by Sonali Dev
He walked up to her, careful to keep his stride lazy. He reached out and touched her tears. Her cheek was velvet beneath his fingers. “If you’re upset I’ll put it away. You don’t have to eat it.”
She sniffed and tried to glare at him through the flood. “Don’t you dare!”
He pushed her into a chair and waited for her to say something about the new furniture, but she was too mesmerized by the food. He had wondered if he was going too far with the dinette set, but he had seen it at the huge grocery store that seemed to carry everything from milk to construction tools and he hadn’t been able to help himself. He was tired of eating on the floor. Plus, he’d seen her rub her ankle when she sat cross-legged on the floor and he knew it hurt. He had almost bought the matching rattan couch too. But something told him that even with this tiny table and two chairs he had a fight on his hands. Except that until she was done eating she wouldn’t be fighting any battles.
Somewhere between her fluttering eyelashes and blissfully raised eyebrows, somewhere between the sensuous working of her jaw and the insanely satisfied smile, it struck him. “You’re not going to the wedding because you don’t have any way to get there.” How had he not figured it out sooner?
She stopped eating and he regretted not waiting until she was done. “That’s not the only reason.”
“But that’s the main reason?”
She shrugged. Fortunately she went back to eating.
“Let me drive you. Your Panjab’s favorite son invited me, so I’m on the guest list too.”
“Thanks, Samir. But I can’t.” She didn’t look surprised that he had offered to take her and it made him absurdly happy. “You’re already doing too much. All that picking up, dropping off”—she waved a spoonful of potatoes around—“all the cooking. You’re spoiling me.” She gave the potatoes a caressing glance and popped them in her mouth.
She might’ve thanked him again, but he didn’t hear one word because she was in the throes of whatever those potatoes did to her and his mind took off to places it definitely had no business going.
Suddenly she stopped and put the spoon down. “And the furniture.” She caressed the white tablecloth with her forefinger. “We have to take it back. I can’t afford it.”
He opened his mouth but she shook her head. “No, Samir, I can’t take this from you.”
He tried to swallow, but couldn’t quite manage. “Not even as a thank-you for letting me write here? Thanks to you, I’m almost done with my script.” Although thanks to her he’d practically had to write the damn thing twice.
She grinned widely. “Is it really almost done?”
He nodded and she picked up the spoon again and dipped it in the dal. “That’s wonderful. But the dining table has got to go, and forget the wedding. This”—she pointed at the dal with her spoon—“this is the way to thank me.” She scooped some of the yellow liquid into her mouth and licked her spoon with such feeling Little Sam gave up on decency and reared to life. And Samir knew he could no longer talk himself out of the crazy plan that had been brewing in his head all day.
13
When Samir picked Mili up outside Pierce Hall she looked ready to drop dead with exhaustion. She sank into the car seat and held her hand cautiously across her belly the way she always did when it hurt. He handed her a pill and a bottle of water and even the grateful look she threw him didn’t have its usual fierceness. Good. He hated that look with a vengeance. Before they were out of the parking lot, her eyelids started to droop shut.
The moment he drove past their street, she sat bolt upright. “Samir, you missed our turn.” Of course he was a fool to think it could’ve been that easy.
“Did I? I’ll take the next one.”
She narrowed those tired eyes. “There is no next one. You need to make a U-turn.”
“Okay, we’ll make one. No worries.” He patted her knee and tried his best smoldering smile.
She rolled her eyes. “What are you doing, Samir?” she asked as if he were a child about to eat his fifth cookie.
“I’m driving a car.”
“But where are you driving your car to?” More of that enunciation.
“We are going on a little trip.”
“I don’t want to go on a trip. I want to go home. Turn the car around. Now.”
“Sure. I’ll turn it around and take you right home on Sunday.”
“This is insanity, Samir. It’s illegal. It’s called kidnapping. You could be arrested. The laws in this country are very strict.” She sounded like she was threatening a three-year-old. Nevertheless, he shouldn’t have smiled, because she jumped straight from annoyed enough to scold him to livid enough to poke his eyes out.
She twisted around and started searching for something. “Let me see your phone.” She shoved her hand under his nose.
He laughed. He threw his head back and laughed louder than he’d laughed in a very long time. How could he not? “Wait three hours. I’m sure Ridhi will be happy to let you see her phone and have me arrested.”
Instead of a response she gave him her back. Okay, so he didn’t have to be a genius to know she was furious. But she was also touched and grateful. She just didn’t know it yet. Her pert little nose went up in the air and she wrapped her arms around herself. But her bravado didn’t stand up to her exhaustion and within ten minutes of silent fuming she was fast asleep, the wet spikes of her lashes splayed across her velvet cheeks, ribbons of hair cascading from her ponytail.
He tried not to focus on the warmth the sight of her suffused in his chest, not to mention other parts of him. But the only other thing to focus on was the open road and the endless fields and the roaring vacuum it blasted open in the pit of his stomach. Here he was again, driving through his oldest nightmares, the wind blowing open those stubborn ancient wounds. And the only thing that made the restlessness recede was the woman who believed she was married to his brother huddled next to him with those damned wet cheeks. Trusting him enough to be fast asleep in his car even when she was furious at him.
Earning her trust had been disturbingly easy. Not that he had ever had trouble getting women to trust him. Even when he wished women mistrusted him, they chose not to. But it had never bothered him before. Never made him wonder how a woman would survive after he’d moved on. And every woman had survived just fine.
Only Mili was unlike any woman he’d ever met.
An intense urge to turn around and look at her overwhelmed him. He kept his eyes on the road. But he didn’t have to turn around. His mind saw her with high-definition clarity. One long spiral curl sprang free from her ponytail and skimmed her mocha skin still tinted pink with the remnants of anger, those high cheeks a barometer of her endless wellspring of emotion. He gripped the steering wheel tighter. Not because the desire to tuck that errant strand behind her ear was unbearably strong but because a bizarre impatience clawed at his insides. A red barn danced in the distance across a cornfield. The bottomlessness that had made him rise screaming from his nightmares blew open in his chest and cut off his breath.
The welts on his back burned. Fire and tar. The smell of his own blood charred his nostrils, mixing with the smell of coal and wheat husk. The storeroom was darker than the coal. Darker than the well.
“Hold on, beta, I’m right here.” Baiji’s voice was as wet as his back. He lifted his head off the cement floor and reached for it. His fingers searching for the soft muslin of her sari. But there was only the dusty air. And her voice. And Bhai’s.
“Chintu? Chintu, come on, champ, wake up. If you get to the window, I can pull you out.”
But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t feel his legs.
“There’s snow everywhere,” he said. “I can’t stand in the snow, it burns, Bhai. Bhai?” His voice rose. His terror tearing through the silence.
“Shh. My precious boy, shh.” Baiji’s voice. “We’ll get you out. It’s over. No more. We’re going to the city, we’re going away. Just you, me, and Bhai. Just stand up one last time
. Just this one time.”
His back tore, but he pushed off the icy cement. Pushed.
His eyes were puffed shut from tears. He pried them open.
Bhai’s shadowy form stuck up from the window. Just his head wrapped in gray sky.
“Are you flying?” he asked, almost smiling. Bhai could fly, Bhai could do anything.
He tried to crawl to the window but his hands slipped on the slickness that dripped down his arms.
“Chintu, come on, champ, you’re strong. I know you are. I’m standing on Baiji’s shoulders. You know how heavy I am. Come on.”
His back disappeared. Dadaji’s belt disappeared. Everything disappeared but Bhai’s voice and the need to get to Baiji.
Bhai grabbed his hands, and pulled him over. Baiji’s sari was in his hands, pressed against his cheeks, twisting between his fingers.
Mili shifted and a blast of wind caught her ponytail. Her hair slapped against the headrest and wrapped around it like ropes. He reached over and set it free. The silk tangled about his fingers. He clutched it, squeezed it. The fist around his throat eased. The slamming in his chest eased. He sucked in a breath, let it fill his lungs, and rammed his foot into the accelerator.
Waking up in a speeding car was the strangest feeling. As if you had been flying in a dream and then you continued to fly after you woke up even though you didn’t know how.
“ ’Morning,” Samir said, his warm honey eyes sparkling brighter than the sun slipping into the horizon behind him, setting his gold-flecked hair ablaze. The familiar possessiveness in his voice sent a thrill down her spine before she could stop it and that made all her anger come raging back. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned away from him.
He swung the car into an exit at full speed and entered the parking lot in his signature screeching-tires fashion. Mili was proud of herself for not grabbing the dashboard or showing any sign of how much his driving acrobatics terrified her.
“Maybe a little coffee will improve memsaab’s mood?” He walked around the car and held her door open.
She got out. What kind of man didn’t realize that she was perfectly capable of opening her own car door? She stepped around him, her stupid ankle sending a jolt of pain through her from having been in the same position too long. Fortunately she didn’t stumble. She just stuck her chin up and started walking, ignoring the pain and refusing to limp.
The sky had started to darken, but the building was lit as if it were Diwali, the festival of lights. One glance around the parking lot told her that the yellow convertible was the only car there. She looked over her shoulder to make sure he was close by.
He placed a hand on her elbow. And something about the gentle, possessive way in which he touched her made her yank her arm away.
“So it’s going to be the silent treatment, I see.” He stepped past her and held the heavy glass door open, not a bit of remorse on his smug face.
How could he be so completely unaffected by how she felt, by how much she hated what he had done? “You don’t see anything. You see only what you want to see. You do only what you want to do. You don’t care what anyone else wants. It’s called being a bully, a big, selfish, pigheaded bully.”
Without waiting for a response she stormed to the ladies’ room. Or at least she wanted to storm. What she managed was a pathetic hobble. Once inside the bathroom, she leaned against the wall and bent over to squeeze her ankle. She had to bite down on her lip to keep from crying out. The stupid thing throbbed but it didn’t hurt badly enough to warrant tears. One huge drop of moisture clung to the end of her nose and dripped to the floor in front of her.
She squeezed her nose the entire time that she used the toilet and then scrubbed her face with soap and water. Her ponytail was beyond salvaging, so she yanked off the band and pulled the tangled mass into a bun at her nape, shoving the stubborn curls that popped free in place, and waited for the tears to stop.
When she stepped back out, Samir was leaning against a wall across from the ladies’ room, one knee bent and resting on the roughened bricks behind him. His heavy burnt-gold hair shone under the fluorescent lights. An unfamiliar flash of raw pain and exhaustion flared in his honey-brown eyes when he looked up at her. But he blinked it away before pushing himself off the wall and walking toward her.
“Quite a temper you’ve got there,” he said, searching her face in that way that made her want to look away. And it brought the anger back full force.
She headed toward the exit without responding.
“Slow down, Mili. You’re limping.” He grasped her arm. The same possessive familiarity of his gaze heated his touch.
She pulled her arm away and kept walking.
“Mili, seriously, you can’t possibly be such a hypocrite. You know how badly you wanted to go to the wedding. How can you be this mad at me for helping you?”
“Helping me? You’ve known me, what, all of three weeks? What makes you an expert on what I want? How dare you call me a hypocrite, you . . . you . . . arrogant donkey!”
He looked startled. His mouth quirked. She wanted to dig her nails into those shoulders of his and shake him until his perfect white teeth rattled. She opened her own car door and sank into the seat.
“So, you’re saying you truly were not dying to go to Ridhi’s wedding?”
“For someone who thinks he knows what I want, can’t you figure out I don’t want to talk to you? Leave me alone.”
His lips quirked some more as he turned the key in the ignition. “So you aren’t going to answer the real question?”
Why would she? She didn’t owe the big, kidnapping bully answers.
Not that she had an answer. Her opinion about weddings, about marriage in general, was getting more and more turbulent by the day. And it made her so angry, so incredibly sad, she felt like she couldn’t go on. Stupid wetness pushed at her eyelids, and her nose, her stupid nose started dripping. If she stayed very silent, maybe he wouldn’t notice she was crying.
“Mili?” She hated the tenderness in his voice. He made one of his racetrack maneuvers and pulled into another spot instead of leaving the parking lot. “Are you crying?”
“No, it’s raining, but only on my face.”
Again that quirking of the lips. She glared at him, daring him to laugh at her.
“I thought Ridhi was your best friend. I’m sorry. Listen, we’ll turn around.” He killed the engine and turned around to face her.
She swiped her cheeks with her wrists. “Ridhi’s not my best friend, you . . . you . . . idiot, she’s the sister I never had. Here in this foreign country she’s been my family.”
“In that case, we really shouldn’t go to her wedding.”
She smacked him hard on his shoulder. “You think you are so funny, don’t you?”
“I’m the one being funny?” He looked so incredulous that if she weren’t so livid she’d smile.
“Of course I’d give anything to go. But I can’t go to a wedding like this. And you can’t just kidnap me and whisk me off somewhere without asking me what I want. I am not a child. I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt. You can’t show up at a wedding with nothing to wear, with nothing to give the bride. I don’t even have a toothbrush. And I have the world’s worst morning breath.”
He threw his head back and laughed. He had been doing that a lot lately. “Well, I kind of knew that. So I packed your toothbrush.”
“You packed my toothbrush?” Mili couldn’t remember the last time she had been so angry with someone. “How dare you? You dug through my private things? Who do you think you are?” She pushed the door open. She needed to get out of the car.
He jumped out of the car, ran around to her side and squatted in front of her. His arm rested on the car door, making his biceps bulge a foot from her face. He shone one of his intense looks into her eyes. “Hey, Mili, I didn’t go through your things. I would never do that. I found your bag packed and sitting in your living room when I went in there to write. And your brush was sitting ri
ght there on your sink.”
Her stupid nose started running again. After last night’s conversation, she had wanted to go so badly she had decided to take him up on his offer and packed. Then she’d realized how stupid she was being. But she’d forgotten about the bag.
“I saw the bag. That’s how I knew how much you wanted to go.”
“And you thought it was okay to make that decision for me? To do my thinking for me? Just because you took care of me doesn’t give you the right to control me, Samir.”
He was leaning too close to her now. She pushed him away. He didn’t budge. “Control you? What are you talking about? I’ve never seen you this angry. What is your problem, Mili?”
“Let me think. Oh yes, maybe being kidnapped is my problem. Maybe being treated like your private property is my problem. Maybe not being allowed to make my own choices is my problem.” Her voice cracked and the frown between his brows deepened.
“The only reason I did this is because I thought it was what you wanted. I never meant to take away your choices. This was about what you wanted. Cross my heart.” But he crossed her heart instead. One tentative finger traced a cross exactly where her heart suddenly and inexplicably started thudding out a frantic rhythm. He trailed the finger to her chin and lifted it up so she stared into his golden eyes. “Do you really want to go home?”
Now she felt even more stupid. Very warm all over and very stupid. And very embarrassed. He had tried to do something nice and she had thrown the biggest tantrum of her life. She wished he would just stop trying to pay her back for his precious script. She wished she didn’t see in his eyes what she saw.
