He reaches for the box. His fingers are steady and he lifts the ring out and holds it up and examines it the way he examines everything: with total focus, turning it slowly between his thumb and forefinger, assessing the weight, the finish, the width of the band.
“It's correct,” he says quietly. And then, even quieter: “It's exactly correct.”
“I know your ring size,” I say, and immediately regret saying it, because the obvious follow-up is how. The honest answer is because I’ve memorized the precise dimensions of every part of your hands including the circumference of your ring finger, which is 54.4 millimetres, and I got this information through twoyears of sustained, focused, unhinged observation. But, that’s not a sentence I’m prepared to deliver in an airport departure lounge.
Arjun does not ask how. He slides the ring onto his left hand. It fits perfectly, sitting flush against the base of his finger, and his hand looks different with it on. Not wrong. Not costume-y. Just... claimed. Like someone’s drawn a permanent circle around him and said this one, this one is mine.
Every single organ in my body relocates. That's what it feels like. A full internal rearrangement, everything shifting to make room for something enormous that just moved in without asking. My lungs are somewhere near my throat. My stomach has vacated the premises entirely. My heart, which has been running a background operation labelled ARJUN KAPOOR: CATASTROPHIC YEARNING for approximately twenty-four months, seizes this moment to announce that it has, in fact, been in charge this whole time, and the rest of me can stop pretending otherwise.
That is my ring on his finger. I picked it out. I held it up to the light in a tiny shop on Queen Street and thought about his hands, and now it is on his hand, and his hand looks like it belongs to someone, and the someone is me. I know it isn’t real, but my entire cardiovascular system doesn’t care.
I swallow. Hard. I look at the boarding screen because if I keep looking at his hand I’m going to do something catastrophic, like cry, or confess, or grab his face and kiss him in Gate 47 of Toronto Pearson International Airport in front of God, Air Canada, and a family of four eating Cinnabon.
He flexes his fingers. He turns his hand over, examining the ring from every angle, the way he checks a surgical site after closing. Thorough. Meticulous. And then his hand drops to his lap, and he looks at it resting there, platinum against brown skin, and his jaw does a very small thing that most people would miss and that I do not miss.
“Where's yours?” he asks.
I pull the second box from my pocket. The wider band. I startto open it, but Arjun's hand intercepts mine before I can get the lid up. His fingers close around the box with a surgeon's grip, firm and deliberate, and he takes it from me.
“If we are going to do this,” he says, not looking at me, looking at the box in his hands, “we should do it properly. A fiancé would put the ring on.” He pauses. “For consistency.”
“For consistency,” I repeat, and my voice comes out approximately half an octave lower than normal, which is a physiological response I’m going to blame on the stale recycled airport air and absolutely nothing else.
He opens the box and takes out the ring. He picks up my left hand, and his fingers are cool against my wrist, and he holds my hand the way he holds a surgical instrument: with total attention, as if the thing in his grasp is both fragile and essential and deserves the full, focused weight of his concentration.
He slides the ring onto my finger.
It takes about two seconds. Maybe three. In those two or three seconds, Arjun Kapoor is holding my hand in an airport and putting a ring on my finger, and his eyes are fixed on the task with the same intensity he brings to a craniotomy, and his lips are pressed together in a thin, concentrated line, and his ears are turning pink, and I’m not breathing. As a matter of fact, I’ve forgotten how breathing works. Breathing is a concept from a previous life, a life before this man's careful, trembling-at-the-edges fingers slid a circle of platinum onto my hand and made the entire departure lounge disappear.
The ring settles. Arjun releases my hand. He straightens in his chair, clasps his hands in his lap, and stares straight ahead at the boarding screen with surgical composure: procedure complete, post-op briefing not required.
“There,” he says, finally. “Consistent.”
“Very consistent,” I agree. My hand is tingling. My entire arm is tingling. I’m possibly having a stroke.
I glance back down at the ring on my finger. It’s simpleand solid and it catches the fluorescent light, and it means nothing, and it’s the most important thing I have ever worn.
The boarding screen flickers. DELAYED changes to NOW BOARDING.
Arjun stands. He picks up his messenger bag, adjusts the strap with one hand, and walks toward the gate agent without looking back. The ring glints on his left hand as he presents his boarding pass.
I sit in the plastic chair for three more seconds. I press my thumb against the band on my finger. I feel the cool weight of it, the way it sits against my skin, foreign and perfect and temporary.
Temporary. Right. Fake. Strategic. A prop for a performance.
I stand up. I grab my carry-on. I follow him to the gate.
The thing about sitting next to Arjun Kapoor in business class for fourteen hours is that it gives you a truly unreasonable amount of time to notice things.
Like the way he buckles his seatbelt. Both hands. Precise, deliberate movements, threading the metal tongue into the clasp with the same focus he'd use on a surgical instrument. He tugs the strap twice to check the tension. Adjusts it a quarter-inch tighter. Smooths the fabric flat across his lap so there are no wrinkles in the belt line. It takes him approximately eleven seconds to buckle a seatbelt, which is nine seconds longer than any normal human being, and I watch the entire process with the rapt, deranged attention of a man who has completely and irreversibly lost the plot.
We are on a 6:55 p.m. Air Canada flight from Toronto Pearson to Delhi, with a connection to Jaipur. Fourteen hours in the air. Business class, which Arjun insisted on and paid for before I could even open my mouth to argue. I suspect it’s less about comfort and more about the fact that he would rather perform open-heart surgery on himself than sit in an economymiddle seat for fourteen hours with his elbow touching a stranger.
The seats are wide, leather, and angled toward each other in a way that the airline probably markets as “intimate pod design” and that I am experiencing as “exquisite psychological torture.” A central armrest separates us. It is approximately four inches wide. It is the most important four inches of my life.
Arjun is sitting on the left in the window seat. I am on the right. He is wearing dark, slim-fit trousers, a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow (the forearms, God, the forearms, lean and corded and perfect), and a lightweight charcoal jacket folded with museum-quality precision in the overhead compartment. He smells like that citrus soap. He has a leather messenger bag at his feet containing, I know, his laptop, two medical journals, a novel he will not admit to reading (I caught the cover when he opened the bag at the gate: it is a Harlequin romance called “The Duke's Forbidden Desire” featuring a shirtless man clutching a woman in a windswept field. I nearly bit through my own tongue keeping a straight face, because Dr. Arjun Kapoor, the Dread Prince of Paediatrics, apparently reads bodice-rippers, and this is the greatest discovery of my life), and a small toiletry bag organized with the kind of pathological neatness that makes me want to sneak a loose cough drop into it just to see what happens.
I am wearing jeans, a henley, and the quiet, full-body panic of someone who just handed his precious goldendoodle to his neighbour Mrs. Kasparian with a handwritten, three-page dog care instruction manual and a freezer bag of Oliver's favourite treats. All the while Oliver pressed his nose to the window and watched me leave with an expression of such operatic betrayal that I almost didn't get in the cab.