She pointed her carrot wielding fork at him. “Lost and awkward, you’re not,” she tossed back.
Daksh tapped his fork against hers in a toast. “To shattering misconceptions about us.”
Vedika grinned, tapping his fork violently enough to send his calamari tumbling to the sand beneath their feet. Daksh grumbled under his breath as she proclaimed, “To being someone other than ourselves.”
He speared a prawn and waggled it at her. “I’ll bet you this prawn you can’t do one out of comfort zone thing while we’re stuck here.”
Vedika leaned over the table, her lips closing over the prawn and pulling it off his fork in a clean, tidy move. Daksh blinked at his empty fork still pointing up in the air.
“I already did. I’m sitting here, eating lunch with Tarzan, aren’t I?”
Daksh threw his head back and laughed, the sound filling the crowded shack and making people glance over at them.
Vedika started to giggle and the unexpected sound set him off again. “Tarzan?” he asked, wiping the tears of laughter dampening his cheeks.
“King of the jungle and all that.” She shrugged, still smiling as she forked up a piece of fish.
“That’s the lion, Mouse,” he informed her, still chuckling. “But I’ll take it. Tarzan is a compliment.”
“Only you would think so,” she retorted dryly.
A companionable silence fell over the table, the first since they’d run into each other. “Are you looking forward to the wedding?” she asked now as she took another small bite of her meal.
“Are you?” Daksh asked, deflecting neatly. He didn’t think Vedika was ready to know exactly how little he was looking forward to her wedding.
“Of course,” she said, the reply sounding like it had been rehearsed. “I’m looking forward to us starting our lives together. We have so many plans. We even have our five year plan colour coded on excel. The ten year plan,” she continued, attacking her fish with a little too much force, “needs some more work.”
Daksh paused, his beer bottle halfway to his mouth. “It sounds riveting,” he said finally.
“You’re being judgemental,” she retorted, an eyebrow quirking in challenge. “Presumptuous, and snotty.”
“What can I say, Mouse?” Daksh grumbled. “You’re a bad influence. And heaven help me, you’re rubbing off on me.”
Laughter bubbled out of her as she sat back in her chair, her meal forgotten. “I’m a bad influence?” she chortled.
Daksh eyed her over the rim of his beer bottle, a strange flutter of something in his chest making him pat it with one hand.
“I love it,” she declared. “I’ve waited a long time to be a bad influence. And look, finally, we’re here.”
“Yeah,” Daksh agreed quietly, watching her with growing disquiet. “We’re here.”
CHAPTER 13
VEDIKA
“I’ve got this handled, sweetheart,”Ashish’s calm voice soothed the last of her nerves.
Vedika relaxed back in her seat, watching Daksh prowl the rocky path that extended into the ocean, taking pictures of…was that a crab he was focused on?
“I spoke with the airline,” Ashish said now. “They said flights should resume by tomorrow. But it’s going to be chaos trying to reschedule everyone who needs to get out of there.”
In that moment, with the sun slowly setting over the horizon, soft music playing and lights winking on in the shacks around her, Vedika found it hard to care. If Banlay was sorted, then maybe she could just relax a bit for once. Go with the flow.
“My mom wanted to know if you’d checked out the pictures she sent you. She said she’d tried calling you but couldn’t get through.”
The flow stuttered, dribbling away until it dried up. Vedika sighed. “I’ll take a look now and reply. Thanks for reminding me.”
She scrolled through her messages before reaching his mother’s contact. Shit. She had forty seven unread messages from her future mother-in-law. She opened them up only for her eyes to be assaulted with a virulently yellow lehenga.
