Chapter 17
The Terrace
Arjun
Ihave been avoiding Casey for six hours and forty-three minutes, and I am running out of rooms.
The estate has thirty-seven rooms. I know this because I grew up here and because I counted them at age eleven during a particularly dull monsoon when Mother had cancelled our trip to Mumbai and I was cataloguing the house out of spite.
Thirty-seven rooms, not including the kitchen, the service wing, or the various storage spaces where generations of Kapoors have deposited furniture they are too sentimental to discard and too proud to admit they have no use for.
I have, in the past six hours and forty-three minutes, occupied fourteen of them.
The study. The library. The small drawing room that nobody uses because the afternoon sun hits it at an angle that fades the upholstery.
The music room, where I sat at the piano and stared at the keys without playing a single note because my hands were shaking and I did not trust them.
The upper gallery, where I pretended to examine a portrait of my great-grandfather that I have seen approximately eight thousand times, and where I caught myself thinking, with a sudden and dangerous clarity, that Casey has been waiting for me in small ways for far longer than I am prepared to acknowledge, and I left the gallery quickly.
The prayer room, which felt blasphemous given that my current emotional state is the antithesis of spiritual serenity.
I have been running from what happened on the polo field.
Not the match. The match was polo. I have played polo for as long as I can remember.
I understand the mechanics, the game plan, the controlled aggression that the sport demands.
What happened on the polo field was not polo.
What happened on the polo field was me losing control so completely, so publicly, that I rode a horse like I was going to war because Rohan touched Casey’s thigh.
I do not lose control. I am a neurosurgeon.
Control is not a personality trait for me.
It is a professional requirement. It is the thing that allows me to hold a blade inside a child’s skull and move it a fraction of a millimetre without tremor.
Control is the architecture of my entire existence, and this afternoon, on a polo field in front of my cousin and the most provocative man in the British Isles, it crumbled like wet plaster because Casey Welling scored a goal and smiled at me and Rohan Mathur’s hand was on his thigh and something inside me, something deep and ferociously territorial, simply detonated.
And then there was the stare. The moment after the match when Casey caught my eyes across the field and I could not look away, and everything I have spent thirty-three years learning to hide was on my face, visible, readable, a complete, uncensored transmission of want and desire so raw it frightened me, and Casey saw it.
He saw all of it. I know because I watched him see it, watched his blue eyes widen and his lips part and his expression shift into something steady and loving and patient that said, very clearly, I know. I see you. I’m not going anywhere.
Six hours and forty-three minutes. That is how long I have been hiding from the only man who sees me.
It is after eleven. The estate is quieting.
The household staff have retired. The aunties have dispersed to their rooms, their WhatsApp reports filed, their intelligence gathered.
Karan left after dinner for Jaipur, something about meeting a supplier for his restaurant, and kissed my forehead again on his way out with the breezy, unearned intimacy that I have never been able to cure him of.
Rohan, mercifully, has retreated to the guest wing, presumably to compose further schemes for my psychological annihilation.
Priya cornered me after dinner, studied my face for approximately four seconds, and said, “You have been haunting this house like a Victorian ghost with a romantic crisis, which is exactly what Gabriel called you, so congratulations on achieving consistency. Go find your fake fiancé before I lock you both in a broom closet and solve this myself. And Arjun? If you quote a single medical term at that man instead of telling him how you actually feel, I will tell Daadi about the Harlequin novels, and she will never, ever let you forget it.” Then she walked away.
I did not go talk to him.
Instead, I went to the terrace. The upper terrace, the one that overlooks the main gardens, the fountains, and beyond them the dark silhouette of the polo field and the mango grove.
It is my favourite place on the estate and always has been.
When I was a boy, before Cambridge, before Edinburgh, before I became the Dread Prince of anything, I used to sit on the stone railing with my legs dangling over the edge and look at the sky.
The Rajasthani sky. There is nothing like it.
No light pollution, no overcast grey, no Toronto winter cloud cover pressing down like a ceiling.
Just an enormous, impossible vault of stars, so many and so bright that they seem close enough to touch, and the Milky Way cutting across the centre like a river of crushed glass.
I am sitting in a low stone chair, my knees drawn up, a glass of whisky in my hand that I have not drunk. The night is warm and dry and fragrant with jasmine and the distant, dusty sweetness of the desert. The stars are exactly as I remembered.
I am trying to think clearly. I am failing.
The problem is not that I want Casey. I have wanted Casey for two years.
I have managed that want with the same discipline I apply to every other unruly variable in my life: I identified it, categorized it, filed it in a sealed compartment, and proceeded with my daily functions.
Wanting Casey from across a hospital corridor was manageable.
Wanting Casey from behind an observation gallery window while he made a child laugh was survivable.
The want lived at a distance, controlled by the gap between us, the professional boundary, the fundamental impossibility of a man like him being interested in a man like me.
The problem is that now the distance is gone.
The distance disappeared the moment he took my hand in his kitchen in Toronto, and every day since then, every shared bed and demolished pillow wall and unconscious migration, every brush of his arm against mine and every laugh that fills a room and every time he puts his hand on my knee under a table without being asked, the distance shrinks.
And now there is no distance at all. Now there is just Casey, enormous and warm and patient and so deeply, quietly present in every part of my life that I cannot remember what it felt like before him, and the want is no longer a manageable variable filed in a sealed compartment.
The want is a living thing with its own heartbeat, and it is consuming me alive.
I hear him before I see him.
Bare feet on stone. Heavy, unhurried steps. The particular weight and rhythm that belongs to one specific person, a cadence I could pick out of a crowd of thousands because my body has been tracking it for two years, tuned to his radio frequency like a receiver that never turns off.
He doesn’t announce himself. He just appears in the archway that opens onto the terrace, leaning against the stone pillar, arms crossed over his chest. He is wearing his grey sweatpants and a white t-shirt, and his blonde curls are damp from a shower, and his bare feet look pale against the dark stone.
The starlight catches the planes of his face, the strong jaw.
Different sculptors working from the same brief designed the sharp cheekbones that are entirely different from mine but somehow complementary.
“Found you,” he says.
“I was not hiding.”
“You’ve been in fourteen rooms since the polo match. Priya counted.”
“Priya should mind her own business.”
“Priya told me you’d say that. She also told me to tell you that her business is you, and it has been since 1997, and you’re welcome.”
He pushes off the pillar and walks onto the terrace.
He doesn’t sit down immediately. He goes to the railing and leans against it, his back to the gardens, facing me.
The starlight is behind him now, turning him into a silhouette, broad shoulders and chaotic curls and the sheer, improbable scale of him outlined against the Rajasthani sky.
“Hell of a sky,” he says quietly.
“Yes.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Back home, on the lake, you can see a lot of stars. Huntsville’s pretty good for it. But this...” He tips his head back, and the starlight catches his throat, the long, exposed line of it, and I grip my whisky glass and do not look. “This is something else.”
“The lack of light pollution. We’re forty kilometres from the nearest city. The atmosphere here is exceptionally dry, which reduces scattering. The conditions are nearly optimal for stellar observation.”
“You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where someone says something beautiful and you respond with a Wikipedia entry.”
He is smiling. I can hear it in his voice: the warmth, the gentle teasing, the absolute absence of cruelty.
He is not mocking me. He is noting a pattern with the same affectionate, observational care that he brings to everything about me, and the tenderness of it is worse than mockery, because mockery I could deflect. Tenderness disarms me.
“The stars are beautiful,” I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I intended. “I used to sit on this railing as a boy and count them. I had a notebook. I was categorizing the constellations visible from this latitude.”
“Of course you had a notebook.”
“I’ll have you know, it was a very thorough notebook.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He moves from the railing and sits in the stone chair across from me. Our knees are close. Not touching. Close. “Arjun. You’ve been dodging me all evening.”