I open the door.
Casey is standing in the centre of the bathroom, in front of the full-length mirror, and the air goes out of the room.
It is a complete respiratory event. I am a physician. I know exactly what is happening to me, in the same way I would know what is happening to a patient presenting with the same symptoms: my diaphragm has performed an involuntary contraction, my pulse has elevated by what I estimate to be twenty beats per minute, and the small fine hairs along my forearms have decided, with embarrassing autonomy, to stand on end. The clinical term for this constellation isautonomic arousal. The colloquial term is something I am not prepared to write down even in my own head.
The suit is gold. Not ostentatious gold, not gaudy or overwhelming. It is a deep, burnished, antique gold, the colour of late afternoon sunlight on sandstone, of temple domes at dusk, of the kind of wealth that does not shout but simply glows. The fabric is the same dupioni silk, with a subtle texture that catches the light and shifts with every movement, and I notice, that the colour was chosen specifically for him. Not for the room. Not for the family aesthetic. For him. Tarun looked at Casey Welling and saw sunlight, and built him a suit out of it.
I do not know why this observation makes my chest hurt. I will not be examining it.
Tarun has cut it to accommodate Casey’s extraordinary frame with a mastery that borders on the supernatural. The jacket sits perfectly across those impossible shoulders, tapers to his waist, and moves with him rather than containing him. The trousers are slim but not restrictive, cut with the kind of precise, considered tailoring that follows the natural architecture of the body, which in Casey’s case is an architecture of such aggressive, uncompromising generosity that the fabric has no choice but to acknowledge it.
I have a thought. The thought arrives fully formed, with the casual brutality of a thought that has been waiting at the door of my consciousness for some time and has finally decided it is going in. The thought is this: I want to put my hand on the lapel of that jacket. I want to slide my palm flat against the silk, feel the warmth of him through the fabric, fist my fingers in the gold, and pull him down to me. I want it with a clarity and a specificity that has no place in a strategic arrangement, in a fake engagement, in any framework I have constructed to survive this week.
I do not put my hand on the lapel. I clasp my hands behind my back. The Dread Prince does not pull men toward him by their jackets. The Dread Prince admires from a controlled distance and writes about it in a journal he will burn before he dies.
I acknowledge it. Once. Briefly. With the detachment of a man who absolutely is not doing what he is doing, and my eyes, having declined to move on any reasonable schedule, eventually drag themselves upward with the discipline of a soldier redirecting fire, and they make a second pass on the way up, which I will not be confessing to anyone, ever, under any form of interrogation.
The traitorous third pass is, I tell myself, a calibration. A clinical reassessment of proportions for the purposes of social camouflage tonight. I will need to know how he carries the suit. I will need to know how he moves in it. I will need to know how the fabric drapes when he stands beside me in front of seventy-two members of the Kapoor extended family, so that I can adjust myown posture accordingly and present a credible visual unit. This is what I tell myself.
I am, I note, a tremendous liar.
The shirt beneath is ivory, open at the collar. Against the gold fabric and the ivory cotton, Casey’s skin is warm and sun-flushed and his eyes are so blue they look like they have been set into his face by a jeweller.
He looks like something from a myth, something carved out of gold and sunlight and placed in a palace in Rajasthan to make the building itself feel inadequate. He looks like a gilded, broad-shouldered god.
He is looking at me. He has stopped moving. His hands are at his sides and his lips are parted and his blue eyes are travelling over the emerald suit with an expression that I cannot classify, an expression that belongs in no medical textbook, an expression that is raw and open and so full of something that the air between us becomes a physical thing, charged and heavy and impossible to breathe through.
“Arjun,” he says, and his voice is rough, like something has caught in his throat. “You look...”
He doesn’t finish.
I don’t need him to.
My composure cracks. Three seconds. Three full, unguarded seconds where every wall I have built and every clinical defence I have erected and every carefully maintained margin of error between who I am and what I feel dissolves, and I am just a man in a green suit looking at another man in a gold suit in a room that smells of jasmine, and I want him so badly that it is a physical ache, a thing with weight and teeth that sits behind my ribs and pulls.
I want to cross the room. I want to take his face in my hands. I want to kiss him until he forgets where he is, until I forget where I am, until the entire engineered architecture of this week collapses and there is nothing left but the gold of his jacket under my fingers and the sound he would make againstmy mouth.
I do not move.
Three seconds. That is the length of the breach. I have, after thirty-three years, calibrated exactly how long my walls can be down before something irrevocable happens, and three seconds is the outer limit. I blink. I rebuild. The walls go up so fast that I can almost hear them, course by course, brick by brick, mortar setting in real time.
“You look adequate,” I say, and my voice only shakes at the very end, on the last syllable, where it cracks like ice on a spring river.
Casey exhales a breath that seems to have been held for a long time. “Adequate,” he repeats, and a smile starts at the corner of his mouth, slow and warm and knowing. “Coming from you, Doc, I’ll take it.”
Tarun materializes in the doorway. I do not know how he got there. I do not know how long he has been standing there. But his eyes are bright, and his hand is pressed to his chest and he is looking at the two of us with the expression of a sculptor who has just completed his masterpiece and is watching the world see it for the first time.
“Magnificent,” he whispers. “Emerald and gold. The prince and his golden one.” He takes a shuddering breath. “I told you that you would cry, Arjun.”
“I am not crying.”
“You are emotionally compromised; I can see it from here. I accept your tears in spirit.” He claps his hands once, sharp and decisive. “Now go. Walk into that party together. Let them see you and weep.” His voice drops, and for a moment, beneath the theatrics and the creative frenzy, something genuine surfaces. “I have dressed hundreds of couples, Arjun. I know what love looks like when it is standing in front of me. You look like you belong together.”
He sweeps out. His assistants scramble after him. The corridor fills with the sound of his voice directing last-minute adjustments to the courtyard draping.
Casey and I stand in the guest suite. Emerald and gold. The mirror reflects us back, side by side, the sharp and the broad, the lean and the massive, and the contrast is so stark and so oddly, achingly perfect that I have to look away.
“Ready?” Casey asks. He holds out his hand.