Chapter 25 #2
He wraps around me. There is no other word for it.
He does not hold me or embrace me or put his arms around me.
He wraps around me the way a wall wraps around a garden, complete and encompassing, and I am pressed against his chest with his arms around my shoulders and his chin on top of my head and his heartbeat against my ear, and I let him.
I let him because I have no defences left, because the adrenaline has stripped them away like a surgeon strips tissue, and there is nothing between Casey's warmth and my shaking except skin and cotton and the thin, trembling, insufficient membrane of my self-control.
“You were amazing,” he murmurs against my hair. “You were so amazing, Arjun. Your hands were steady. Your hands were perfect.”
“They're not steady now.”
“I know. That's okay. That's the adrenaline crash. I've got you.”
He has me. He has me the way he has always had me, completely and without reservation, and my hands are fisted in his kurta and my face is pressed into his chest and I am shaking, and I am not afraid of the shaking, and I am not ashamed of it, because I am in the arms of a man who has seen me at my worst and my best and who does not distinguish between the two because to him they are the same person.
“Casey.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
The words come out without permission. Without clinical review.
Without a thirty-second timer or a leather notebook or a strategic assessment of the optimal moment for emotional disclosure.
They come out because they are true, and because I am shaking in the arms of a man who just put a dinosaur sticker on a seizing child and told his mother everything was going to be okay, and because some truths are too heavy to hold any longer.
Casey's arms tighten around me. His breathing hitches. I feel his chest expand against my cheek, a sharp, unsteady inhale, and then a long, slow, shuddering exhale that sounds like a man putting down something he has been carrying for a very, very long time.
“I know,” he says, and his voice is wrecked, completely wrecked, rough and broken and so full it sounds like it might overflow.
“Arjun, I know. I've known since the supply closet.
I've known since you looked out your window and said my name. I have loved you for two years, and hearing you say it is...” His arms tighten again. “It's everything. It's everything.”
I lift my face from his chest. The garden is dark around us. The festival murmurs in the distance. The stars are out, enormous and bright, the same stars I counted as a boy from the terrace railing, except now they are blurred because my eyes are wet and I do not care.
I kiss him.
It is not desperate, not a collision, not a moonlit fall.
It is deliberate and sure, a kiss that tells you that he has said the truest thing he knows and is sealing it with his mouth.
Casey’s lips are tender and familiar, a landscape I have been mapping for days, and the kiss deepens slowly, his tongue against my lower lip, my hands sliding up his chest to his neck, pulling him down to me, and his hands drop from my shoulders to my waist, to my hips, and the contact is electric and specific and I want more.
I want more.
I have spent my entire life controlling want.
Categorizing it. Filing it. Sealing it in compartments with clinical labels and important justifications.
And right now, in the dark garden with the stars and the adrenaline still buzzing in my blood and the taste of this man on my tongue, I do not want to control it.
I want to let it consume me. I want to actively be consumed.
“Casey,” I say against his mouth, and my voice is low and urgent and nothing like the Dread Prince, nothing like the surgeon, nothing like any version of myself that anyone has ever seen. “Take me to bed.”
He pulls back. Just enough to look at me. His blue eyes are dark in the dim garden light, his pupils blown wide, and his breathing is uneven, and his hands on my hips are gripping hard enough that I will feel it tomorrow and I want to feel it tomorrow.
“Are you sure?” he asks, and the fact that he asks, the fact that this man, who has been wanting this for two years and who is holding me in the dark with his hands shaking and his eyes blazing, still stops and asks, is the reason I love him.
It is one of a thousand reasons, but right now it is the reason.
“I am sure.” I press my forehead against his.
“I am not panicking. I am not experiencing adrenaline-induced impairment. I am not going to blame the moonlight or the stars or the papers adjacent. I want you. I have wanted you for longer than I knew how to admit, and I am done waiting, and I am done being afraid, and I need you to take me to bed before I lose what is left of my composure and do something undignified against this garden wall.”
Casey makes a sound. It is a sound that I will remember for the rest of my life. It is half laugh and half groan and entirely undone, the sound of the last thread of his restraint just being cut.
“The garden wall,” he repeats. “You. Arjun Kapoor. Against a garden wall. At a family festival.”
“I am providing you with a range of options. The bed is the preferred option. The garden wall is the contingency.”
“You have a contingency plan for sex.”
“I have a contingency plan for everything. It is a professional requirement.”
He laughs. He laughs so hard he has to press his face into my hair, his whole body shaking with it, and I am laughing too, which is not something I do, which is not something the Dread Prince does, except I am not the Dread Prince right now.
I am just Arjun, in the dark, laughing into the chest of the man I love, and the laughter feels like the last wall coming down.
We make it to the guest suite. We do not take the main corridor.
We take the service passage, the one I used to sneak to the kitchen as a boy, because my sister has surveillance capabilities and my aunties have a WhatsApp network and there are still limits to the amount of family intelligence I am willing to generate in one evening.
The door closes behind us. The room is dark except for the moonlight through the balcony doors, silver and cool, and the bed is there, and Casey is there, standing in the moonlight, and he is looking at me with an expression that makes my medical training completely, comprehensively irrelevant.
I close the distance. My hands find the hem of his kurta, and I pull, and the fabric comes up and over his head, and Casey Welling is standing in the moonlight in the guest suite of the Kapoor estate with his chest bare and his blonde curls wild and his blue eyes fixed on mine, and I put my hands on him.
My surgeon's hands. The hands that have been steady inside operating theatres and unsteady everywhere else.
The hands that tremble when I am stressed and stop trembling when he holds them.
I put them flat against his chest, against the hot, broad, extraordinary expanse of him, and I feel his heartbeat under my palms, fast and hard and real, and my hands are steady.
Perfectly, completely, impossibly steady.
Casey reaches for my kurta. His fingers find the hem, and his breath catches audibly, a sharp, unsteady sound that I feel against my lips, and then the fabric comes up and over my head and his hands are on my skin, broad and warm and reverent, tracing the lines of my ribs with a focus so total it makes me shiver.
“You're beautiful,” he says, and his voice is rough with something that sounds like wonder. “I've wanted to say that without a cover story for two years. You're beautiful, Arjun.”
Nobody has ever called me beautiful without the word sounding like an observation. When Casey says it, it sounds like a prayer.
He kisses me. His hands slide up my sides, over my ribs, tracing the architecture of my body with focused, reverent attention as he learns a new landscape by touch.
He is gentle. He is so gentle that it takes my breath away, his thumbs tracing the lines of my hips, his mouth moving down my jaw to my throat, and I tip my head back and close my eyes and let myself be mapped.
There is no clinical terminology for what happens next.
Casey lowers me onto the silk sheets with one hand cradling the back of my head and the other sliding down my side, learning the topography of my ribs, the dip of my waist, the sharp angle of my hip bone.
His weight settles over me, not crushing but encompassing, and I pull him closer because the distance between us, even this fractional, residual distance, is intolerable.
His mouth follows his hands. He kisses the hollow of my throat, the ridge of my collarbone, the flat plane of my sternum, and each kiss is a point on a map he is drawing with his lips, slow and deliberate.
I am arching into him, my fingers in his hair, pulling him closer, my hips rising to meet his, and the friction when our bodies align sends a sound out of me that I will deny producing until the day I die.
I map him back. I trace the broad landscape of his shoulders with my surgeon’s hands, the dense muscle of his chest, the length of his spine.
He is vast. He is a continent, and I explore him with the focused, consuming attention I bring to everything that matters.
My mouth finds the juncture of his neck and shoulder and he groans, a low, shattered sound that vibrates through his chest and into mine, and his hips roll against me and the world reduces itself to this, to skin against skin and heat and the maddening, building, inescapable pressure of two bodies learning how to speak the same language.