The woman with the red hair was a good striker. The first time she kicked it in, the ball sailed to the top corner. An age-old fury rolled through Ashna. It almost knocked her off her feet. As she picked up the ball and threw it back, the fury spread through her.
Not past these hands.
Words that had been her soul.
The next time the ball flew into the box, her hands slapped around it. The striker snarled at her. Ashna laughed. The sound swallowed her whole.
“You’re a one-trick pony, aren’t you?” she mumbled to the striker.
And she was. Every goal she tried was the same. Top corner. Not a single one went through after that. Ashna robbed every single one. Punching it out.
Not past these hands.
The slam of the ball against her sternum, the slap of it against her gloved palms branded her, and danced across every inch of skin, so essential it blasted her out of herself and back into herself.
The game went on for a lifetime. It was done in a flash.
Back in the locker room, the scalding spray of the shower engulfed her, gathering all that she had found of herself—the straining muscles, the stretched sinew, the wild thrumming heart—into herself.
On her way out, the captain of the team invited Ashna to join them. They played in a local league twice a week—just a bunch of women who loved the game. The pull to say yes was a whirlpool that sucked her toward itself, but that wasn’t her life anymore. She promised to think about it.
By the time they were walking back to the parking lot Ashna was exploding out of her skin. Exploding.
Rico watched her as she rubbed her hands together, gathering up the lingering sensations. “Everything is going to hurt tomorrow. How am I even going to work tomorrow?” she said, trying to remember where she had parked. Everything from before the game was a haze.
“You’re not even feeling that. You run? Work out? This was nothing.”
He was wrong. It was everything. When she ran, she was chasing something. Mostly chasing the thoughts out of her head. Pushing herself, punishing herself. When she’d played soccer in school, she had played the game, that was it. Keeping the ball out of the goal, that’s all that had mattered. Her entire existence had focused on that one thing, and the exhilaration of it had been at once more intense than anything else and yet so elemental, it was the simplest part of her.
That’s how she felt right now.
Her cheeks burned, her heart floated, energy coursed through her.
“Were they even a keeper short?” Where on earth was the car? A red Mazda in a sea of sporty red cars. Thanks, China!
To his credit, he didn’t try to hide his guile. “They were a player short. They usually rotate the keeper since theirs went on maternity leave.”
One of the players had told Ashna in the locker room that Rico had met the team this week when he’d visited as a favor to his agent.
The team had made him think of her.
“You could have just asked me if I wanted to play.”
“Would you have?”
“Now you’ll never know, will you?” She pointed the keys down an aisle and pressed the emergency button.
He chuckled at that. How had she forgotten how much she loved his chuckle?
“You were fierce today.” How had she forgotten how much she loved the way he looked at her?
“It’s a sport. It’s easy to forget who you are.” She tried to be nonchalant, but her heart was pounding too hard for it.
“You’re not just fierce on the pitch, Ashna.”
She pointed the key down another aisle, and the car alarm went off. This conversation was setting off its own alarms. She pressed the unlock button and silence returned.
They walked to the car, their arms touching, their fingers flirting with what they really wanted to do, tangle with each other. When they got to the car Ashna gasped. Across the parking lot the Bay Bridge was lit up against a fading sky. Instead of getting into the car, Rico leaned against the hood. She joined him. The view was mesmerizing. Ashna loved San Francisco, but it had been a while since she’d taken the time to notice its wonders.
“I’m sorry I didn’t just come out and ask you to play today. But there has been another thing I’ve been wondering, should I just ask you?”
“Sure,” she said as they stared at the serendipitous view that she hadn’t even noticed on her way in.
“Why did you give up football?”
Laughter swelled in her chest. Maybe a small laugh even escaped her. Every memory with him rose to the surface. He had attended every single one of her games. He’d worked cramps from her calves. Held her face when she cried because she’d let a crucial goal go. You’re fierce. You can do this.
It was plain in his eyes how badly he wanted to understand. It made the mismatched size of his eyes more apparent. Even more important than how well he had understood her was how badly he’d wanted to. How much she had needed that. How many things it would have changed to have had it for longer.
For a few moments the emerald centers hypnotized her. But the golden flecks asked questions she had no answers to, questions that proved how little he knew her now.
“I grew up,” she said finally before pushing off the hood and getting in the car.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
One moment they were standing close enough that Rico could drop a kiss on her head, and the next moment she was inside the car, leaving behind the scent of her wet hair. God, her hair smelled like magic.
He followed her into the car.
She turned the ignition and looked at him. “Can I ask you a question too?”
“Sure.”
“How did you convince China to give me her car?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Right. China told me she’s going to some sort of corporate dinner and wanted me to take her car home, so she could, you know, imbibe.”
He shrugged. They were both suppressing smiles and it felt even better than straight-out smiling. It wasn’t fair how every cell in Rico’s body lapped up just how good it felt.
Shifting gears, she pulled out of the parking spot.
They merged into traffic with cars packed back to back. She switched gears again. On the drive in he’d been in such a haze of anticipation, he hadn’t noticed that the car had a manual transmission. He had no idea she could drive manual. There was something insanely hot about it.
She caught him looking at her hand on the gear box. “My uncle insisted we all learn how to drive stick shifts. Wanted to make sure we had essential life skills.”
“Driving manual is a life skill? I must have missed that memo.” He barely drove anymore. Hadn’t in years.
She looked mock-horrified. “What will you do when you’re stranded in . . . um . . . anywhere in the world where they still drive only stick?”
“Take George with me?” he said.
Her answering laugh was husky and teasing. She followed it up with a quick lesson on the gears and the clutch.
It was the first time they were talking. Not using words to transfer pain and regret, just talking. Suddenly he was terribly curious about her life.
“Is it hard to manage the restaurant with the show?” Talking about the restaurant felt tenuous, but they were crawling along. He’d never been so grateful for traffic.
“My aunt’s helping. That’s Trisha’s m-mother.” Her voice stuttered on the word mother and she pursed her lips, obviously mortified that it had.
“I know,” he said gently, knowing their moment of casual conversation had passed. “Is your mother still in Sripore?”
Another word that made a muscle twitch in her jaw. At first he’d found it amazing that she had grown up in a palace, then he’d realized that to her it was just a home she missed.
When was the last time you visited? If he asked her, he’d have to deal with the fact that he’d never gone back to the home of his childhood even when he went to Rio.
“She’s here right now.”
Okay. The one person she had never talked about was her mother. All Rico knew was that any mention of her mother turned Ashna into a ball of longing and anger. Having her here was obviously not a simple thing. “Does she live here permanently now?” He had no idea why he pushed, but it felt important to.
“She’s been here a few weeks.” A breath. “She just won a prestigious national award in India and she’s having . . . never mind.”
“Let me guess. She’s having a Large Life Moment. She wants to go back and examine all the things that went wrong.” If that didn’t cut too close to home, Rico didn’t know what did.
Is that why you’re here? Maybe the question didn’t actually shine in her eyes. Maybe he just imagined it. “Something like that,” she said.
“So, you don’t want her here then.”
“She’s my mother.” She kept her voice dead flat. It was one of those lines that could mean entirely different things depending on which word you emphasized. Like one of those acting exercises. But she didn’t let emphasis fall on any single word.
“And yet you don’t want her here.” That he would do anything for another day with his parents was plain in his voice.
Growing up, Rico could never have imagined being able to live in a world without his parents. They hadn’t let him feel unloved a single day that he’d had them. For all the challenges a relationship like theirs had to have come with, his mãe and pai had always put his happiness before everything.
Even though Rico knew none of the details, he knew that Ashna’s parents had inflicted the kind of hurt on her that had become woven into her fabric. Her father had willfully snatched the possibility of happiness from her hands. How Rico hated him. Not for the first time, Rico regretted how badly he had reacted to the man.
For years he had been too angry to admit it, but the things he had said to Ashna about her father had been thoughtless. It had ruined everything, pushed her into a corner where she’d had to choose between Rico and him. And she had made her choice.
At least her mother was a safe topic. “If your mother is here to fix things, why don’t you want her to?”
They were at a standstill again and Ashna wiggled the gear stick impatiently. “Is it that easy? To fix things you broke?”
He stared out the window. Six lanes of traffic unable to move, the gridlock turning a small distance endless.
“I don’t kn
ow.” He stayed silent for a while before speaking again. “But does it matter?” He twisted in his seat and met her eyes, the glossy black clouded with painful memories. “Does it matter if it’s easy or hard? If the person is essential to you, then fixing things with them is essential.” The word felt magical in his mouth. The way his tongue wrapped around it, he could almost taste it. Essential.
That’s how this felt. Being here. Figuring this out. Her. “Your mother isn’t someone you can just cut out of your life. If you could, you would have by now.”
Her knuckles turned white around the steering wheel. He’d hit a nerve.
“Or you find a way to stop the person from being essential to you.” She slipped a glance his way. “How do you do that?”
Was she suggesting that it was something he had greater expertise at than her?
All he could do was stare at her. The stalled traffic meant she could meet his stare.
“You think I know?” His hand rubbed his leg. How was he in love with a girl so willfully obtuse? She had literally dumped him because her father believed she was too good for him. She’d walked away from him without a backward glance and now all he could get from her was this sense of being wounded.
She didn’t look away. Just watched him the way you watch liars, with curiosity and disbelief.
His hand kneaded the knots that seemed permanently lodged around his knee. “Sometimes when people leave you, you get so caught up in trying to convince yourself that you can cut them out of your life that you think you’ve actually figured it out. You keep moving. You ignore the feeling of being chased, even as you can’t stop running and running to get away. But then you realize that you haven’t moved at all. Those who are essential to you have always been an absence. Even when you refused to acknowledge it, their void was always there.”