My hands are perfectly still.
Chapter 20
The Morning After
Casey
Iwake up with Arjun Kapoor's hand fisted in my shirt and his face pressed into the hollow of my throat, and, at least for now, I’m the happiest person who has ever existed.
Just a few minutes. That’s how long I’ll get of this.
The morning light is coming through the balcony doors in long, warm stripes of gold. The whole room has the soft, amber quality of a painting, and inside this painting, the most beautiful man I’ve ever known is curled against my chest like he was built to fit there.
He’s on his side, pressed tightly along the length of me, his forehead tucked against my collarbone, his knees drawn up against my thighs. His hand, his surgeon's hand, the hand that Geeta painted with vines and flowers two days ago, is gripping a fistful of my t-shirt with the same desperate, unconscious hold that I've felt every morning since we arrived, except this morning it means something different. This morning, the man holding my shirt kissed me. He fell forward into me in the moonlight and pressed his mouth against mine and said it was real, all of it, fromthe beginning, and then he fell asleep wrapped up in my arms without rebuilding a single wall.
His breathing is slow and deep. His face, in sleep, is undefended. The sharp lines are soft. The jaw is unclenched. His curls are a mess against the white pillow, and looking at him hurts in a way that is warm and enormous and makes my ribs feel too small for what's inside them.
I want to stay here. I want to stay in this exact moment, in this golden light, with his hand twisted in my shirt and his breath on my throat and the taste of him still ghost-printed on my lips, and I want to freeze it, preserve it, trap it in amber so that when whatever comes next comes, I can hold this and say: this happened. This was real. He said so.
Because I know what comes next.
I’ve spent two years studying this man. I have a PhD in the micro-expressions of Dr. Arjun Kapoor, and I’ve logged more hours observing his emotional patterns than I spent in the entirety of my medical school education, and I know, with the cold, clinical certainty that he would otherwise appreciate, exactly what is going to happen when he opens those eyes.
He’s going to panic.
He’s going to wake up, register the position of his body against mine, register the fact that he kissed me last night, register the pernicious, irreversible, un-take-back-able (trademark pending) reality of what he said and what he did and what it means, and every single wall he demolished in the moonlight is going to rebuild itself at triple speed. The drawbridge is going to slam shut. The clinical mask is going to snap into place. And the Dread Prince, who spent last night making sounds against my throat that I will hear in my dreams for the rest of my natural life, is going to look at me across the wreckage of the most extraordinary night of my existence and try to explain it away.
I know this. I've known it since the moment his lips touched mine, the full, devastating weight of what was happened settlinginto my bones. I knew it the way you know a storm is coming when the barometric pressure drops: not because you see the clouds, but because you feel it brewing.
So, I hold him. I hold him for these last, quiet, golden minutes before the storm. I press my lips against his hair, so lightly he won't feel it. I breathe him in, citrus soap and sleep-warm skin and the faint, lingering trace of henna paste. I memorize the weight of his hand in my shirt. The angle of his jaw against my throat. The way his body fits against mine like a key in a lock, like something that was always supposed to be here but took thirty-three years and a fake engagement and a palace in Rajasthan to find its way home.
And then I feel it. The shift.
His breathing changes. Not immediately. It's gradual, a subtle acceleration, the slow rise from deep sleep to consciousness, and I track it the way I track vitals in the ER because that’s what my body does with this man. Monitor. Catalogue. Prepare.
His fingers tighten. A reflex. Then loosen. Then tighten again as his brain comes online and starts processing the data: hand in shirt, face in throat, body against body, sunlight, and oh, right, last night I kissed him and told him it was real and let him put his lips and tongue on my neck and made sounds that I have never made in front of another human being.
I can feel the exact moment it hits.
His whole body goes rigid. Every muscle, from his shoulders to his calves, contracts simultaneously, and the man who was soft and pliant and trusting against my chest three seconds ago is suddenly a board, a plank, a human piece of surgical steel lying in my arms with the frozen, brittle stillness of someone who has just remembered something they spent the entire night not regretting and is now, in the merciless clarity of morning, regretting furiously.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t pull away. He lies there, rigid, his hand still in my shirt because his hand hasn't gotten the memoyet, and I can feel his heartbeat through his back, fast and hard and accelerating, and I can feel him thinking. I can practically hear it, the surgical brain spinning up like a machine booting, running diagnostics, assessing damage, calculating escape routes.
I wait.
I’ve been waiting for this man for two years. I can wait for this, even if it hurts.
“Good morning,” I say, and I keep my voice soft. Easy. The voice I use in the ER when a kid wakes up from sedation and doesn't know where they are. No sudden movements. No pressure. Just affection, and presence, and the steady reassurance that the person next to them is safe.
Arjun does not respond. He’s conducting an internal crisis assessment and apparently the results are not good.
“It's about seven-thirty,” I continue, because talking seems better than the alternative, which is lying in silence while the man I love processes a five-alarm emotional emergency against my collarbone. “The birds have been going nuts for about an hour. I think there's a turf war happening in the mango grove. Very dramatic. I've been taking sides. I'm backing the one with the high-pitched call. He's got range.”
Nothing. Absolute silence. Rigor mortis levels of stillness.
“Also, your hand is in my shirt. Not that I’m complaining, of course.”
His fingers uncurl like they've been burned. He pulls his hand free and rolls away from me in a single, fluid movement that would be impressive if it weren't so obviously a retreat, and he’s on his back on the far edge of the mattress, staring at the ceiling, his chest rising and falling with the rapid, controlled breathing of a surgeon performing emergency emotional triage on himself.