Chapter 9
The Bedroom Problem
Arjun
The guest suite has one bed.
I stand in the doorway and stare at it as if I were evaluating a malignant tumour on a scan, cataloguing its dimensions, its position in the room, and the exact degree to which it is going to ruin my life.
It is a king-size bed. A massive, ornate, canopied king-size bed with a carved mahogany frame, draped in silk in shades of deep crimson and gold, piled with approximately fourteen decorative pillows arranged in a cascading formation that someone on the household staff clearly spent a meaningful amount of their day perfecting.
It sits in the centre of the guest suite like an altar, flanked by matching rosewood nightstands, each topped with a brass lamp, because my mother does not miss a single detail and she has furnished this room as a romantic stage set with the deliberate, calculated precision of a field general establishing a forward operating base.
One bed. One. Not two singles that have been pushed together and could be discreetly separated under cover of darkness.
Not a bed and a sofa. Not a bed and a chaise lounge.
One singular, silk-draped king-size bed, positioned in a room with a ceiling painted in delicate Mughal miniatures and a private balcony overlooking the moonlit gardens.
My mother orchestrated this with the subtlety of a battering ram.
“Nice room,” Casey says, shouldering past me through the doorway with his bag slung over one arm and his carry-on in the other.
He drops both on the floor with a casualness that makes something in my left eye twitch, surveys the space with an appreciative whistle, and immediately gravitates toward the balcony doors.
“Oh, wow. You can see the whole garden from here.
Is that another fountain? That's definitely another fountain. Arjun, look there's a fountain.”
“Yes. There are seven fountains on the estate grounds.”
“Seven fountains.” He shakes his head, grinning out at the moonlit gardens. “My mom has a birdbath that she bought at Canadian Tire when I was a kid. It's shaped like a frog.”
I am not thinking about the bed. I am standing in the doorway of a guest suite in my family's ancestral estate, and I am absolutely, categorically not thinking about the fact that in approximately three hours, I will be expected to lie down in that bed next to Casey, who weighs two hundred and twenty pounds, and radiates heat like an industrial furnace.
The same man whose shoulder I fell asleep on during an overnight flight and whose henley smelled like sun-warmed cotton and clean sweat and something underneath that I can still feel imprinted on my skin like a residual chemical burn.
I am a neurosurgeon. I have separated conjoined cranial vasculature. I can handle a bed.
“Alright,” Casey says, turning away from the balcony. He claps his hands together once, the sound sharp yet practical. “Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Or, I guess, the bed in the room.”
“There is nothing to discuss. The sleeping arrangements are covered under Rule Three of the engagement protocol.”
“The pillow wall.”
“Yes. The pillow wall.” I step into the room, closing the door behind me with a click that sounds considerably more final than I intended.
I survey the bed's existing pillow inventory with professional detachment.
Fourteen decorative pillows. The decorative ones are useless, silk and embroidery and not structurally sound.
But there is a carved window seat with four firm cotton bolsters arranged along its back, and the bed itself has four sleeping pillows.
That gives me six viable construction units, leaving two pillows for our own personal use.
I begin.
Casey leans against the balcony doorframe.
His arms are crossed over his chest, which stretches his t-shirt to the point of structural concern, and watches me build a pillow wall down the centre of a king-size bed with the reticent, patient amusement of someone watching a nature documentary about a very determined animal constructing an elaborate nest.
“You're really going for it,” he observes.
“Adequate boundary definition requires structural commitment.” I place the bolsters end-to-end down the centre line of the mattress, creating a firm base layer approximately eight inches high.
I then layer the sleeping pillows on top at alternating angles to create overlapping coverage.
The decorative pillows I arrange along the flanks for additional lateral support.
When I am finished, there is a fortification running from headboard to foot that would withstand moderate seismic activity.
I step back and evaluate my work. It is precise. It is thorough. It is the most ridiculous thing I have ever built in my life, and I have constructed scale models of cranial anatomy out of surgical clay.
“It's a pillow Hadrian's Wall,” Casey says, and his voice is doing that thing, that warm, barely restrained thing that means he is finding me hilarious and is being very generous about not saying so. “Are you trying to keep me out, or keep yourself in?”
“Both,” I say, before I can stop myself.
Casey's expression shifts. The amusement softens.
Something warmer, something careful and steady and entirely too perceptive, replaces it, and he looks at me across the pillow fortification with those blue eyes that see everything I try to hide, and I have to look away because my heart is doing something that is incompatible with continued composure.
“Okay, Doc,” he says gently. “Pillow wall stays. I respect the engineering effort.”
“Thank you.”
“Fair warning, though. I already told you before; I migrate.”
“And I told you I would reinforce the wall.”
“Against two hundred and twenty pounds of unconscious Canadian? In your sleep?”
“I am a light sleeper. I will detect any breach; do not concern yourself with this.”
He smiles at me, warm and devastating, and says nothing, and the silence between us fills up with everything we are not saying, which is likely enough to furnish several additional rooms in this palace.
Dinner is a controlled disaster. We sit at a table long enough to land a small aircraft, surrounded by silver candlesticks and more bone china and the quiet, watchful presence of household staff who move with the choreographed precision of an operating theatre team.
Meera presides from the head of the table, directing conversation with the ease of a conductor guiding an orchestra through a difficult passage.
Priya sits across from us, her eyes tracking every interaction.
The food is extraordinary, a succession of dishes so vibrant and complex that Casey makes small, involuntary sounds of pleasure with each course that I find deeply distracting for various reasons.
He compliments the cook three times. He asks about the spices.
He eats with an enthusiastic, unselfconscious appetite like he has never once considered whether his enjoyment of food might be too much, and by the third course, even the kitchen staff are peering through the service door to watch the giant Canadian demolish a third helping of dal makhani.
Meera watches this with an expression I cannot entirely decode. I survive the meal by contributing minimal answers to direct questions and allowing Casey to carry the conversational weight, which he does with the same effortless, gravitational enthusiasm he brings to everything.
By ten o’clock, we have been dismissed to our suite with instructions to rest, and I am simultaneously exhausted, overfed, and vibrating with a low-grade panic that has nothing to do with dinner and everything to do with what comes next.
We take turns in the bathroom. The bathroom is, predictably, the size of a small apartment, all marble and brass and a soaking tub that could comfortably fit three adults, which I refuse to think about.
Casey showers first, emerging in a cloud of steam wearing grey sweatpants that sit distractingly low on his hips exposing a strip of skin and a white t-shirt that is performing a heroic structural service across his chest and shoulders.
His blonde curls are wet, darkened to something closer to honey, and plastered against his forehead and neck.
I do not look at the way the water droplets track down his neck and disappear into his collar. I do not look at this because I am reviewing post-operative notes on my phone and I am extremely focused on the surgical outcomes of a patient seven thousand kilometres away in Toronto.
I shower second. I take precisely nine minutes, which is my standard.
I change into my sleep clothes in the bathroom: slim, dark pyjama trousers and a grey t-shirt, both precisely folded and packed in the exact position in my suitcase where I placed them.
I brush my teeth for two minutes. I apply a conservative amount of moisturizer. I complete my routine.
When I emerge, Casey is already in bed.
On his side. The right side, nearest the balcony.
He is propped up against the headboard, reading something on his phone.
The brass lamp on the nearby nightstand casts warm, golden light across his face and the broad plane of his shoulder and the truly absurd swell of his bicep, which is resting on top of the pillow wall with relaxed, possessive ease.
“Your arm is on the wall,” I say.
“It doesn't fit on my side. The wall's too wide.” He does not move his arm. He does not even look up from his phone. “The engineering is structurally impressive, but it didn't account for wingspan.”