40. The Sun
The Sun
Kiri
One night, during one of her increasingly rare visits, everything seemed almost normal again.
We'd gone to dinner. We'd made it through an entire evening without arguing about schedules, flights, marriage, or whether I was avoiding her calls.
Back at my hotel, she laid naked in my arms with her head resting against my chest. Her nails moved gently along my hairline, then into my scalp, combing through my hair in slow passes.
It was one of my favorite things she did.
I could fall asleep beneath her hands in seconds.
Every ugly thought in my head went quiet when she touched me that way.
For a few minutes, I let myself believe we were back in that diner at four in the morning.
Back in India beneath clouds of color. Back before every conversation became a demand for an answer I didn’t have.
She looked up at me and I looked down at her and smiled.
“If we ever had a baby,” she whispered, touching my face, “I’d want them to have your eyes.”
She said it lightly. Almost absentmindedly. Nothing more than a thought passing through her mind while her fingers played with my hair, but it made my entire body go cold.
A baby. Ours.
I closed my eyes, then pulled away from her hand and checked the time even though I had nowhere to be.
“What?” she asked.
I sat up and reached for my jeans.
“Kiri?”
I stepped into them.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting dressed.”
“I can see that. Why?”
I found my shirt on the floor and dragged it over my head. Behind me, the sheets shifted.
“You’re always talking about marriage or kids,” I said. “Every fucking time we’re together now.”
I turned. Radhika was sitting upright against the pillows, the sheet gathered loosely around her waist. Hurt moved across her face, followed quickly by fury.
“I made one comment.”
“It’s never one comment.”
“It was a passing thought.”
“They’re all passing thoughts until I don’t give you the answer you want.”
She threw the sheet aside and climbed out of bed.
Even furious, even naked, she was breathtaking.
Every perfect curve moving as she crossed the room, arms flung outward in disbelief.
Usually, the sight of her like that would have erased every thought in my head but not this time. The fear was louder.
“Are you seriously leaving?” she demanded. “In the middle of the night?”
“I need air.”
“We barely have time together as it is.”
“Exactly.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re never here with me anymore.”
Her mouth fell open.
“I'm standing right in front of you.”
“Yeah. You’re standing here thinking about five years from now. Ten years. Rings and houses and kids. You’re never just here.”
“Because I need to know there will be a five years from now!”
“Why?”
The word came out harder than I meant it to. She recoiled. I kept going anyway.
“Why can’t we just be in love and not turn every fucking night into a negotiation?”
“A negotiation?”
“Yes.”
“I said I'd want our baby to have your eyes.”
“There's no baby. I don’t want to talk about one.”
“Then say that without behaving like a fucking child.”
“I've tried. You keep doing this.”
“I keep doing what?”
“Marriage. Children. Meeting my parents. Every time we’re together, there’s another thing I’m not giving you.”
“Because every time we're together, you remind me how little of your life I actually have.”
“You have me!”
“Do I? For how long?”
“I don’t know!”
The words cracked through the room. Radhika went still. I dragged both hands through my hair.
“We’re twenty-four and twenty-five.”
“You're almost twenty-six.”
“Fine. I’m almost twenty-six. We’ve barely been together two years. We both have insanely busy lives. Why can’t we just be together without constantly worrying about what comes after? Fuck!”
What I meant was that the thought of children chilled me to the bone.
I had no compass for how to be a good father.
No example I wanted to follow. All I could see when she spoke about babies were small, helpless people who would look at me expecting something I didn’t know how to give them.
Children I might love and still damage. Children who might learn to read the air in a room before they learned to read words.
I saw my father in every future version of myself. I saw Radhika learning to fear the sound of my footsteps. It made no sense. I'd never touched her in anger. Never would. But fear didn’t need sense. It only needed memory.
I wanted her to forget the future. To lie beside me now. Love me now. Why was that so goddamn difficult? I stomped toward the door and her face crumpled. The first sob escaped before she could stop it and the sound cut straight through me.
“Radhi.”
“No, you don't get to call me that.” She grabbed the sheet and wrapped it around herself. “Not after you just said telling me you loved me was a mistake.”
I froze. I didn't say that, did I?
The fight came back in fragments.
I had.
I'd said it somewhere in the argument.
I just couldn’t remember exactly when.
It was just more confirmation that I was always walking a fine line of turning into my father. If I couldn't even remember what I'd said, would I do something I couldn't remember too?
I shook my head.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“You meant it enough to say it.” She wiped angrily at her face, but the tears kept coming.
“Just know, if you walk out that door, this is over.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I'm not doing anything. You're the one leaving.”
“I need space.”
“You always need space when I ask whether I belong in your life.”
“You do belong.”
“Then stay.”
My hand closed around the door handle. She looked at it. Then at me.
“If you leave now, I'll know you don't love me.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Neither is this.”
I stood there with my hand on the door. Every part of me wanted to open it.
Not because I wanted to leave her but because leaving was what I knew how to do.
Leave before the questions became too heavy or before anyone saw the parts of me I couldn’t explain.
Run away before love turned into something I could fail at. Behind me, Radhika began to cry harder.
I let go of the handle and the breath left me. Then I turned around. She covered her face as I crossed the room and took her into my arms. At first, she resisted. Her palms struck my chest once, then again, weak with grief rather than anger. I held on until her body settled against mine.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She sobbed into my shirt.
“I love you. I’m sorry.”
I lifted her and carried her back to bed. Turned off the lights. Pulled the blankets over us and held her while she cried. I apologized until the words lost all shape. She eventually fell asleep with one hand twisted in my shirt, like even unconscious she thought I might still leave.
I stayed, but something in me was already gone. After that night, I began pulling away in pieces. I let her calls ring while I stared at the screen. I told myself I was busy, even when I was sitting alone in a hotel room doing nothing. Her messages stacked up.
Are you awake?
Did you land?
Can we please talk?
Kiri, answer me.
Sometimes I typed a response and deleted it. Sometimes I sent something short enough to keep her from calling again.
Long day. Sorry.
In rehearsal.
Talk soon.
I loved her. That was the worst part. I loved her so much that every conversation felt like standing at the edge of something I couldn’t survive falling into.
When she did catch me on the phone, I kept my voice distant.
Tired. Distracted. I gave her nothing she could hold long enough to ask what had changed.
She knew anyway. Radhika always knew when I was lying, especially when I didn’t say anything.
A few weeks later, I went to a party in the Hollywood Hills.
Another glass house overlooking Los Angeles.
Another infinity pool glowing blue beneath people who had no intention of swimming.
Music shook the windows. Actors, musicians, models, executives.
Everyone beautiful enough to make beauty meaningless.
I'd been drinking. Just enough to pretend I didn’t have control.
A woman I vaguely knew pulled me onto the dance floor.
Blonde, maybe. Or light brown. I couldn’t remember later.
Her hand settled on my shoulder while mine rested at her waist. I wasn’t cheating.
I would've never been that stupid. I still knew she was special, my heart was still hers and Radhika’s family knew everyone.
If I so much as disappeared into a hallway with another woman, she would probably receive photographic evidence before I made it back to the room.
But I flirted. I let the woman lean close to speak into my ear.
I smiled when she touched my chest. I knew exactly what I was doing.
Making myself look like the man Radhika’s father already suspected I was.
The woman laughed at something I didn’t hear.
Then her expression changed. Her gaze moved past my shoulder. I turned.
Radhika stood at the edge of the room. She was still wearing whatever she had flown in, dark trousers and a fitted jacket over a silk top. Her hair was pulled back. Her face was bare except for the makeup left from a day spent traveling.
She looked exhausted. Furious, devastated.
I removed my hand from the woman’s waist but it was too late.
Radhika crossed the room. People moved out of her way.
When she finally reached me, she slapped me across the face with all her strength.
My head snapped to the side. The room went silent enough to hear the pool water lapping outside.
I tasted blood where my tooth had caught the inside of my cheek. Fair, I thought.
Radhika’s hand shook at her side. “How dare you,” she said.
The girl beside me stepped back. Smart. I slowly turned my face back to Radhika.
There were tears in her eyes, but the fury held them there, bright and unshed.
I could see the whole thing. The flight she must have taken.
The calls I ignored. The photos and humiliation.
The worry. The hope, stupid and stubborn, that I would see her and drop the act.
I should have. Instead, I took another drink.
“Long flight?” I asked.
Radhika stared at me like I had become a stranger while she was looking directly at me. Then she let loose in Hindi, fast and vicious and beautiful, every word cutting through me even where I couldn’t catch all of it.
“Tumne mujhe kya samjha?” she snapped. “Main koi bewakoof hoon? Tum mujhe phone nahi karte, mere messages ka jawab nahi dete, aur phir yahan kisi aur ladki ke saath tamasha kar rahe ho?”
What did you take me for? Do you think I’m a fool? You don’t call me, don’t answer my messages, and then you’re here making a spectacle with some other girl?
I understood enough. My face stayed blank. That was the trick, let nothing through. Make yourself empty and people eventually stopped trying to find you.
“Radhika,” I said.
“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don't say my name like that, like you're sick of me.”
My jaw flexed. She stepped closer, lowering her voice, which made it worse. “You told me you loved me.”
My grip tightened around the glass.
“At my home,” she said. “With my family. With everyone there. You held me like—” Her voice caught. She swallowed it down. “Like you knew what that meant.”
I looked at her then. Her face was open in a way I had no defense against. Radhika had been born into cameras and contracts and family expectation. She knew what men could be. She had chosen to believe better of me anyway. So I made myself worse.
“You knew what this was, Radhika.”
Her expression changed. I kept going because I was already bleeding and wanted the wound fatal.
“Don’t act like we were going to get married or something.”
I watched her heart break in real time. The tears finally spilled, one clean line down her cheek, and I hated myself so violently I almost laughed from it. Radhika nodded because she finally understood that there was nothing left in me worth fighting for in that room.
“You are smaller than I thought,” she said.
She turned and walked away.
I lifted the glass to my mouth and drank.
When the music started again, I found the girl from earlier.
At the end of the night, I took her home.
That felt right. Miserable, but right. Back in the dark.
Back where I belonged. No estate or flowers.
No father demanding real plans for his daughter's future.
No mother pressing sweets into my hand. No Radhika laughing in a courtyard covered in color, looking at me like I hadn't been born damaged beyond repair.
The sun had finally seen what I was.
A thing that consumed light if it got too close.