Against All Odds

by Aarti V Raman

  He gathered her closer, even draping her thigh over his hip.

  Sophia felt warm and squished and it just made everything that much better. She had been so wrong. They were perfect for each other. And she was so very glad he’d come for her.

  “Bharat?” He didn’t open his eyes so she figured he was asleep. There was a shadow of a beard on his jaw that she found sexy, all over again. But he looked…soft, sated. Afterglow, she figured. But maybe it was because of her too. Because he’d found her.

  “I think I might love you,” she whispered.

  Sophia closed her eyes. Soft and sated herself.

  ~~~~~

  Beside her, Bharat opened his eyes and gazed at the face of a woman he’d known less than a week. A woman whose family he had destroyed. And knew a kind of fear, nameless and inexplicable.

  There was no way he was going to get to keep her.

  Not Sophia.

  Not after everything he had done in his previous, misbegotten life. He wanted to tell her he might be in love with her too. That he’d loved her first. That he’d come for her. But he didn’t.

  He was afraid she would hear him and leave.

  ~~~~~

  Once they woke up, they took turns showering in the little bathroom, Bharat cursing creatively as he tried to reach all parts of himself without knocking stuff over.

  It was a good thing the stateroom was sound-proofed she told him over uncontrollable giggles. Then they got into bed and dozed a while longer when the AC sputtered and stopped working around four in the morning.

  He woke up first and saw Sophia breathing deeply next to him.

  Her hair was in complete and glorious tangles and he itched to touch it again. But then there was the satiny skin of her back and the curve of her spin and the downy hairs of her nape. He trailed one light finger over her back, down to where it joined her cute butt.

  Sophia made a little noise and wriggled closer to him.

  He smiled softly. Pinched her butt. She cursed and opened one eye slowly to glare at him.

  “What?” It was less a word and more a growl.

  “You have a very sexy ass.” Bharat caressed the body part in question. “I could do things to it.”

  She smiled, a half-sleepy smile and pulled him closer for a kiss.

  “The AC stopped,” he said, before she could close the distance between their lips. “It’s going to get fucking hot here.”

  “It already is.” She trailed one hand down his front. “Yep. Fucking hot,” she murmured appreciatively.

  Bharat clamped one hand down her wrist. “I used to dream about stuff like this,” he murmured as he settled himself next to her. Nestling close.

  He wasn’t really a cuddler, but with Sophia he couldn’t stop touching her.

  He wanted to keep her as physically close as possible. He supposed it was part of this whole love-slash-lust thing he was experiencing. He supposed it could be paranoia.

  What if she left if he didn’t hold onto her?

  ~~~~~

  “When did you have time to dream? I thought you were too busy being the next Steve Jobs at IIT-Kharagpur.”

  Sophia ran a hand down his arm, traced her name on his bicep. It fit quite easily there. The man had muscles forever. She wished she found him less attractive. It would make feeling what she did a little easier.

  As it was, a part of her waking, conscious brain was yelling obscenities for literally sleeping with the enemy. Especially after what she’d just told her brother. I’m out. I want no part of this anymore.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Not in college. And Steve Jobs was a poser, a package guy, may his soul rest in peace. I am a purist. Give me ‘the Woz’ any day.” He shook his head and some of it tickled her on the nose and she smiled. God. She loved him. It made no sense but there you go. “Anyway, this dream was from before…when I was at the boy’s home at Velacherry where I grew up.”

  “Right,” she murmured. All sexy humor drying up. “The boys’ home.” She’d read articles on Bharat’s meteoric rise in the Indian startup world and they’d all begun the same way – Orphan boy from Chennai suburb becomes youngest millionaire tech CEO.

  Bharat shrugged. “I know what you’re thinking and it wasn’t as bad as that. Yeah, it sucked that I never got adopted. And that I didn’t speak till I was four years old and that we never celebrated birthdays or Diwali or Christmas. We celebrated July 22nd. It was a common, non-denominational holiday.” His smile became nostalgic as he remembered the raucous times at the orphanage. “Plus, we got gifts, lots of gifts and there was cake and chips and…hey, hey. Don’t cry.”

  Bharat wiped two hot tears off her cheeks and kissed her on the nose. He looked at her with all the earnestness he could muster.

  “It doesn’t sound like fun,” she sniffed. “It sounds really bad.”

  “I promise you, it wasn’t bad,” he reassured her. “It was what it was. They had a computer over there in the Mother Superior’s office. It was an old Win 97. A total dabba.” He grinned at the memory of the aging and yellowed box-like thing which ran exactly two programs and had had Aladdin the pixelated game.

  “I can’t help it,” Sophia continued, sniffing in an undignified manner after having incendiary sex all night. “You were all alone there. It breaks my heart to think of you all alone there. Kids aren’t supposed to be like that.”

  He squeezed her closer and she put her arms around him and held him tight. Something else shifted and settled inside his chest. The last of the bitterness he’d been carrying around inside of him, for the last six years.

  This was acceptance. This fierce storm of emotion was what he’d been craving all his life…

  And he hadn’t even known it.

  What an idiot.

  “I wasn’t alone for very long, you dummy. Pretty soon, I was on the computer for hours. I learned BASIC. And DOS commands before I learned my multiplication tables.” He shared this tidbit proudly. “And then…we got the Internet. This was 1997. I was ten years old. They wanted to try for abroad adoptions for the prettier kids. Figured they could send some of us out of the country…”

  “Wait.” Sophia put a hand on his chest. “Prettier kids? Abroad adoptions? What are you talking about?”

  Bharat moved his shoulders, a patently uncomfortable movement; different than a shrug.

  She felt gooey at deciphering something as intimate as the meaning of his shrug.

  “I wasn’t always this sex god I am right now.” He grinned at her eye roll. “I was a chubby, tall kid who tripped over his own two feet and couldn’t talk without drifting off. They actually had me tested for the autism spectrum.”

  “That’s fucked up.” The outrage in her voice warmed him too.

  “Anyway, so I was on one end of the spectrum – passably cute when I made an effort but a social disaster otherwise. So definitely not eligible for adoption.”

  “What achodes,” Sophia said fiercely. “Fuckers,” she translated at his questioning look. He burst out laughing, which only subsided when she continued more thoughtfully, “I guess you really meant what you said when we first met.”

  “What did I say when we first met?” He brushed sweaty hair off her temple.

  “That my laugh attracted you. It was an epic pickup line.” Sophia winked at him. “Continue, please,” she invited.

  Bharat grinned. “Anyway, the parents always wanted the smart, chatty, well-dressed kids. There were a few who were exceptionally cute and even they weren’t getting placed so the Mother Superior got the bright idea of looking outside the country. America.”

  “So they got the internet to search for parents abroad?”

  He nodded. “Technically, it was to communicate with other Catholic adoption agencies who’d look for ‘situations’. And I was literally the only one who knew what to do with it so I spent a lot of time on Yahoo! It was…informative.” Bharat gave a reminiscent grin. “Very. Very informative.”

  Sophia mock-glared at him. “Y
ou were a pervy little boy, weren’t you?”

  “The smartest pervy little boy,” he corrected her with a quick kiss on her shoulder. “So I saw stuff way younger than I should have. It took me a couple years to even understand the anatomy of some of the stuff I was seeing, but by then I was over girls and boobs and onto the binary code.”

  “Oh, and when did you get back under girls?”

  In answer, he pulled her over on top of him and she made a tiny little sound, part pleasure-part surprise. He was hard again. That was three times in one night.

  She didn’t know such things actually happened in real life. Especially with mild-mannered programmer geeks.

  “Well,” he murmured, as he twined his fingers around her hair and brought her closer to him so they could kiss. “About five seconds ago.”

  And she smiled and kissed him back.

  “That was the right answer,” she murmured before she took him to where they both wanted to go.

  ~~~~~

  Sophia took a holiday the next morning.

  Technically, she informed the floor manager Juggy Singh that she was feeling extremely, inconveniently unwell due to cramping all night with the worst period she’d had in years. Years. Juggy turned green by the time she’d done describing the state of her maxi pads.

  He also gave her the day off.

  Bharat snuck up to the upper deck American café where Tessa was waiting for the both of them. He bought the ladies breakfast and told them how he’d managed to sneak in to the private establishment.

  “I paid them,” he said casually. “Five hundred dollars for letting me in.”

  Tess’s eyes bugged out while Sophia choked on her coffee, as she did mental math. Five hundred dollars was twenty thousand rupees! “Are you fucking serious?”

  Bharat grinned and speared a healthy bite of the maple syrup-doused pancake. “That was the first night, yesterday they upped it to seven hundred.” He pointed his fork at Sophia whose jaw had dropped. “I am deducting that from your fees.” He winked.

  “You know,” Tessa murmured while she ate her own wheat toast more slowly and with a lot less appetite. She wasn’t the one having headbanging sex, after all. “I don’t know if that’s romantic or borderline creepy or just downright arrogant.”

  “Not romantic. Definitely not romantic,” Sophia declared.

  Then she saw Juggy’s minion come into the café and she dived under the table. Tessa continued to eat her toast in nonchalance.

  Bharat looked completely mystified. “What’s going on?”

  “I am saving my job,” Sophia hissed from under the table. “Now shut up and continue eating as if I am not here.”

  He didn’t understand but he was hungry so he did as ordered.

  ~~~~~

  Later, when they were on the ferry back to the mainland, Bharat asked her, “Do you like it? Being at sea? Working the blackjack table?”

  Sophia tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled. It wasn’t a happy little smile. “I don’t really think about it anymore, I guess. I mean, no one’s really happy with their jobs, are they? And my job is glamorous, isn’t it? Black tie events. Sexy customers and what not.”

  “Sophia.” Bharat’s patient voice was her undoing.

  “Dad shot himself,” Sophia said quietly, so quietly he wasn’t sure he heard her. “I was going to appear for my finals. They were in May. I had a paper due on the first Srinagar Summit of 1999, the one that New York Times finally decided to cover. I crammed for the finals, even using a cheat sheet because I was not sure I knew everything.” She leaned into the railing.

  “Nakul came to see me in the middle of the night. He is my brother, my dada.” She shot him a wan glance. “He hates your guts, by the way. You’re his nemesis.”

  “I don’t blame him.”

  “So, dada came to see me, banging at my apartment door. His eyes were wild. Crazy. I thought he was on drugs. Turns out our father had shot himself. In the temple. Blown a part of his ear out. But before he could finish the job, he had a proper stroke, a heart attack. And…”

  Sophia sighed, hung her head. “Nakul and I have been trying to fix things ever since. The company, my father’s legacy. I don’t think about if I like my job or like being away at sea or whatever, Bharat. I don’t have the luxury. This is my life. This is all I have. God, dada would kill me if he saw us together.”

  She smiled, a bitter twisting of her lips that shook Bharat. “Actually, he’d probably make you pay for it anyway. My brother knows his priorities.”

  Bharat caged her between his arms. And she leaned against him. Finding strength and comfort and a kind of acceptance she hadn’t known existed.

  ~~~~~

  He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. He had already apologized. But life was what it was. And no amount of apologies was going to bring Rajeev Kulashreshtha back.

  “Harrison Grant’s firm, they made you an offer?” Sophia asked, watching the Sydney Opera House draw closer in the mid-morning sun.

  Bharat nodded. “I think so. They were very enthusiastic when I hustled out of the meeting before they’d finished dessert. In fact, if I know Henry and Donald, they’d have spun it so the leaving made sense. I was playing hard to get, they would call it.”

  “I haven’t played hard to get at all, have I?”

  He didn’t know why she sounded sad and he didn’t like it.

  “I haven’t been playing at all, Sophia. Not since I met you.”

  Sophia turned in his arms and went up on her toes and hugged him.

  He put his arms around her waist and drew her closer, holding on tight. This small slip of a woman who had appeared out of nowhere into his life, was the one variable he had never accounted for…someone he needed. It was a sobering thought.

  “What happens when you leave?” Sophia asked softly.

  Bharat had no answer to that. So he said nothing and held her close for as long as he could.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They took another shower back at his hotel room, this time together. And it wasn’t sexual. Just really intimate and comfortable.

  Sophia whistled between her teeth when she saw the expanse of his back and offered to wash it for him. Then it turned sexual very fast. But it wasn’t practical to have sex for a small person and a larger person against a shower stall so they got out, fast, and made it to the bed.

  When it was over and he was able to catch his breath back Bharat said, “I bet we could do this in that big-ass bathroom Harrison has at his villa. I bet, we could arrange for another meeting with them and then we could go do it in the bathroom.”

  He was touching her dewy, sweat-soaked skin everywhere he could while he talked, Skin he was fast becoming addicted to. Her hand was on his heart, which was racing like he had run a marathon. He figured he had.

  She made a sound. It could have been a laugh. “You’re such a pervy guy.”

  “Hey, I saw how you looked like when you came back with Harrison after the tour. You were impressed.”

  “I wasn’t impressed. Besides, those guys are number crunchers. I don’t like them.” Sophia wrinkled her nose in a way he found adorable.

  “Honey, the world runs on money. That’s an inescapable fact. We can’t pretend otherwise.”

  She cocked her head to one side and regarded him steadily. “Is that why you built Caliban? So you could keep making money endlessly and not have to think about all the other jobs you’re destroying with your automation.”

  Bharat sighed. “It’s not that simple, you know. Business is about commerce. If my technology does not make money, the most money in the fastest, most efficient way possible, no one is going to use it. If no one uses it, no one will buy it. And that means no money for it. How is that any better than the alternative?”

  Sophia continued watching him quietly. “Of course it’s not better! But you and I both know it’s not as simplistic as you just made it out to be. There can be a workaround. A…recalibration, if you w
ill. If you decided to figure it out. Save lives instead of destroying them.”

  He grinned, lopsided. “Save the world, you mean.”

  “Something like that. I know it’s a quixotic notion, but it could be done. And if anyone can do it, it’s you.”

  Bharat felt absurdly proud at the casual confidence she displayed in him. But he was a guy, and a horny guy at that. “So, are you saying you won’t do me anymore due to ideological and moral reasons? You’re holding your sexy body hostage till I surrender?”

  He tried to grab her but she evaded his long reach. Barely.

  She smiled and pushed sweaty, wet and soapy hair behind her ear. “Let me put it this way. We accept white flags in surrender. But…I am also pretty sure I would have straight up jumped you three days ago if you’d taken me to Harrison’s Grant’s gold-plated bathroom instead of this dingy room.”

  His heart swelled even as his jaw dropped. “Dingy?” he managed.

  Sophia laughed. There was nothing unclear about it. And she held him by the scruff of his neck and kissed him soundly. “You’re such an idiot. But you’re an adorable idiot so I don’t mind. Too much.”

  “I don’t think that was a compliment.”

  “What are we doing today? I am on holiday. I want to do things. Many things.”

  He tried to shuck off her arms but she was scrappy and she used her boobs so he stayed where he was. Squeezing them and allowing her to do all sorts of illegal things to his ear.

  “We could do this,” Bharat murmured.

  “That is such a pervy guy thing to say.”

  “HEY!”

  Bharat pushed her hands back against the headboard, totally indignant. And saw that she saw laughing. With her eyes. That her eyes were actually sparkling. His heart about stopped at the smile, the sheer radiance of her face.

  “I was thinking, I could stay here longer,” he said instead.

  “What?” She tried to raise her head up for a kiss but he held her easily in place. She knew she was pervy too because she found it hot. “Kiss me, you fool.”

  “I was thinking about us. This…situation.” He evaded all her attempts to kiss him. He didn’t know why. But it seemed important to talk about this stuff.