Casey’s hand brushes mine. Not deliberately. Just the natural swing of his arm in the narrow corridor, the back of his knuckles against the back of mine, warm and brief. He doesn’t reach for my hand. He doesn’t close the distance. He just lets the contact happen and lets it go, and the absence of his skin against mine after the touch is worse than the touch itself, a negative space that my hand can feel the shape of, and I have to close my fingers into a fist to stop them from reaching.
It happens twice more before we reach the door. Each time, the back of his hand against the back of mine, light and accidental and not accidental at all, because three brushes in twenty metres of corridor is not the natural physics of two people walking side by side. It is a question. It is a question being asked very quietly, in the dark, with no expectation of an answer, and I am not answering, but I am also not stepping away, and somewhere between the second brush and the third I understand that my not-stepping-away is itself an answer of a kind, and I think Casey understands it too, because his hand finds mine for the third time.
The guest suite door is ahead. Behind that door is the bed. The bed with no pillow wall, because I am not going to rebuild it, because I am choosing, tonight, to stop engineering barriers against something my body has already decided.
I am not ready to name it. I am not ready to catalogue it or file it or assign it a framework. But I am ready, for the first time, to stop pretending that the warmth moving toward me across the mattress every night is an accident, and to stop pretending that I am not moving toward it too.
I do not rebuild the pillow wall.
Casey notices yet he says nothing. He climbs into bed, on his side, and I climb into bed, on mine, and there is nothing between us but silk and air and the fading scent of Mathania chillies on our fingers.
I fall asleep in under four minutes. I know this because I am counting, and I stop at four, and the last thing I am aware of is warmth, moving toward me across the mattress like a tide, and I do not resist it.
Chapter 14
Enter the Charming Menace
Casey
The man who walks into the Kapoor estate at four o'clock the next afternoon looks like he was assembled by a committee whose only brief was “make everyone else feel underdressed.”
I’m sitting on the garden terrace with Priya, who has been drilling me on Kapoor family history for the past hour with the focused, relentless precision of a woman preparing a witness for cross-examination. She has a notebook. She has colour-coded tabs. She has just quizzed me on the name of the great-uncle who disgraced the family at the 1987 polo championships (“Uncle Vikram, he bet against his own team, they don't speak of him, different from the Pune exile, that's a separate scandal entirely” ), and I was feeling reasonably confident about my progress when the front gates open and a car pulls in that makes the Kapoor family Range Rover look like a rental.
It is a gleaming vintage Jaguar, in British racing green.
The driver's door opens, and a man unfolds himself from behind the wheel with the languid, unhurried ease of someonewho has never once in his life been in a rush and considers punctuality a suggestion that applies to lesser people.
He’s tall. Not as tall as me, though to be fair few people are as tall as me, but tall enough to carry himself with the kind of relaxed, athletic confidence that comes from a lifetime of expensive sports and excellent nutrition. He’s wearing a linen suit that is the colour of heavy cream, unbuttoned, with a pale blue shirt open at the collar, no tie, and the whole ensemble has the deliberately careless look of someone who spent forty-five minutes achieving the appearance of not having tried at all. His dark hair is swept back from a face that features spectacular cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a permanent, easy smirk that suggests he finds the entire world mildly amusing and is waiting for it to catch up.
He pushes his sunglasses up onto his head, and surveys the estate. He spots Priya and me on the terrace and his smirk widens.
“That,” Priya says, snapping her notebook shut, “is Rohan Mathur. And you should brace yourself.”
“For what?”
“For being the most interesting thing that's happened to him in months.”
Rohan crosses the courtyard with a stride that’s somehow both purposeful and relaxed, as if he were strolling through his own living room, and he takes the terrace steps two at a time. He kisses Priya on both cheeks with the practised, affectionate ease of old acquaintance, murmuring something in her ear that makes her roll her eyes and swat his arm.
Then he turns to me.
He looks at me the way a man looks at a painting he's just discovered in a gallery he wasn't expecting to visit. Slowly. Thoroughly. With open, unapologetic appreciation that starts at my shoes, travels up my jeans, pauses at my shoulders with visible interest, and arrives at my face with an expression of pure, delighted fascination.
“So,” he says, and his voice is warm, rich, British-accented withthe particular polish of someone who went to the right schools and knows exactly how good he sounds. “You're the Canadian.”
“I'm Casey,” I say, standing up and offering my hand. He takes it, and his handshake is firm and unhurried, and he holds it approximately two seconds longer than a normal handshake, his dark eyes locked on mine with a focus that is not hostile but is absolutely, unmistakably, something else entirely.
“Casey,” he repeats, his mouth moving as if tasting the name. “Rohan Mathur. Old family friend of the Kapoors, and Dev's best mate. You know about Dev, right? Cardiac surgeon, cheekbones that could cut glass, the man your fiancé's mother was rather hoping Arjun would marry before you so inconveniently appeared?” He grins, unbothered by his own audacity. “I've heard a great deal about you from the WhatsApp group, which has been providing minute-by-minute coverage of your visit with the dedication of a parliamentary press corps. You've been quite the topic of conversation.”
“Good conversation or bad conversation?”
“Oh, absolutely ruinous. Sunita has filed more dispatches in the last week than most war correspondents manage in a career. The general consensus is that you are enormous, alarmingly Canadian, and either the greatest thing to happen to Arjun Kapoor or the most spectacular disaster in family history.” He tilts his head, that smirk deepening. “I just couldn’t restrain myself, I had to fly in specifically to determine which.”
“That's a long flight for gossip.”
“Darling, the Kapoor WhatsApp group is not gossip. It's intelligence. And you...” His eyes travel over me again with leisurely, unapologetic thoroughness. “You are the most fascinating intelligence report I've read in years.”
Priya clears her throat. “Rohan, stop flirting with my brother's fiancé. It's been forty-five seconds.”