Chapter 11
Eleven
HARSH
This was a nightmare, one he couldn’t seem to wake up from. He leaned back against the wall as the families argued, their voices getting louder as they tried to shout each other down.
His father as usual, interspersed his shouting, with venomous glares in Harsh’s direction. Raashi’s support of him had been as unexpected as it was surprising. Harsh could defend himself perfectly fine, thank you very much. He just didn’t want to. Why expend the energy when no one was listening?
His phone buzzed in his hand and he glanced down. Nanda Garu’s assistant. He sighed. He’d been expecting this ever since he saw the news story his father had been frothing at the mouth about.
“Sir,” he said, quietly, turning his back on the room in a futile attempt to cut out the noise.
“What is this Harsh?” The assistant had passed the phone to Nanda Garu the minute he’d picked up. “I tell you low profile and instead you do this?”
Harsh pinched the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t do this,” he sighed. “Trust me, I’ve done a lot of shit but this one…this one isn’t on me.”
“Now what?” Nanda Garu asked. “What are you doing about it? Because if you’re not doing anything then I will have to reconsider our discussion. I have too much riding on this movie Harsh. Too much.”
Harsh’s throat clenched, his fist vising over the phone. “It’s bad reporting. That story isn’t true. None of it is.”
The other man grumbled, “It’s always bad reporting. My question is, what are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll sue-“
Nanda Garu made a scoffing noise. “Sue. By the time you get a court date only, your reputation will be finished.”
“I’ll fix it,” Harsh blurted out rashly. “Give me this week. If it’s not fixed, you can offer the role to someone else.”
Silence fell and then the other man sighed. “One week and only because I like you. Don’t let me down.”
The line went dead in his hands and the sound from the rest of the crowd in the room rushed in, making Harsh wince. He scrubbed his hands over his face as he contemplated what he was going to do. He knew what he had to do. He just didn’t want to do it.
“Harsh!” His father’s grating voice cut through his musings.
He sighed again before turning to face the horde of agitated people.
“I would like to speak to Raashi,” he announced. “Alone.”
Everybody gaped at him like he’d announced his intention to colonise Mars. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, Harsh mused. Maybe he should leave all these psychos behind and go find another planet to live on.
“No,” Ram said. “You say what you want to say with me in the room.”
Agastya rolled his eyes. “Do you just recycle your dialogues?”
“I have to,” Ram snapped back. “Because you Kodela brothers won’t leave my sisters alone.”
“Ram Anna,” Harsh interjected. “Please?”
Ram stared at him, his eyes seeming to bore right through him. And then he nodded, waving a hand through the air. “I’ll be right outside.”
Agastya scoffed, a disbelieving noise. “With him, you’ll wait outside. With me-“
“Get over yourself Kodela,” Ram grumbled, as he turned to leave the room. “I trust Harsh. He’s a good guy.”
“And I’m not?”
Harsh suppressed a smile. His brother was known to the world as the OG good guy. So, his outrage at being thought otherwise was palpable.
“You’re doing better now with Veda’s influence. Before that, you were a bit dodgy.” Their voices faded out as they left the room, followed by the staff, parents and assorted spouses and brothers-in-law.
Until, finally, it was only the two of them.
Harsh exhaled hard.
“Yeah,” Raashi said, staring at the mug in her hands. “I know.”
“Harsh-“
“Raashi-“
They both spoke at the same time, falling silent too at the same moment.
“You first,” he offered.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was angry and feeling bitchy and I didn’t think before I spoke. I didn’t mean or plan for any of this to happen.”
“Well.” Harsh leaned against the wall behind him, crossing his legs at the ankles. “I don’t think anyone plans to get hit in the face with designer slippers.”
Raashi snorted. “Hideous designer slippers.”
His gaze dropped to her sneakers. Of course, she would think so. Raashi wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that in public. It just wasn’t her.
“We are going to have to do this,” he said now, not needing to elaborate on the ‘this.’ The tensing of her shoulders told him she got it.
She was going to have a massive black eye by morning, he thought, as he looked at her tense face. He should know…he’d gotten into enough fistfights to know when a shot to the face would turn the skin around the eye purple. She was chewing on her lips now.
“How exactly would this work?” she asked, hesitantly.
Harsh shrugged, feeling his old friend, fatigue, settle in. “It’s fake and a temporary fix,” he said finally. “The details we’ll leave to the professionals to work out. The how, the what, the where.”
“It has to be fake. There can be nothing between us, especially physically.” The words spewed out of her in a rush.
“I would rather dip my dick in bleach,” he informed her honestly.
“You asshole,” she said, on a soft laugh, shaking her head. “Can’t believe I thought you were being tolerable.”
“Manwhore,” he reminded her.
Her head shot up. “You’re not going to keep that up, are you? While we are faking this shit?”
“The reminder that you called me a manwhore?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Being a manwhore.” Her lips pressed into a thin line. “I won’t have you humiliating me like that while I am supposedly your girlfriend.”
He debated telling her the truth, but he wasn’t ready to lower any of his walls with the Viper. She already knew he needed her for his career and that was, to his mind, already too much leverage in the hands of his enemy.
So, he did what he always did. He smiled, letting it slip into seductive asshole territory. “Well now, Rash. If it’s not other women, who’s it going to be? You?”
Her eyes flashed fire behind those huge glasses of hers. “Your hand,” she retorted, before slamming her mug down and getting to her feet.
Harsh laughed. “Do we have a deal?”
She glared at him. She wanted to refuse; he knew she did. But he also knew she had no choice. They’d been painted into a corner. They had no choice but to play the game until the paint dried and they could escape.
Raashi nodded. “Deal.”
He watched her storm out of the room, the door banging shut behind her. And once again, as in his recent past, he noticed the fatigue sloughing off him like water off a duck’s back.
Odd.