Chapter 6 #3
I smile in the dark. I close the iPad, slide it back into my bag, and settle into my seat.
The business class pod has a recline function that goes almost flat, and I push it back, stretching my legs as far as the footrest allows, which isn't quite far enough because nothing built for humans is quite far enough for me.
We are somewhere over the Atlantic. Three hours in, eleven to go. Through the window, the sky is a vast, black, star-scattered expanse, and somewhere far below us, invisible in the dark, an ocean is doing whatever oceans do at ten o'clock at night when no one is watching.
Arjun reclines his seat. He has changed into a pair of slim, dark travel trousers and a soft grey cashmere pullover that he produced from his messenger bag that appears to have been packed for every conceivable contingency.
He looks, in the dim blue light, like a painting.
Like something behind glass in a museum that you're not allowed to touch, staring at the ceiling of the cabin as though he could intimidate sleep into arriving.
He won't sleep. I know this. Arjun doesn’t sleep easily.
He’s told me this in fragments over two years, offhand comments about insomnia during long shifts, about the way his brain won't stop running case scenarios, about the three a.m. hours when he lies in his immaculate condo and calculates margins of error for surgeries that are already finished.
Sleep requires surrender, and surrender requires trust. Arjun Kapoor trusts nothing he cannot control with a scalpel.
I turn onto my side, facing him. He’s on his back, his profile sharp in the blue cabin light, and I watch his jaw tighten and release, tighten and release, a rhythmic clench that I know means he’s working through something, chewing on a thought that he can't digest.
“Hey,” I say, quietly. “You okay?”
A long breath. His eyes close, then open. “I am calculating the probability of various disastrous outcomes upon our arrival.”
“What's the current frontrunner?”
“My mother seeing through the entire deception within the first ninety seconds and having us both socially executed before dinner.”
“That seems dramatic.”
“You haven't met my mother.”
“I've read the dossier and her three pages. I know all of her tactical Communication Patterns. I'm ready, it’s going to be fine.”
He turns his head on the pillow. In the blue light, his eyes find mine, and they’re so tired, so deeply, bone-marrow tired, that something in my chest physically hurts.
This is someone who has been holding himself together with precision and willpower and perfectly clasped hands for so long that he doesn't know how to stop.
Now, at thirty-seven thousand feet in the middle of the Atlantic, with nowhere to go and no one to perform for, the seams are showing.
“What if you hate it?” he says, and his voice is so quiet I almost miss it under the engine drone. “The estate. The family. The entire... production. What if it's too much?”
“Arjun.”
“My family is a great deal. They are loud, and invasive, and they will have opinions about everything from your diet to your dental records. My mother will attempt to dismantle you. The aunties will surveil you. Daadi will see directly through you, through both of us, and I cannot predict what she will do with that information.” His hand, resting on the armrest between us, flexes.
“I have brought you into a situation that I had no right to ask you to enter, and I am...”
“Arjun.” I say it gently, and I watch his mouth close.
“I said yes. Remember? In the supply closet, with the saline bags? I said okay, and I meant it. I won’t hate it and I won’t bail.
Your family is going to throw everything they've got at me, and I'm going to be right there, being exactly what you need me to be.” I pause.
Let the words settle. “That's what I'm here for.”
He looks at me in the dark. The engines hum. Outside the window, the stars have frozen, remaining unimaginably distant and unimaginably bright.
“You're here because I panicked in my office and said your name,” he whispers.
“Yeah.” I hold his gaze. “But you said my name, Arjun. Out of everyone. You looked out that window and you said mine.”
Something moves across his face. Something seismic and slow, like tectonic plates shifting deep underground where no one can see.
His lips part. His breath catches. And then his eyes close, and his jaw tightens, and the walls go back up, brick by brick, smooth and practiced and so fast it's almost invisible.
“Get some rest,” he murmurs. “We land in eleven hours.”
“You too, Doc.”
He turns away, facing the window, and pulls the thin airline blanket up to his chin.
I watch the rigid line of his shoulders.
I watch the way his breathing evens out but doesn't deepen, which means he's not asleep, just performing sleep, the same way he performs composure and control and the pretence that he isn’t desperately, quietly afraid of the thing he wants most.
I close my eyes.
I don't sleep either. Not really. I drift in the shallow, buzzing half-consciousness of a long flight, where thoughts come loose from their moorings and float around like debris after a storm.
I think about Oliver, who is probably sleeping on Mrs. Kasparian's couch right now, having charmed his way into a second dinner.
I think about my mom, who texted me a photo of herself holding up a sari she bought at Devi's Silk House with the caption For when it's real.
I think about the old tailor on Spadina, who patted my arm and said trust me and whose charcoal suit is currently folded in my carry-on like a piece of armour I'm not sure I deserve.
I think about Arjun's face during the T-Rex scene, and the way the word “remarkable” sounded in his mouth, and the way his fingers crept one inch closer to mine on the armrest and then stopped.
Somewhere around hour ten, I feel it.
A shift in weight. The slightest dip of the seat. Warmth, moving toward me like a tide.
I open one eye.
Arjun has turned in his sleep. His actual sleep, not the performed version, because his face is doing the thing it only does when he's truly unconscious: it's soft.
The sharp lines, the clenched jaw, the controlled architecture of his expression, all of it has dissolved.
His lips are slightly parted. His dark curls have fallen across his forehead.
His breathing is slow and deep and even, and he looks young, and tired, and so unbearably attractive that I have to close my eye again because it physically hurts to look at.
He’s leaning toward me. Not dramatically. Not a full collapse. Just a gradual, unconscious drift, his body angling in my direction like a compass needle finding due north. His head is tilted, his temple hovering about three inches from my shoulder.
I don't move. I don't adjust my position. I don't shift the armrest. I don't do a single thing that might break whatever part of his unconscious brain decided, in the depths of exhausted sleep, that I was safe enough to lean toward.
Two inches now. His breathing deepens. His body relaxes in slow degrees, the tension draining out of his shoulders.
One inch.
And then he's there. His temple against my shoulder. The weight of his head, light and careful even in sleep, resting against me. His curls brush my neck, soft and impossibly fine, and I can feel his pulse, slow and steady, through the thin fabric of my henley.
My arm’s going to go numb. I know this with certainty.
The angle is wrong, the pressure is directly on the nerve bundle in my shoulder, and within twenty minutes I'm going to lose all feeling from the deltoid down, and I don’t care.
Not even slightly. I would sit in this exact position for the remaining hours of this flight, even for the remaining decades of my life, if it meant that Arjun Kapoor felt safe enough to sleep on my shoulder at thirty-seven thousand feet.
His hand, in his sleep, finds the edge of my sleeve and curls loosely around it. Not holding. Just... touching. A single point of contact, fingertips against cotton, unconscious and unhurried and so gentle that it barely registers as pressure.
I close my eyes. My arm’s already tingling. I don't move.
I memorize everything.
The weight of him. The slow, trusting rhythm of his breathing.
The way his curls feel against my neck. The impossible, fragile, world-ending gentleness of his fingers around my sleeve.
The hum of the engines. The star-scattered dark outside the window.
The four-inch armrest that neither of us is using anymore.
I will remember this flight for the rest of my life.
Several hours later, the cabin lights come up in a slow, artificial sunrise. The overhead speakers chime. A flight attendant's voice, professionally cheerful, announces our initial descent into Delhi.
Arjun wakes up.
It happens in stages. First, the breathing changes.
Then the tension returns, rolling back into his shoulders like a wave.
Then his eyes open, and for one suspended, half-awake second, he registers where he is: his head on my shoulder, his hand on my sleeve, his body angled into mine like it was designed to fit there.
His eyes widen. His entire body goes rigid. He sits up so fast he nearly hits his head on the overhead console, and the armrest between us is suddenly the Berlin Wall, four inches of leather and metal and catastrophic mortification.
“I...” He’s straightening his pullover, smoothing his curls, reconstructing himself with frantic efficiency.
A flush is climbing up his neck, reaching the tips of his ears, which are turning that distinct Arjun-proprietary shade of rouge that I want to photograph and frame.
“I apologize. That was... the altitude affects circadian regulation, and the cabin pressure can cause involuntary postural adjustments during REM sleep cycles, and I...”
“Arjun.”
He stops. He looks at me. His green eyes are wild and wide and devastatingly vulnerable, and I can see him bracing for... what? Mockery? Discomfort? The horror of being caught being human?
“You fell asleep,” I say. Gently. Like it's the simplest thing in the world. Because it is.
“I fell asleep on you.”
“Yeah. It was nice.”
The word nice lands between us like a warm stone dropped into cold water. He blinks. His mouth opens, then closes. The pink in his ears deepens to crimson.
“My arm's a little numb,” I add, flexing my left hand, which has approximately the sensation and motor function of a rubber glove filled with sand. “But it's coming back. No permanent damage. I've had worse in hockey.”
He stares at me for three full seconds. Then he turns away, facing the window, where the first pale light of the Indian dawn is spreading across the sky like a slow, golden bruise.
“Thank you,” he says, so quietly I almost miss it. “For not moving.”
My heart does something that a cardiologist would find very interesting.
“Anytime, Doc.”
He doesn't look at me again until we land.
But when we stand to collect our bags from the overhead, and the aisle crowds with passengers and the air fills with the bustle of arrival, his hand brushes mine.
Brief. Deliberate. The backs of his fingers against my knuckles, a touch so light it could be an accident if I didn't know better.
I know better.
We walk off the plane and into Delhi, and my left arm won't fully work for another forty-five minutes, and I’ve never been happier about potentially permanent nerve damage in my entire life.