Touch six: adjusting a non-existent crease on Casey’s collar while complimenting his shirt. His collar. The collar that sits against the base of his throat, against the warm, tanned skin where his pulse is visible when he laughs, the skin I was pressed against at four o’clock this morning when my body decided that the appropriate sleeping position was face-first into the hollow of his neck. Rohan’s fingers touched Casey’s collar and I nearly bit through the inside of my cheek, and the fury that detonated behind my sternum was not about the collar, it was about the fact that Rohan’s fingers were where my face had been six hours ago and the territorial response this produced was so primal, so far below the threshold of anything I can justify, that I frightened myself.
Touches seven through ten: assorted arm contacts during this morning’s breakfast, each one positioned slightly higher than the last, migrating from wrist to forearm to bicep with the methodical territorial escalation of a man planting flags. Casey’s bicep, when flexed, has a circumference that I have estimated at approximately forty-three centimetres, which is not a measurement I have taken deliberately but which my spatial awareness has provided without being asked, in the same way that it provides the dimensions of a surgical field. The comparison to a surgical field is clinical and appropriate. The fact that I want to put my hands on it is neither.
Touch eleven: the one happening right now, where Rohan has placed his hand on Casey’s shoulder while leaning across him to reach the fruit bowl, a manoeuvre that requires him to press his chest approximately four inches from Casey’s face, and which could have been avoided if Rohan had simply asked someone topass the mangoes like a normal human being instead of using tropical fruit as a pretext for physical contact.
I am not jealous. I am appalled at the lack of spatial boundaries. I am also experiencing a blood pressure reading that would concern a cardiologist and a comprehensive, full-body awareness of every square inch of Casey Welling that Rohan Mathur has touched, because each of those square inches is territory I have been mapping in my sleep for days, territory my hands have memorized without permission, territory that I have no claim to and no right to and that I want, with a ferocity that is burning a hole through every structure I have ever built, to be mine.
“You should try the Alphonso,” Rohan is saying, holding up a slice of mango that is, I will grudgingly concede, a perfect specimen. He offers it directly to Casey, holding it at a height that requires Casey to either take it from his fingers or lean forward and eat it from his hand, and the ambiguity is so deliberate, so perfectly calibrated, that I have to set down my teacup before I crack the bone china.
Casey takes it from Rohan’s fingers. With his own fingers. Like a civilized person. Something in my chest cavity unclenches by approximately seven percent.
“That’s incredible,” Casey says, and the genuine pleasure on his face is exactly the same expression he made when he tasted the Laal Maas in the kitchen at three in the morning, the expression I catalogued in extensive sensory detail while pretending to examine the spice wall. It is the expression that involves his eyes closing and his lips parting and a low sound that originates somewhere deep in his chest and that I am absolutely not thinking about right now at this breakfast table.
“Isn’t it?” Rohan says, and his voice drops into that warm, intimate register that he deploys with practised ease. “The Alphonso is the king of mangoes. Extraordinarily sweet. Incredibly juicy.” He leans slightly closer to Casey. “Best enjoyed slowly. With the hands. You really have to get them messy.”
I stand up.
I stand up so abruptly that my chair scrapes against the marble floor with a sound that makes Priya, at the far end of the table, look up from her phone with the sharp, interested expression of a woman who has just heard the opening note of a symphony she’s been waiting for.
“I have calls to make,” I announce to no one in particular. My voice is perfectly steady. My posture is perfectly controlled. My face is perfectly composed. My ears are, I suspect, approximately the colour of a fire engine, but I am choosing to attribute this to the temperature of the chai.
“At eight-thirty in the morning?” Rohan asks, his dark eyes dancing with an amusement so thorough, so clearly delighted, that I am forced to reconsider my position on justifiable homicide.
“Time zones,” I say, which is not an answer, and I leave the breakfast table with the measured, dignified stride of a man who is absolutely, categorically not fleeing from a mango-based seduction attempt.
I make it to the corridor. I make it approximately fifteen metres down the corridor before the footsteps catch up.
“Arjun.”
Not Casey. Priya.
“I have calls, Priya.”
“You don’t have calls. You’re on vacation, visiting your family, or have you forgotten? Your hospital is eight hours behind and your patients are asleep. Stop walking.”
I stop walking. I turn around. My sister is standing in the corridor with her arms crossed and her head tilted and an expression on her face that I have known and feared since she was five years old and caught me hiding Brussels sprouts in a potted plant.
“You’re spiralling,” she says.
“I am not spiralling. I am making a diplomatic withdrawal from a social situation that was compromising my operational focus.”
“You’re spiralling because Rohan offered your fiancé a mango, and you nearly shattereda teacup.”
“The teacup was poorly manufactured. The handle had an inherent weakness.”
“Arjun.” She takes a step closer. Her green eyes are sharp, intelligent, and mercilessly devoid of patience. “I have been watching you, and I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it without deflecting into surgical metaphors or pretending you have phone calls to make.”
“I genuinely have calls to?—”
“You do not have calls, you absolute fool of a man!” She practically shouts it, her voice ringing off the marble and the oil paintings with an authority that could shatter crystal. Two household staff members at the far end of the corridor freeze, exchange a glance, and silently reverse direction. I close my mouth. She is a Kapoor woman. When a Kapoor woman raises her voice, you stop talking. It is a genetic imperative. It is survival.
She takes another step. We are standing in the corridor outside the portrait gallery, surrounded by oil paintings of our ancestors, all of whom are looking down at us with expressions of varying degrees of aristocratic judgement. Great-Uncle Vikram, the polo disgracer, seems particularly interested.
“You are not being rational,” Priya says. “You are being jealous. Violently, transparently, almost impressively jealous, in a way that I have never seen from you, because I have never seen you care about anything enough to be jealous of it except your surgical outcomes and your parking spot at the hospital.”
“I am not?—”
“You counted. Arjun, you counted the number of times that man touched Casey. I watched you do it. You were sitting at the breakfast table with your jaw locked and your teacup at a forty-five-degree angle, and every time Rohan so much as breathed near Casey, your left eye twitched. Your left eye, Arjun. The eye that only twitches when Mother announces surprise dinner guests. I know your tells. I have known your tells since you were eleven and tried to bluff your way through a maths exam you hadn’tstudied for.”