“Casey.” I look at the garden below. The fountains. The darkoutline of the polo field. “Why do you think I asked you to do this?”
“You said you panicked. In your office, when you were on the phone with your mother.”
“Yes. But why you? Of everyone I could have named. Every colleague, every acquaintance, every person in my professional or personal network. Why did I say your name?”
Casey is silent for a long time. He is looking at me with those steady blue eyes, and I can see him choosing his words with an uncharacteristic care, turning them over, weighing them, and the patience of this man, the absolute, bone-deep, endlessly generous patience, is the thing that undoes me more than anything else.
“I think you said my name,” he says slowly, “because when you were panicking, and your brain was looking for someone safe, it found me.”
The word safe lands on the terrace between us like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples spread outward into the warm darkness.
Safe. He thinks I said his name because he is safe.
He is not wrong. He is so profoundly not wrong that it hurts, physically, a sharp constriction behind my sternum. Because that is exactly what happened. I was standing in my office, suffocating under the weight of my mother’s expectations and Gabriel’s lecture and my own relentless, bone-grinding loneliness, and I looked out the window, and there was Casey. Bright and happy and enormous and laughing with a child, and my brain, in its moment of maximum desperation, reached for the one thing that has made me feel safe in the last two years.
Not the surgery. Not the precision. Not the control.
Casey.
“I didn’t just panic,” I say, and the words come out in a voice I don’t recognize, stripped of detachment, stripped of the formal diction and the elevated vocabulary and the ten-dollar words I use to keep the world at arm’s length. “I looked out my window, and you were in the ER, and you were laughing, and the stickers, andthe child had stopped crying because of you, and I...” My throat closes. I press my fingers against the arm of the stone chair, hard enough to feel the grain. “You were the only thing I wanted to look at. In that entire building. You were the only thing that didn’t feel like it was crushing me.”
The night is enormous around us. The stars are indifferent. But Casey’s face, in the starlight, has gone very still, and his blue eyes are luminous, and his lips are parted, and he is looking at me with an expression that has never been directed at me in my entire life, an expression of such careful, fierce, consuming tenderness that it is actively dismantling me, organ by organ, system by system.
“Arjun,” he whispers.
“That is not an adequate answer to your question,” I continue, because if I stop talking I will fall apart, and if I fall apart I will not be able to reassemble myself, not here, not with him this close, not with the stars and the night pressed against us like conspirators. “The adequate answer, the clinical answer, the answer that I should give you as a rational, professional adult who entered into this arrangement with clearly defined parameters, is that I selected you because you are credible, personable, and possess the social resilience necessary to withstand my family’s scrutiny.”
“But that’s not why.”
“No.”
“Why, then?”
I look at him. He is three feet away from me. The closest we have been while both fully conscious and vertical since the engagement announcement, and the proximity is electric, a tangible field of charged particles in the space between our bodies.
“Because I have thought about you every day for two years,” I say, and my voice breaks on the word year, cracks right down the middle like a fault line that has been under pressure for too long. “Because when my mother said Dev’s name, the only name in my head was yours. Because you eat terrible food, and you wearridiculous scrubs, and you do magic tricks for crying children, and you are the sunniest, most impossibly good person I have ever stood next to, and when I am standing next to you, the noise stops. All of it. The surgical margins, the risk assessments, the constant, relentless cataloguing of everything that could go wrong. It just stops. And there is just you.”
I have never said anything like this in my life. I have never come close. The words are raw and graceless and nothing like the concise, elegant language I pride myself on. They are the most honest things I have ever spoken, and they are hanging in the air between us like a living thing, exposed and vulnerable and impossible to take back.
Casey doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak. His blue eyes are bright with something that catches the starlight like water, and his hands are gripping the arms of his stone chair, and his chest is rising and falling in a rhythm that is not steady, that is not the easy, golden-retriever breathing of a man who is calm.
Then he leans forward. Slowly. So slowly that I can track the movement in real time, the shift of his weight, the angle of his shoulders, the way his right hand releases the chair and rises, and I know what he is going to do before he does it, and I do not move, and I do not breathe, and every nerve ending in my body is lit up like a surgical theatre.
His hand reaches my face. His fingers, broad and warm and calloused, brush the edge of my jaw. Then they move upward, feather-light, tracing the line of my cheekbone, and find the dark curl that has fallen across my forehead, the one that always escapes no matter how carefully I style it, and he tucks it behind my ear.
That is all. A curl, tucked behind an ear. The smallest gesture. The kind of thing that happens between people every day, in kitchens and corridors and queues, meaningless and forgotten in seconds.
Except his fingers do not leave. They settle behind my ear, warm and calloused against the thin skin there, and the touch is so gentle, so deliberately careful, so infused with a reverence that I donot know how to receive, that something behind my eyes burns and I have to close them.
I can feel his pulse through his fingertips. Fast. Hard. Faster than mine, which should be impossible, because my heart is currently attempting to exit my body through my ribcage. His thumb traces a slow, barely perceptible arc along the hinge of my jaw, and the sensation travels down my neck and across my collarbone and pools somewhere deep in my chest like a warm liquid spreading through tissue.
He is close. He is so close. I can smell him, the vetiver and cedar of the guest soap and underneath it the warmth that is just him, that I have memorized from every morning waking up with my face against his chest, and his breath stirs the hair at my temple in a slow, uneven rhythm that tells me he is not calm. He is not composed. He is holding himself still with the same kind of focused, deliberate control that I use in the operating room, the kind that costs everything.
I could open my eyes and close the distance. One inch. Less. I could tilt my chin and find his mouth and end this, end the slow burn that has been consuming us both since a kitchen in Toronto, since a hand held across a table, since the first morning I woke up wrapped in him and pretended it meant nothing. I could kiss him right now, under the Rajasthani stars, and it would be real. It would be the realest thing I have ever done.
I don’t.
Not because I don’t want to. The desperate want is a roar inside me, so loud it drowns out the blood in my own ears. But because if I kiss Casey Welling right now, on this terrace, after everything I just said, it has to mean something I can stand behind in the morning. It has to mean something I will not retreat from, will not clinically reclassify, will not file under “lapse in judgment caused by emotional fatigue.” And I am not there yet. I am close. I am closer than I have ever been to anything. But I am not there.