20. Naina
Chapter Twenty
NAINA
I think squirrels are weird.
I think you’re weird.
I’ve always wanted to have a pet owl.
I slammed the laundry basket on top of the kitchen table a little harder than necessary. Samira glanced up from her position on the couch, where she was reading one of the books Kat had sent for her birthday.
She looked between me and the laundry basket pointedly.
“You know, it would be nice if you helped with the laundry since you’re off for the summer,” I said.
Pulling clothes from the basket, I started folding them and placed them in two piles on the table.
My mind went where it always did when I was doing idle work. To Kash.
I couldn’t do casual relationships or situationships. My weakness was that I needed my people around me. I had always been a homebody, needing the safety of my people and my things. It made relationships harder and casual dating impossible.
I’d barely dated in college and hadn’t dated at all in law school. If I hadn’t needed the money, I would have never agreed to this relationship. The truth was this Kash was a lot different than the man I met five years ago on New Year’s Eve.
That man had been a little lost, a lot softer with none of the harsher edges that I saw in the man I married. If I had known then he was Kash Sutherland, I would have stayed away from him.
We didn’t belong together and I knew better than to dream that we did. If I had known it was his family whose secrets I was giving up for my own revenge, I wouldn’t have done it.
I shouldn’t have done it at all. That was the thing about acting out of anger. I let a man destroy my peace of mind and in return, I used my anger to set fire to my own career. Lo and behold, he was still in the same position he had always been because my revenge had zero effect on him.
Setting the folded clothes back in the laundry basket, I reached for my phone in my back pocket.
Like an idiot, I pulled up the chat with Kash. Each morning he messaged me something about himself and I reciprocated.
I couldn’t help but wonder if these messages were a way to keep a hold on me.
This is a privilege only you will have. So, yeah, I’ll play along with your little game.
I made up the game and now he was using it to keep me tethered to him.
So far, I had learned that Kash hated cream cheese frosting, he was a cat person, the last book he read was a James Patterson one, he had no personal social media accounts, and the closest thing he had to a sibling was Vera.
The driest information possible, which gave me zero understanding of who he was as a person. Which is what made me think he was only giving it to me because one, I had forced him to, and two, to keep me hooked for whatever came next.
“Is Nick coming over for dinner?” Sami asked. It was her birthday today and she was officially nineteen. The only thing Sami had wanted was family dinner, for the first time in no mood to celebrate.
Dad had liked big birthday celebrations. There would be cake at midnight and cake in the evening day of. He used to make all our favorite foods and invite friends over to make it a proper celebration.
“Yeah, he said he will be here around 7:30.”
Nick was the closest thing we had to an older brother. Originally from San Francisco, he had driven up one night year’s ago and our mother had hired him to help manage the Inn. He only worked here for six months before he got a job with Covington Media, but he still came by to see us every week.
“Are you going to tell him about Kash?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said. I was still wearing the ring, even though Kash wasn’t around to see it, so I could theoretically take it off.
“Have you told Kat yet?” Sami asked, her mouth twisted to the side.
No, I hadn’t told my best friend that I got married. It happened so suddenly that I was still trying to wrap my head around it. What was I going to tell her? There was no backstory here. Kash and I hadn’t discussed what we were going to tell people.
“Are you sure you don’t want to do anything else today?” I asked.
Sami fell back on the couch with a groan.
“Yes, I’m sure. I’m already going to San Fran tomorrow to meet Ayana. I just don’t feel like having a big celebration tonight.”
In favor of keeping peace, I dropped the topic. Sometimes it was hard to draw the line between caring and overbearing.
“Oh my god,” Sami gasped.
“What? What happened?” I didn’t panic because a gasp with her could mean anything from the end of the world to her finding out the store was out of her favorite yogurt brand.
She sat up again, her book forgotten, and turned wide eyes to me.
“You’re not going to like it,” she said.
The room was starting to fill with the sweet scent of cake and lemons. I was making her favorite lemon cake. I was never going to win any challenges with my baking, but I could easily follow a recipe and make something that wasn’t poisonous.
“You don’t have to draw out the suspense, just tell me.”
I glanced behind me at the oven and noted the timer on it still had ten minutes left.
“Augusta posted a photo of you and Kash kissing at your wedding on her Instagram page with the caption, ‘congratulations to my darling nephew and his new wife’,” Sami said. “It’s got thousands of likes already.”
My heart dropped and I ran around the table to snatch her phone out of her hand. Sami got up on her knees, peering at the screen of her phone from the side.
Yep, there it was, in a black and white filter, a photo of Kash and I kissing. I had to admit, we looked hot. Even in the picture, I could clearly see Kash’s fingers digging into my waist, the strain in my hands as I gripped his shirt with one hand and his hair with another. If I looked really closely, I spotted a peak of tongue. Whose, I didn’t know.
It wasn’t just an average photo taken on a phone and posted to social media. No, it looked to be professionally edited and somehow, even in the sheer long sleeves of my blouse, my tattoos stood out. If anyone I knew saw this photo, they would immediately recognize me.
There was some sense of relief that none of my mother’s family in India, including my grandmother, would follow Augusta Sutherland on Instagram. There was no way I could explain this marriage to them.
I was still having trouble making sense of it.
“This is bad,” I said. “How could he let her do this?”
“You married Kash Sutherland, what did you think was going to happen?” Sami asked.
“You did what?”
Startled by the question, Sami dropped her phone and I stepped in front of her and grabbed the nearest object—a throw pillow—tossing it in the direction of the intruder. Not that it was any protection.
“Oof! Why did you do that?”
“Nick!” I exclaimed, staring at my friend. “How did you get in?”
His brown eyes bounced from me to Sami and back to me.
“The door was unlocked. I knocked twice.”
I turned an accusatory glare on my sister, who was in the habit of forgetting her keys and constantly leaving the door unlocked.
“You’re going to get us killed.”
“Please, we live in sleepy Carmel-By-the-Sea, there’s no crime here.”
“That’s the kind of thinking that gets people killed.”
“I can put in a new keypad lock so Sami can still lock the door and not worry about forgetting her keys,” Nick offered. “Now, can we get back to the topic at hand. You got married, to Kash Sutherland of all people?”
I felt a flush rise to my cheeks looking into Nick’s inquisitive eyes. Nick had these really intense eyes that seemed to stare right into your soul. It didn’t help that he refused to look away, waiting his victim out until they gave in. In another life, he would have made a great detective.
“So…yeah,” I swallowed, “I got married. To Kash Sutherland. Last week. We kind of eloped.”
“You eloped,” Nick repeated tonelessly.
“Yep.” I flashed him my wedding band.
There was no way he wasn’t going to ask more questions and I didn’t have the explanation to a single one of them. Our parents always told us not to do anything we couldn’t explain to our family and friends. Here I was, doing the exact opposite of that.
“Where did you meet him?” Nick asked.
On the rooftop of an apartment building in New York, five years ago.
“In the restaurant,” I said. “He’s come in every week for the last six months.”
“And what? You fell in love?” There was a mocking tone to his voice that I didn’t appreciate.
The notion of Kash and I falling in love was absurd. I understood that. But the fact that even one of my best friends thought it was ridiculous? I had to admit, it hurt a little.
“What can I say?” I shrugged and smiled sweetly. “It happens a lot at the Windfield.”
Sami quietly ‘oooh-ed’, eyes shifting back and forth between Nick and me. Nick shifted uncomfortably. Yeah, he could pass the judgement he wanted and I would toss it right back.
“This is different!” He insisted, regaining his composure. “You’re married. Married! To someone I’ve never even met. What do you even know about this guy?”
Thanks, Nick, for poking right at the heart of the problem.
“Gee, I wonder why I didn’t introduce the two of you?”
Sami leaned over the back of the couch until her torso was almost hanging off and made a T with her hands in a time-out gesture.
“Can we please save the arguing for another day? It’s my birthday.” She looked at Nick. “And Nick, you will like Kash, I promise. He’s nice.”
Nick looked like he still had a lot to say which he was choosing to keep to himself for Samira’s sake. If his reaction was this bad, I could only imagine what Kat would say once she found out.
It wasn’t like I had purposely set out to keep this many secrets. So it didn’t make sense how I ended up here. When did I become the person who kept secrets?
The timer on the oven went off and I walked back to the kitchen to pull the cake out. Once I had set it on the counter, I grabbed my phone and pulled up Kash’s contact, my thumb hovering the call button.
There was no point in calling him, I realized. I wasn’t on his list of priorities.