Bare feet on stone. Heavy, unhurried steps. The particular weight and rhythm that belongs to one specific person, a cadence I could pick out of a crowd of thousands because my body has been tracking it for two years, tuned to his radio frequency like a receiver that never turns off.
He doesn’t announce himself. He just appears in the archway that opens onto the terrace, leaning against the stone pillar, arms crossed over his chest. He is wearing his grey sweatpants and a white t-shirt, and his blonde curls are damp from a shower, and his bare feet look pale against the dark stone. The starlight catches the planes of his face, the strong jaw. Different sculptors working from the same brief designed the sharp cheekbones that are entirely different from mine but somehowcomplementary.
“Found you,” he says.
“I was not hiding.”
“You’ve been in fourteen rooms since the polo match. Priya counted.”
“Priya should mind her own business.”
“Priya told me you’d say that. She also told me to tell you that her business is you, and it has been since 1997, and you’re welcome.”
He pushes off the pillar and walks onto the terrace. He doesn’t sit down immediately. He goes to the railing and leans against it, his back to the gardens, facing me. The starlight is behind him now, turning him into a silhouette, broad shoulders and chaotic curls and the sheer, improbable scale of him outlined against the Rajasthani sky.
“Hell of a sky,” he says quietly.
“Yes.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Back home, on the lake, you can see a lot of stars. Huntsville’s pretty good for it. But this...” He tips his head back, and the starlight catches his throat, the long, exposed line of it, and I grip my whisky glass and do not look. “This is something else.”
“The lack of light pollution. We’re forty kilometres from the nearest city. The atmosphere here is exceptionally dry, which reduces scattering. The conditions are nearly optimal for stellar observation.”
“You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where someone says something beautiful and you respond with a Wikipedia entry.”
He is smiling. I can hear it in his voice: the warmth, the gentle teasing, the absolute absence of cruelty. He is not mocking me. He is noting a pattern with the same affectionate, observational care that he brings to everything about me, and the tenderness of it is worse than mockery, because mockery I could deflect. Tendernessdisarms me.
“The stars are beautiful,” I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I intended. “I used to sit on this railing as a boy and count them. I had a notebook. I was categorizing the constellations visible from this latitude.”
“Of course you had a notebook.”
“I’ll have you know, it was a very thorough notebook.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He moves from the railing and sits in the stone chair across from me. Our knees are close. Not touching. Close. “Arjun. You’ve been dodging me all evening.”
“I have been attending to various personal matters around the estate.”
“In fourteen rooms.”
“The estate is large. There are many matters.”
“Arjun.”
The way he says my name. Every time. Every single time. It is not the crisp, clipped “Arjun” of my mother’s tactical address, or the sharp “Arjun” of Priya’s sisterly interrogation, or the professional “Dr. Kapoor” of the hospital. When Casey says my name, it sounds like a place he’s been looking for. A door he’s been waiting to open. It sounds like the word was made for his mouth to say and has been waiting there his whole life.
“The polo match was...” I begin, and stop. I take a breath. “I behaved in a manner that was disproportionate to the circumstances.”
“You mean you went full Dread Prince because Rohan flirted with me and you nearly murdered your own cousin with a polo mallet.”
“That is a dramatic oversimplification.”
“It’s an accurate under-simplification.”
I set down the whisky glass on the stone arm of the chair. The glass clinks against the stone, a small, precise sound in the warm night. My hands, I notice, are trembling. Not the post-surgical tremor. The other one. The one I don’t have a medical term for, the one that only happens around this man.