Chapter 16 #2
The second chukker is where I start finding my feet.
Or rather, Rani starts finding them for me.
The mare is a genius, reading the field with an intelligence that shames my first-year medical school grades, and she carries me into position after position, anticipating the ball’s trajectory while I figure out the timing of the swing.
I make contact more often. The mallet starts feeling less like a foreign object and more like an extension of my arm.
I make a play on the ball, a genuine, deliberate, controlled play, riding Rani at a gallop alongside Karan and shoulder-checking his horse with a move that is absolutely borrowed from hockey and almost certainly illegal in polo, and the ball rolls between the posts.
“GOAL!” Rohan roars, wheeling his horse around with both arms raised. “The Canadian scores! The lumberjack scores!”
Casey Welling, one. Decades of aristocratic equestrian breeding, temporarily held.
I’m already covered in sweat and grinning so hard my face aches when Rohan rides up beside me and, in full view of the entire field, puts his hand on my thigh.
Not my knee. My thigh. High up on my thigh. His palm’s warm and his fingers curl against the inside of the jodhpur fabric and he leans in, close enough that his breath is warm against my ear, and says, “Magnificent ride, Casey. You have the most extraordinary seat I’ve ever seen on a beginner.”
He says “seat” the way other men say words that would get them escorted out of polite company.
Across the field, I hear a sound. It is the sound of a polo mallet being gripped so hard the leather wrapping creaks. I look. Arjun is sitting on his horse at the centre line, motionless, his green eyes locked on Rohan’s hand on my thigh with an expression that could curdle milk at fifty yards.
His jaw is set. His knuckles are white on the mallet. A vein in his temple is pulsing visibly. He looks like a man who is currently performing emergency-level emotional triage on himself, and the surgical assessment has concluded that the situation is critical.
Rohan follows my gaze. Sees Arjun. His hand stays on my thigh for exactly two more seconds, long enough to make a point, then withdraws. He gives me an amused smile, and it’s completely intentional.
“He’s watching,” Rohan murmurs. “He’s been watching you the whole match. I don’t think he’s taken his eyes off you for more than fifteen seconds since we started.”
“Rohan.”
“I’m just making another friendly observation.”
The third chukker is when Arjun starts playing like he’s trying to win a war.
The first sign is the hook. Rohan’s riding for the ball, mallet drawn back for a clean shot, when Arjun materializes beside him and hooks the mallet out of the swing with a flick of the wrist so fast it’s almost invisible.
The move’s technically legal. The force behind it is deeply, personally aggressive.
Rohan’s arm jerks, his shot goes wide, and Arjun’s already past him, the ball under his control, driving downfield with a ferocity that wasn’t present in the first two chukkers.
He scores. 2-1.
The second sign is the ride-off. Karan has the ball, but I’m closing in on his flank, and I have a shot.
Arjun comes from nowhere. His horse slams into Rani’s shoulder with a controlled, legal, absolutely vicious shoulder-to-shoulder impact that drives us sideways off the line.
The mallet swings and the ball’s gone, redirected downfield in a blur of grass and hooves.
Arjun’s thigh presses against mine for a fraction of a second during the ride-off, hard muscle against hard muscle through the thin jodhpur fabric, and his face is inches from mine, and his eyes are emerald fire, and he smells like sweat and horse and that citrus soap, and then he’s gone.
3-1.
“He’s getting competitive,” Rohan observes, pulling his horse alongside mine after a water break.
“Or rather, he was always competitive, but now he’s getting personal.
” He wipes his forehead with his sleeve.
“I may have activated something by touching your thigh. In my defence, it’s a very nice thigh. ”
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Darling, everything I do is on purpose. But watching Arjun Kapoor come unglued over someone is a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, and I refuse to miss a single moment of it.” He grins.
“The man is so in love with you he’s about to commit polo-based homicide, and he still thinks he’s being extremely subtle about it. ”
The fourth chukker is where the match becomes something else entirely.
Rohan turns up the provocation. Every time he rides past me, there’s contact.
A hand on my shoulder. A palm on the small of my back as our horses cross paths.
A murmured “beautiful” after I make a decent shot that’s pitched just loud enough for Arjun, ten yards away, to hear.
It’s shameless, it’s calculated, and it’s working, because Arjun is no longer playing polo.
Arjun’s waging a highly personal, barely contained, aristocratic war disguised as a sporting event.
He hooks Rohan’s mallet again, harder this time.
He rides Karan off the ball with a shoulder-to-shoulder that makes Karan yelp.
He intercepts a pass between me and Rohan with a backhand so viciously precise that the ball changes direction at ninety degrees and Rohan actually whistles in appreciation.
And every time he rides past me, there’s something.
A brush of his knee against mine. A look, hot and so intense it’s practically a physical force.
His horse cutting in front of Rani so close that I can see the individual sweat droplets on his collarbone, the heave of his chest, the white-knuckled grip on the mallet.
He is channelling every ounce of jealousy and desire and possessive, primal fury into this match, and it’s the most ferociously attractive thing I have ever witnessed in my life.
I want to pull him off that horse.
I want to grab the reins and stop his horse and pull him out of that saddle and press him against the nearest flat surface and kiss him until neither of us can breathe, and I want to do it in front of Rohan and Karan and the grooms and anyone else who happens to be watching, and the intensity of the want is so physical, so immediate, that I have to grip Rani’s mane and breathe and remind myself that we’re in the middle of a polo match and I’m on a horse and this isn’t the time.
4-3.
Then Arjun stops holding back entirely.
He takes the ball from a centre throw-in with a move that leaves Rohan flat-footed.
His horse surges forward and he rides low, his body compressed into the saddle, his mallet an extension of his arm, and he sends the ball downfield with a full swing that makes a sound like a gunshot and scores from thirty yards out.
Then he does it again. And again. Three goals in a row, each one more vicious and precise than the last, delivered with cold, elegant violence. It seems clear to all of us that Arjun has decided that losing isn’t a thing that’s going to happen to him today.
Game.
Arjun doesn’t celebrate. He simply pulls his horse to a stop, sits perfectly still in the saddle, and adjusts his grip on the mallet with the calm, serene expression of a man who has just performed a routine surgical procedure and is ready for the next case.
Except he isn’t calm. He isn’t composed.
Because I can see him, really see him, from thirty feet away on Rani’s back.
He’s breathing hard. His curls are wild, plastered to his forehead with sweat.
His polo shirt is clinging to his chest, to the lean architecture of his torso, the narrow waist, the sharp definition of his shoulders.
His forearms are slick with sweat and still trembling slightly from the force of that last swing.
His cheeks are flushed. His lips are parted.
His eyes are blazing with the fierce, consuming fire of a man who just refused to lose, who channelled every emotion he can’t name into a polo mallet and a horse and beat the thing that was making him feel too much by making himself feel everything.
He looks completely, categorically wrecked.
He looks like someone just undressed him.
He looks up and finds me across the field. And the expression that crosses his face when our eyes meet is so naked, so entirely unguarded, that the air between us turns to something solid, something I could reach out and touch.
Hunger. Want. A desperate, burning, barely contained thing that has nothing to do with polo and everything to do with the fact that Rohan Mathur spent four chukkers touching me, and Arjun Kapoor spent four chukkers wanting to be the one touching me, and now he’s looking at me with those feral eyes and every wall he owns is rubble and he knows it and I know it and neither of us moves.
I hold his gaze. I hold it across the width of the polo field, and I let him see everything. The want. The patience. The ache. The hope. The love. All of it. Because I’ve been hiding nothing from this man since the moment he said my name in that supply closet, and I’m not going to start now.
Three seconds. Four. Five. Six.
A record.
Then a groom calls out something about the horses needing water, and the moment breaks, and Arjun looks away.
He doesn’t speak to me for three hours.
Three hours. I keep a rough count because at this point, counting things related to Arjun Kapoor is apparently my primary hobby.
He dismounts, hands his horse to the groom, and walks back to the main house without a word.
He showers, changes, and appears at the late lunch in a fresh white shirt with his curls restored to their immaculate configuration and his composure bolted firmly back into place.
He sits beside me, because the cover requires it.
He responds to direct questions from family members with clipped, exact answers.
He allows my hand on his knee under the table because we established that as protocol.
But he doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t initiate conversation.
He doesn’t do the thing he’s been doing more and more over the past few days, the unconscious drift in my direction, the barely perceptible lean of his body toward mine, the gravitational pull that neither of us has acknowledged but both of us feel.
He has retreated behind every wall he owns, and I can feel him behind them, locked in, reinforced, furiously repairing the breach that the polo field blew open.
I let him.
I let him have his three hours of silence, because I have been patient for two years and I can be patient for three more hours, and because I know something now that I didn’t know before the polo match.
I know what his face looks like when the walls come down all the way.
Not the three-second cracks. Not the morning-extraction glimpses.
All the way down. And I know that what’s behind them is a man who wants me so badly he can’t look at me after he lets it show.
At dinner, he sits beside me and passes me the dal without being asked, and his fingers brush mine on the bowl, and neither of us mentions it, and neither of us pulls away, and the silence between us is not cold.
It’s the silence of a man who showed too much and is trying to figure out how to live with it, and a man who saw everything and is telling him, with every patient, steady, quiet breath: take your time. I’m not going anywhere.