by Sonali Dev
China walked in with her crew and Ashna blinked away the storm in her eyes at his words. They were led into the interview studio, where they proceeded to answer the usual barrage of questions. How special it was to be here. How special it was to form a bond with each other (a bond between strangers!). How food was nourishment not just for bodies but for souls, and so on and so forth. He filled the silence with sound bites. She did the monosyllables.
“When did you know cooking was your passion?” the interviewer asked her, and the layer of misery at her core rolled to the surface.
Her lips stretched, desperate for a smile. “I . . . I always . . .”
“I’m so glad she’s passionate about it, because I’ve always been terrified of the damn thing,” Rico drawled with a wink. “I mean, she literally had to walk me through the churro in baby steps. I still managed to mess it up.”
The interviewer chuckled and picked up the perfect pass Rico threw him. “I don’t think we’re allowed to criticize that churro. I believe Ms. Raje said it was the best churro she’d ever tasted.”
For all her being flustered just now, fierceness shone through her smile. “You should have tasted it. It was.”
For all his smoothness just now, Rico couldn’t come up with a response to that.
Satisfied at canning another perfect on-camera moment, the interviewer moved on to rehash The Video, making Ashna shut down again. She really hated that video. Rico really hated that she did.
Thinking about his slide across the floor refreshed the pounding in his knee.
“So you ready for your next cooking challenge today?” the interviewer asked.
“Can’t wait to get in there and cook up a storm,” Rico said, overcompensating for her silence again.
When they were done, Ashna hurried out of the studio, racing right down the passage and out through one of the back exits into the open air. Rico had no idea why he followed her, dragging his damn leg with him.
She leaned her head back and sucked in a breath. The bun at her nape loosened and Rico’s insides did a godawful leap.
“Can they talk about anything other than that stupid video for one damn second?”
He let the door slam behind him. “Right, the stupid video of me tearing open my wound because you couldn’t keep a grip on a knife.”
She squeezed her temples, hands shaking. “You know what I meant.” Her fingers rubbed her skin so hard it reddened. “Did you really tear . . .” Her gaze dropped to his knee. The need to touch him, to comfort him, flared in her eyes.
He didn’t want her looking at him this way. It was this look, this look that drank his pain up into herself, that had screwed him in the first place.
“It’s nothing,” he snapped. “And it isn’t a secret that I tore open my stitches. If you had cared to ask you would have known.”
She tugged at her hair, trembling fingers seeking that one errant strand that pulled at her scalp. The realization that he would do anything to stop her from hurting like this was a soft tap inside him, right on the nerve that made him want to double over.
He was about to tell her it was okay, lie and soothe her, but she faced him, remorse dimming her eyes. “It’s not nothing. You saved me from getting hurt and I’m so sorry that you hurt yourself.” There was that look again. The one that said I can’t bear to see you in pain. The one that said his pain was her pain. He knew what a lie that was. He knew.
“You’ve apologized already. It hardly matters now. One year ago, you might have cut my career short. But I’m already done with that. Timing is everything when someone inflicts pain, isn’t it?”
Seconds ago he’d wanted to take it all away from her; now he was hurting her when she was down, when she was hurting for him. When the only thing that had distracted her from whatever she was struggling with was his pain.
Her look said she couldn’t believe what had become of him.
He couldn’t believe it either.
“True. Timing is everything.” Those were the words that cracked her voice. A thin hairline fracture that she swallowed around. “And the timing of that video means we can win this, doesn’t it?”
“Any advantage is an advantage,” he said, because suddenly they were both masters of saying one thing and meaning another.
For a breath, her gaze clung to him so tight he almost reached for her.
“If it bothers you so much that the advantage is based on people loving us together, all we have to do is stop acting like it’s a big deal and they’ll stop.”
Shock widened her eyes. Whether it was from what he had said, or the fact that he had said it at all, he didn’t know.
His own heart thundered with realization.
Well, bugger him sideways, the public did have a way of identifying something real. It’s why people loved watching sports. You couldn’t lie on the pitch when the clock was breathing down your neck. There was no way to hide your heart when you locked in on your goal, when winning became the sum total of who you were.
“Why is winning this so important to you anyway?” He had to know. She’d been a madly competitive player, but that part of her seemed to have been entirely snuffed out.
She swallowed, the long column of her neck straining. “If I don’t win, I’ll have to shut my restaurant down.”
Wow. Okay. That explained so much. But it made fresh rage rise inside him. “Then why aren’t you competing harder? Why aren’t you even in that kitchen when we cook?”
The trembling started again. Her lips, her hands. She wrapped her arms around herself, and sagged against the wall. Her mouth opened but nothing came out.
“What is it, Ash, what are you not telling me?”
The word hung in the air between them. A name he hadn’t let slip from his lips for twelve years.
Pushing away from the wall, she started pacing. Her hands went to her hair, and with a frustrated grunt she unhooked her bun. Hair cascaded down her back. Electricity kicked in his gut like a damned bolt of lightning.
She shook it out, then gathered it back in a bun.
Leave it down. Just for another moment.
She let it go and pulled the sharp dagger-like hair clasp out of her mouth. “We can’t win, Rico. We can’t win because . . . because . . .” Her hands went to work on the bun again. She rolled it back up and poked it with the dagger to keep it in place. No points for guessing what else the dagger pierced.
“Because what?”
Her eyes were stripped bare when they met his. “Because I can’t cook.”
His brain had to still be stuck on her hair, because that made no sense. “You made that omelet perfectly.”
“I can only cook certain things.”
Excuse him?
“I’ve . . . I’ve never told this to anyone.” Her hands twisted together. “I can only cook things on the menu at Curried Dreams. If . . . if I try to cook anything else, I . . . well, I can’t.”
Suddenly everything made sense.
Then, nothing did.
“Can you . . . can you please not ask questions. Please.” She was breathing hard. Her hands were shaking like leaves in a storm, a storm she had swallowed whole and trapped inside her lungs, under her skin.
He reached out and took them. “You’ve never told anyone?” They were ice cold and he wrapped them in his. “No one?”
That made her laugh and she clamped her mouth shut. It made her eyes water as she choked it back.
He tamped down the rage that rose inside him. He was going to dismember whoever had done this to her. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.
He’d tell the network that he wanted to be the one doing the cooking. They’d accommodate him. He’d make them. He’d make this go away for her.
His thumb traced the backs of her hands. The rise of veins, the ridges of tendons, the sparklers bursting in his heart. Letting her hands go was going to be the hardest thing he’d ever done.
“Thanks.” The word was the barest whisper on her lips.
He’d never known how not to give her what she asked for.
I need you to not ask me questions right now. I need to handle my father my way. Please.
Look where it had gotten him. “How do you hold in so many secrets, Ashna? Why?”
She snatched her hands out of his and pushed him away.
His hands fell like lead to his sides. “Why does he have such a hold on you?”
That made her step back. Without another word she went to the door. Yet again, done with the conversation, done with him.
But she stopped and Rico hated the relief of it. “You know what? I don’t want you to take care of it. I will take care of it myself. I don’t need your help.”
“How? How will you take care of it? By walking away?” Again. “You’re a chef, and you’re telling me you can’t cook! I could never have imagined you like this. What happened to you?”
“I should never have told you. I should have known you wouldn’t understand.”
“Understand what? Is this what happens when you push away what you want for too long? You forget who you are.”
This wasn’t her. This Ashna had suffocated the Ashna he knew—his Ash. She might have been just a girl he dated in high school, but that girl had breathed life back into him and he had to bring her back. Even if she wasn’t his anymore.
She leaned her head into the door. “Is this what happens when you do exactly as you wish for too long? You stop understanding anyone? You end up selfish and alone?”
Damn right. And it was a condition she had thrust him into. “So, you’re not alone, is that it? You’re surrounded by people who love you. People who love you so much that you need to hide anything that’s important to you from them?”
“Will you ever let that go?”
Never. “Sure, I’ll let it go. But have you ever thought about what it means to hide what’s important to you from those you love?”
“Have you ever considered that maybe I hide it because it’s not worth sharing?”
That should have hurt, but it didn’t. He knew she was lying, and she knew it too.
“Or maybe if you stopped hiding it, you’d have to admit its worth. You’d have to admit your own worth. You’d have to admit that you’re deserving of happiness. And if you did that you’d have to fight for it, and maybe you’ve forgotten how to fight for anything.”
Her hand squeezed the doorknob until her knuckles turned white. His heart felt like that doorknob, squeezed tight in her grip. Silence flooded them like a spotlight, leaving no place for their words to hide.
They stood there like that, time slipping and sliding around them. In the end, she was the first to leave. Instead of going back into the studio, she ran around the building and disappeared, exactly the way she had done twelve years ago.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Wanting to run away was never a conscious thought Ashna had. It was this constant, beating sense that was threaded into her being. So much a part of her that she never examined it. She had sure as hell never acted on it.
There was only an hour before they started shooting the competition segment. But she couldn’t stand to be at the studio. She ran out onto the Embarcadero and slowed to a walk.
Her hand went to her phone. She had no idea what she was doing when she dialed Shobi’s number. Hindi rap burst from the speaker instead of a ring and Ashna hung up, realizing that she couldn’t remember the last time she had called Shobi.
Anger pulsed inside her. The constant, inexhaustible anger at Shobi, at Rico. Every single time she walked away from him, she felt like she had walked through fire, and the flames had burned off her clothes, leaving her naked, her flesh blistered.
The memory of his hands wrapped around hers lingered like a phantom touch. The solidity of his arm beneath her fingers every time they walked into the studio had become a phantom crutch. Why had she taken strength from it? How had she let it soften her?
Soften her enough that she’d exposed herself to him and he’d used it to strike at her.
How dare he talk to her about fighting for things? She’d fought so hard for him that she’d pushed her own father over the edge. In return he’d left her.
It didn’t matter that he regretted it now, because obviously, he did. It didn’t matter that he saw right to the center of her. That he remembered everything she’d been, everything she’d wanted so badly to be.
She’d shared so much with him. What it was like to grow up in Sagar Mahal, a child alone in a palace. Parts of her she’d never shared with anyone else. But it had felt essential for Rico to know about the home she’d grown up in. Especially because she had never been able to let him into her real home.
Have you ever thought about what it means to hide what’s important to you from those you love?
The look on his face when he’d shown up at the restaurant one evening out of the blue had never stopped haunting her. The hurt in his eyes when she’d walked away from him without acknowledging him had burned inside her all weekend. The terror that she’d lost him, the certainty of it, had been worse than anything she’d ever experienced.
How could she have acknowledged him? It had been one of their busiest days, and Baba lay drunk in a room upstairs, unable to move.
As Rico had stood there, eyes expectant and probing, waiting for her to unfreeze, Baba had soiled himself. Tara, one of the hostesses, had whispered the news in Ashna’s ear with Rico watching.
It had been the most humiliating moment of Ashna’s life. Or at least the most humiliating moment that she cared about. When her parents screamed at each other in front of the whole family, in front of her cousins, she had learned not to care about the shame. This had been different. Rico saw her as strong. With Rico she got to be self-possessed, like her mother. Droll and humorous, like her father. She got to be a version of herself unstained by irreparable pathos, because he gave her the gift of not coloring his vision with sympathy like everyone else in her life.
It had meant everything. Especially when all the stories of his childhood had felt so wholesome, his parents’ love for each other and him so undamaged.
That night, cleaning Baba up without having him create a scene had taken an hour. The crowd in the restaurant hadn’t thinned until after the midnight closing time. Ashna had slept on the floor next to Baba in his room behind the kitchen, because she didn’t want him alone, in case he threw up in his sleep. The EMT had performed CPR when that had happened the month before, and he had choked on his own vomit. She couldn’t have him go through that again.
The next day had also raced by. Sunday-brunch prep started at five in the morning, and Baba hadn’t risen until almost twelve hours after that.
Her finger had hovered over Rico’s number several times on Sunday evening after she was back at the Anchorage. But he hadn’t called, and she hadn’t been able to.
On Monday when she got to school, Rico was waiting for her at their usual spot near her locker. There had been a moment of terror when they studied each other, not knowing where to go from there. All Ashna wanted was to go back to how they had been, to erase those moments when he had stepped into a different part of her life. A part of her life that could take away what they had with each other. Because how would he even recognize her in that part of her life?
Rico had grabbed her bag from her, taken her hand, and asked her about calculus homework. Just like that he’d given her her wish, erased those moments that could have changed everything. And he never brought it up again.
Ashna found herself all the way at pier 24. She had walked from pier 33 without realizing it. She leaned into the railing, letting the cold metal dig into her belly, and stared at the Bay Bridge. Sure, the Golden Gate was beautiful, but this one, this one seemed to have all the magnificence but none of the glory. The female in the marriage between San Francisco’s two beloved bridges, Shobi would say.
For some reason the thought made her laugh. It started as a soft whimper of a giggle. Then it broke through her. Laugher pum
ped out of her, hard and fast, until she doubled over the railing of the pier. Her feet left the ground. For a second she was suspended. She leaned farther, needing to turn herself over, inside out. Needing to empty the laughter out of her. Get rid of it once and for all.
She let it go. Spat it up. Let it convulse from the very depths of her like deeply settled morning phlegm. And expelled it. Shaking out every last drop, wave upon wave pumping out of her. On and on and on.
When she finally straightened up, unfolding from over the railing, the world whirled around her, a twister spinning her and forcing her to close her eyes.
Had she really forgotten how to fight?
She was fighting for Baba’s restaurant.
No, she hadn’t forgotten how to fight. She had never learned how to win.
Shobi had picked her war. Everything was female pitted against male to her. She saw nothing beyond that. It’s why she had won.
It’s how Rico had always been with the ball. Nothing else, only that one thing. The world distilled down to one point, one thought, his goal, the deepest meditation.
Ashna wanted that. The GB High girls’ soccer team had been undefeated her senior year of high school. She had loved winning.
What makes you happy?
Go to hell, Shobi!
Maybe you’ve forgotten how to fight for anything.
Go to hell, Rico!
Her ebbing laughter swelled again, wrapping around those words. Tightening and loosening with the muscles of her belly, shredding them inside her and throwing them out, laughter and sobs mixing seamlessly inside her.
Shobi and Rico were the two people who had stolen from her the ability to fight. Now they dared to shame her for it. And she was letting them win.
Throwing her head back, she let the last of her laughter hiccup out of her. The calm gray-blue bay stared back at her, meeting the sky along the jagged lines of Oakland. She wiped her eyes and patted her bun in place. Everything inside her told her to turn around and run, but there was nowhere to go.
