Chapter 11 #3
The traitorous third pass is, I tell myself, a calibration.
A clinical reassessment of proportions for the purposes of social camouflage tonight.
I will need to know how he carries the suit.
I will need to know how he moves in it. I will need to know how the fabric drapes when he stands beside me in front of seventy-two members of the Kapoor extended family, so that I can adjust my own posture accordingly and present a credible visual unit. This is what I tell myself.
I am, I note, a tremendous liar.
The shirt beneath is ivory, open at the collar. Against the gold fabric and the ivory cotton, Casey’s skin is warm and sun-flushed and his eyes are so blue they look like they have been set into his face by a jeweller.
He looks like something from a myth, something carved out of gold and sunlight and placed in a palace in Rajasthan to make the building itself feel inadequate. He looks like a gilded, broad-shouldered god.
He is looking at me. He has stopped moving.
His hands are at his sides and his lips are parted and his blue eyes are travelling over the emerald suit with an expression that I cannot classify, an expression that belongs in no medical textbook, an expression that is raw and open and so full of something that the air between us becomes a physical thing, charged and heavy and impossible to breathe through.
“Arjun,” he says, and his voice is rough, like something has caught in his throat. “You look...”
He doesn’t finish.
I don’t need him to.
My composure cracks. Three seconds. Three full, unguarded seconds where every wall I have built and every clinical defence I have erected and every carefully maintained margin of error between who I am and what I feel dissolves, and I am just a man in a green suit looking at another man in a gold suit in a room that smells of jasmine, and I want him so badly that it is a physical ache, a thing with weight and teeth that sits behind my ribs and pulls.
I want to cross the room. I want to take his face in my hands.
I want to kiss him until he forgets where he is, until I forget where I am, until the entire engineered architecture of this week collapses and there is nothing left but the gold of his jacket under my fingers and the sound he would make against my mouth.
I do not move.
Three seconds. That is the length of the breach.
I have, after thirty-three years, calibrated exactly how long my walls can be down before something irrevocable happens, and three seconds is the outer limit.
I blink. I rebuild. The walls go up so fast that I can almost hear them, course by course, brick by brick, mortar setting in real time.
“You look adequate,” I say, and my voice only shakes at the very end, on the last syllable, where it cracks like ice on a spring river.
Casey exhales a breath that seems to have been held for a long time. “Adequate,” he repeats, and a smile starts at the corner of his mouth, slow and warm and knowing. “Coming from you, Doc, I’ll take it.”
Tarun materializes in the doorway. I do not know how he got there.
I do not know how long he has been standing there.
But his eyes are bright, and his hand is pressed to his chest and he is looking at the two of us with the expression of a sculptor who has just completed his masterpiece and is watching the world see it for the first time.
“Magnificent,” he whispers. “Emerald and gold. The prince and his golden one.” He takes a shuddering breath. “I told you that you would cry, Arjun.”
“I am not crying.”
“You are emotionally compromised; I can see it from here. I accept your tears in spirit.” He claps his hands once, sharp and decisive.
“Now go. Walk into that party together. Let them see you and weep.” His voice drops, and for a moment, beneath the theatrics and the creative frenzy, something genuine surfaces.
“I have dressed hundreds of couples, Arjun. I know what love looks like when it is standing in front of me. You look like you belong together.”
He sweeps out. His assistants scramble after him. The corridor fills with the sound of his voice directing last-minute adjustments to the courtyard draping.
Casey and I stand in the guest suite. Emerald and gold. The mirror reflects us back, side by side, the sharp and the broad, the lean and the massive, and the contrast is so stark and so oddly, achingly perfect that I have to look away.
“Ready?” Casey asks. He holds out his hand.
I look at his hand. The hand I held in a kitchen in Toronto.
The hand that finds my waist in the dark every night and holds on like I am something worth keeping.
The hand that is broad and calloused and scarred, and that is offering itself to me now, openly, in the golden afternoon light of Rajasthan, as if this is the simplest thing in the world.
I take it.
His fingers close around mine. Warm. Steady. Sure.
We walk out of the guest suite together, emerald and gold, and down the stone corridor toward the sound of music and the murmur of seventy-two voices and the beginning of a performance that I am no longer certain is a performance at all.