Chapter 10 #3
A household attendant materializes from the shade of the garden wall to take Daadi’s arm, and she transfers herself from me to him with a gentle squeeze of my forearm that I feel all the way up to my shoulder.
I watch her go, the tap of the cane on the stone path growing fainter, the cotton of her sari disappearing into the cool dark of the main house.
I’m standing alone in the garden. The warm early afternoon sun is heavy on my shoulders and I’ve just told an eighty-year-old woman with a silver cane that I’m in love with her grandson, and she told me not to waste it, and my chest is cracked open and everything inside is exposed and glittering and raw.
I take the long way back. Not because I need to.
Because I’m not ready to walk into the guest suite and reassemble my face into something that doesn’t look like I just had the emotional equivalent of open-heart surgery performed on me by a four-foot-eleven grandmother with a one-tap approval rating.
The garden path curves through an archway into the interior courtyard. I’m halfway through it, still running Daadi’s voice on a loop in my head, when I see him.
Arjun is on the upper balcony. He’s leaning against the carved stone railing reading one of his secret bodice rippers, the kind with a title like The Duke’s Forbidden Desire and a cover featuring a man wearing a shirt that has given up on him, and he has the thing angled just so, tilted toward his chest in a way that I recognize from two years of watching this man try to conceal things.
The Dread Prince of Paediatrics, reading about a heaving bosom on his ancestral balcony, and he thinks he’s getting away with it.
He hasn’t seen me yet. For a few seconds I just stop walking and stand there like an idiot in an archway, because the sight of him physically knocks the wind out of me in a way that it has no business doing after two years of daily exposure.
It’s the light. That’s what I tell myself.
It’s the Rajasthani afternoon light, which is doing something obscene to him right now, turning his skin warm and golden and catching the blue-black of his curls where they fall across his forehead.
He’s changed into a white linen kurta, loose and open at the collar, and the fabric shifts against him when the breeze comes through, and I can see the architecture of his collarbones, the lean line of his throat, the narrow wrists resting on the stone railing with that particular, precise elegance that his hands bring to everything they touch.
At the hospital, Arjun is armour. White coat, rigid posture, clinical distance. I’ve been in love with the hospital version for two years and it has been plenty, believe me, it has been more than enough to ruin me.
But this version. This man, in this light, in this place, looks like he belongs here, inside this sandstone and marble, the way a painting belongs inside its frame, and simultaneously like a man who has taken off a costume he didn’t know he was wearing.
My mouth goes dry. Not metaphorically. Actually, physically dry, the specific kind of dry I associate with presenting cases to attendings I was terrified of in residency.
Except my blood pressure is doing the opposite of what it did then, and my pulse is somewhere in the vicinity of where it would be if I had sprinted up three flights of stairs.
This is a deeply inconvenient set of vital signs to have in the middle of your fake fiancé’s ancestral garden, where any one of forty relatives could walk past and witness you staring up at a balcony with an expression that probably belongs on the cover of one of those Harlequin novels Arjun thinks I don’t know about.
He turns a page. His fingers, those narrow, devastating, impossibly precise fingers, move against the paper with the same delicate focus I’ve watched through gallery windows during eight-hour surgeries.
Except he’s not holding a scalpel. He’s holding a book in the afternoon sun with his bare feet on the stone, and it’s the most disarming thing I’ve ever seen, because this is Arjun without the operating room, without the armour, without the title and the walls and the Dread Prince persona, and he’s so handsome it makes my teeth ache.
I want to go up there. I want to climb those stairs and cross that balcony and put my hands on the warm stone railing on either side of him and stand close enough to feel the heat of his skin through the linen.
I want to press my mouth against the spot where his jaw meets his ear and find out if his pulse jumps the way mine did earlier when I touched his knee.
I want to know what sound he makes when there are no aunties watching and no pillow walls between us and no clinical terminology left to hide behind.
I want him so badly my hands are shaking, and my hands don’t shake.
My hands are the steadiest part of me. And right now they are trembling at my sides because Daadi just stripped me down to the truth and the truth is looking at me from a balcony, except it isn’t looking at me, it’s reading a book in the sun, and that’s worse somehow, that’s so much worse, because I am wrecked by the mere uncurated existence of this man.
He looks up from the pages of his book. Not at me.
At the sky, the enormous Rajasthani sky that I understand now is part of him, part of where he comes from, and his throat is a long, lean line as he tilts his head back, and the light catches his jaw, and something behind my ribs pulls so hard I have to press my hand flat against the archway wall just to stay standing.
Then he looks down. Into the courtyard. His green eyes find mine across thirty feet of sunlit stone, and for one unscripted second, something crosses his face.
Something quick and startled and warm, like a door blown open by a gust of wind before he catches it and pulls it halfway shut.
His spine straightens. His jaw does the thing where it resets into its default setting of mild aristocratic disapproval.
But the book stays in his hand, forgotten against the railing, and he doesn’t quite manage to put the rest of the armour on in time.
Something warm is still in his eyes. The Dread Prince is, for once, leaking.
And I’m not anyone. I have spent the last two years learning the exact speed of Arjun Kapoor’s emotional retreat, and the thing I saw before the door closed, the split second of open, unfiltered warmth when his eyes first landed on me, is now living in my chest beside everything Daadi said in the pavilion.
The two truths are so tightly pressed together that they fuse into something that feels like a fist around my heart.
“The tribunal is over,” I call up to him, and my voice comes out normal, easy, golden retriever as advertised, because I’ve been hiding what this man does to me for two years and I’m very, very good at it by now. “I survived. Your aunties love me. Kavita called me a good, solid boy.”
“That is not the compliment you think it is, Casey.”
“It’s absolutely the compliment I think it is.”
He looks at me for one more second. Then he lifts the book, very deliberately, and pretends to resume reading, which would be more convincing if he weren’t holding it upside down.
I make myself walk. I make my legs carry me across the courtyard and through the corridor and up the stairs to the guest suite, where I close the door behind me and stand in the jasmine-scented dark with my back against the carved wood and my hand pressed over my chest, where my heart is hammering so hard that if I were my own patient I would order an ECG and a referral to cardiology.
She told me not to waste it.
I won’t.