“Or the jasmine. Or the papers adjacent.”
And then something happens that I’ve never seen before. Arjun Kapoor, the Dread Prince of Paediatrics, the most controlled man in Canadian medicine, lying on a silk-covered bed in a palace in Rajasthan with his clinical mask in pieces on the floor and his ears still pink from being told he was a spectacular kisser, laughs.
It’s not the polished, social laugh he deploys at Kapoor dinner parties. It’s not a controlled exhalation of amusement. It’s a real laugh, slightly broken, slightly wet, startled out of him by the sheer absurdity of lying in bed and dismantling his own excuses one by one while a man he kissed mere hours ago holds his hand and refuses to let him run. It’s the laugh of someone who has just realized that the thing he was most afraid of, being seen, being known, being held accountable for his own heart, is also the thing that makes the unbearable pressure in his chest finally, finally ease.
I stare at him. I stare at him laughing, eyes crinkled and bright and wet at the edges, and my heart does something that I don’t think hearts are supposed to do, something that involves expanding past the boundaries of my ribcage and filling the entire room.
“Papers adjacent,” he repeats, and he’s still laughing, and it’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. “That was genuinely the worst thing I have ever said. And I once told a patient’s mother that her son’s recovery outlook was 'within the ninety-fifth percentile of statistical probability' while she was crying.”
“That’s day-one Arjun. We’re way past day one, Doc.”
“Yes,” he says quietly, and the laugh fades into something warmer, something steady and certain. “We are.”
He lifts our joined hands. He looks at them, his slender surgeon’s fingers threaded through my big, blunt ones, and then he does something that I wasn’t expecting, that I couldn’t have predicted with any scouting report or dossier or two-year study of his micro-expressions.
He pulls me toward him by our joined hands. Gently. Deliberately. No falling this time. No gravity, no collision, no desperation. Just Arjun Kapoor, in the full, merciless clarity of morning, with no moonlight to blame and no adrenaline to cite and no clinical framework to hide behind, choosing to close the distance himself.
He kisses me in the daylight.
It’s soft. It’s unhurried. It’s a morning kiss, warm and simple and tasting faintly of sleep and entirely of morning breath, and I don’t care, I don’t care even slightly, because Arjun Kapoor is kissing me on purpose in the daylight and if that comes with morning breath then morning breath is my new favourite flavour. It’s nothing like the desperate, shaking collision of last night, and it’s better. It’s better because it’s a choice made in daylight, without excuses, without the cover of darkness or the fuel of adrenaline, and when he pulls back, his eyes are clear and calm and entirely, unambiguously present.
“Not a lapse in judgment,” he says.
“Not a lapse in judgment,” I confirm.
He leans his forehead against mine. I can feel him breathing, slow and steady, and his hand is still in mine, and his fingers are still. Perfectly, completely still.
There will be time for the difficult conversations. There will be time for Dev arriving and his Mother recalibrating and the terrifying, exhilarating work of figuring out what two people do when the fake thing becomes real and the real thing is bigger than either of them planned.
But right now, in this room, in the morning light, with hisforehead against mine and the taste of a daylight kiss on my lips, we’ve crossed the first hurdle. The hardest one. The one where the walls go back up and the words get taken back and the moonlight gets blamed.
We crossed it. Together. In daylight. Without the moon.
Take that, papers adjacent.
Chapter 21
Dev Arrives
Arjun
Dev Mehindra arrives at the Kapoor estate at half past four, in a car that is not as expensive as Rohan's, wearing a suit that is not as deliberately careless as Rohan's, and carrying a quiet, steady confidence that is, in every measurable way, more dangerous than anything Rohan has ever deployed.
I am watching from the upper terrace when the car pulls through the gates. Mother arranged this with the same meticulous, strategic choreography she brings to everything: the timing, the entrance, the way the afternoon light hits the sandstone courtyard at this hour, turning it golden and warm, a stage set for the arrival of the man she chose.
Casey is beside me. He is leaning against the terrace railing with his arms crossed, and he has been unusually quiet for the past hour, ever since Mother announced at breakfast, with a smile so carefully casual it could have been rehearsed for weeks, that “Dev will be joining us this evening. How wonderful. Priya, do ensure the east guest suite is prepared.”
The east guest suite. Not the west wing, where Rohan is staying.The east suite is adjacent to Mother's rooms, connected by a private corridor. She is keeping Dev close. She is positioning her pieces.
“That's him?” Casey asks, watching the car door open.
“That is him.”
Dev steps out into the courtyard, and the first thing I notice, the first thing anyone would notice, is that he is handsome. Not handsome the way Rohan is handsome, which is deliberate and curated and deployed like a weapon. Dev is handsome the way a well-designed surgical instrument is beautiful: precisely engineered, perfectly proportioned, and entirely functional. He has spectacular cheekbones, dark, intelligent eyes, and the build of someone who plays polo and rows and does whatever other aristocratic athletic pursuits one does when one lives in Kensington and has a membership at the kind of gym that doesn't advertise or have signup promotions.
He is wearing a charcoal suit, impeccably tailored, with a pale blue shirt open at the collar. His hair is dark, neatly cut, and his posture radiates the easy authority of a man who has walked into rooms like this his entire life and has never once questioned whether he belonged.
Mother appears on the front steps. She greets Dev with both hands extended, her smile wide and genuine, the warmest smile I have seen from her since we arrived. She touches his face. She says something I cannot hear from this distance. Dev laughs, a pleasant, unremarkable laugh, and bends to touch her feet in the traditional greeting of respect, and Mother places her hand on his head with a tenderness that makes something behind my ribs constrict.