Rudra sighs, and I feel slightly sorry for him because he has to put up with Priti’s dramatics. But I’m relieved to see he’s not looking as tired anymore.
Priti shuts off the lights in the living room. “Baga Beach, here we come!”
It’s a quick drive to the beach, just like Priti said, and Rudra navigates the difficult roads of Goa with expertise (nothing short of what I expected of him). I sit in the front this time, map open on my phone, knowing I owe Priti for having slept the whole journey from Pune to Goa.
What I love about Goa is that it doesn’t look like any other city in India. Most of the roads snake through thick forests with greenery all around, palm leaves scraping a moonlit sky. There’s a sprinkling of wine shops, thatched huts, and a variety of markets. There are so many tourists walking the roads here it doesn’t feel like India.
Calangute has an active nightlife, even past one a.m. Every few meters, there are clubs and pubs and restaurants blasting music, both DJ and karaoke, letting out waves of smoke and featuring crowds of people in shimmering outfits, jubilation painted over their faces.
Everyone’s wearing such short clothes that no one really stands out. In India, I’m used to people turning around to leer when I wear anything that shows a little more skin than I normally would. This isnew. I don’t feel out of place in my halter-neck and skirt anymore. Instead, I feel quite the opposite. I feel like I fit right in. Safe.
The excitement pools into every corner of me, making my veins buzz. I look out the window the entire time, soaking up the glorious sights, itching to get to our destination.
When we get there, Rudra stops in front of the path leading to the beach. “Priti, why don’t you book us a table while Krishna and I find a parking spot?”
Priti’s too revved up to make a comment about why he’s specifically asking me to stay or why I can’t accompany her instead. She nods, opens the car door, and jumps out, yelling, “We’re here, baby!” before sprinting down the path.
And then it’s just Rudra and me inside the car. We’re restlessly quiet while he looks for a parking spot. I don’t dare turn to him, my mind racing with a hundred different possibilities of why he might’ve asked me to stay, ninety-nine of them being that he’s going to confront me about whatever’s going on between us.
So I focus on looking for a vacant spot instead. I find one a minute later, tucked away into a dark corner of the lot. This time, I can’t help but shamelessly watch as he does that hot steering-the-wheel thing again, with just one hand, his palm pressing into the curve of the wheel and directing it to the right. The BMW smoothly slips into the parking space, perfectly parallel to the cars on either side of us.
I gulp as the car hums to a stop. Rudra’s face is dark, barely lit by the green and blue lights from the digits on the dashboard. The only streetlight is five parking spaces away, and it silhouettes him, casting most of his face in shadow. I grab the door handle, pulling, needing to get away—
“Wait.”
Rudra unbuckles himself from the seat and leans toward me, his hand touching my shoulder. A tiny current zips out from the point where the skin of his palm and my skin come in contact, and I shiver, loving and loathing how his hand feels on my bare skin.
“What?” I whisper, turning to look at him. He’s so close our shaky breaths cloud together in the space between our faces.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” Rudra says, his voice so hoarse it’s like he’s struggling to dislodge it from his throat. His calloused fingers brush my shoulder, just briefly, and a million unholy thoughts fog my head.
“Chance to tell me what?” Now it feels likemyvoice is stuck in my throat. I can barely speak. I tilt my head, moving my shoulder up, nudging him, begging him to do it again, to brush his fingers against my skin.
Granted the permission, he skims his knuckles up to my ear, that same spot he touched last night, when we were standing under a hundred fireflies. My eyes flutter shut, and I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move. It’s like he read my mind. It’s like he knows exactly what makes my knees weak and my veins catch fire.
He brushes a lock of my hair behind my ear, and I can feel him looking at me with that dark gaze of his, and god, if I look at him again, I’ll disintegrate to dust. There’ll be nothing left but the essence of me. And just the essence of me isn’t enough to become a doctor, so something must be done about it.
He draws closer, his inexplicably feverish form oozing warmth into my side, and his lips touch my ear, grazing it so lightly I don’t even feel his lips on my skin, just on the tiny hair now standing to attention all over my body. The part of me that shoutsThis is wrongis overpowered, conquered by the part of me that’s on my knees, longing for him to kiss me.
“Just that you look really fucking hot right now,” he finally responds, right into my ear. His voice is deep and rough, and the blood pulsing in my throat turns to steam. His fingers knot into my hair from the back, tilting my head up, and his lips move from my ears to my cheekbone, my cheekbone to the corner of my lips. I give in, mouth parting to kiss him—
And he pulls away.
I nearly scream as he draws his hand back to grab the door handle and wrenches it open. My eyes snap open and stare at him, flushed and hot and embarrassed, my body an absolute mess of nerves. I can’t believe he had the audacityto come that close, to almost kiss me, and then... and thenpull away.
“Why would you do that?” I gasp, wanting to bring my hands up to my cheeks to siphon some of the heat from them but finding myself unable to move. My lips are tingling, and I can’t wrap my head around the fact that he almost kissed me.
Almost.
“Because I want you to make up your mind about what you want, Krishna,” he says. The distant chaos of the outside leaks in through the open door. “And as much as I want nothing more than to kiss you so hard you see stars right now”—he locks gazes with me one more time before stepping out onto the pavement, and the fierceness of the desire I see in his eyes nearly bowls me over—“it’s just going to have to wait.”
27
Seriously, in Public?
Goa, Monday
We’re inside one of the bars in Baga Beach, seated on a sofa, sipping our drinks and eating fried, oily starters. Most of the items on the menu were seafood and nonvegetarian; the only options on the veg menu were fried baby corn, aloo, and paneer.
