“Good morning,” I say.
“Good morning.”
“How are you feeling?”
He considers this. “Sore,” he says, with tremendous medical precision. “Pleasantly sore. In locations that are consistent with the activities conducted.”
“Activities conducted. That's what we're calling it?”
“I am a professional. I use clinical language.”
“You used some very non-clinical language last night.”
His ears go pink. Incandescent, visible-from-orbit, neon pink. “That was a contextual deviation from standard communication protocols.”
“You said my name so loud I think the night birds stopped singing.”
“I will not be taking further questions at this time.”
I grin at him. He glares at me with the intensity of a man whose dignity has been comprehensively undermined by his own vocal performance, and I lean forward and kiss him because I can, because this is my life now, because this man is in my bed with pillow lines on his cheek and my marks on his collarbone and the most beautifully outraged expression on his face, and I’m allowed to kiss him, and the kissing is real, and the morning is real, and we are real.
The kiss is slow and warm and tastes like sleep and I do not care, because after this trip, morning breath has become my favourite flavour, and this is a position I have held since approximately forty-eight hours ago and will hold for the foreseeable future.
We stay in bed for another hour. We don’t do anything strategic or productive. We lie tangled together and talk, really talk, in the easy, unhurried way of two people who’ve crossed a line and are discovering the landscape on the other side. He tells me about the first surgery he ever performed solo, and the way his hands shook afterward, and how Gabriel found him in the stairwell and sat with him in silence. I tell him about thefirst patient I ever lost, a six-year-old with an undiagnosed heart condition who coded in my arms during a night shift, and how I drove to Huntsville the next morning and sat on the dock with my mom and didn't speak for three hours. He traces the scar on my shoulder, the one from the hockey injury that ended my playing career, and I trace the henna lines on his palm, and neither of us says anything about what comes next, because right now the room is warm and the world is small and next can wait.
But, of course, next comes anyway.
The door opens at nine-fifteen.
Not a knock. Not a pause. Not a discreetare you decent.The door simply opens, and Priya is in the room, mid-sentence, before the handle has finished turning.
“Mother has called a family gathering in the main drawing?—”
What happens next happens fast.
Arjun lunges for the sheet. I lunge for the sheet. We lunge for the same corner of the same sheet, because the rest of the sheet is somewhere on the floor, having been demoted from bedding to obstacle at some point during the night. The corner we both grab is approximately the size of a dinner napkin. Arjun pulls it toward his lap. I pull it toward my lap. The sheet, being a sheet and not a magician, can only be in one place at a time. It chooses Arjun. I am left holding a fistful of nothing and a sudden, urgent appreciation for the value of a well-placed pillow.
I grab said pillow.
The pillow I grab is the small decorative one, the kind that exists for visual purposes and has never been asked to perform this type of work in its life. It covers, generously, about a third of what needs covering. I add a second pillow. The second pillow is somehow smaller than the first. I’m now holding two pillows and have achieved roughly the coverage of one mediocre pillow.
Arjun, who has secured the sheet, has secured it across the wrong half of himself. His left leg, from hip to ankle, is fully on display. He notices. He attempts a correction. The correctioninvolves a hip-swivel that exposes a different region entirely, briefly, before the sheet remembers its purpose and flops back into approximate position.
Priya hasn’t moved.
Priya is, in fact, staring at the ceiling. The ceiling is suddenly the most interesting object in the room. Priya is studying it the way an art historian studies a fresco. With deep, sustained, professionally invested attention.
“I am,” she announces to the medallion, “going to take a moment.”
“Priya,” Arjun says.
“I am taking the moment.”
“Priya, if you could?—”
“I am still in the moment, Arjun. The moment is ongoing. The moment has, in fact, just begun.”
I shuffle the pillows. The pillows don’t improve. I briefly consider the bedside lamp.