Chapter 28
Jaiman was swirling the water around in what felt like his fiftieth peg of whiskey when someone rang the doorbell. He stumbled over to unlock the door and crashed back onto the couch before Jia could so much as greet him. When he looked up, she was still standing by the open door, her mouth agape. She was wearing a pink silk nightgown he’d seen on her a hundred times before, and fuck, she looked perfect. “Jaiman, are you okay?” she whispered.
Jaiman rubbed a hand on the side of his jaw and shrugged. “Do I seem okay?”
“You’re slurring.” Jia tsk-tsked. She shut the door and sat next to him, setting her purse beside her. Her eyes fell to the glass of whiskey on the coffee table, no coaster in sight. “How many have you had?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.” It was true. Jaiman had lost count after the fourth peg, when he ran out of ice and starting drinking whiskey with chilled water instead. Things had become considerably blurry after that.
“Jaiman.” Jia’s eyes softened, and she took his hand in hers, then tipped his face so he’d look at her directly. “What’s wrong?”
He pulled his hand away and rubbed his eyes so hard he saw stars. Anything to distract him. “Everything that could possibly go wrong in my life.”
“I’m sorry,” Jia said, her voice hushed. “Do you want to talk about—”
“For starters, Flora and Harish are in love.” He massaged the back of his neck and raised his gaze to the ceiling lights to stop his tears from falling. “My best friend is dating my archenemy, and now he’ll probably turn her against me. I’ll lose Flora, my one ally in this fucking miserable restaurant business. And I’ll lose her to the man who’s ruining everything for me.”
Jia opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “Wait, so they’ve been together this whole time? And she never told you?”
“They’ve been dating for at least a few weeks. All that talk about hating him was just for my benefit, I suppose.”
Jia tapped her finger against her chin. “Did anything else happen?”
He averted his gaze. How could he tell her he was scared to lose her without admitting his feelings for her and screwing up their relationship even more? So he had to pivot to the final thing that was destroying him one inch at a time.
“Jaiman?”
“Yeah. There’s something else.” Breathing hard, Jaiman reached forward to refill the glass, but Jia picked it up and pushed him back on the couch.
“I’m cutting you off,” she declared and headed to the kitchen, her nightgown flaring out with her graceful movements.
Jaiman sat in silence for a minute, deliberating whether to tell her about the one solution he’d found to all his problems. He didn’t know how she would react, but hey, it wasn’t like she needed him to stick around. She had her whole future ahead of her, with her family money, that meeting with the matchmaker, and all the potential her career held. She wouldn’t miss him.
Nobody would miss him.
Jia returned with two glasses of cold water and handed him one, setting the other on the table on a coaster she’d brought from the kitchen. “You get dehydrated so fast,” she reminded him.
As he sipped the water, he told her, “I’m going to shut down the pub.”
“What? Why would you even consider that?”
“I haven’t made any profits in the last five or six months,” he said, laughing sadly, “and I’ve used up most of my savings to try to keep it running. I’ve been behind on rent and salaries and every fucking expense there is.”
Jia squeezed his hand with hers, then nudged the glass to his mouth with her free hand. “Hey, finish your water.”
He chugged the first glass and set it down on the table. “Manoj offered to do extra gigs for free on Mondays. That’s helped, a little. But ever since VV opened, it’s been…it’s been really hard, Jia. And now I have no money to renew my lease. What choice do I have?” Jaiman tried to fight off his sobs, but his eyes were dampening anyway. He looked up, blinking back tears. “Sorry, I—”
“Let yourself cry,” she whispered, rubbing his back tenderly. “Crying is good. Or at least, that’s what Charu tells me.”
Jaiman let out a choked laugh as he pressed his face into Jia’s shoulder. Calmed by her rosy scent, he pulled away and wiped his eyes. Here it was. The moment of truth. “I think there’s only one way out of all this.”
“Did you try getting a loan?” she asked.
“My credit score is really bad,” he explained, “and I still haven’t paid off the first loan I took to open the pub.”
“So you haven’t even applied for another loan.” Jia stared at him with those dark brown eyes. That mole next to her right eye really was so beautiful. “You—you can’t just give up like that!” She stood up and paced around the living room, rubbing her cute chin with her fingers.
“I’m scared,” he admitted with a weak chuckle. “Maybe Devdutt Uncle made a mistake convincing Dad to pay for culinary school. Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe I never was.”
Jia’s mouth dropped open. “What are you saying?”
He patted the spot next to him on the couch, and she sat back down again, her eyes wide as though she knew what was coming. He looked away from her, tugging on a stray thread from the couch cushion. “I think I’m going to move to San Francisco and join my dad’s business,” he said.
Silence. He snuck a look at Jia and winced internally. A mascara-stained tear rolled down her face, then another one. Shit, he’d made her cry. He moved to wipe her cheeks, but she stood up again, walking to the far end of the living room.
Jia rubbed her hands along her arms as though she were shivering. “You—you can’t move,” she said tensely. “You can’t leave me—us—everyone and everything behind.”
He drank the full second glass of water and set it on the table. Then he stood with the last of his energy. The room zoomed in and out of focus, but he swayed over to her anyway. “Jia, I have nothing to my name except what my parents gave me. I’m nothing and nobody, with or without the pub. Nobody needs me to stay. Why would they?”
She took hold of him as he nearly fell over and ushered him back to the couch. “Sit down, please.”
Jaiman rubbed the front of his forehead. A pounding headache was already starting to build; he was going to hate himself in the morning for drinking this much. “I’m going to call my dad tomorrow and ask him if there are any positions available for me in his company. I might not have an MBA, but I’m a fast learner—”
“Damn it, Jaiman, stop thinking like that!” Jia clutched fistfuls of her short hair. “How can you give up on your dream like this? How can you settle for a career move you know won’t make you happy?”
He chuckled. Jia and her hypocrisy. “You’re one to talk,” he said. “I don’t see you following your dream any more than I am.”
“Bullshit.” She frowned. “You know I’m going to start my matchmaking business someday. I haven’t given up on it. Besides, there are exciting things happening at Mimosa—”
“Yeah,” Jaiman rolled his eyes exaggeratedly as nausea tickled his churning stomach, “giving up your creative freedom to your manipulative boss sounds so exciting.”
Jia froze. “How did you—”
Jaiman tasted acid in the back of his throat. Fuck. He stood up with a lurch, one hand clapped over his lips. “I think I need to—” The muffled words were barely out of his mouth before Jia wrapped his arm around her shoulder and helped him to the bathroom as fast as she could with her body supporting his weight.
After he flushed, rinsed his mouth, and wiped his face with a towel, he turned to the doorway, where Jia was waiting. Her face was now a crumpled mess, a never-ending stream of saltwater falling down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, resting his weight against the wall and shutting his eyes to block out his own tears, “but I’m not going to change my mind. I need to leave.”
Jia nodded slowly, sniffling. “I understand. Let’s get you into bed.” She didn’t look at him once as she tucked him into bed, pulling the comforter up to his chin. She switched on the air-conditioning, turned off the lights, and said, her back to him, “Good night, Jaiman.”
“Good night,” he got out in a rumble. “I’m sorry.”
Jia drove home in a state of numbness. Jaiman was adamant on shutting J’s Pub down and leaving his dreams—and her—behind. He wasn’t just sad, he was defeated. He had been defeated by his own dreams. He was giving up. It broke her heart more than she could comprehend.
But all those thoughts were quiet compared to the realization that Jaiman was TheReMix. Nobody else knew about her potential deal with Monica. The boy she grew up with, the man she had such complicated feelings for, had been putting on a fa?ade this whole time?
After parking inside the gate, Jia headed upstairs to her room in silence. Papa’s office was lit, but she didn’t have the energy to talk to him, or anyone. Tanu had texted her asking what was up, but Jia left the messages on Read. All she could do right now was open her laptop and log in to her Love Better with J Gmail account.
She reread every single email from TheReMix, connecting the dots. They had been frustrated with work just as much as Jaiman was. They agreed with almost all of his views on relationships. Every time there was tension between Jia and Jaiman, TheReMix took longer to respond. And Jaiman had known about her agreeing to see the matchmaker. Had Papa really told Jaiman about Radha Sethia, or was that a lie?
Jia scrolled back to the initial email notification from WordPress about her very first blog subscriber, well over a year ago, even before she published the introductory post. How had Jaiman found out? Why hadn’t he just asked her about it? Why go through the trouble of creating a fake identity and a whole web of lies? No wonder Jia was so attracted to both Jaiman and TheReMix—they were the same person.
She shut her laptop and paced around her bedroom, gripping her hair and fighting back the urge to scream into a pillow. This whole time, he had played with her feelings, and for what? Was this all just a game to him? Something to distract him from the pub and his financial troubles?
Jia slumped to the floor and let her head fall in between her knees. The man who had been her one constant her whole life was leaving. And taking TheReMix away along with him. But almost worse was that he had lied to her. Over and over and over again.
Everything was off-center now—her career, her dreams, her emotions. The one thing she’d been sure of in her twenty-six years of existing was that Jaiman, as much as he annoyed her, was always going to stick around. She didn’t know a world without him—she didn’t have a life without him. Yet he had violated her trust by interfering in the one part of herself that she had wanted to keep hidden from everyone.
Maybe his leaving was for the best. Jia lifted her head and wiped her face with the back of her hand. Maybe she would be better off without him. She was Jia Deshpande, after all. She didn’t need anybody to stay. Not even if she maybe wanted them to.