He glances up. He catches me looking.
I don't pretend I wasn't. There’s no point. The man sat on a terrace last night and told me the noise stops when I'm near him, and I held his gaze across a polo field while he vibrated with jealous fury, and we slept facing each other with an inch of air between us with my fingertips still tingling from the contact they had with him. We are past pretending.
His ears turn pink. His gaze holds mine for three full secondsbefore it drops back to his hands. But the corner of his mouth moves. The micro-expression. My personal seismograph. And this time it's not a twitch or a flicker. It's the beginning of something real, something hot and shy and almost unbearably sweet, and I feel it in me like a match striking.
“The Mehndi suits you,” Priya says to Arjun, leaning over to examine Geeta's work. “You look almost human.”
“Thank you, Priya. Your warmth is, as always, suffocating.”
“I aim to smother, brother dearest.”
The morning moves slowly, measured in the steady rhythm of Geeta's squeeze bottle and the rising warmth of the sun through the carved screens. The henna dries and darkens, and as it does it begins to crack. I’m assured this is normal, and not to worry. The aunties circulate, examining each other's designs with the competitive scrutiny of art critics at a gallery opening. Ananya has requested an exceptionally elaborate pattern that extends past her elbows, and is currently engaged in a detailed comparison of henna colour intensity with a cousin I haven't met, using a phone flashlight and what appears to be a standardized rating scale.
I’m sitting with my hands displayed on my knees, letting the paste dry, when a shadow falls across my cushion and a familiar voice says, “Well, isn't this picturesque.”
Rohan. Of course.
He sinks onto the cushion to my right with the fluid, uninvited ease that is his signature move. He stretches his long legs out in front of him as he surveys the room with an open, appreciative gaze as if he finds beauty in everything and isn’t afraid to say so. He’s wearing a white linen shirt, unbuttoned to a degree that suggests he views buttons as a polite recommendation, and his dark hair is swept back. He looks, as always, like the cover of a magazine that exclusively features people who’ve never worked a day in their lives and are deeply comfortable with this fact.
“Mehndi,” he says, peering at my hands with genuine interest. “Beautiful work. Is that a scalpel I see hidden in there?”
“Priya's idea.”
“Priya is a genius. Don't tell her I said that, she already knows and the confirmation would be lethal.” He settles deeper into the cushion, his shoulder now two inches from mine. “You know, in some traditions, the darkness of the Mehndi stain shows the depth of love between the partners. The darker the henna, the deeper the bond.” He tilts his head, his dark eyes warm and teasing. “Yours is looking particularly dark, Casey. Practically black. Someone's in deep.”
“Rohan.”
“I'm just reading the henna. I'm not the one who put a scalpel in your love lines.” He grins. His shoulder brushes mine. “Also, and I say this with complete sincerity and no ulterior motive whatsoever, you look absolutely stunning in that kurta. White is your colour. It makes your eyes look like they were imported from a Scandinavian fjord.”
“That’s the most aggressively specific compliment anyone has ever given me.”
“What can I say, I'm a specific man.” His knee presses against mine. “Has anyone ever told you that your shoulders in traditional Indian formalwear are genuinely destabilizing? Because I've been thinking about it since I saw pictures of you at the engagement party and I feel it needs to be said, publicly, for the historical record.”
He’s doing it again. The deliberate, calibrated provocation, the flirtation that’s pitched at the exact volume and frequency to carry across a room to the one person it's designed to reach. His body is angled toward me, his shoulder and knee pressing warm against mine, his attention focused on me with the full, magnetic force of his considerable charm, and the entire performance is aimed, like a spotlight, at the man sitting to my left having henna painted on his surgeon's hands.
Beside me, Arjun is watching.
His hands are still in Geeta's lap, the henna half-finished, and his eyes are fixed on Rohan's shoulder against mine with an expression that has evolved significantly since the polo match.The jealousy is still there, the hot, barely leashed possessiveness that makes a vein pulse in his temple and his jaw go rigid. But underneath it, something new. Something that wasn't there before the terrace, before the confession, before he told me that the noise stops when I'm near him and I tucked a curl behind his ear and we held each other in the dark space of an almost-kiss for an eternity counted in heartbeats that was both too long and yet not long enough.
Underneath the jealousy is fear. The specific, desperate fear of someone who has finally admitted what he wants and is watching someone else sit next to it.
I make a decision.
It’s not negotiated. It’s not covered under any subsection of the engagement protocol or any rule written in a leather notebook. It’s the simplest, most instinctive thing I’ve done since I said okay in a supply closet, and it requires no thought at all.
I lean away from Rohan.
Not dramatically. Not a flinch or a recoil. Just a slow, deliberate shift of weight, my shoulder pulling away from his, my knee separating from his knee, a clear, unmistakable redistribution of my body's orientation away from the charming man beside me and toward the complicated, terrified, extraordinary man across the room.
And then I look at Arjun.
I look at him and I hold his gaze, and I do not smile, and I do not wink, and I do not perform. I just look at him. Steady. Open. The same way I looked at him across the polo field. The same way I looked at him on the terrace. The way I’ve been looking at this man for two years: like he’s the only person in the room, the only one who matters or exists. Only now he sees me.
That look says I know you're scared. It says I know Rohan is right there and his charm is effortless, and I know your mother picked someone else and the astrologer hasn't delivered his ruling yet and the Aunties are watching and the WhatsApp group is running and your whole family is a beautiful, terrifying machinethat wants you to be something I can never compete with. I know all of that. And I'm still here. Looking at you. Choosing you. Every single time.
Arjun holds my gaze.
He holds it while Geeta works on his palm, her squeeze bottle tracing a slow spiral that he is not looking at. He holds it while the room murmurs and chatters around us, while Kavita circulates with her tray and Sunita angles her phone and Ananya argues about colour intensity two cushions away. He holds it, and his emerald eyes are bright and fierce and afraid and wanting, and his henna-covered hands are open in his lap like an offering.