First Comes Like

by Alisha Rai

  “Please stop blaming yourself. I only spotted it because they were my lines. I have a rather good memory.” He wouldn’t tell her that he’d written those lines, and probably any other that she’d gotten. That was more personal.

  She resumed walking, and he fell into step. “When I think this whole thing can’t get more absurd,” she muttered, then set her shoulders. “Okay. Let’s get back to the Dixit family history lesson while I process this.”

  For once, talking about his family didn’t seem impossible. “It’s fairly common knowledge my grandparents virtually disowned my father when he married my mother, though I think that scandal’s not as fresh for the younger generations.”

  “I saw something about that when I first looked you up. Because she was Muslim?”

  “That was what the press believed, but their actual objection was that she was poor. You can imagine how much class mattered then, especially for the son of a couple who was so in the public eye.” He tried to control his sneer, but he couldn’t quite manage it, he feared. His wonderful memories of his mother were punctuated by her sadness over them not having any extended family nearby. “My father was just getting into a screenwriting career, but my parents moved to Dubai. I was raised there until I was sixteen. I never met anyone on my dad’s side of the family. My folks did fine without my grandparents. Dad actually started teaching eventually, and my mother became a nurse. We were raised without cameras following us or anyone wanting anything from us. It was a good childhood.” It had been a perfectly normal life, actually, away from the Dixit fame. That was probably why he didn’t feel too much fear at losing his grandfather’s money or not relying on the family fortune. So long as he and his little family were taken care of, he’d be fine.

  “But when I was sixteen, my parents died in a car accident and my brother and I were shipped back to my grandparents’ home. They took us in, because what would it look like if they didn’t?” Dev shrugged. “Besides, my brother was very handsome even at thirteen; he was the spitting image of my grandfather. The world could forget who his mother was. My grandfather was less interested in me. I was still so angry about how he’d treated my parents, and I was a reminder to him about his own loss, I imagine. I only lived with them for a year or so before I left.”

  Jia’s step faltered. “You were so young. Where did you go?”

  “I tried my hand at a couple careers. Acting was the easiest paycheck. I got a flat in Mumbai, as far as I could get from them in the same city.” He didn’t like to think about those early years too much. He’d still been grieving the upheaval of what had been a good life, and missing his brother something fierce.

  A few years later, Dev had tried to get Rohan to come live with him, but it was too late. His brother had already been sucked into the Bollywood film star machine, filled with all the debauchery and wealth that came with it. Another regret to add to his shoulders, that he hadn’t taken over Rohan’s guardianship when the boy was a minor.

  “I’m sorry. Your family has had so many losses.”

  “Some people say there’s a curse. My parents and uncle were young, and my brother was as well. Then my grandfather. I think that Rohan’s death took too much of a toll on him.” He paused. “It’s quite odd to mourn your family members when a whole nation is also mourning them.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Jia murmured.

  What had been in those pancakes to make him confess his darkest secrets? “Apologies, I don’t know why I’m talking so much. Obviously, none of this is common knowledge. I would prefer you not share it with anyone, including your family.”

  She mimed locking her lips. “I have that kind of face. People tell me things.”

  “That must be it.”

  They walked quietly for a moment. “You have a nice little family now.”

  “Yes. I’m glad Adil Uncle could come live with us. I didn’t see him much when I was growing up. I think there was some question of him taking custody of Rohan and me when we were young, but I believe my grandparents convinced him we were better off with them.” More over-sharing. “It’s been good to have help with Luna, too.” He’d been surprised Luna hadn’t seemed overly enthused to meet or spend time with Jia earlier tonight, but he supposed that could be chalked up to shyness.

  “Is Luna’s mother—?”

  “Out of the picture. I don’t even know who she is. I think Rohan must have bought her off.” He didn’t know the ins and outs of what had happened when Luna was born, just that one day Rohan had been a carefree bachelor, and the next, the newspapers had proclaimed him a father. When Dev had called him, he’d refused to speak of it, merely said, Congratulations on being a kaka, Bhai, and hung up.

  He didn’t know how his grandparents had felt about Rohan’s illegitimate child initially, but his grandmother at least had seemed to come around quickly. In the end, their family name had squelched the worst of the gossip.

  Jia switched her purse to her other shoulder. “Luna seems to be healthy and happy, and you clearly adore her. You’ve made up for missed time, it appears.”

  “Can you make up for such a thing?”

  “I think so.” Her feet slowed, and he met her pace. “My roommate, Katrina, she likes to say that people come in and out of our lives, and we have to enjoy the parts in the middle. But I think it’s okay to not enjoy all the parts, you know? Things change, life changes, you change. I definitely feel like my relationship with various family members has ebbed and flowed.”

  He filled his lungs with air. She was wise, but he already knew that from watching her deceptively simple videos. “Are your feet hurting? Those are very high heels.”

  Jia gave him a chiding look. “Please, I can travel up a mountain in these. It’s a nice night for a walk.”

  “It is.” They walked in silence for a moment. At some point, he’d have to walk them back to the garage they’d parked in. “Now that I have given you my family’s darkest secrets, tell me something about you,” he said instead.

  “I’m an open book. I post my whole life online.”

  “Do you? I don’t think you do. You’re different in real life.” She already knew he’d watched her videos. There was no harm in admitting that.

  Her smile was faint. “I suppose my online persona is authentically real, just not all of me.”

  “So what are the other parts of you?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s a blurry line, where online ends and real life begins.”

  Dev nodded. “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Pink.”

  “Favorite animal?”

  “Giraffes.”

  He straightened to his full height. Giraffe had been the nickname classmates had teased him with since puberty, but if she liked giraffes . . . “Favorite sibling.”

  She glanced around. “Did one of my sisters put you up to this? Are they going to jump out and yell at me?”

  Dev chuckled. “No.”

  “I love all my sisters the same,” Jia said loudly, then leaned in and continued in a whisper. “My twin, followed by our middle sister.”

  “Ayesha and . . .” He thought for a second. “Sadia.”

  “Wow, you do have a good memory.”

  Only for things he cared about, but he didn’t want to spook either of them by admitting that. “It’s from years of memorizing lines.”

  “Sadia’s the one I identify the most with, probably. She’s all married and happy now, but she bucked my parents to marry the guy she loved when she was like twenty.”

  “How did they take that?”

  Jia glanced away. “They disowned her for a few years. Came around when she had my nephew and then really reconciled when her first husband passed away. But it was scary. I was only, like, thirteen, and I barely got to see her for years.”

  Dev’s heart cracked a little. He’d seen the effects of parental estrangement in his own life. “That’s terrible.” For the first time, he wondered how his uncle had felt when his brother ha
d been banished. Had the infamous playboy cried? Had he tried to see his brother? “Is that why . . . ?” He trod a little delicately. “Is that why you’re so eager to please your parents?”

  She came to a halt at a stoplight. He moved closer to her. He told himself it was for protection, though there wasn’t much in the way of danger here. “I don’t think they’d ever do that again. They regret cutting her off.”

  “But the fear is still there.”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand.”

  “I suppose you do understand rigid family members.”

  A car honked and Dev jolted. He’d forgotten that they were in a public place, while he’d been spilling family secrets. “We should head back to the garage,” he murmured.

  “Yes, let’s do that. I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  “Time flies when you’re eating pancakes, I suppose.” Their walk back to the garage was quiet. He gave her a sideways glance when they approached her car.

  “I can drive you home,” she blurted out.

  “No, I’ll take a car.” It was already intimate, her coming to his home to fetch him. Her driving him back smacked far too much of a proper date. Especially combined with all the soul baring they’d done this evening. “Getting into your car is a struggle,” he teased, trying to lighten the mood.

  It worked; she chuckled. He opened her car door for her. “Well, good night. I’ll see you soon.” He hoped he saw her soon. He started to extend his hand to her, but Jia took another step forward, closing the distance between them.

  The hug was so fleeting and quick, he might have imagined it had he not taken the split second to imprint the feel of her whole body, from chest to thighs.

  Dev didn’t go around hugging women in public, and he told himself that was the reason he stood there like a shell-shocked buffoon until his brain kicked into gear. He wrapped his arms around her and gave her a little squeeze. Warmth filled him, taking up all the empty spots inside him.

  He inhaled, absorbing the delicate floral scent Jia wore. He let her go the moment her arms started to loosen. He wanted to ask what that had been. A pity hug? A friend hug? A business hug?

  An I’m Interested in You for Real hug?

  But he couldn’t ask any of those things because he feared the answer. So he merely stepped away.

  “Good night,” she almost whispered and got in the car.

  “Night,” he repeated. He watched her drive away, wondering if that was his fate for the immediate future. Watching her drive away after she’d doled out a small crumb of affection.

  He pressed his hand against his chest. He feared even if it was, he would take it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tuesday 1:25 P.M.

  Jia: do you like magic?

  Dev: Is this an American pickup line?

  J: Ha, no.

  D: Magic stresses me out. I spend all my time trying to figure out how they do it.

  J: Ah

  D: Why?

  J: someone offered me tickets to a show

  D: I’ll come with you

  J: No, I don’t want to stress you out!

  D: It’s okay if you enjoy it, I will enjoy it.

  J: It wouldn’t work anyway. There’s too many people there. Cameras.

  D: Okay, scratch that.

  J: I’ll come up with something more remote before then.

  D: Yes, we should get to know each other more. Before your parents come.

  Thursday, 8:22 P.M.

  D: What are you doing?

  J: Working. What about you?

  D: Also working. Night shoot downtown.

  J: Cool. I love seeing shoots.

  D:

  You will have to come sometime.

  What are you working on?

  J: Trying to work up some pitches for various brands. My metrics have been slipping a lot lately.

  D: I’m sorry to hear that.

  Thursday, 10:45 P.M.

  J: What did you do??

  D: What?

  J: My mentions started getting flooded, and when I traced it back, it started with your old costar tagging me and raving about one of my videos??

  D: I simply told her my niece thinks you are cool. It’s not a lie. I did not ask her to promote you.

  J: This is going to look suspicious. People will put two and two together.

  D: They won’t.

  People see what they want to see.

  J: . . . that’s true, I suppose.

  D: Are you upset?

  J: No. This is sweet. One tag won’t get me back to where I was, but you met my weekly goal in about twenty minutes so thanks, haha.

  D: Not a problem.

  Friday Morning

  Jia woke up to her phone ringing. She groped for it on the pillow next to her head, then sat straight up. Ayesha! Finally. “I’ve called you a million times. What have you been doing?” Jia hissed, as soon as her twin’s face popped up on her phone.

  “What have you been doing?” Ayesha yelped. “I go camping for a couple weeks and come back to all hell having broken loose.”

  “Maybe that’ll teach you not to go camping.” She and her twin had always been glued at the hip, but when Jia had quit med school, their paths had diverged. It was weird to see Ayesha in their old shared bedroom alone, but also a relief that she herself wasn’t in that bedroom.

  “Um, trust me, I’m never going camping again for other reasons.” Ayesha scratched at an obvious mosquito bite on her cheek. She was dressed sedately, in monochromatic colors, a gray long-sleeved dress and a gray cotton scarf wrapped around her hair. Ayesha preferred things she could mix and match easily. She was too focused on other priorities, like her career, to care about clothes.

  Jia was aware that Ayesha was about as close to a perfect Pakistani American daughter as could be, but she’d never felt any envy or anger at her twin for that. If anything, she’d tried to emulate her, as her parents had always told her to do. Unfortunately, that had always led to her eventually growing bored. A bored Jia wasn’t a good thing. It led to her starting a tiny empire in her bedroom, for example. “You didn’t enjoy it like you thought you would?”

  “Worst rebellion against our parents ever. They were right, they didn’t cross the ocean so their daughters could go sleep outside.”

  Jia’s lips curled up. “I can teach you better ways to rebel.”

  “So I see.” Ayesha hooked her thumb over her shoulder. “Mom’s out here claiming that you’re practically engaged to Dev. When did you even meet him?”

  “Ugh.” Jia scrubbed her face. That’s right. Ayesha didn’t know about the debacle of meeting Dev. “It’s a long story.”

  “Stop touching your face,” Ayesha chided, ever the young doctor.

  “Right, sorry.” She wanted to wail her news out to her sister. Ayesha had been the one person who had known everything: not just who Jia was talking to, but also how much she’d started to swoon over him.

  Time is—

  Nope, nope, she wasn’t going to dwell on a single one of those fake scripted words. Dev’s real words were way better. “First, make sure the hallway is clear.” She wouldn’t put it past Zara to be hovering out there.

  Ayesha rolled her eyes, but did as she asked.

  “Okay, so . . .” Jia quickly recapped the whole situation for her sister, while Ayesha’s mouth opened more and more.

  “Whhaaaaaat is happening?” Ayesha squealed when Jia went silent. “So Dev’s cousin catfished you?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t mention the brother. No need to complicate this more.

  “Did he give a reason?”

  “No.”

  “So.” Ayesha stopped, then shook her head. “What’s up with all these photos of you and Dev snuggling? Why is Mom planning your engagement party?”

  “There was one photo, and Mom . . . she and Noor and Zara confronted me, all at once. I got overwhelmed, and well . . . I let them believe that I was dating him. It seemed to make them happy.” An
d she so rarely made her family happy.

  Ayesha made an annoyed sound. “Jia, this inability to look at long-term repercussions is a real problem.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Dev agreed to play my boyfriend while Mom and Daddy are out here.”

  Ayesha’s lips parted. “When they’re out there?”

  “Oh, they didn’t tell you that? Yes, they’re coming.”

  “They didn’t tell me that, but that explains why Mom told me to give her my schedule.”

  Jia sat up in bed, happiness soaring through her. “Oh yay. You’re coming for sure? That’s wonderful.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Sound more excited,” Jia chided. “This is fantastic. It’s not going to be only me and him against the parentals, that means.”

  “I’ll be happy to see you, Jia, but I was really hoping that at some point we would have left these wild schemes behind us. Behind you.”

  Jia bit her lip. “I deserve that.”

  “I’ll talk to Mom. Of course I’ll come.”

  “Phew.”

  “Let’s save our phews for a minute,” Ayesha said. “What’s going to happen after our parents fall in love with Dev and come back home?”

  “I’ll tell them it didn’t work out, eventually. It’ll be so much easier to tell them bad news when they’re back home and I don’t have to see it. They’ll be disappointed, but less disappointed than if they know I was catfished.”

  “What are you getting out of this?”

  What you have. She wanted her parents to look at her, just once, the way they looked at Ayesha. Like she’d done something right, met their standards.

  She knew her parents loved her. But she craved their respect, and she wouldn’t have that, not from her mother at least, until she fit into the mold they had created with their first daughter.

  Ayesha squinted at Jia when she didn’t speak. “You’re too much, you know that?”

  Too much.

  Oh, Jia was aware. She felt the words like a dagger in her heart, her confidence deflating. She hated those two words, though perhaps only second to a lot. Jia is . . . a lot. Always with that same pause between the words, the hesitation of looking for a word that could encompass superficial and silly and ditzy and foolish all in one word. Or two words, actually.