For months, I’d felt guilty for admiring his body when Nirvaan’s was failing. For taking pleasure in the musky, masculine scent of a healthy man when Nirvaan’s sickly, sweet smell would make me gag. I was not going to feel guilty anymore—not tonight, at least.
Zayaan came to bed, naked, at last. We aligned ourselves on our sides, heads on pillows, staring into each other’s eyes, as our hands roved and touched and mapped our bodies to memory.
The hair on his chest, armpits, and genitals was neatly trimmed, and I wondered briefly if it was hygiene or religion that had made him manscape. Whatever the reason, he looked clean and appetizing. I raked my nails across the ridges of muscle on his chest, making him hiss.
He grabbed my hand, tugging me on top of him. He pushed my hair off my face, not letting me hide anything from him. His hair-rough thigh slid between my smooth legs, and he anchored us together—mouth to mouth, chest to chest, groin to groin.
“Yes,” I hissed as my body hummed with excitement.
There was the passion he had been hell-bent on leashing. I wanted it unleashed. I wanted to be swept away in a tidal wave of pleasure. I wanted to be burned alive and be reborn.
I used my teeth down his chest, sank them into a hip blade. He reared up with a shout and grabbed my shoulders. Shrugging his hands off, I roused him to a fever with lips and teeth and tongue, dipping lower and lower. I was on a mission, and it wasn’t one of mercy. He flopped back with a groan when I took him in my mouth.
Zayaan was cut where Nirvaan wasn’t, long where Nirvaan was thick. They tasted the same—salt and tart and heat—yet I knew their differences. I would always know and revel in their differences, my twin knights. I stroked him, teasingly at first and then with purpose. Zayaan’s hands fisted in my hair a little too tight, and I welcomed the pain.
When you felt pain, it meant you were alive. I was learning the same about joy. I was giving life a chance.
I wasn’t numb tonight. I wasn’t dead or frozen or unfeeling. I was alive. In this bed. With this man. And as long as I was alive, Nirvaan’s baby would thrive inside me.
The tide turned, and Zayaan flipped me onto my back. Not a slick move. He wasn’t thinking now, and it made me smile. He explored every inch of my body, as if I were data to be studied, weighed, and consumed. It was my turn to groan and break into gooseflesh. Every part of me seemed to be connected to every part of him, every fiber, every follicle, every delectable taste bud.
“I want to see you. All of you.” Zayaan manacled my wrists in one hand and stretched them up over my head. His other hand hooked under my knee, and he pushed my leg wide open.
“Zai, please,” I begged. I was half-embarrassed, fully aroused when he stared at that part of me. I wanted him to touch me.
“Know your voice,” he said, using the same gruff inflection he reserved for poetry recitation. It took his, “Recognize you when you first come ’round the corner,” for me to realize he actually was reciting poetry. Rumi again.
I had no breath left to giggle.
His hand began to read me by braille. He licked between my breasts.
“Sense your scent when I come into a room you’ve just left.”
He shifted his body to kneel between my thighs. He picked up one foot and pressed soft kisses on it.
“Know the lift of your heel, the glide of your foot.”
I slid my other foot along the back of his thigh, his calf. I married our soles together.
“Become familiar with the way you purse your lips, then let them part, just the slightest bit, when I lean into your space and kiss you.”
He kissed me then. Khodai, did he kiss me.
I moaned into his mouth and wished…wished for so much. I arched into his hand, willing him to hurry up and join our bodies, but he tightened his hold on my hands until I lay flat again.
“I want to know the joy of how you whisper more.”
“Dear God, Zai. I can’t whisper more unless we finish the first round,” I groaned. I was at the end of my tether.
He snorted, but he released me.
Suddenly, I was a buoy bobbing in a sea of nerves with no anchor. And before I had time to grumble or tell him how much I wanted him, Zayaan rolled off me, and our eyes locked together.
We were sweating, both of us. Sex was a strenuous business and, if done right, not for the faint of heart. We were neither faint-hearted or out of shape. But we were cautious—at least, Zayaan was.
“I don’t have a condom.” He looked ready to bang his head against the wall.
My lips twitched. “You’re clean, disease-free. Healthy…obviously. I’m clean, healthy, and possibly pregnant. And if I’m not…” I left the rest hanging.
If the IVF failed like last time…
If I couldn’t hold Nirvaan’s baby inside me for whatever reason…
Zayaan didn’t look away from me. Not even when doubts and reservations sprang across his face again. I held my heart in my hands until, not ten seconds later, a mask of decision fell into place.
He covered me again, from head to foot, and slowly pushed into me. He was bare. I was ripe. If I wasn’t pregnant with Nirvaan’s baby already, there was a good chance I’d get pregnant with Zayaan’s. This was a commitment we were making to each other and to Nirvaan.
“I love you,” Zayaan whispered as he slid inside me to the hilt.
I started to say that I loved him, too, so, so much, but my gasp swallowed up my words.
It was indescribable when you experienced something you’d only dreamed about. It was overwhelming and life-changing. It was sudden and shocking, and it was over much too soon because it didn’t even take half a dozen strokes for us to explode in orgasm together.
“That’s not fair. It was too fast,” I cried the minute I caught my breath.
“Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened,” quipped Zayaan as he rolled off me, tucking me against his trembling chest.
“Rumi again?” I teased, secretly ecstatic he was quoting the love poet so much.
“Dr. Seuss,” Zayaan deadpanned before he dissolved into a fit of moronic laughter.
I smacked him on the chest and left him in bed with the giggles to wash up in the bathroom. I didn’t need to look in the mirror to know I was smiling like a fool, too.
But I looked because I had old ghosts to exorcise.
It was still dark even though a slit of pinkish predawn had ripped open the night.
I walked onto the deck for the first time since Nirvaan had sunk into a coma. The waves hailed me with gentle growls, and I greeted them back, breathed them in. The chilly ocean air tried to defeat me, but I stood my ground. I would not run away ever again.
Zayaan sat on the lounger, head bent in sajdah, probably adding Nirvaan and the baby to his daily dua. And me.
We’d made a commitment to each other last night, and I meant to keep my word. I wondered if he could, after all was said and done this morning.
I had to tell him of the rape. I didn’t want any secrets between us.
I frowned, pulling the blanket tight around me, to keep the shivers at bay. I hadn’t bothered dressing myself when I’d woken to find Zayaan gone. For a second, the snakes had come back disguised as panic, and I’d realized they hadn’t really gone away. They’d simply been sleeping.
I sensed more than saw his shoulders shake. He couldn’t be laughing, and Zayaan was never cold. I went to my knees before him and took his face between my hands.
Soundless streams of tears tracked his face.
“You were right to push me away. I would’ve dragged you down with me. I couldn’t save him…Rizvaan. He was not a nice man…but he was my brother…and I betrayed him. I failed to protect my family. I would’ve failed you, too…God help me, I would’ve destroyed your life. Look what I’ve done. He trusted me to care for him, and look what I’ve done. Oh God, Simi, look what I’ve done to Nirvaan. It’s my fault…my fault.”
I went with the instinct Ba had credited me
with. I pressed his face against my shoulder to stop the babbling and allowed him the release he so desperately needed.
For the first time, it struck me what Nirvaan had been about these last few months. I wasn’t the only one he’d been trying to fix in this house.
I realized something else, too. I was right to keep my secret all these years. I couldn’t tell Zayaan about Rizvaan. Not ever. Not under any circumstances. That night was my burden, and I had to carry it to my grave.
“It’s not your fault. Hush. You are not responsible for the choices your brother made. You are not responsible for Nirvaan’s condition. You—we did the best we could under very bad circumstances. Hush, sweetie. Please.”
It took him a long time to calm down. Time enough for me to set aside fear and remorse, degradation, disease and death. I gave love the reins and let it wander as it pleased.
Zayaan pulled me onto his lap. He molded my body to his, murmuring first shock and then appreciation as he grasped that I was stark naked under the blanket. He wanted me. Again. I smiled through my tears. Again.
Here, on this deck, I’d kissed my husband at sunrise and made impossible promises over sunsets. Here, we’d made little paper boats of our dreams and set them adrift on love’s vast shore. So, here, I turned in our lover’s arms and told him I loved him.
“Will you stay with us?” I asked, our mouths touching.
“Always and forever,” Zayaan promised with a kiss.
Here, in our house in Carmel, there was no right and wrong. It just was.
I wish I could tell you the Awesome Threesome rode off into the sunset on Jet Skis, raiding the high seas, brandishing scimitars and water pistols. That the rest of our lives were filled with laughter and love poetry like we’d imagined before we’d turned eighteen. Don’t get me wrong; some of it was. But a lot of it was sheer work and a continuous juggling act.
Making a marriage work between two people was hard. Making a ménage work where one partner was in a severely vegetative state and the other with no legal ties, save for a promise and a limited power of attorney, was beyond difficult.
There were days when I’d doubt my own shadow. Days when Zayaan and I’d fight as hard as we made love, scaring Beatrice to the point where she’d feel compelled to kidnap Nirvaan and visit a friend so that he wouldn’t have to hear us shout—correction, hear me screech. Zayaan didn’t shout. He held his tongue, schooled his expression, and rode out the storm.
I told him, in no uncertain terms, his mother was banned from our home forever. He was free to visit her in London as often and as long as he wished. I had no desire to come between mother and son, but I wouldn’t put up with her power games in my house. I had no wish to poison the son against his mother, but I had to draw a line. His sisters and their families were more than welcome, and that was the extent of my largesse toward the Khans.
I hated seeing Zayaan hurt or torn between his responsibilities, but I wasn’t a mouse anymore. And I needed all my strength to care for my husband.
Nirvaan’s health remained an ongoing battle and was not always uphill. When he slid down, the results were disastrous, and it shook us up. My world would tilt off its axis until Nirvaan was better again.
The Desais and my brothers were my bastions. Even Nisha ultimately decided that I wasn’t a leech—or not as big a one as she’d assumed. With them behind me, I could face the world and its myopic judgments. It wasn’t easy. Dear God, it wasn’t easy to ignore the sneers and the questions.
Zayaan bore the brunt there, too. He wasn’t my husband. He wasn’t our baby’s father, not legally and not in the eyes of the world, even if he was Daddy and Nirvaan was Papa. He bore it all for love, and I worshipped him for it.
Marjaneh didn’t disappear from my life like Sandwich Anu. She was Zayaan’s friend and a colleague and remained one whether I liked it or not. I got used to her. I hadn’t had a choice.
As for me, I learned to get along with Ahura Mazda. I came to believe He’d had a plan for me—for us—all along. He’d meant for us to be a unit—Nirvaan, Zayaan, and me. Why else had He brought us together on Dandi Beach on our birthdays? Why else would we feel incomplete without the other or compelled to rescue one another?
On the days I was being fanciful, I would weave a tale of a soul with three bodies who made one baby.
Yes, we had a daughter. A little angel with a smile as wicked as her Papa’s and eyes as enigmatic as her Daddy’s. She had my complexion and chestnut-brown hair but, thankfully, not my nose. Her every laugh, her very existence made our lives worthwhile and our choices sacred. She was our soul.
We named her Nirvi, after Nirvaan. But we called her Tickles, for love.
The End
A Book Club Guide is available at http://falgunikothari.com/my-last-love-story.php.
“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you,
a joy.”
—Rumi
First and foremost, I have to thank Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi for the wonderful words he gifted to this world. His words helped me through some of the roughest patches of writing this novel. There were tears. There was anger. There was sorrow. There was grief. And there were memories—new ones, old ones—all moving through my soul like a river of joy.
Thank you to my editors, Deb Nemeth and Jovana Shirley, for helping me make this beautiful book spotless. To Hang Le for the amazing covers. To the tireless teams of RockStar Lit and Read Out Loud Publishing, for your guidance and support in publishing.
The themes My Last Love Story touches on are about love, relationships, and internal strength. So, lastly, I thank all the people who give me that and more—always, every day, and in infinite ways. My family, my friends, and my readers, I am because we are.
With much love,
Falguni
Falguni Kothari is a New York–based hybrid author and an amateur Latin and ballroom dance silver medalist with a semi-professional background in Indian classical dance. She writes in a variety of genres sewn together by the colorful cultural threads of her South Asian heritage and expat experiences. When not writing, dancing, or being a domestic goddess, she fools around on all manner of social media and loves to connect with her readers. Her books are available worldwide.
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My Last Love Story Page 25
