Incense and Sensibility

by Sonali Dev

  The need to pull her close had been growing inside him ever since he’d seen her standing there at the edge of the trail, searching for him with her entire body. “It wasn’t guilt. It was a reminder of our connection. If I’d been reminded of it—”

  “You wouldn’t have been able to act like that night never happened.” Instead of pulling away, she scooted closer, as though the knowledge that he was going to do it again gripped her and she wanted to hold on.

  He touched her hair again, the silky thickness of her short strands soothing between his fingers. “When we sat here that night, I felt more like myself than I ever have.” Until he’d seen her again.

  She clutched his hand as it stroked her hair and pressed into it. Forgiveness. Which was so much more than he deserved.

  Then her hands were on his chest, pressing into the very center of it. Warmth flowed from them, easing him as shame threw open wounds he should have sought help for long ago, so he could be whole for her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “When I kissed you that evening, I was only thinking of how I felt. It was like all the world had turned magical. That’s how free, how bold you made me feel. I wish I had known that it would trigger something ugly for you. I should have asked. I shouldn’t have assumed.” She tried to pull away, but he clung on and she stayed.

  “Don’t say that. It was the best day of my life. That kiss was what I’ve needed to stay sane. It let me look in the mirror again and see someone who might be happy someday. It kept hope alive inside me when I couldn’t bear my own ugliness. But I wasn’t strong enough to believe it completely. Instead of dealing with the fear our time together dug up, I chose to run.”

  Fierce eyes locked on his, she climbed into his lap and wrapped her arms around him, not one whit of anger or judgment in her as she held him.

  He tried to keep his voice from thickening with relief and regret, but failed. “I was a coward, and now I’ve brought us both here.” Where the only future was pain.

  Her lips pressed against his neck and made him tremble.

  Love rose strong and hard inside him. He dropped a kiss on top of her head and caught the shiver it sent down her body.

  For a moment she stayed like that, absorbing his reactions the way he absorbed hers.

  At Nisha’s wedding, the first time she’d smiled at him, a sense of inevitability had taken root deep inside him. He’d known he was going to kiss her. It was a thought he’d never had before that, but it had been there from that first shy, curious smile.

  When he’d gone to her studio after the shooting and she’d run at Ashna with worried questions about him, that same sense of inevitability had nudged to life inside him. The inevitability that they’d have to touch, that they’d have to join. Two halves tugged together by a cohesive force that was bigger than them.

  Now here they were, lips inches from each other’s, and no power on earth was going to keep them from touching. No matter how much it hurt afterward.

  The full impact of what they were going to have to do—untangle from each other and walk away—hit them together, slowly, muscle by muscle.

  “I don’t want to understand,” she said, body stiffening, then softening again, emotions rolling and ebbing through her. “But I do. What have you done to me, Yash?”

  He pulled away just enough to drink in the beauty of her face.

  Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, eyelashes spiking in all directions.

  “Why?” he said. “How? How do you understand? What are you doing to me, India?”

  She opened her eyes, and anger flashed in the molten brown depths, more anger than he’d ever seen there, anger at herself, anger at him, anger at all the world.

  “These past weeks I’ve done everything in my power to silence my feelings for you just so I could go on. I never understood silencing your inner voice to make things bearable before, but I do now.” Her gaze hitched on his lips. She blinked as it struck her that it was what she was going to have to do for the rest of her life, silence how she felt. Because of his choices.

  It made that anger flare in her eyes again. “What were you planning to do about Naina once you became governor?”

  “Nothing. Go on the way we’d been going on for the past ten years. It’s not like you need to be married to do the job of running a state.”

  “So you never planned to marry?”

  “I never thought about it.”

  Now she was angry enough to pull away. She sprung up, and he felt like something had been ripped from him. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  He squatted in front of her and slipped her flip-flops onto her feet. They had stopped bleeding.

  “You plan everything. How could you not have thought about whether or not you planned to marry her?” She didn’t like feeling anger and he saw her struggle to shove it down.

  Her rising temper was fully justified. He didn’t know what to do with anger that felt this impotent either.

  Standing up, he came face-to-face with her again. “We never planned for it to go this far. Neither of us ever planned to marry.”

  Her gaze bored into him. She knew there was more, and she wasn’t letting him bypass it. Not now, not after he’d dug everything up.

  “But you’re right,” he said finally. “There is more to it. I told you I’m a mess when it comes to intimacy. I couldn’t separate intimacy from marriage, so I chose to avoid it entirely.” The irony of talking about fear of intimacy seconds after she’d been sitting in his lap wasn’t lost on him. Especially when he wanted nothing more than to pull her close again.

  “But it wasn’t a complete lie, was it? You were with her. You didn’t date other women. You Yudishtired it.”

  “You already know that’s true. But you’re trying to ask me something. Just ask me.”

  She jutted out her jaw, determined for answers she knew would hurt her. “Did you sleep with her?”

  “Yes. It was a few times, many years ago. It wasn’t . . . I’m not sure how to explain it.” He was too much of a coward to tell her he’d mostly blocked it out. He’d closed his eyes and waited for it to be over, even though it was Naina, someone he trusted.

  Something in his voice told her more than he could say, and what she heard made her step close to him again. Their two-step routine, chasing each other’s footsteps, unable to stay away.

  “You don’t have to say more,” she said gently. “I shouldn’t have pushed you. I don’t know what came over me. She’s a friend, you felt safe with her.”

  Stepping even closer, he pushed her hair behind her ear, then cupped her jaw, needing to fill his hands with her. “I thought I felt safe with her. Truth is, until I met you again, until Ashna brought me to see you, I had forgotten what feeling safe with someone felt like.”

  Her eyes met his, the impact of his words on her clear in them. “Yash . . .”

  “India . . .” Letting her go, he tugged his inner shirt out of his pants. “I told you about my scars. They aren’t just scars. It’s . . . they’re . . . they cover almost my entire torso.” He had to stop and breathe. “No one has ever seen me without a shirt after I recovered from the accident. I could never take my shirt off around Naina, not even when we had sex. No one’s seen me like this, not even in an inner shirt.” He hadn’t registered taking his shirt off when he saw her bleeding feet. And he didn’t care.

  “Even in the video with Julia I have my shirt on. I don’t remember any of it, but she had to have tried and I had to have stopped her. Even in my drugged state I couldn’t let it go.”

  He reached for the edge of his shirt, but his hands wouldn’t move to take it off.

  She wrapped her hands around his, strong gentle hands. The focus of his entire body shifted to her touch. “You have nothing to prove. I know how safe you feel with me. I feel it too.”

  He dropped his head again, their foreheads touching once more. “What if I need to show you? What if I need someone to see?”

  Her hands stroked his, tracin
g the knuckles, the tendons, then inched to the hem of his shirt, cool fingers skimming the hot skin at his waist. “Do you?”

  He shuddered, torturously hungry for her touch. “Please.” Just that one word.

  She slid her hands under his shirt and splayed them against his abdomen. Skin against skin. The relief was so great that bursts of light blurred his vision.

  A laugh escaped her. A laugh, of all things. “Yash Raje, is that a six-pack?” She was teasing him, now, in this moment when the pressure had felt like it might split him open.

  A laugh huffed out of him.

  “How has no one killed you for being so perfect?” She was looking up at him, eyes bright with wonder, hands trembling on his skin.

  “Someone tried,” he said against her mouth, because their lips were almost touching now.

  The smile slid off her lips. He felt it.

  “Too soon?” he asked.

  “Too dark,” she answered, sliding his shirt up and off his body.

  “Sorry.” He watched as she took him in. Something fevered flared in her eyes at the sight of his bare ruined body.

  He’d expected shock, even anger and pain for the trauma those scars made obvious, but it was her arousal that made him step into her and press his lips to hers.

  She sucked in a breath at the contact, then pulled away, only the slightest bit. “Yash . . .”

  “India?”

  “Let’s think about this for a minute.” But she pressed into him.

  “I feel safe with you,” he said. “I feel safe with you.” He pressed another barest of kisses against her mouth; nothing had ever felt so soft. “What if I don’t want to think about anything but that?”

  Pushing up on her toes, she returned his kiss with one of her own, as quick as his had been. Then another, this one lingering the slightest moment longer.

  Then him.

  Then her.

  A rhythm of touches, building, nudging aside all that was in their way, setting them aflame.

  The fire built as her hands traced his body. Up his torso, across his chest, caressing his body blanketed in puckered, gouged skin.

  She was touching his scars.

  His lips trembled against hers, the sensitivity of her fingers on him almost too much. Even the act of pulling clothes on and off still felt like something sharp dragging over raw nerves.

  “Does it hurt?” she said against his convulsing breath.

  He held her hand in place when she tried to remove it, pressing her smooth hand into his scarred skin. “No. It’s not pain exactly. Just heightened sensation. Sensitivity.”

  Her kiss was harder this time, fierce. “Is this pain something that’s never been treated because you’ve never told anyone?”

  The anger in her voice, the possessiveness, he fell into it, pushing into her kiss so hard and hungry that this time she gasped.

  Need exploded inside him. She opened her mouth and he was lost. His tongue dragged against hers. Lush, wet, yielding. Her hand slid over his shoulder, to his wrecked back, tracing the relentless rawness, digging up sensations he’d spent years pushing away. Her body melted into him. Heat against heat.

  Everything he’d ever buried, all the pain and soreness and shame and anger at being hit by a car, at being dragged across asphalt and gravel, skin wearing off bone. He relived it in bright, brutally clear flashes. Pressing into her, pushing into her, and she opened for him, took him in, and held him as he came apart in her arms. Bit by bit, wound by wound.

  When they separated, needing breath, it was like he’d never again know where he ended and she began. He was clutching her face. A drowning man. When he let go, pink streaks brightened her skin where his hands had been. He dropped kisses on them. She was still clinging to him too. Unable to let go.

  “Promise me you’ll see someone,” she whispered. “You’ll get help.”

  “I don’t need anyone but you.”

  She pulled away then, panic in her eyes, her mouth swollen and wet. The delicate scar at the bow of her lip white against her flushed skin. He caressed it. Unlike his, her scar was where she couldn’t hide it.

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t do this to me.”

  His only response was to reach for her again, fingers diving into her hair, hand shaping the back of her head, where her hair tapered into her neck. He pulled her to him. Their faces touching. Their entire bodies touching.

  “How will I leave you if you do this? If you don’t take care of yourself? How will I let you go?”

  Just like that, he knew he had been wrong. He couldn’t do it. “You won’t. You can’t. Not because I won’t take care of myself. I will. I promise. But because I can’t. I can’t go back there.”

  The push and pull of her body, leaning into him even as she tugged away, tightened her muscles, twisted her. “You can. You have to. Back there is where all your hopes and dreams are. You may feel safe with me, but everything you hold dear isn’t. I wish we hadn’t met. I wish . . .”

  She wanted him to agree with that. Her eyes were begging him to tell her she was right. He couldn’t.

  “Everything would have worked out,” she pushed. “If we hadn’t met again, everything would have turned out okay.”

  “Only if you define okay as not living. Meeting you again was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. All I’ve ever wanted was to live honestly, to make everything I say and do matter. But I was lying to myself, I wasn’t feeling anything.” He grabbed her hand and pressed it against his chest, where his heart thumped under jagged skin. Already the sensations were softer, her touch soothing them the way nothing ever had. Even the pain somehow less, just for being acknowledged.

  “Don’t,” she said, “please.” As though that were the only defense she had left.

  “I had pushed myself inside a box so I didn’t have to deal with myself. So I could be the person everyone saw in me. You let me out. I’m not afraid of myself anymore, because someone like you can love me. Because of how you see me, inside and outside that box. How can I let that go? How can I go back inside that box?”

  Her hand caressed his chest, unable to pull away. “We have no choice, Yash.”

  “Do you really think we can let each other go? Now?” How strong did she think they were?

  As though she heard his thoughts, she pulled away, stepping back and putting several feet between them. The cuts on her feet made her wince. “How can you think we have a choice? If you lose the election, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  He tried to get close again, but she held out her arm to stop him.

  “I should be the one to decide whether or not I put my ambitions in jeopardy. That should be my choice.”

  “But it’s my life. The last time around you made that choice without me. I was left questioning my feelings. My judgement of men and relationships.” She pressed her hands into her own chest. They were trembling. “I’ve always been proud of being connected to my inner voice. But I learned to mute it and I didn’t even know it. Now you want me to do that again.”

  “No, I don’t. I want you to listen to it this time. I want you to be true to what we’re feeling.”

  “You’re missing the point. You want me to mute the voice that is telling me that I will destroy your dreams. How will I live with myself? If I crush your family’s dreams, crush the hopes of all the people who’ve put their faith in you. Abdul almost died!”

  Didn’t she think he knew that? He’d sat here all evening reliving his conversation with Abdul and Arzu. Until he’d seen her again, seen her bleeding feet, until he’d felt her hands on his scars, until he’d kissed her, he’d thought he could walk away. But there had to be another way. “We don’t know that I will lose if we’re together. We’ll tell the truth and let people decide.”

  She didn’t react. Her face was set, a stubborn mask. “If you tell people that you lied about your relationship with Naina—to the world, to your family—your integrity will be destroyed. Everything you’ve ever said or d
one will be questioned as a lie.”

  “We don’t have to tell anyone it was a lie. We’ll just announce a breakup. Half the marriages in our country end in divorce. We’re not even married.”

  “If you break up with her now, after she sobbed over your fallen body, after she took on Cruz’s attacks for you, after the big deal the media has made about your unconventional love story, your credibility will still be destroyed. The media won’t buy ‘we grew apart,’ not now so close to the election. The speculation will take the focus off your issues, it will taint you. They’ll go on a witch hunt. Start digging for reasons why you broke up.” New horror creased her forehead. “Once the media circus starts, Julia might come back. If she claims you forced her to sleep with you when she was your intern, no one will believe you. Not just this election but your political career will be over.”

  “So we’ll wait until after the election. We’ll leave everything as it is until then.” Even as he said the words he knew he’d made a mistake.

  Her eyes dimmed with sadness and she stepped away from him. “So you’ll make the lie worse? You’ll be with me in private and pretend to be with Naina in public? You’ll start something you’ve been dreaming about most of your life with a deception this calculated? We’ll start our relationship with a lie? That’s not who I am, Yash.” She stepped close to him again and reached out but couldn’t touch him. “I might love you in ways that make me feel completely out of control, but I don’t have the hubris to believe that our love can survive that. No love can. You know what I’m saying is true.”

  “India. Please. Please don’t do this. Let’s at least talk about this.” Don’t leave me.

  “You wanted me to fight for you. This is me fighting for you. I’m the only thing standing between you and everything you’ve ever wanted. The only answer is for me to step out of the way.” She picked her phone up from the rock and dialed.

  “What are you doing?” Yash asked.