“It was an impulsive, irrational decision driven by acute psychological distress and sleep deprivation,” he says, and he's talking faster now, the way he does when he's dictating surgical notes, like if he gets the words out fast enough they'll sound clinical instead of insane. “I have not slept in thirty-one hours. Gabriel just eviscerated me about my interpersonal deficiencies.My mother was on a FaceTime call describing astrological compatibility matrices, and I looked out of my window and you were...” He stops. Something shifts behind his eyes, just for a fraction of a second. “You were there with the children, and the stickers. I said your name before I could stop myself.”
I stare at him.
He stares back at me.
A saline bag falls off a shelf and hits the floor with a loud, anticlimactic thud, and neither of us flinches.
Let me be very clear about what’s happening inside my brain right now. There are two tracks running simultaneously, and they’re both screaming.
Track one: This is insane. This is clinically insane. This man, this beautiful, impossible, emotionally barricaded man, is asking me to pretend to be his fiancé in front of his terrifying aristocratic Indian family because he panicked on a phone call with his mother. This is the plot of a bad made-for-tv movie. This is the kind of thing that happens to people in romantic comedies, not to oversized Canadian paediatricians who peaked athletically in the OHL in their late teens.
Track two: He picked me.Me.
Of every person in this hospital, every person in his life, every name his panicking brain could have grabbed, he said mine. Casey Welling. The loud, messy, too-big golden retriever who leaves Dermabond on the chart tablets and eats Uncrustables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He looked out his window, and he saw me, and he said my name.
Track two is winning. Track two is winning by a landslide, and track one never stood a chance.
“Okay,” I say.
Arjun blinks. It is the first time I’ve ever seen him look startled, and it does distracting things to his face. His green eyes go wide, his lips part slightly, and for one unguarded second he looks young and stunned and so painfully beautiful that I have to look at the shelf of gauze to my left just to keep breathing.
“I... what?”
“I said okay. I'll do it.”
“You'll— Casey.” He says my first name so rarely that hearing it in his mouth feels like a physical event, like someone just pressed a warm hand directly against my sternum. “You understand what I am asking. I am asking you to travel to Rajasthan, India, to my family's estate, and convincingly pretend to be my fiancé for three weeks in front of my entire extended friends and family, who are, collectively, the most formidable, intrusive, and strategically ruthless group of people on the Indian subcontinent.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“I am not exaggerating when I say that my mother is essentially a warlord in a silk sari.”
“Sounds fun.”
“She has an astrologer on retainer.”
“Sure.”
“She will interrogate you about every facet of your existence, from your education to your financial portfolio to your exact birth time for celestial chart compatibility analysis.”
“I was born at 3:47 a.m. Mom had to be induced because I was ten pounds, two ounces. They thought I was twins.”
He stares at me, his mouth ajar, and I watch the gears in his brain try to compute the fact that I’m not running. I'm not asking for time to think about it. I'm not raising the seventeen extremely valid objections that any sane person would typically raise in this absurd situation.
Because here's the thing. The thing that Arjun Kapoor, with all his brilliant surgical intelligence and his meticulous risk assessment and his beautifully organized, catastrophically repressed emotional architecture, has not figured out.
I have been in love with him for two years.
Two years of watching him from across the ER floor. Two years of memorizing the way he tilts his head when he's reading a scan, the specific sigh he makes when a resident disappoints him, the way his ears turn the softest shade of pink when someonecatches him off guard. Two years of finding excuses to be on the same cases, handing him coffee he didn't ask for, learning the way he takes it (black, scalding, in a mug he wipes down with an antiseptic wipe first because of course he does). Two years of lying awake in my apartment with my dog Oliver's giant head on my chest, staring at the ceiling, knowing with total certainty that I’m gone for a man who looks at me like I'm a variable in an equation he hasn't solved yet.
And now that man’s standing in a supply closet, his composure in ruins, telling me he said my name when he needed a fake fiancé.
So yeah. I'm going to Rajasthan.
“Casey.” His voice drops, and there's something underneath the clinical control now, something raw and careful and barely audible, like a frequency only I'm tuned to pick up. “I need you to understand that this would be strictly a strategic arrangement. There would be rules. Boundaries. This is not...” He falters, and his gaze drops to somewhere around my collarbone. “This is not a romantic proposition.”
Right. Obviously. Because the universe is a comedian with a mean streak, and the man of my dreams is standing close enough for me to count his eyelashes and asking me to pretend to love him, which is basically asking a fish to pretend to swim.
“Totally get it,” I say, and my voice comes out remarkably steady for someone whose heart is currently doing something that would concern a cardiologist. “Strategic arrangement. Fake engagement. Boundaries and rules. Got it.”