“Shhh…”
“Why are you making me ok?” She sobbed. “Why are you hell bent on returning me to the girl I had forgotten?”
“Is that a bad thing?” He palmed the back of her head. She shrugged.
Nilay gently peeled her back from his chest and cupped her face in his palms. He thumbed her tears away — “The girl I met was pretty phenomenal. I am just uncovering more phenomenal sides of her.”
She laughed through that deluge of tears — “You weren’t this smooth when we first met. What happened now?”
“My heart has recovered.”
Her head fell on his shoulder again, this time vibrating with a different kind of energy. Happy energy.
“You want to change into something more comfortable?”
She nodded, pulling back. Her head turned, and she glanced around at the vast suite. The views from the window were all stunning, dark, Mumbai with the stars and lights blinking bright.
“You crazy, you booked a Presidential Suite to just chat?!”
“I don’t stay in rooms.”
“I can’t let you pay for this.”
“Then you pay for it.”
She glared at him — “We are both using it, why should only I pay for it?”
Nilay chuckled, reaching for his shirt and unbuttoning it. “Split it, then, Doctor. Here,” he shrugged out of his shirt and held it out.
“They have robes,” she sassed, but reached for it. Nilay crossed his arms across his chest as she slipped out of her heels and walked barefoot into the bedroom. In the dress he had bought, covered in his jacket, holding his shirt — she was the future he had never imagined he would beg for.
————————————————————
“I didn’t ever think I would want revenge,” she said, sitting on the sofa with her legs turned under her, gazing at the sky. His shirt was flirting with her knees, and it was taking him everything to not think about flirting with them with his fingers. The low, sad tone in her voice snapped him out.
“This was not revenge, Ritu.” He clarified. “Revenge would have been having him dragged out of that party by the Police in front of his daughter and her in-laws.”
She sighed, crossing her arms on the armrest and laying her chin on it. Her hair tumbled in waves down her back. She looked like a piece of art — turned away from him, in his shirt, eyes on the sky.
“You know, in my idle moments, when those thoughts came to me, I would imagine him dying a painful death. Then I would think I am spoiling my own karma by thinking it. I would talk myself out of his thoughts, then again return, sometimes months later, sometimes years later, imagining another scenario where he is disgraced, crying, begging, running for his life. Those thoughts were so dark but so satisfying, even when I had made peace with it all and moved on.”
Silence. He did not break it. And a few minutes later, more words tumbled out of her.
“I sometimes thought to myself I had overreacted…”
Nilay began to open his mouth but she was faster.
“That maybe he would have backed off if I had just hidden in that first year.”
“Ri…”
“But then I think about the terror I felt every time his call came on the house landline or when somebody said he was on his way to the house… just the mention of his name. The way he looked at me. I felt like I was naked.” Her head pushed further into her folded arms. “It was fear not of one moment but of… forever. That he will find me and ask the same thing again… or touch me again or worse. You know, there is a principle in psychology. When I studied it, I understood what had happened.”
She went quiet again. And again he let her be.
“The fear of anticipation,” she voiced after a long pause. Her deep breath was loud. Audible.
“The fear of anticipation feels far worse and is more prolonged than the actual fear of a negative event. He pushed me there.” Ritu’s voice thinned. “It would just not end. I thought it would never end. Fear turned into disdain, disdain into rage when I was continents away from him.”
