Casey knows. Of course he knows. He can read me the way I read scans, and he can feel the tremor in my breathing, and heknows exactly how close I am and exactly why I’m not closing the distance, and he does not push. He does not move. He stays exactly where he is, his fingers behind my ear, his breath on my temple, holding the inch between us like it is something sacred, something that belongs to me to close when I am ready.
The patience of this man. The staggering, infuriating, heart-destroying patience. I am only beginning to understand its full dimensions. The hallway encounters. The coffee in my hand without my asking. The gallery windows. He has, I am realizing, been waiting for me in small ways I never named, never once asking for more than I could give. And now his lips are an inch from my lips on a terrace in Rajasthan, and he is still waiting, and I do not deserve it, and I know I do not deserve it, and the knowing is the thing that makes me want to close the distance most.
We stay there. Suspended. I count his heartbeats through his fingertips. I lose count at twenty-three because the numbers stop mattering and there is only the rhythm, steady and sure, the most certain thing in a world I have spent my entire life trying to control.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Casey says, and his voice is barely a whisper, rough and broken and so full of everything he has been carrying for two years that the words sound like they weigh a thousand pounds. “I need you to hear that, Arjun. Whatever this is, however long it takes you. I’m not going anywhere.”
I open my eyes. He is right there. One inch away. Blue eyes. Starlight. The whole galaxy behind him, and I cannot see any of it because the only thing I can see is him.
“Okay,” I whisper.
His hand drops from my ear. His fingers trail down my jaw as they go, a slow, deliberate withdrawal that leaves a line of warmth on my skin like a brand.
He leans back in his chair. He looks up at the sky. He breathes.
I breathe.
The night holds us both, and the terrace is very quiet, and very warm, and very full of something that neither of us has named but that we both, now, understand.
We sit there for a long time. Not touching. Not speaking. Just existing, side by side, under the biggest sky I have ever seen, and the silence is not avoidance and it is not strategy and it is not the silence of a man who showed too much and is trying to recover.
It is the silence of two people who have finally said something true and are letting it settle.
Eventually, Casey stands. He stretches, his arms overhead, his back arching, his t-shirt riding up to expose a stripe of stomach that I absolutely do not look at.
“Bed?” he says.
“Yes.”
We walk back through the darkened estate together. Our bare feet are quiet on the marble. The corridors are lit by low sconces, casting warm, golden pools of light. We don’t speak. We don’t need to.
We enter the guest suite. I go to the bathroom. I brush my teeth. I change into my pyjamas. I complete my routine. When I come out, Casey is already in bed, on his side, the sheet pulled to his waist.
The pillows and bolsters are stacked neatly on the window seat, exactly where the household staff placed them this morning. They have been there, untouched, for days now. I stopped rebuilding the wall after the kitchen, after the Laal Maas and Karan’s laughter and Casey’s arm warm against mine. At first, I told myself it was a concession to inevitability, an engineering problem that could not be solved. But that was a lie. The truth is that I stopped rebuilding the wall because I did not want it there anymore. Because the space between us in that bed, the open, unobstructed space where I migrate toward him every night and wake up in his arms every morning, is the only place in this entire estate where I feel like myself.
Tonight, the bolsters on the window seat do not even registeras an option. They are relics. Artefacts from a version of this arrangement that no longer exists.
I climb into bed. I lie on my side, facing him. There is a foot of space between us. Maybe less. I can feel his warmth across the gap, that furnace heat that migrates toward me every night whether I build a barrier or not.
“Goodnight, Casey,” I say.
“Night, Arjun.”
He closes his eyes. His breathing starts to slow. And for the first time, I do not lie rigid and wakeful and catastrophically alert. For the first time, I close my eyes and let the warmth find me, and I do not resist it, and I do not count the seconds, and I fall asleep facing him, with the ghost of his fingertips still warm behind my ear and the taste of the truest words I have ever spoken still on my lips.
Chapter 18
The Mehndi
Casey
The woman painting my hand is named Geeta, and she has the steadiest fingers I’ve ever seen outside of an operating room.
I’m sitting cross-legged on a silk cushion in the women's parlour, which is a sun-flooded, open-air room on the east side of the estate with carved stone screens that filter the morning light into intricate geometric patterns on the marble floor. There are approximately fifteen people in the room, mostly women, an assortment of aunties and cousins and Priya, all in various stages of having henna applied to their hands and feet by a team of artists who arrived this morning in a van packed with copper bowls, squeeze bottles, and what appears to be an entire ecosystem of ground henna paste.
I wasn’t supposed to be here. This isn’t a formal Mehndi, not really. A proper Mehndi is a pre-wedding ceremony, and we’re a long way from any wedding. But Priya decided that the engagement deserved a celebration of its own, so she hired a team of henna artists, commandeered the women's parlour, and informed the aunties that they were having what she called “an engagementhenna party, because my brother finally brought someone home who stayed for more than a day and we are marking the occasion whether he likes it or not.” When she informed me at breakfast that I was attending, Arjun looked up from his chai with an expression of such genuine alarm that I thought someone had paged him for an emergency surgery.
“He's the fiancé,” Priya said, before Arjun could object. “Well, one of the fiancés. Both of you are getting henna. I've decided. It's happening.”