39. A Man Who Stayed
A Man Who Stayed
Kiri
That night, we laid in a bed that felt bigger than mine and Rithy's first apartment, in a guest room the size of a small country, with bursts of color still clinging to our hair no matter how much we washed. Outside, the house had finally gone quiet. Inside, I was trying not to think about the fact that I told her I loved her and the world hadn’t ended.
Radhika had other plans. She climbed over me without warning and pushed at my shoulder. Her skin carried jasmine and heat and all I wanted to do was pull her close and breathe her in for the rest of the night.
“On your stomach,” she said.
I opened one eye. “What if I’m tired?”
“You survived Holi, you'll survive me.”
“You're way more exhausting. Besides, I'll be dead by morning if your dad realizes you've snuck in here.”
She shoved me again, laughing, and I rolled onto my stomach because I was weak for her and she knew it.
The sheet slipped down my hips as the cool air touched my back.
Then her fingers touched the tattoo curling over my shoulder.
I went quiet. She traced the dark line of the naga slowly, from the curve near my shoulder blade down along my arm, following the coils like she was reading something written under my skin.
“You've never told me about this,” she said.
“It’s just ink.” I smiled into the pillow. “Sex doesn't normally make you this curious. Did I hit an extra spot tonight? Open a chakra?”
She pinched my side.
“Ow.”
“Tell me. Now.”
I breathed out. The easy answer was that I liked snakes, shit guys accept without question. The better answer was that it looked good under stage lights. But the honest answer sat somewhere old and inconvenient, coated in incense smoke and held in my mother’s hands.
“My mom used to take us to a temple,” I said.
“Buddhist, Cambodian. Not every week or anything, life was…” I paused.
My dad didn't appreciate Ma having anything of her own, so she'd sneak us out when he was in a stupor.
But Radhika didn't need to know that, that wasn't her baggage to carry.
“Life was life. But when she could, she took us.”
Radhika’s fingers stilled, then continued softer.
“I remember the smell the most. Agarwood mainly, but the food, fuck me the food was crazy good. The floor was always warm under my feet when we took our shoes off. People actually talking in Khmer. Ma bowing, lighting incense, telling me and Rithy to stop acting like wild animals for five seconds.”
Radhika smiled. I could feel it against my shoulder before she kissed me there.
“The naga was everywhere in stories,” I said. “Protection, water, old things. Sacred shit. I liked that, I guess. Something dangerous that wasn’t evil. Something with fangs and muscles that could still guard a temple, that could keep us safe.”
Her fingers moved over the snake’s tail near my shoulder.
“So this is you?” she asked. “Something big and dangerous but not evil?”
I laughed, but it came out too quiet.
“I don’t know.”
She leaned down and kissed the line of ink at the top of my spine.
“You know, in our stories, Lord Shiva wears Vasuki around his neck. A serpent king,” she paused and let her fingers linger in the sweep of the snake along my back.
“A naga too. During the churning of the ocean, the gods and asuras used him as the rope. He suffered in the middle of it, pulled between both sides.”
“Sounds fucking rough.”
“It's a very old story. Everyone wants immortality, so everyone pulls.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. “That's people for you.”
Her hand rested warm between my shoulder blades.
“Shiva wears him,” she continued. “He's not a decoration, he represents power and control. Poison, destruction, protection and even stillness. All together.”
I stared into the dark. Something in my chest felt uncomfortable, and I couldn't pin down why. Radhika kissed along the curve of the naga, one slow press of her mouth after another.
“You carry your naga the same way,” she whispered. “Like you’re proud of what it means, but you're scared of what it might do.”
“No one should let you talk after midnight,” I said, trying to make light of how close to the truth she'd come. “You're starting to sound like those spiritual guides on infomercials.”
She smiled against my skin. Then she said something in Hindi, soft enough that I almost missed it.
I turned my head. “What was that?”
Her lips brushed my shoulder again.
“??? ????? ????? ???? ???,” she whispered.
I knew that one. I’d have known those words in any language coming from her mouth like that.
I love you.
I closed my eyes. There were a hundred things I could have said, a hundred jokes, a thousand exits. Instead, I reached back until I found her hand and threaded my fingers through hers.
“Huh? I think I've gone deaf from all the powder. I've got some stuck in my ear.” I teased.
So she said it again.
And for one single night, in that insane house, wrapped up together in a massive bed with color fading on my skin, I wanted to be the kind of man who stayed.
For the first three months after India, I believed love had changed me.
Maybe Holi had done it. Maybe Radhika had.
I came back to Los Angeles with color still trapped beneath my fingernails and red dust buried so deeply in the seams of my boots that it followed me into rehearsal rooms for weeks.
Every time I found another streak of it, I remembered her laughing in my arms. Blue across her face.
Tears brightening the pigment beneath her eyes.
Her mouth against mine when she told me she loved me too.
Something inside me had settled. For the first time in my life, I looked at the distance between us and thought we could beat it. We would make it work. We loved each other, after all. That's all it took, right?
Those words had meant everything to me because I had held onto them for my entire adult life.
Saved them like there was only one person in the world worthy of hearing them from me.
Radhika was the first woman I'd ever said them to and, as far as I was concerned, she'd be the last. How could anyone come after her?
She was beautiful enough to make people stop speaking when she entered a room.
Smart enough to make me feel like I should start reading books with fewer pictures.
Talented, funny, stubborn, generous. She could argue with me for an hour, leave me furious, then make one face and have me fighting not to laugh.
I had no idea how I had gotten so lucky.
For all three months, I walked on a cloud.
Radhika became part of the band so naturally that I couldn’t remember what it had been like before she was there.
She flew to Seattle while we were recording the next album and sat cross-legged on the studio floor at three in the morning, eating fries from a paper basket while Rafe replayed the same vocal line until everyone wanted to kill him.
“That last word is wrong,” she told him.
Rafe turned slowly from the mixing desk.
“And what would be the right one?”
“You’ve played it fourteen times. I don't know the right one, I just know the last one is wrong.”
Rithy pointed at her without looking up from his guitar. “You don’t get a vote for being beautiful.”
“Neither do you,” she said, sticking her tongue out. “The lyric is Rafe’s.”
“I’m protecting the artistic process.”
“You’re protecting him from discovering a thesaurus.”
Ronan leaned back behind the kit. “Oh she's grand. Finally someone getting onto you two geniuses.”
“You rushed the second chorus,” Radhika said.
Ronan stared at her. She smiled sweetly.
“I take it back,” he said. “She’s banned.”
We ended up at a diner after recording, all of us crowded into a booth beneath lights too bright for four in the morning.
Emily sat tucked beneath Rafe’s arm, wearing one of his jackets and looking more rested than any of us had a right to be.
He had finally settled down with her and bought a place in Seattle, something he had sworn for years he would never do until he was thirty.
Radhika sat beside me with one hand wrapped around a coffee cup and the other beneath the table, resting on my thigh.
The guys argued about the album. Emily stole bacon from Rafe’s plate. Rithy declared all critics intellectually bankrupt. Radhika laughed until she nearly spilled her coffee. I looked around the booth and thought, This is it.
Everything we were supposed to feel once we had money, success, and more people knowing our names than we knew what to do with.
I was making an album with my brother and my best friends.
We could afford to order whatever we wanted without checking the price.
I was in love with the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen and at least some of the time, I got to wake up with her tangled around me.
Nothing could touch us.
Then Radhika got the film.
It was the kind of role people waited their entire careers for.
The kind of script that came with awards talk before anyone had shot a frame.
She would be in nearly every scene, filming across India, Europe, Morocco, and whatever other country the production decided could stand in for somewhere magical.
They expected filming to take close to a year.
I was proud of her. I told her that so many times the words started sounding inadequate.
She deserved it. She deserved every billboard, every premiere, every review that would try and fail to explain what she could do on screen.
At first, the film felt like another distance we could beat.
We had practice. We knew airports, hotel rooms, calls made at all hours.
We knew how to turn three days in the same city into something that could sustain us for a month.