Chapter 17 #2
“I have been attending to various personal matters around the estate.”
“In fourteen rooms.”
“The estate is large. There are many matters.”
“Arjun.”
The way he says my name. Every time. Every single time.
It is not the crisp, clipped “Arjun” of my mother’s tactical address, or the sharp “Arjun” of Priya’s sisterly interrogation, or the professional “Dr. Kapoor” of the hospital.
When Casey says my name, it sounds like a place he’s been looking for.
A door he’s been waiting to open. It sounds like the word was made for his mouth to say and has been waiting there his whole life.
“The polo match was...” I begin, and stop. I take a breath. “I behaved in a manner that was disproportionate to the circumstances.”
“You mean you went full Dread Prince because Rohan flirted with me and you nearly murdered your own cousin with a polo mallet.”
“That is a dramatic oversimplification.”
“It’s an accurate under-simplification.”
I set down the whisky glass on the stone arm of the chair.
The glass clinks against the stone, a small, precise sound in the warm night.
My hands, I notice, are trembling. Not the post-surgical tremor.
The other one. The one I don’t have a medical term for, the one that only happens around this man.
“Casey.” I look at the garden below. The fountains. The dark outline of the polo field. “Why do you think I asked you to do this?”
“You said you panicked. In your office, when you were on the phone with your mother.”
“Yes. But why you? Of everyone I could have named. Every colleague, every acquaintance, every person in my professional or personal network. Why did I say your name?”
Casey is silent for a long time. He is looking at me with those steady blue eyes, and I can see him choosing his words with an uncharacteristic care, turning them over, weighing them, and the patience of this man, the absolute, bone-deep, endlessly generous patience, is the thing that undoes me more than anything else.
“I think you said my name,” he says slowly, “because when you were panicking, and your brain was looking for someone safe, it found me.”
The word safe lands on the terrace between us like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples spread outward into the warm darkness.
Safe. He thinks I said his name because he is safe.
He is not wrong. He is so profoundly not wrong that it hurts, physically, a sharp constriction behind my sternum.
Because that is exactly what happened. I was standing in my office, suffocating under the weight of my mother’s expectations and Gabriel’s lecture and my own relentless, bone-grinding loneliness, and I looked out the window, and there was Casey.
Bright and happy and enormous and laughing with a child, and my brain, in its moment of maximum desperation, reached for the one thing that has made me feel safe in the last two years.
Not the surgery. Not the precision. Not the control.
Casey.
“I didn’t just panic,” I say, and the words come out in a voice I don’t recognize, stripped of detachment, stripped of the formal diction and the elevated vocabulary and the ten-dollar words I use to keep the world at arm’s length.
“I looked out my window, and you were in the ER, and you were laughing, and the stickers, and the child had stopped crying because of you, and I...” My throat closes.
I press my fingers against the arm of the stone chair, hard enough to feel the grain.
“You were the only thing I wanted to look at. In that entire building. You were the only thing that didn’t feel like it was crushing me. ”
The night is enormous around us. The stars are indifferent.
But Casey’s face, in the starlight, has gone very still, and his blue eyes are luminous, and his lips are parted, and he is looking at me with an expression that has never been directed at me in my entire life, an expression of such careful, fierce, consuming tenderness that it is actively dismantling me, organ by organ, system by system.
“Arjun,” he whispers.
“That is not an adequate answer to your question,” I continue, because if I stop talking I will fall apart, and if I fall apart I will not be able to reassemble myself, not here, not with him this close, not with the stars and the night pressed against us like conspirators.
“The adequate answer, the clinical answer, the answer that I should give you as a rational, professional adult who entered into this arrangement with clearly defined parameters, is that I selected you because you are credible, personable, and possess the social resilience necessary to withstand my family’s scrutiny. ”
“But that’s not why.”
“No.”
“Why, then?”
I look at him. He is three feet away from me. The closest we have been while both fully conscious and vertical since the engagement announcement, and the proximity is electric, a tangible field of charged particles in the space between our bodies.
“Because I have thought about you every day for two years,” I say, and my voice breaks on the word year, cracks right down the middle like a fault line that has been under pressure for too long.
“Because when my mother said Dev’s name, the only name in my head was yours.
Because you eat terrible food, and you wear ridiculous scrubs, and you do magic tricks for crying children, and you are the sunniest, most impossibly good person I have ever stood next to, and when I am standing next to you, the noise stops.
All of it. The surgical margins, the risk assessments, the constant, relentless cataloguing of everything that could go wrong. It just stops. And there is just you.”
I have never said anything like this in my life.
I have never come close. The words are raw and graceless and nothing like the concise, elegant language I pride myself on.
They are the most honest things I have ever spoken, and they are hanging in the air between us like a living thing, exposed and vulnerable and impossible to take back.
Casey doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak. His blue eyes are bright with something that catches the starlight like water, and his hands are gripping the arms of his stone chair, and his chest is rising and falling in a rhythm that is not steady, that is not the easy, golden-retriever breathing of a man who is calm.
Then he leans forward. Slowly. So slowly that I can track the movement in real time, the shift of his weight, the angle of his shoulders, the way his right hand releases the chair and rises, and I know what he is going to do before he does it, and I do not move, and I do not breathe, and every nerve ending in my body is lit up like a surgical theatre.
His hand reaches my face. His fingers, broad and warm and calloused, brush the edge of my jaw.
Then they move upward, feather-light, tracing the line of my cheekbone, and find the dark curl that has fallen across my forehead, the one that always escapes no matter how carefully I style it, and he tucks it behind my ear.
That is all. A curl, tucked behind an ear. The smallest gesture. The kind of thing that happens between people every day, in kitchens and corridors and queues, meaningless and forgotten in seconds.
Except his fingers do not leave. They settle behind my ear, warm and calloused against the thin skin there, and the touch is so gentle, so deliberately careful, so infused with a reverence that I do not know how to receive, that something behind my eyes burns and I have to close them.
I can feel his pulse through his fingertips.
Fast. Hard. Faster than mine, which should be impossible, because my heart is currently attempting to exit my body through my ribcage.
His thumb traces a slow, barely perceptible arc along the hinge of my jaw, and the sensation travels down my neck and across my collarbone and pools somewhere deep in my chest like a warm liquid spreading through tissue.
He is close. He is so close. I can smell him, the vetiver and cedar of the guest soap and underneath it the warmth that is just him, that I have memorized from every morning waking up with my face against his chest, and his breath stirs the hair at my temple in a slow, uneven rhythm that tells me he is not calm.
He is not composed. He is holding himself still with the same kind of focused, deliberate control that I use in the operating room, the kind that costs everything.
I could open my eyes and close the distance.
One inch. Less. I could tilt my chin and find his mouth and end this, end the slow burn that has been consuming us both since a kitchen in Toronto, since a hand held across a table, since the first morning I woke up wrapped in him and pretended it meant nothing.
I could kiss him right now, under the Rajasthani stars, and it would be real.
It would be the realest thing I have ever done.
I don’t.
Not because I don’t want to. The desperate want is a roar inside me, so loud it drowns out the blood in my own ears.
But because if I kiss Casey Welling right now, on this terrace, after everything I just said, it has to mean something I can stand behind in the morning.
It has to mean something I will not retreat from, will not clinically reclassify, will not file under “lapse in judgment caused by emotional fatigue.” And I am not there yet.
I am close. I am closer than I have ever been to anything. But I am not there.
Casey knows. Of course he knows. He can read me the way I read scans, and he can feel the tremor in my breathing, and he knows exactly how close I am and exactly why I’m not closing the distance, and he does not push.
He does not move. He stays exactly where he is, his fingers behind my ear, his breath on my temple, holding the inch between us like it is something sacred, something that belongs to me to close when I am ready.
The patience of this man. The staggering, infuriating, heart-destroying patience.
I am only beginning to understand its full dimensions.
The hallway encounters. The coffee in my hand without my asking.
The gallery windows. He has, I am realizing, been waiting for me in small ways I never named, never once asking for more than I could give.
And now his lips are an inch from my lips on a terrace in Rajasthan, and he is still waiting, and I do not deserve it, and I know I do not deserve it, and the knowing is the thing that makes me want to close the distance most.
We stay there. Suspended. I count his heartbeats through his fingertips. I lose count at twenty-three because the numbers stop mattering and there is only the rhythm, steady and sure, the most certain thing in a world I have spent my entire life trying to control.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Casey says, and his voice is barely a whisper, rough and broken and so full of everything he has been carrying for two years that the words sound like they weigh a thousand pounds.
“I need you to hear that, Arjun. Whatever this is, however long it takes you. I’m not going anywhere. ”
I open my eyes. He is right there. One inch away. Blue eyes. Starlight. The whole galaxy behind him, and I cannot see any of it because the only thing I can see is him.
“Okay,” I whisper.
His hand drops from my ear. His fingers trail down my jaw as they go, a slow, deliberate withdrawal that leaves a line of warmth on my skin like a brand.
He leans back in his chair. He looks up at the sky. He breathes.
I breathe.
The night holds us both, and the terrace is very quiet, and very warm, and very full of something that neither of us has named but that we both, now, understand.
We sit there for a long time. Not touching. Not speaking. Just existing, side by side, under the biggest sky I have ever seen, and the silence is not avoidance and it is not strategy and it is not the silence of a man who showed too much and is trying to recover.
It is the silence of two people who have finally said something true and are letting it settle.
Eventually, Casey stands. He stretches, his arms overhead, his back arching, his t-shirt riding up to expose a stripe of stomach that I absolutely do not look at.
“Bed?” he says.
“Yes.”
We walk back through the darkened estate together. Our bare feet are quiet on the marble. The corridors are lit by low sconces, casting warm, golden pools of light. We don’t speak. We don’t need to.
We enter the guest suite. I go to the bathroom. I brush my teeth. I change into my pyjamas. I complete my routine. When I come out, Casey is already in bed, on his side, the sheet pulled to his waist.
The pillows and bolsters are stacked neatly on the window seat, exactly where the household staff placed them this morning.
They have been there, untouched, for days now.
I stopped rebuilding the wall after the kitchen, after the Laal Maas and Karan’s laughter and Casey’s arm warm against mine.
At first, I told myself it was a concession to inevitability, an engineering problem that could not be solved.
But that was a lie. The truth is that I stopped rebuilding the wall because I did not want it there anymore.
Because the space between us in that bed, the open, unobstructed space where I migrate toward him every night and wake up in his arms every morning, is the only place in this entire estate where I feel like myself.
Tonight, the bolsters on the window seat do not even register as an option. They are relics. Artefacts from a version of this arrangement that no longer exists.
I climb into bed. I lie on my side, facing him. There is a foot of space between us. Maybe less. I can feel his warmth across the gap, that furnace heat that migrates toward me every night whether I build a barrier or not.
“Goodnight, Casey,” I say.
“Night, Arjun.”
He closes his eyes. His breathing starts to slow.
And for the first time, I do not lie rigid and wakeful and catastrophically alert.
For the first time, I close my eyes and let the warmth find me, and I do not resist it, and I do not count the seconds, and I fall asleep facing him, with the ghost of his fingertips still warm behind my ear and the taste of the truest words I have ever spoken still on my lips.