The question is whether love is enough to bridge the gap between a gift shop and a palace.
I don't call my mom. Not because I don't want to, but because I know what she'd say. She'd say, Casey James Welling, since when do you let a big house scare you? And she'd be right. And I'd feel better. And the question would still be there, heavy and real, waiting.
A hand touches my shoulder.
I look up. Arjun is standing behind the bench, dressed in a white linen shirt and dark trousers, his curls slightly damp, his eyes soft in the morning light. He’s holding something. A plate. On the plate is a paratha, cleanly folded into a neat triangle, and a small steel cup of chai, and a cluster of green grapes.
“You missed breakfast,” he says.
“I was in the garden.”
“I noticed. I also noticed you were sitting with Dev.” He pauses. His jaw does the thing. The micro-tighten that means he’s processing something complicated. “Was it... was it a difficult conversation?”
“No.” I take the plate. The paratha’s warm. He brought me breakfast. Arjun Kapoor, who has never in his life performed a domestic act that was not strategically pre-approved, went to the kitchen and assembled a plate and brought it to me in the garden. “He's a good man, Arjun.”
“I know.”
“He brought me chai.”
“I know. Kavita told me.” His ears go red. The faintest shade. “I came to bring you chai and was informed that I had been, and I quote, 'beaten to the punch by the London boy.' Kavita seemed disappointed in my response time.”
I laugh. It comes out of me like something that has been held too tight, a release, a loosening, and the heavy stone in my chest shifts, just slightly, and the weight eases by a fraction.
Arjun sits on the bench beside me. Not on the far end, the way Dev sat. Right beside me. Close enough that his shoulder presses against my arm, and I feel his warmth against mine. He picks up a grape from the plate and eats it, which is the Arjun equivalent of a revolutionary act given that this is unapproved, non-cellophane-wrapped produce being consumed outside of a controlled dining environment.
“Casey,” he says, and his voice is quiet, and his green eyes are looking at the fountain. “I know what you're thinking.”
“You can't hear my thoughts.”
“You haven't made a single joke since I arrived. You always make jokes. When you stop making jokes, it means something is eating you alive and you're trying to hold still so it doesn't show, except you're a six-foot-three golden retriever, Casey, and golden retrievers cannot hold still. Your leg has been bouncing since I sat down.” He glances at my leg, which is, in fact, bouncing. I stop it. “You're wondering if you're enough.”
My chest constricts. “Arjun...”
“You're wondering if a lake cottage and a goldendoodle can compete with a flat in London and astrological compatibility charts. You're wondering what happens when we go back to Toronto and the magic of Rajasthan wears off and you're just a paediatrician in dinosaur scrubs and I'm just a neurosurgeon who can't make small talk.”
I stare at him. He stares at the fountain. His hand, resting on his knee, is trembling. The outside-the-OR tremor.
“I know you're wondering this,” he says, “because I've beenwondering the same thing, except from the other direction. I've been wondering if I'm enough. If a man who has the emotional range of a surgical instrument and who processes affection through clinical terminology and who couldn't tell a crying mother that her son was going to be okay deserves a man who can walk into any room on any continent and make every person in it feel like they matter.”
The stone in my chest dissolves.
Just like that. Just dissolves. Because this ridiculous, beautiful, impossible man just sat down beside me on a bench and told me that while I was wondering if I was enough for his world, he was wondering if he was enough for mine, and the symmetry of it, the perfect, absurd, heartbreaking symmetry, is the funniest and the saddest and the most reassuring thing I have ever heard.
“We're a mess,” I say.
“We are a comprehensive disaster.”
“A comprehensive disaster with good chai.”
“Kavita's chai,” he corrects. “I cannot take credit for the chai.”
“You carried it to the garden. That counts.”
He looks at me. I look at him. The morning sun is warm through the neem leaves, dappling his face with light and shadow, and his eyes are bright and scared and completely, entirely, unmistakably mine.
“You are enough,” he says. “You have always been enough. You were enough in a supply closet in Toronto and you are enough on a bench in Rajasthan and you will be enough in a freezing Canadian winter in a cluttered apartment with a goldendoodle who eats furniture.”
“Oliver doesn't eat furniture. He eats roses. And the occasional throw pillow.”