Recipe for Persuasion

by Sonali Dev

  At this point Ashna’s ears started ringing so loudly that she had to focus hard on what people were saying because she could barely hear them.

  “This was a terrible idea. What the hell was I thinking?” she whispered as she walked across her kitchen to where Jonah had found her stash of bitter melons. Please don’t touch those, she was about to say, but he bounced away and managed to find a chopping board and placed it on the prep counter.

  Nisha stroked Ashna’s back. “You’re going to do great. This celebrity person is lucky to have you.” She tucked the lock of hair that always came loose from Ashna’s bun behind her ear again.

  Jonah opened and shut a few drawers, then pulled out the biggest meat cleaver from Ashna’s knife drawer. That thing could sever a lamb shoulder as though it were butter and he was handling it like it was a toy.

  “This should work for your . . .” He threw a baffled look at the vegetable. “Odd-looking cucumbers.”

  If Ashna weren’t fighting off rampaging panic, she would have smiled. “They’re bitter melons.” She had no idea where that very-uppity-chef-like tone had come from, because that was not her at all. “You want me to chop vegetables with a meat cleaver? Are you sure you work for the Food Network?” Ashna took the cleaver from him with the care it deserved.

  To his credit, Jonah looked sheepish. “I just started last week. I was with National Geographic before that.”

  Ashna didn’t know what to do with that information so she walked to the knife drawer and switched the cleaver out for her biggest santoku.

  “That one’s impressive too. It’ll work!” Jonah said.

  Glad you approve, Ashna wanted to say, but panic and snark weren’t mixing inside her today. “It’s a Misono santoku,” she said instead.

  These knives were Baba’s prized possessions.

  The smooth wood of the handle filled her hand and brought her back to this moment. She was doing something different this time. Not repeating the same thing and expecting different results. Given how much people loved tossing out that advice, it had to work. The blade caught the gleam of the camera lights.

  “Go ahead and get started on the chopping here, and he will walk in through there.” Jonah waved his hands and positioned Ashna where he wanted her. Then he started to arrange things on the countertop so the camera picked them up.

  Okay, so the celebrity was a he. That meant no grandma. Ugh.

  “She will be fine,” Trisha said, pushing Jonah away from Ashna so he wasn’t crowding her.

  Ashna pulled a breath all the way to the center of her, the way India, her yoga instructor and Northern California’s foremost stress management therapist, had taught her. India was China’s big sister and Ashna needed to go see her right now.

  Jonah herded Trisha and Nisha to the other side of the room. Then he pressed his finger into his earpiece in a gesture so theatrical that, of all things, that’s what made Ashna smile.

  For the first time that day she relaxed. Shifting her focus to the familiar motion of the knife, she started slicing the bitter melon into slivers.

  “Okay, and we’re rolling,” Jonah said. “Just remember to be yourself. Don’t worry about the cameras.” Which was not something you ever said when you didn’t want someone to worry about cameras.

  He turned to the door, and with no more warning than that it flew open.

  Time did a backflip.

  For the longest breath the world around Ashna disappeared. Then it slammed back into her chest and all the oxygen left the room.

  A vise clamped around Ashna’s lungs. Cold sweat broke across her forehead. She raised her elbow to wipe it. The knife’s blade gleamed at the edge of her vision, and the heavy wooden handle started to slide from her hand. She tightened her grip.

  Breathe.

  The man, at once broad and limber, strolled toward her, his stride lazy. As lazy and graceful as it had ever been. Reflective sunglasses covered his eyes, completely obscuring them. Dark hair was pulled back from his face in a bun. Thick, perfectly trimmed stubble highlighted the sharp lines of his jaw. How she even recognized him she had no idea. He looked entirely different, yet so familiar that the vise tightened around her lungs.

  Her elbow was still pressed into her forehead. Frozen there.

  He stuck out his hand, that too-wide, too-finely-etched mouth pressed tightly together, his tell that things weren’t as boring as his body language suggested.

  The knife slipped from Ashna’s grip.

  Screams erupted around them. The blade flashed in the lights as it fell, pointed tip down, toward Ashna’s sandal-clad feet.

  A ball spun across the air, slicing through years in an instant. A hand reached out to catch it. The hand closed around the handle, missing the blade by a breath just as the tip scratched the leather of her sandal. Without touching her skin.

  He was on his knees at her feet, knife held in one hand like a ninja. His sunglasses had gone flying as he leaped. Breath panted from his mouth—the only sound Ashna could hear—as golden eyes met hers, the green flecks on fire. They were still edged in thick spiky lashes, still one slightly smaller than the other, still stunning enough to steal her breath.

  “You okay?” The voice floated up across the years. A thunderclap of emotions spun those years into a tornado around them. Ashna fell to her knees in front of him, almost grabbed his face the way she had done the first time she kissed him.

  Pain flooded his eyes, yanking her back to her kitchen, to the clang of the knife on the floor next to them. To the pandemonium of voices asking—demanding—to know how he was . . . how she was . . . what the hell had just happened? But the pain in his eyes—

  “You’re in pain,” she said, springing to her feet and grabbing his arm. “Someone help him up. He’s hurt himself.” His eyes squeezed shut as Jonah grabbed his other arm, and together they helped him up, but he couldn’t straighten his leg. Obviously couldn’t put weight on it.

  “Someone call 911,” she shouted, then remembered that Trisha was a doctor. “Trisha! Where’s Trisha? Someone get Trisha—”

  “Relax,” he said, steadying her with those kaleidoscope eyes. “Breathe.”

  “I’m here.” Trisha squatted down in front of him and reached for his leg. “I’m a doctor. Hi. Dr. Trisha Raje. May I?”

  He nodded at Trisha, then threw a quick look at Ashna again, which didn’t help her breathe at all. “I’m fine. I just landed on my stitches.”

  Ashna’s heart spasmed.

  From across the kitchen Nisha mouthed, What the hell was that?

  “I’m going to have to cut that. The pant, not the leg.” How could Trisha joke right now? But he smiled.

  Ashna handed her a pair of shears. Trisha cut the fabric, exposing one massively muscled calf. He’d always had the most beautiful legs. The most beautiful body. The most beautiful—

  His knee was swelling so fast it looked like it might burst. A fleshy pink scar edged in angry red staple marks stretched at its seams. In his eyes was pure agony.

  Trisha pushed the denim out of the way and examined the knee. “We need to get you to the ER. There’s internal bleeding. They’ll have to drain it,” she said as though talking about scooping seeds out of bitter melon. “That was spectacular, by the way. I think you saved Ashna’s toes.”

  “Pleasure?” he said in that way he’d always had of turning everything into a question.

  I love you?

  Who made words like that sound like a question?

  “I am so sorry,” she said, her voice shaking despite her best effort, everything inside her shaking.

  “No apology necessary,” he said. Then his voice tipped suddenly low and cold. “Not for this.”

  Just like that he was a stranger again, a stranger who had just slid across her kitchen floor on his hurt knee.

  The way his gaze touched hers was the opposite of his voice. In his eyes was every bit of the knowing they had shared.

  Ashna stepped away from him. Suddenly she was s
haking for a whole different reason. He was wrong; this was the only thing he deserved an apology for. Every other apology was his to give. Not that all the apologies in the world would change anything.

  “The ambulance is here,” Jonah shouted across the kitchen.

  Paramedics wheeled a gurney into the kitchen and helped him onto it. They threw out a string of questions about what had happened, his pain level, the kind of surgery. He answered patiently, his lips barely moving because his jaw was clenched in pain.

  Trisha supplied medical-sounding words that turned distorted at the edges in Ashna’s ears. The room floated as though she were underwater watching it undulate.

  “It’s a good thing we’re barely a mile from Stanford Hospital. They should have you fixed and good to go before it gets worse,” Trisha said.

  At this point his knee resembled a small melon, a very angry melon with a scar that looked ready to rip open. But the initial blast of agony was gone from his eyes. It had to have taken an insane effort, but he had himself well under control.

  Ashna’s hand tightened on the stainless-steel countertop. She wanted to step closer to the gurney and ease the pain he thought he was hiding. The thought made her livid at herself.

  His eyes searched for something. Her gaze followed his to the floor and found his sunglasses wedged under a cabinet. Picking up the aviators, she handed them to him, careful not to let their fingers touch, even as he avoided touching hers.

  In one quick motion he covered his eyes, and the mix of steady green and volatile gold disappeared behind the reflective blue.

  When they started to roll him away, Ashna tried to follow, but the front of her sandal slid off her foot and hung from it like a dog’s tongue. The strap had been sliced almost right through, and the last bit of leather holding it together came apart. If his reflexes hadn’t been what they were, she might have had a few toes missing right now.

  Then again, if his reflexes hadn’t been what they were, her life would not have taken the turn it had all those years ago.

  Ashna watched them wheel the gurney out. The rest of the crew, and her cousins, followed. Only Jonah stayed back, fluttering around the kitchen looking strangely excited. Then he followed too.

  He was almost out the door when he stopped, slapped a hand to his forehead, and turned to Ashna. “Shit, he never got a chance to introduce himself. That was Frederico Silva, the legendary striker for Manchester United.”

  Car engines fired in the parking lot. A single siren blast rang through the air, then dropped into silence. Jonah ran out the door.

  Ashna sank to the floor, shrinking back into the cabinets and under the countertops. “I know,” she whispered into her suddenly empty kitchen. “I know exactly who he is.”

  Chapter Seven

  What are you hiding from?” It was a strange question coming from someone you didn’t know. Too intimate for a first conversation, especially if you were huddled under bleachers. So intimate, in fact, that a person couldn’t be blamed for losing her heart to it.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t those words that stole Ashna’s heart. Maybe it was the strangely shaped eyes, one slightly smaller than the other, and the utter lack of feeling in them as he said those words. A question so personal with not a flicker of anything.

  Nothing.

  Ashna watched eyes. Studied them. As Green Brook High’s star goalkeeper, scanning eyes and body language across the pitch was what she did. A goal took seed long before the ball hit the net, stretching it back against its knots. Or in her case, before her gloved hands slapped around the ball before it got near that sacred net. This season alone she had prevented forty goals.

  His eyes held nothing.

  Whose eyes held nothing?

  Whose clear—what color were his eyes? She couldn’t tell in the shadows—held nothing? At first she thought they looked almost black, like her own. Then she scooted out from her crouch under the bleachers and he straightened up, and the beam of stadium lights fell across his face. Emeralds glinted in the shadows.

  There was this stained-glass window in the Sagar Mahal, the Sripore palace that had been Ashna’s home until she was ten, all in shades of green. Glass chips from the palest jade to the deepest moss and everything in between. Gold filigree edged each piece. At night the glass pieces seemed lifeless. In the day, the sun infused them with light, turning them into gemstones so luminous Ashna could stare at them for hours, mesmerized.

  “Hello?” He waved his hand in front of her face. “Did you have a seizure or something? Are you OD-ing?”

  “OD-ing?” Yes, that was the first word she ever said to him. In the two and a half years that followed—the best years of her life—he would insist it’s what swept him off his feet. That absurd word, said with enough incredulousness to cover all the questions she’d had at the sight of the first person who had found her in a hiding place she’d counted on for a year and a half without being found.

  The real miracle was that she had never doubted that she really had done that. Swept the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen off his feet. How could she have doubted it, when the air became saturated with sensation every time they got near each other? The earth softened beneath her feet when he laughed. Eyes that had seemed lifeless until that laugh filled them with light, Fourth of July fireworks over the bay.

  “I’m not hiding,” she said with all the indignation of a liar. Then, just to prove it, she stepped out from under the bleachers, dusting off her soccer shorts and jersey.

  It was safe now anyway. Her teammates were gone. She usually hid until they left, so she didn’t have to go through the entire song and dance of why she couldn’t go out with them on a Friday night after practice.

  She had to get back to Baba. Fridays were hard on him. Curried Dreams stayed open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, so she went to Palo Alto to help.

  It’s not like she couldn’t tell her teammates this, but she didn’t want to. No one needed to know anything about her family. She liked having her life divided neatly into airtight compartments, nice and tidy. No one in her family knew that she had gone back to playing soccer either. It wasn’t a small thing to hide, playing a varsity sport, but Trisha had graduated early, and Vansh was at boarding school, so Ashna was the only Raje at the high school, which had worked out perfectly when, as a freshman, she had rediscovered the sport by accident.

  When she’d lived in Sripore, it hadn’t been a choice. Mamma’s life revolved around getting girls to play sports, so naturally her daughter had to play. Ashna didn’t let the pop of sadness drag her down. The days of her mother caring about what Ashna did were long gone. When Baba moved her here, he and everyone else in the family seemed to forget that she’d had a life before that. It was as though that twenty-hour flight erased her life in Sripore.

  In freshman year, Ashna had found herself at the tryouts. She had no idea why she’d gone, because she hadn’t allowed herself to miss it. When she made the team, the idea of telling anyone didn’t even enter her mind. Baba wouldn’t have come to her games anyway. He’d gotten so big in the past few years that he was having a harder and harder time getting in the car. Driving out to the Anchorage once every few months to see his mother was the only time he left home and the restaurant. She didn’t want Mina Kaki and HRH coming to games and making a big deal out of it. As for Shobi, it was out of the question. Ashna did not need to give her parents another reason to fight.

  Exactly when the secret started to feel good, Ashna had no idea, but having something all her own had felt great. One less thing in which her success or failure was naked in front of everyone. Her cousins were her best friends, but she couldn’t even tell them. The lie had become comforting in a way she couldn’t explain.

  “Are you sure?” the beautiful boy said, meeting Ashna’s eyes more directly than anyone at school ever looked at one another. There was something adult, unafraid, something deeply confident about the way he met her eyes, as though he didn’t know how not to see her.<
br />
  “Yes, I’m sure I’m not OD-ing on anything, but thanks for asking.”

  His mouth twisted. He had a mouth like the models in the perfume ads from Nisha’s glossy magazines. A wide, lush mouth made for hinting at a smile by the slightest pulling up at the edges. He said nothing more, just waited for her to answer the question he’d really been asking, the one she had deflected so clumsily.

  “I’m hiding from the girls on my team.” Hearing the words pop out of her mouth surprised her so much she blinked up at him.

  A frown folded between brows that were thick and arched. “Your teammates are not nice to you?” He had an accent of some sort. Something South American or European, she couldn’t decipher what kind exactly, but it explained how he looked. Boys in Woodside didn’t look like this, sun-kissed in the way of glossy magazine models.

  “No, they’re very nice to me.”

  “You hide from people who are nice to you, then?” He even cocked his head with an accent. Something about that made her want to laugh out loud.

  “Every single thing you’ve said to me has been a question,” she said needlessly.

  She wasn’t sure if he meant to answer, but before he could, his gaze flew to the right of her head and before she could respond to the warning shout he gave, his hand shot out and caught the ball before it smashed her in the head.

  One-handed, his palm splatted against the leather, fully in control.

  Shouts rose behind her. With the kind of skill she’d only seen pros display, he spun the ball up in the air, bounced it with his knee, and then letting it drop to his feet he juggled it a few times before bending it in a perfect arc to the exact spot on the pitch where some boys from the soccer team were waiting for it.

  At first there was complete stunned silence, then cheers rose from the pitch.

  His face shuttered. His entire body went into lockdown. Ashna had never seen anyone pull on armor, but this had to be how it looked. He turned, eager to make an escape, but then he threw a glance at her and paused. Possibly because her mouth was hanging open.