My hands, resting on his chest, are perfectly still.
Chapter 26
Pandit-ji’s Verdict
Casey
Iwake up in a different world.
Same room. Same moonlight through the balcony doors, fading now into the grey-pink of pre-dawn. Same silk sheets, though they’re in a state that would give the household staff a significant amount of professional concern. Same carved ceiling with its Mughal flowers watching from above like patient, ancient witnesses.
But different. Everything is different, because the man lying beside me is naked, and so am I, and our bodies are deliciously tangled together beneath the silk sheets in a configuration that has nothing to do with unconscious migration and everything to do with consciously repeated choice. His leg’s hooked over mine, and his arm’s across my waist. His curls are a wreck against the white pillow, his face soft in sleep, one hand resting on my bare chest over my heart, and the skin-on-skin warmth of him, the full, unhidden, nothing-between-us reality of waking up with no clothes and no walls and no pretence, is so different from every other morning we have shared in this bed thatit feels like a different room entirely. This is the man I love, and he knows it, and I know it, and last night we stopped pretending about anything at all.
I lie very still. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to disturb a single molecule of air in this room, because right now, in this precise configuration of light and warmth and tangled bodies, everything is perfect, and I’ve learned from extensive experience that perfection at the Kapoor estate has a half-life of approximately four hours before something detonates.
So I hold the perfection. I hold it the way I hold a newborn in the ER, carefully, with both hands, aware that it’s fragile and temporary and more valuable than anything I’ve ever been trusted with.
Arjun turns on his side, shifting and facing me. His body is curved toward mine, his knees tucked against my thigh, his forehead close enough to my shoulder that his breath stirs the hair on my arm. He’s thinner without clothes than he looks in his tailored armour, lean and sharp-angled, the architecture of his body built for precision rather than mass. There are marks on his collarbone. My marks. Small, faint, pink against his brown skin, and the sight of them sends a wave of something through me that’s so tender and so fierce it feels like being hit.
I did that. He let me do that. The most controlled man I have ever known let me press my mouth against his skin and leave evidence, and when I look at those marks in the pale morning light I feel a possessiveness that is completely new and slightly terrifying and absolutely, categorically, not something I am ever going to apologize for.
Last night happened.
I let myself sit inside that fact. I let it fill me like warm water filling a glass, slow and steady, all the way to the brim. Last night, Arjun Kapoor told me he loved me. Not in the heat of a kiss, not in the middle of a crisis, but in the raw, shaking aftermath of saving a child, when every wall was down and every defence wasstripped, and the only thing left was the truth. He said “I love you” as if he has been carrying them inside himself for longer than he can bear, and the weight of them leaving his body was visible, a physical release, like a breath held for a year finally being let go.
And then he took me to bed. Or rather, he told me to take him to bed, with a scandalous garden wall contingency plan and an assessment of his own composure levels, because even in the act of complete surrender Arjun Kapoor can’t resist categorizing the variables, and I love him for it. I love every ridiculous, over-analyzed, clinically annotated thing about the way this man processes desire, because underneath the terminology and the contingency plans is a person who wanted me so badly he was vibrating with it, and who chose to stop being afraid, and who fell apart in my arms with a generosity and a trust that I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.
It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t the choreographed, cinematic, perfectly lit scene that Harlequin romance novels sell. It was real. It was elbows and laughter and a water glass sacrificed to enthusiasm, and it was his hungry hands on my skin with the focused, reverent precision of someone who treats everything precious with surgical care, and it was my mouth on his neck and his voice saying my name like a word he had just invented, and it was the best night of my life. Better than the kiss. Better than the terrace. Better than every night of sleeping tangled together in a bed that was never big enough for two people this complicated.
I look at him sleeping. I look at the marks on his collarbone and the henna traces still visible on his hands and the way his eyelashes, dark and long and absurdly beautiful, cast tiny shadows on his cheekbones in the pre-dawn light.
I’m in love with this man in a way that I did not know was possible before him. Not the two-year pining, not the across-the-hallway ache, not the patient, steady, background frequency of wanting someone who didn't know you wanted them. This is something else. This is the love that comes after. The love that exists on the other side of a confession and a firstkiss and a first night, the love that is no longer theoretical, no longer a thing carried in silence. This is love with evidence. Love with marks. Love that has been spoken out loud and sealed skin-to-skin.
And I’m terrified.
Not of him. Never of him. Of the fact that in just a few hours, the Kapoor estate will wake up, and Meera will have a new plan, and the family machine will grind forward, and the world outside this room will do what it always does, which is try to complicate the simple things.
Arjun stirs. His fingers tighten on my chest. His face buries deeper against my shoulder, a small, unconscious burrowing that makes my entire cardiovascular system do something medically inadvisable.
“What time is it?” he mumbles, his voice rough with sleep and barely audible.
“Early. Go back to sleep.”
“Are you watching me sleep?”
“No.”
“You're watching me sleep.”
“I'm conducting a visual assessment of your post-operative condition.”
His mouth twitches against my shoulder. “That is the worst use of medical terminology you have ever attempted, and you once called a thermometer a 'temperature acquisition device' in front of a seven-year-old.”
“That seven-year-old was very impressed.”
“That seven-year-old asked the nurse if you were 'the weird doctor.'“
I laugh. He burrows deeper. His arm slides across my waist and pulls, and I let myself be pulled, rolling onto my side to face him, and we are nose to nose in the grey morning light, his eyes half-open and sleep-soft and looking at me with an expression that has no clinical framework and no labels and no thirty-second timer. Just warmth. Just Arjun.