She pats my cheek, the same brisk, unsentimental pat that Kavita gives Casey when she’s feeding him, and walks back toward the breakfast table.
I stay in the corridor. I press my back against the cool stone and I breathe. Somewhere in this house, Rohan is touching Casey’s arm for the twelfth time, and I am standing in a hallway with a painting of my great-great-grandmother, and my sister just told me to stop being an idiot, and she is right.
She is right, and I know it, and the knowing is a thing with teeth.
I unclasp my hands from behind my back. I flex my fingers. I straighten my collar.
Then I walk back to the breakfast table, because if Rohan Mathur touches Casey’s arm one more time, I am going to do something that the Kapoor WhatsApp group will be discussing for generations.
I arrive to find Rohan demonstrating a polo grip on a butter knife while Casey watches with polite, engaged interest as he humours him. Casey sees me in the archway. His blue eyes find mine across the table. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t wave. He just looks at me with those steady, tender, patient eyes, and something in his expression says, very quietly: there you are, I was worried about you.
I sit down. I pick up my teacup. Rohan launches into an anecdote about a charity match in Jaipur. I drink my chai.
Under the table, I put my hand on Casey’s knee.
It is not controlled. It is not strategic. It is not pre-approved under any subsection of the engagement protocol.
Casey’s hand finds mine. His fingers thread through my fingers and hold. Tender.Steady. Sure.
Rohan, mid-anecdote, glances under the table, sees our hands, and his smirk deepens into something that looks, for the first time, genuinely pleased.
He keeps talking. He does not mention the hands. But his flirting, I notice, dials back approximately nineteen percent, as if a signal has been received, a frequency acknowledged, and the charming menace, having accomplished exactly what he came to do, is content to wait for the next act.
I do not let go of Casey’s hand for the rest of breakfast.
Chapter 16
The Polo Match
Casey
I’ve played hockey on frozen lakes in Northern Ontario at temperatures that would make a polar bear reconsider its life choices. I’ve taken slap-shots to the shin, crosschecks to the ribs, and one memorable elbow to the jaw from a guy named Peterson in the OHL playoffs that loosened a molar and earned me a standing ovation from the Huntsville bench. I’ve been hit, checked, slashed, tripped, and once accidentally punched by my own teammate during a line change.
I’ve never played polo. I’m about to play polo.
“It’s simple,” Rohan says, handing me a mallet that’s approximately four feet long and feels like it was designed for a person who grew up doing this, which I didn’t. We’re standing at the edge of the Kapoor polo ground, which is a vast, immaculately maintained rectangle of emerald grass that stretches toward the mango grove and looks like it was trimmed this morning by someone with a ruler and a deep personal commitment to geometric perfection. “You ride the horse. You hit the ball. You try not to fall off. The rest is instinct.”
“I told you about the petting zoohorse.”
“You did. And I chose to interpret that as a solid foundation to build on.”
Four horses are saddled and waiting, held by grooms who are watching me with expressions that I would describe as professionally neutral and deeply sceptical. The horses are beautiful, lean and muscular and glossy.One of them, a chestnut mare who’s apparently mine, turns her head and looks at me with large, dark eyes that communicate, with equine clarity, that she has assessed my qualifications and found them lacking. I don’t blame her.
“Her name is Rani,” the groom tells me. “She is very patient.”
“She’s going to need to be,” I say.
Across the field, Arjun is warming up.
I’ve seen Arjun Kapoor in a lot of contexts. In surgical scrubs under fluorescent lights. In a cashmere overcoat on a frozen Toronto street. In an emerald suit that made my brain short-circuit. In pyjamas at two in the morning with his guard down and his curls soft against my shoulder.
I’ve never seen him on a horse.
He’s sitting on a dark bay horse with the natural, unconscious grace of someone who likely learned to ride before they learned to walk. His spine is straight but not rigid, moving with the animal’s rhythm in a way that looks effortless. He’s wearing white jodhpurs that fit him like they were painted on, hugging the lean lines of his thighs and the narrow angle of his hips, and a fitted navy polo shirt with the sleeves pushed up to expose his forearms, which are tanned and corded and gripping the reins with the same dexterous precision he brings to a scalpel.
He looks like he was carved for this. Like the horse, the mallet, the wide green field were all built specifically to frame him, and the result is something that hits me low and hard in the gut, a physical response so immediate and so visceral that I have to look away for a second and stare at Rani’s mane just to remember how to breathe.
He’s going to destroy me. And the truly embarrassing thing, the thing I will take to my grave and never admit to another livingsoul, is that the thought of Arjun Kapoor riding at me across a polo field with those eyes blazing and that jaw set and every ounce of his surgical competitiveness directed at beating me into the ground is doing something to my insides that has absolutely no place on a sporting field. Competitive Arjun is an Arjun I’ve only glimpsed in fragments, in the flash of his eyes during a difficult case, in the steel of his voice when a resident makes an error, and the idea of all that intensity aimed at me, unleashed and unfiltered, is making my mouth go dry in a way that has nothing to do with the Rajasthani heat.