Chapter 31 #2
His nose grazed along the line of her jaw, drinking in the intoxicating scent of her hair. Every nerve in his body screamed to turn her fully into his arms, to press his mouth to hers until neither of them could breathe.
Within seconds…his hands betrayed him. One splayed firmly at her stomach, drawing her back closer into him, the other sliding up the curve of her waist towards her breast. His fingers trembled along the way, knowing they were crossing a line.
Just as his fingers brushed her soft breast, she whispered his name with longing, wanting more, and that snapped through his haze. His muscles went rigid. With a sharp inhale, Kushal pulled back. His arms dropped, the heat of his touch vanishing as he stepped back abruptly.
Arundhati opened her eyes. Her face hardened with hurt and fury. This kind of rejection always felt brutal.
“Why?” She spun to face him. “Why do you always do this? If you want distance, Kushal, then stop pulling me into your arms like I mean something only to push me away the next second. Stop loving me in pieces,” she demanded.
Although hurt to see her like this, he still kept his pride high. “I’m only returning the favour.”
She closed the distance between them, fingers knotting into the fabric of his shirt until the heat of him touched her palms. “I know I hurt you,” she said.
“I misunderstood your intentions. I ignored you, pushed you away when all you wanted was me. You survived it all, but my heart isn’t as strong as yours.
It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve been living with you like a stranger in our house.
You don’t even look at me unless you have to.
Do you even realise what I’m going through?
How does it feel to sleep in another room despite staying under the same roof with your husband? ”
He saw the rage and pain on her face, but chose to remain mute, letting her speak.
“Every night I leave the door unlocked in the hope you’ll come. I hope you’ll see how much I want you, hope you’ll pick me up and carry me back to our bed and never let me go.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks as she continued.
“I don’t think I can survive like this for long. I’ve never wanted someone as much as I have wanted you, Kushal. And when you do things like this, giving me a glimpse of what we could be and then shattering it like a glass dream, it crushes my heart. It destroys me.”
She moved closer in anger, fisting his shirt a bit more.
“Either claim me whole,” she demanded, “or be ready to live with me falling apart in front of you every single day. But please stop torturing me like this.”
“Torture?” he repeated, as his own dam of buried hurt cracked open.
“This is not even close to torture. You want to know what real torture is, Aru? It’s living every single day, thinking the flaw was in me.
Believing I was too late in winning you back.
Convincing myself that I should have explained everything about Kamya before it twisted into a separation between us.
That I should have fought harder to make you understand that marrying you never meant I was stealing your right to lead Verma and Associates.
It just meant I wanted to stand beside and work alongside you.
And if you still couldn’t see that, then me stepping back because you…
You, Aru, were more important to me than anything in this damn world.
The real torture is to think that I failed to convey all this to you at the right time. ”
Her eyes widened at the sting of his words.
“All this time, I thought it was my failure. That my silence, pride, and ego were what destroyed us. But I was wrong. The fault wasn’t in me. It was in you.”
Arundhati looked at him in pure shock.
“Your uncle was right about you. When you decide you want something, you chase it blindly…blind to the consequences, blind to the damage you leave behind. And when you finally wake up, it’s already too late.
You don’t even see how much you break people’s hearts, how carelessly you push them to the edge.
When you don’t want someone, you push them away.
And when they give you the distance you asked for, suddenly you want them back. ”
He let out a bitter laugh, pain flashing through his eyes.
“Take Verma and Associates, for example. You refused to work with your uncle, ran off to Bangalore to prove yourself because nepotism offended your pride, despite his pleas. And then, when he decided to hand over the reins to me, when you thought you were losing the very legacy you’d thrown aside, you came running back.
That’s you, Aru. That’s always been you.
Your damn pride doesn’t let situations stay ‘not in your favour’ for long.
And worse, your damn ego doesn’t even let you give people a second chance. That’s your flaw.”
“Yes, I’m flawed,” she cried, her eyes glistening with unshed tears.
“I realise everything too late, when the damage is already done, when the hearts I’ve broken can’t be pieced back together.
You’re right. When I came back to work with Uncle, it wasn’t out of love for the firm but because I was terrified of losing my legacy.
And you’re right again, I don’t give second chances.
But it isn’t because my ego is too high, Kushal.
It’s because I can’t trust. I have a problem trusting people, trusting situations.
I can’t believe that people will stay, that they won’t betray me, that they won’t leave me shattered when I finally let my guard down. ”
She looked down, completely disappointed, but finally letting it out. “This isn’t my choice, Kushal. I’m like this because of something that happened in my childhood… something that shaped me into the woman you see now.”
Kushal’s fury dimmed for a flicker of a moment. Childhood? He hadn’t expected that.
Arundhati leaned back against the marble counter, ready to let out the story she had buried for so long.
“I was seven,” she began, “when I first realised there was something wrong between my parents. And that something… was another woman in my father’s life. She was his client. Every night, I would lie awake listening to their fights, their voices shredding the little world I thought was safe.”
Her throat tightened, but she forced the words out.
“One day, my mother couldn’t take it anymore.
She decided to leave, to take me with her.
I remember Dad begging her not to go. He was pleading, promising, swearing that he would never see that other woman again, that he would change.
Mom didn’t believe him at first, but after a few days…
she softened. She gave him another chance.
And for a while, it worked. She smiled again.
Dad smiled. And I… I was happy, because my family felt whole again. ”
“Then came Dad’s birthday.” Her eyes then turned glassy suddenly. “His friends threw a party at a hotel. I was there with Raj Uncle, watching Dad laugh, shake hands, act like everything was perfect. But after some time, he disappeared. I went looking for him. And then I found him.”
Her fingers curled into the edge of the counter as though she needed something solid to hold onto.
“He was in the secluded parking lot. With another woman. They were too close. The kind of closeness that belonged only to my mother. My heart sank. I turned around, wanting to run, but then… I saw Mom. She had followed me out, and she saw them too.”
Her breath hitched as if she were still that seven-year-old girl, watching her world collapse.
“She screamed at him, at the woman. Her face… I’ll never forget it.
It was as if her whole world had shattered in front of her eyes.
Like after that, she could never trust anyone again.
Dad tried to explain, but she was too hurt, too angry.
I panicked and ran inside to get Raj Uncle.
By the time I brought him out…” her voice broke, tears spilling freely now. “It was too late.”
She pressed a hand to her chest, steadying her breath.
“Mom had stormed to the car. She got inside, furious, broken, ready to drive away. Dad followed her, desperate to stop her, to explain, and he got in the car too. They drove off so fast. Raj Uncle grabbed me, and we followed them in his car. I kept praying, begging God to make them stop fighting, to make everything okay again.”
Her lips trembled. “But when we finally found them… it was over. Their car had crashed. Both of them… gone. Dead. On the spot.”
She shivered, her whole frame trembling with the pain of memories she had buried too deep for too long. Instinctively, Kushal reached out to hold her, but she stepped back sharply, refusing the comfort of his arms. He hated her rejection, but he didn’t move again.
“The locals who witnessed the crash said the car was speeding. Mom… she was so blinded by her anger, she didn’t even realise.
Dad was trying to stop her, trying to reason, but in the chaos, they both lost control of the steering.
The car swerved and collided head-on with a concrete divider.
The impact was so brutal there was nothing left to save. ”
A single tear escaped down Kushal’s cheek. Arundhati finally lifted her gaze to him.
“Uncle Raj and everyone else… they believed it was just an accident. A normal fight between husband and wife that spiralled out of control. But I knew the truth, Kushal. I knew why it happened. My mom was innocent. She lost her life because she trusted again. Because she gave someone a second chance at love. And that night, something carved itself into my little head forever—the price of second chances.”
“I know not everyone meets the same fate. Not everyone who forgives ends up destroyed. But it happened to her. To my mother. And because it happened to her, I’ve lived my whole life terrified of risking it happening to me.”
Kushal shook his head, struggling to absorb the depth of her wound, the kind of wound that never truly heals. His chest ached with a sorrow that she had to go through all this.
“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this now.
I’ve never spoken about it. Not even to Raj Uncle.
Maybe that’s why the fear has lived inside me for so long, poisoning everything.
The fear of being cheated. The fear of being betrayed again if I allowed myself to trust too much, too easily.
That’s why every relationship I had before you was so short-lived.
One mistake, one flaw from the guy, and I couldn’t forgive.
I couldn’t trust again. I would rather end it than risk the devastation. Until you.”
His heart twisted as her eyes glistened with something more than tears. With love.
“Until you, Kushal,” she whispered again.
“Despite you never giving me any explanation about Kamya. Despite you never telling me you had already stepped back from wanting to lead Verma and Associates. Despite every silence, every wall between us, I still took the leap. I still gave our marriage a chance. Because losing you… losing us… was more terrifying than trusting my own fears.”
His eyes brimmed with more tears.
“But you’re right. I am flawed. Deeply. And you have every right not to give me another chance, because I never gave you one. Maybe you deserve better than a woman this broken, this scarred. I’m sorry, Kushal. I am really sorry.”
Before he could speak, before his hands could betray the desperate urge to pull her into him, she turned and walked quickly toward the guest room, still trembling with the pain of what she had confessed.
Kushal didn’t stop her. He couldn’t. He rubbed his palms over his face to physically hold himself together.
But her words… her truth… had seared into his heart.
He had never known Arundhati carried such a wound, never realised that one brutal incident from her childhood, watching her parents’ marriage shatter and end in tragedy, had shaped her into the woman before him.
Her inability to trust, her refusal to give second chances, all of it traced back to that night.
And over the years, the silence she kept and never shared had only made it worse.
For the first time, he realised that she hadn’t been cruel when she pushed him away all those times. She had been scared. Terrified. And yet tonight, she had chosen to share her deepest wounds with him. Because he was the only one, she trusted enough to share her most fragile truth. The only one!