Recipe for Persuasion

by Sonali Dev

She took his hand, gazes locked, grip firm. “Does this place have a bedroom?”

  If anyone could fill a nod with erotic heat, this man could. She pulled him toward what had to be the bedroom (please let it be). He followed, eyes intense, hungry for her.

  The sight of the bed was such a relief she almost cried. Turning around, she pushed him onto it, then climbed into his lap and straddled him. With a mighty moan that was pure need, he pulled her close. Body to body. Her legs tightened around his hips, all of her wrapped around him. He reached back and unclasped her bun as though he’d waited a million years to do it. Her hair cascaded around them as she shook it free, shook herself free. Then her tongue was in his mouth, and his hands were tugging at her clothes.

  Their bodies recognized each other, coming together like elemental atoms, their only purpose to fuse and re-form. Everything old turning into something new in an explosion of desire and trembling connection and unvarnished hope.

  In the aftermath they lay panting, the screamed calls of each other’s names echoing in the cavernous room, sweat and slick wetness still joining them where their skin touched, no words left on their lips, no breath in their lungs. Not for a long, long time.

  There was just the tight grasp of their bodies. Hands clinging, inner muscles clutching, hair tangled, breaths mingling. She soaked up the oneness of them, too afraid to move, because how could this perfection last?

  “If you tell me you don’t feel beautiful after that—” Rico whispered, voice hoarse as she kissed his mouth, stealing the rest of his words.

  Rolling onto their sides, they kissed lazily, their heartbeats surging up and down. They played each other like beloved instruments they’d lost to time and given up on. Taking notes with their touches. Relearning. Reclaiming.

  Ashna had no idea when she drifted off, but when she woke up, the room was pitch dark. Inside her was a new brightness. Without even a moment of disorientation, she knew exactly where she was. Lying sprawled on top of Rico, skin on skin.

  She knew from his breathing that he was awake.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “What time is it? Can we have some light?”

  “It’s noon.”

  She sprang up and found him laughing. And gorgeous.

  “It’s barely seven.” He hit a button on a remote and a complicated orchestra of blinds opened just enough to let in a gentle glow of morning light. The man was going to kill her.

  Pulling her back to him, he kissed her soundly. A phrase that had to have been coined for this very moment.

  Yes, she felt soundly kissed and it made her smile against his mouth. “You’re a very loud man. That’s certainly new,” she said.

  He talked during sex, a lot. The chant of her name with every term of endearment in the world, all of them. A lot of Portuguese. Every word lightning, striking straight at her womb.

  It was probably the first time she’d seen him blush. “It’s easier when you’re not hiding.”

  She stiffened, but she knew he only meant how quiet they’d had to be in his aunt’s house, even though his aunt had never been there when they were together.

  He stroked her back, thumb tracing the keys of her spine. Soothing her again. “Growing up has to have some advantages.”

  It should, shouldn’t it?

  He sensed the shifting of her mood. “You want to talk about what happened?”

  She pushed herself off him and lay down on her back. The restlessness inside her was nothing if not stubborn. “What I’ve always known about myself, turns out it’s true.”

  He went up on an elbow and started stroking her hair again. Her restlessness quelled a bit, which in turn made her angry, because becoming dependent on him to keep her from feeling like this, like a stringless kite, had destroyed her once.

  Breathe, his hand in her hair said to her.

  Breathe, his kaleidoscopic eyes said to himself.

  “Listen, Ash, we didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation earlier. I . . . what you said . . . that your mother had never done anything to disprove your opinion of her, I couldn’t stop thinking about that. She is doing something now, isn’t she? She’s here . . . just like—”

  “Please don’t.” She couldn’t talk about this right now, and still, somehow, she wanted to tell him everything she had overheard Shobi and Mina Kaki say. Everything about herself she now knew. Everything she had always known that she now had proof of. She wanted to burrow into him, scream it all into the solidity of his chest.

  “You’re right. She’s here now.” She stroked his face. “And you are too.” They were both so brave, and how terrible she had been to them. “Everything you see in me, it’s a lie.” Her very existence was an ugliness.

  “Everything I see in you is truth, and it’s more beautiful than anything.”

  “No, it isn’t.” She sat up. “You don’t understand. That’s not true.”

  He pushed himself off the bed and stood, unabashedly naked and so very beautiful. “Can I show you something?” He held out his hand.

  “I think I’ve seen everything you want to show me.”

  His eyes smiled and he made a beckoning gesture with his hand. “Come on.”

  She took it and stood, wrapping a sheet around herself, and followed him, dragging the sheet along as he led her to a huge mirror in the alcove. He positioned her to face her reflection.

  Behind her he was a head taller. Wrapping his arms around her, he rested his chin on her head. Their bodies were made to fit together, perfect jigsaw pieces.

  Their eyes met in the mirror and there she was. Seeing herself through his eyes, her downfall.

  It had made her feel wanton, always. Not a word she’d known to use in high school, but one of the many intangible things she had ached for ever since losing him. He brought out this hot, pulsating spirit inside her, turned all of her into reckless desire. Hair down loose, arms akimbo, breath not held. Ready for anything. Her. The her who had thrown herself at the ball on the pitch. The one who had pushed Rico down on the bed and climbed on top.

  In every part of her life, that was all she ever wanted to be, forcefully the same on the inside and the outside. Able to say what she wanted to say, able to do what she wanted to do, able to think of herself as she wanted to be thought of.

  So many people loved her, and yet her love for them was tainted with fear. Her cousins, her friends, her aunt and uncle, her aji, they would always love her. Their love wasn’t conditional, the logical part of her knew that. But she couldn’t stop working for it, aching for it. She never felt worthy of it. Because they knew the truth about her.

  Only with him had she never had to work for it.

  Despite how that had ended, she wanted what they’d had again with a terrifying desperation.

  He kissed the top of her head without looking away from her. She needed his gaze and he would not take that from her.

  Look at you. Look at what I see. He didn’t have to say the words.

  Being with him was the only glimpse she’d had of being fearless, of not being in need of armor. All the rest of her life had been spent in fear of being unwanted.

  And now she knew it definitively.

  Marital rape is hardly rare.

  Ashna’s stomach turned and instinctively Rico’s arms tightened around her.

  He is not like us. Life is hard enough with someone who’s your social equal.

  That had been such a terrible lie. Life was hardest when you pushed away love. So many terrible lies her father had told her. It still felt like betrayal to think critically about Baba, even as her rage shifted inside her.

  It doesn’t help that she romanticizes Bram so much.

  Mom had that wrong. Ashna had never romanticized her father. She’d just felt like he was all she had. Actually, that was a lie. Truth was, she had always felt like she was all he had. In the end, she’d been right, because when she left him, look what happened.

  Finally, eyes still clinging to Rico’s unwavering gaze, Ashn
a spoke the one truth she could tell. “I was never fierce, Rico. It was what you imagined me to be. No one else ever saw me that way. Just you.” How much she had needed that. How many things it would have changed to have had it for longer.

  “That’s not true, meu amor. I’ve seen you with your family. Everyone sees you that way.”

  She’s too fragile.

  She pulled his arms from around her, but she kissed his hands before going back to the bed and retrieving her clothes. “My family sees that I’m broken.”

  He stood in the doorway watching her put her clothes on. Then he followed her lead and pulled on his shorts.

  “I come from the kind of dysfunction you can’t even imagine.” She thought about her mother, powerful to a point that standing in her presence made you judge yourself against her. But so physically small. And her father had been a giant; even as a young man he’d been close to three hundred pounds and over six feet tall. For all her fierceness, Shobi would have no chance against him.

  No wonder Mom had never wanted her. And all Ashna had ever done was judge her for it. She’d been a person who punished the victim, her own mother.

  Dear God, if she threw up in this beautiful suite with Rico watching she would never forgive herself.

  Rico came to her and cupped her cheek. “Tell me what happened.”

  Where could she even begin?

  “My mother never wanted me.”

  “Did she say that to you? Did you have a fight?”

  She had to laugh at that. How she envied him the innocence of thinking a parent could only say those words in anger, without meaning them. “I grew up hearing my parents fight about how they never wanted me.” If he wanted to understand her, well, he was welcome to wade through the mess that she was. “It’s not just that either. She was forced into a marriage to my father.”

  “That’s sad. But not your fault.”

  If one more person said that to her she was going to poke their eyes out.

  “It is my fault.” She twisted her hair into a bun. “Because without me she would have moved on. She would have left him. But my father . . .” How did you say the words? “My father forced himself on her.” She had no idea when her forehead ended up on his chest, pressed into his sternum, his skin warm and salty against those ugly words.

  This is what she’d missed most. Someone she could hold when everything spun.

  “You know why I hid you from my family? It was because I couldn’t let them see the lie I was being with you. And I couldn’t open that door and let you see me on the other side either. I didn’t want you to see the real me. I wanted to be what you saw, wanted to know what being wanted without pity felt like.”

  He stroked up and down her arms. “What I see is the real you. That was you on the pitch. You in the kitchen.”

  “No.” She shook her head so violently, her unpinned bun loosened and slid down her back.

  The green of his eyes darkened. “You’re not broken. You’re hurting. You can hurt and be fierce at the same time.” He said those words like someone who knew. Age-old pain was naked in his eyes and something deep inside her grew ravenous.

  All she wanted was to rise up on her toes and touch her lips to his again and again. But now he knew. Suddenly she couldn’t tell what it was that shone in his eyes, love or pity.

  Then she remembered the loathing in his eyes after he’d met Baba. It came crashing down on her. All of it. He had seen who she was when it came to her father. And the first glimpse of it had made him run.

  Who are you, Ash? How can you stand being around such a horrible person?

  When she hadn’t been that girl—the one on the pitch, the one in the kitchen—he hadn’t wanted her.

  “I have to go,” she said, unable to breathe.

  “What? Why?” His eyes grew wild at the idea of her leaving. She knew exactly how he felt.

  Except he knew how to survive, to thrive when things went wrong. She didn’t. She couldn’t go through losing him again. “Because I’m not the person you think I am.” Look at how she had run from her mother. “Because we’re too different. We couldn’t cross that distance once, how will we now?” With that she started walking to the door.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Rico was next to her in a minute, his arms around her, his lips in her hair. This entire morning had felt like trying to hold on to her as she slipped away. But he would hold on until his arms fell off. He no longer knew how not to.

  “Distance? You call what’s between us distance? This connection is distance? We’re the same person, Ash. We’re practically inside each other.”

  For a second her body went slack as she gave in to the urge to lean back into him. But then she groaned and held herself apart.

  How could she not see? She was in his breath, his bones. Without even touching him she filled him up from the inside out. When they touched, there was no him left. From that first day when he had stopped that ball from hitting her. From that day he had never been the same, and he knew she hadn’t either. There had been no him, no her, only them.

  A tortured laugh hissed out of her. She turned around and something in her face made him let her go and step back. The entryway to the suite was too narrow. They couldn’t go too far from each other. A bloody metaphor if there ever was one.

  “Our connection didn’t matter before, and it matters even less now.” She pressed herself into the wall behind her. “It’s the other things. Our lives, how the world has been to us. That’s the distance that’s too far for us to reach across. I mean, look at you. You’re one of the greatest athletes of our time. You’re on magazine covers, Rico! You’re on calendars. Grown women drool over you. Grown men weep when you score a goal. And I’ve barely left my restaurant in ten years.”

  “This is about my work? About the way I look? You think I care about any of that? You see the way women look at me, but you don’t see the way I look at you? I can’t look away from you, Ash!” He leaned back into the front door, a desperate move.

  The black of her irises was so wide and deep, so clear he could dive into it and disappear. “Your eyes . . . for twelve years your eyes have haunted me. The way they look at me, all the way into me, the way they make me feel like I’m home, finally. Sometimes when you look at me the way you do, I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I can’t feel myself as separate from you. How can you do this? Those years we spent together, how can you call them false?”

  “I’m not. They weren’t. But you met me when you were grieving, when you weren’t yourself.” Her voice hitched as though she’d just figured out some big Eureka-moment truth. “Oh God, even now you’re vulnerable, in pain, grieving the loss of work you love.” She pressed a hand to her mouth. “That explains so much.”

  He pushed his hands through his hair. He’d grown the bloody thing out because he’d been so lost after losing her that he hadn’t remembered to cut it. After his first big win for Sunderland the rubber band holding it back had broken and he’d shaken it out, and the action had become a post-win ritual, a talisman for the fans. “So what? So something in the universe knows to bring me to you when nothing else works. Isn’t that something? Only you, Ash. Why isn’t that enough?”

  He hadn’t felt this lost, this helpless in a very long time. He was seventeen again, fifteen, with no one. If she walked away from him again, he’d have no one. “You know my greatest fear? It’s that I’m not . . . that I’m not separate from you. That this being half of myself is what I’m stuck with for the rest of my life, because I don’t know how to be whole without you. It’s why I found my way back here, to you, because I couldn’t stand to be that way anymore. Why isn’t that enough?”

  She swallowed as though it hurt her throat to do it. Had she not just been in that room with him? In that bed? Wasn’t she tired of this, of fighting to stay away from him? For so damn long.

  “Because you know how to heal, and when you do, you’ll walk away. You did once.”

  “What? You threw me out.
You let someone convince you that I wasn’t good enough for you. First it was my being the boy who lives in a housekeeper’s quarters, now it’s being the man on a calendar. Do your father’s words really mean so much that nothing else matters?”

  A ravaged sound tore from her throat. Their past would never leave them alone. A million storms passed in her eyes.

  “Ash, please, please say what you’re thinking. Don’t shut me out.” He reached for her. But she shook her head so violently he pulled back.

  “That’s what you think of me? That I bought into that nonsense my father believed? That’s who you think I am? Or was it just easy to damn me like that so you could move on and leave me?”

  “I’m not the one who left you! You walked away from me. You chose him.”

  Yes, he had ignored what she’d asked. Just that once.

  I do not want you to meet my father, Rico. Please. Let me take care of it.

  But her father had called and left a message with his aunt. Tell him to come see me. Tell him if he tells Ashna, he’ll regret it. She’s underage, having him thrown in jail won’t be hard.

  Wow, he’s all grace and warmth, Rico remembered thinking with all the cockiness of an eighteen-year-old. He hadn’t believed the jail thing. Ashna would kill someone before she let that happen. His aunt had been terrified, but Rico had been sure he’d charm the man once he met him. So he’d gone. At the appointed time, as though his girlfriend’s father were a judge and Rico had a hearing.

  You think Ashna will go against our wishes? Our daughter doesn’t do anything we don’t approve of. Why do you think she never brought you home? She’s a princess, you’re a bastard. Does she know that your mother was your father’s whore?

  Even now the words made Rico want to wrap his hands around the man’s throat and squeeze the life out of him. He didn’t care that he was Ashna’s father.

  Then your daughter’s going to be with a bastard. Because try what you want, Ashna and I are going to be together.

  The man had gone red in the face. Spittle had flown from his mouth. He’d issued his challenge with absolute faith: Try bad-mouthing me to her. She’ll drop you like the garbage you are.