Incense and Sensibility

by Sonali Dev

  She stood. “Will something to eat help?”

  “Overnight oats?”

  She smiled. He actually sounded enthusiastic. “I thought the nectar pus story might have deterred you from them forever.”

  “I do think of them as devotional oats now.” He smiled, then cleared his throat. “Also, I haven’t felt my legs in about a half hour.”

  “Oh no. Chutney is heavy. I should have warned you.” She picked the baby off his lap.

  Chutney didn’t so much as stir. India put her on the couch and turned back to Yash, who had the strangest expression on his face.

  “Do you need help getting up?” She held out her hand.

  “I wasn’t kidding when I said I can’t feel my legs,” he said with such self-deprecating misery she wanted to hug him.

  “I can lift you up. Standing up and straightening your legs is the only way to get the circulation back in them.”

  “You’re going to pick me up?” he said with mock-horror. “Have you no regard for my fragile male ego?”

  “Umm, maybe you can grunt and beat your chest afterward?” She walked behind him, tucked her arms under his, and lifted him to his feet.

  He made a ridiculously tortured sound as blood rushed back into his legs.

  “I know that tickles. Just give it a moment,” she said still holding him up.

  Laughter bubbled through his chest as he squeezed her hands and tried to stand and pushed back into her in involuntary jolts.

  She was laughing too, because to see Yash Raje like this, felled by tickles and completely vulnerable, was something she would never forget as long as she lived.

  This close, his scent, all that masculine vibrancy, made a heady mix with the gentleness with which he clutched her hands, the trust with which he leaned into her. Pain and pleasure gathered where their bodies touched.

  Moving to face him, she let him go slowly, her hands taking cues from his. Finally he was standing, and she could tell that he was fine.

  Her hands stayed in his.

  “Better?” she asked.

  His gaze dropped to their joined hands. He nodded.

  “And the male ego?”

  “Absolutely battered.”

  She found herself grinning as she left him to retrieve the oats from the fridge.

  He took out two bowls from a drawer as though they’d done this a million times. “Will you have some?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Slipping the extra bowl back, he handed her the other one. “I’m being a coward again.”

  She took the bowl. “Yash, not being able to talk about something that hurt you isn’t cowardice, it’s self-protection. You don’t have to tell me. But if you want to, it will help me understand, and I do need to understand.”

  When she handed him the full bowl, he put it down and took her hand instead. He needed the contact. She did too.

  “That night . . . you . . . you knocked the breath out of me. It was the first time in my life I had felt like that. You already know that I didn’t exactly have a normal dating history as a young person. The accident happened when I was fifteen, and for the rest of high school I was trying to figure out how to get back on my feet and not disappoint everyone in my life and do all the things I wanted to. Through college I was trying to get rid of my limp—it made me too self-conscious to date. I . . .” He stopped, and she knew this part was harder than the rest.

  “I have scars. A . . . a lot of them. They were fresh then. And still painful.” He let her hand go and touched his collar as though making sure it was there, covering him up, and she had to work hard to keep from wrapping her arms around him.

  “I was also trying to get through college and law school at an accelerated pace, because I was in a hurry and because it gave me somewhere to put my energy, so I didn’t have to think about the things that were broken. I let myself heal wrong, then I overcompensated for it. My first job out of law school was with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I loved that job, it was like finding myself.” He stopped and took a breath, an ujjayi one, like she’d taught him.

  He was fully inside himself, his face tight, his aura drained of its glow. It was the palest she’d ever seen it, almost every hint of gold gone. The desire to comfort him raged inside her, but she held still.

  “I . . . I’ve never told this next part to anyone. Only my family and Naina know. When Trisha was at Berkeley, I spoke to a pre-law class. Afterward I took Trisha and her roommate out to dinner. Her roommate—Julia—developed something of a crush on me. She reached out for an internship and I took her on because she was bright and because she was my sister’s friend.” His hands shook, but he pressed them into the countertop and kept going.

  “One evening she called me and said Trisha was in trouble and she wanted to meet and talk to me about it. Then she drugged me and . . . and recorded me having sex with her. I remember nothing of the actual incident except for the splitting headache and throwing up all of the next day. But I do remember the terrible sense of violation, a disconnection from myself that I didn’t understand, couldn’t shake off.”

  Rage shook inside her. Never in her life had she truly wanted to hurt someone. But what that woman had done to him made her want to hunt her down. She took his hand and he pulled their joined hands to his heart, as though he’d been waiting for her to.

  “Naina and I were friends and Julia thought we were together, so she sent the video to Naina with a threat to release it to the press if Naina didn’t break up with me. I was running for my first election. Naina came straight to me. She stood by me. My family took care of it. Everyone went into crisis mode. We paid Julia off, had her destroy the video, had her sign all sorts of gag orders, and basically made the threat disappear.”

  “But no one stopped to see how you were doing.”

  “That wasn’t deemed a priority at the time.”

  “Yash . . .”

  “I’m not done. Please let me finish.”

  She nodded.

  “I never went out with anyone after that. At first if women flirted with me I felt physically ill. Naina and I were close enough that everyone assumed I didn’t date because we were together. I want you to know that when I met you at Nisha’s wedding, I was not with Naina. I had never even thought about her that way.”

  His heartbeat beneath their clasped hands was strong and steady. She pressed into it.

  “You know how that night was. All the fear, all the coldness I’d felt at the thought of intimacy, I didn’t feel that with you. For the first time I didn’t need to control everything. I felt free and safe.”

  Some of the warmth returned to his gaze. “You swept me entirely off my feet. I was surrounded by people I’d known my whole life, but I couldn’t keep track of conversations. Everyone kept asking me what was wrong with me. All I knew is that I didn’t feel like myself. It was the headiest feeling, as though a part of me I’d never hoped to get back had returned.” He squeezed her hand, a tremor going through him.

  She wanted to tell him he could stop, he didn’t have to relive all this. But she knew he had to say it. He’d been waiting a long time to say it.

  “Then you kissed me, and it was beautiful. Too beautiful. Too much.”

  For ten years now, the memory of that kiss had haunted her. His tentativeness at first, then his intensity, how it had consumed them both.

  “All the darkness my mind associated with intimacy came back. Just for a flash. But the beauty of it gave me a taste of how it could be. I wanted that. After you left that night, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking about you, about our kiss. As the night wore on, my old memories kept getting tangled up with our kiss. How consumed by you I felt got tangled up with what I associated with feeling out of control. I didn’t put this together until you made me think about my control issues.”

  How strong, how untouchable he seemed, how blessed. Yes, he was those things, but the things he’d withstood would have broken almost anyone else. “I really want you to be m
y governor,” she said, then laughed because it was such an absurd thing to say in this situation.

  It made him laugh too, and pull her hand to his lips.

  When he spoke again, his gaze was locked with hers, his breath fell on her knuckles like kisses. “In the light of day, the dark feelings receded. On the flight to Sripore, you were with me. I didn’t know how I was going to wait that long to see you. But after we got to Sripore everything changed again.”

  He told her the rest of it.

  Going back to how Naina’s parents had started pressuring her to get married, to “settle down,” as soon as she turned twenty. Her way of dealing with it had always been to joke about it and say, “I’m only ever going to marry Yash, so you have to wait until he’s ready.”

  Her father never thought it was a joke. He kept talking to Yash’s parents about it. When Yash’s parents asked him, Yash had blown them off by saying that he didn’t have time for a relationship. But his father had become convinced that Naina was a match made in heaven for him. A reformer, an activist, someone who had proven her loyalty after what had happened with Julia Wickham.

  “He wasn’t wrong, was he?” India said.

  “If anything, it was a friendship made in heaven. All the comfort we both needed, with none of the complications of feelings being involved.”

  Then Naina had gotten into a program that does research in Nepal. Her father refused to let her go. In his view, at twenty-eight, an unmarried daughter was already his greatest failure. He dug in his heels, she had to get married and then do whatever she wanted to do with her husband’s permission, or he was cutting her off. Naina had always had a complicated relationship with her dad. Telling her parents to go to hell was just never an option for her.

  “It never is,” India said, and he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “When we were in Sripore for the ceremony, Julia went on social media and started to like some of Naina’s posts about the wedding. She sent me seemingly innocent messages about how lovely my family looked, even though it violated the gag orders she’d signed. What had happened between you and me had already dug up things that I’d repressed and Julia’s messages just threw open the floodgates.”

  All that had been churning inside Yash when Naina and her father had fought, and she’d told her father that she and Yash were together but that Yash didn’t want to get married until he won the election.

  “I remember the look on Dr Kohli’s face as though it were yesterday. I’d never felt such rage as I felt at everything that was behind that look. If my father had done that to my sisters, I would never have let him get away with it. For all their demanding ways, my parents have never treated their daughters’ dreams and abilities as less than their sons’, or any man’s.”

  Naina’s father had completely ignored what his daughter was saying and asked Yash if she was telling the truth.

  “What did you say to him?” India asked, anger threaded through her voice. She was back in that moment with him, his rage her rage.

  “I asked him if he’d heard his daughter, because she’d said everything he needed to hear.”

  “You Yudishtired it,” she said, feeling pride, of all things. Pride at what he’d done for another woman, even when it had compromised their chance at happiness. The belief that she would follow him to the ends of the earth wrapped around her. She would do anything to make him happy, to keep him safe.

  He saw it, and it made him drop another kiss on her fingers, sending sensation skittering across her skin.

  “Our families acted like it was inevitable. Naina and I insisted we wanted to keep it private, and for a while everyone complied. Naina got to go off to Nepal and I went back to losing myself in my work. I buried that night with you, convinced myself that I had imagined it. I told myself that helping my friend was the right thing to do. But I was just choosing to run away, because it was easier than dealing with the mess in my head. I felt cornered, but I also felt relief.”

  A tear slid from his eye and she wiped it, when what she wanted was to kiss it away.

  “I am so sorry that I didn’t think about what it would do to you. I took the easier path, the path that let me keep everything I’d buried, buried. All my life I’ve thrived on fighting for things, but I never got to fight Julia, I never got to confront her, and the self-loathing made me lose you.”

  This time she pulled their joined hands close and dropped a kiss on his fingertips. Hope filled her heart so hard and fast she knew she should stop it. But, looking in his eyes, falling into the crystal gray that had not a single defense against her, against his own remorse, she knew she was lost.

  “I didn’t fight for you,” he said. “I give you a hard time about not fighting for things, but it was me who didn’t fight my own demons for you. I want to fight for us now. I don’t want to do this without you.”

  Those words fell like a hammer between them. Reality over the magic glittering in the air.

  What was she doing? If he broke up with Naina and India’s role in it came out, the media and the Cruz campaign would destroy him. They’d paint him as a cheater, a liar. She tried to pull away, but he didn’t let go. “Yash, please. I believe you. I know how you feel. But we can’t do this. There’s too much to lose.”

  He stepped closer, his body pulled to its full height, his shoulders square, purpose and strength radiating from him like heat. The Yash the public saw, the Yash who was strong enough to take on anything.

  “I want you to trust me. I can’t lose you again. I can’t keep lying. I don’t want to live a life in which you aren’t with me. Can you?”

  She shook her head, but before she could speak the alarm on his phone went off.

  He reached for his phone. “Shit. I have to be at the airport in an hour. Rico and I are flying to L.A. for an appearance on Good Morning America. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. It’s going to be okay. I’ll talk to Naina and figure out how we make the announcement. We can discuss the rest later. All of it.”

  Her heart was beating too fast. It was that sense again, the one she’d had when she walked around her home making sure that her family was safe, that they were still there.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’ll cancel. I can do GMA later.” He started to call someone, and she stilled his hand.

  “No, you’re not canceling. Go, knock their socks off. We’ll talk when you get back.” We have time, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t.

  “We have a lifetime,” he said, and she went up on her toes and kissed his cheek. A quick peck, because she couldn’t stop herself, because what gripped her was hot and ravenous and chased by the kind of fear she’d never known.

  He wrapped his hands around her face, his touch tender, his gaze worshipful. Then, with all the conviction of someone who had made a decision and never went back once he had, he dropped a kiss on her forehead. Then her eyelids, one at a time. Then the edges of her mouth. Their breaths mingled. The breath he gave her was all hope, the breath he took from her all trust. Finally their lips met, quick and gentle. A promise for more soon. A promise that threaded through her body and awoke every cell to possibility.

  “I will see you soon,” he said, or she did. In that moment there was nothing that separated them. No her, no him, just them, and that promise they had uttered as one.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  If hope were a drug, Yash wanted everyone addicted. Because the way it beat in his heart and ran through his blood, every dream felt within reach, every moment brimmed with possibilities. He’d spent the morning on the set of Good Morning America, and for the first time in a very long time he didn’t feel like an imposter, he didn’t feel like he was taking up space from others.

  He felt like he was here to fight for everyone, but for himself most of all, because he needed to live in a world that was more equitable. A world that took care of the sick and protected the weak while it also gave free rein to those who innovated and made the world richer, more connected, more plentiful for ev
eryone. Those things were not separate, not mutually exclusive, and they needed to be tied back together in the consciousness of our nation, and the world, not just California. But like in everything else, California was as good a place as any to start something.

  The clip of him saying all that on GMA had gone instantly viral. Rico had whooped so loud and been so ecstatically smug, all Yash could do was laugh.

  “I know I sound like a stuck record, but only an act of God can drop your poll numbers now, mate,” Rico said, leaning back in the chair across from Yash in his office. Outside, his Fabulous Five were arguing about what the best part of his appearance on GMA was.

  An empty box of Bob’s Donuts sat between them. Another, smaller box sat in his bag. He’d ordered extra to take to India after. Yes, he was going to sugar and grease her up, or die trying. Knowing her, it would be the latter.

  As for the poll numbers, well, an act of love was an act of God, wasn’t it? The fact that breaking up with Naina was going to take over the news cycle and tank his numbers felt oddly insignificant. He had never wanted it to be part of the campaign in the first place.

  All he felt was relief. Finally he’d get to win or lose on his own, not on the basis of a lie. From everything he knew about politics, lose was the likely outcome. He didn’t care. He would do this the right way or not at all.

  “Anything else?” Rico asked.

  They’d driven straight to the office after flying back from L.A. and had spent all afternoon working on speeches for a spate of upcoming fundraising dinners. The Cruz campaign had become frustrated with Yash’s sensible gun-reform messaging and launched an attack from a not entirely unexpected quarter. The NRA was riling up the Blue Lives Matter crowd and spending a lot of dollars on targeted social media to spread disinformation about crime statistics that harmed the Black Lives Matter message. This wasn’t an issue Yash was going to pussyfoot around and let them get away with. Rico and he had been trying to come up with an out-of-the-box solution that stopped Cruz and the gun lobby in their tracks.