A record.
Then a groom calls out something about the horses needing water, and the moment breaks, and Arjun looks away.
He doesn’t speak to me for three hours.
Three hours. I keep a rough count because at this point, counting things related to Arjun Kapoor is apparently my primary hobby. He dismounts, hands his horse to the groom, and walks back to the main house without a word. He showers, changes, and appears at the late lunch in a fresh white shirt withhis curls restored to their immaculate configuration and his composure bolted firmly back into place. He sits beside me, because the cover requires it. He responds to direct questions from family members with clipped, exact answers. He allows my hand on his knee under the table because we established that as protocol.
But he doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t initiate conversation. He doesn’t do the thing he’s been doing more and more over the past few days, the unconscious drift in my direction, the barely perceptible lean of his body toward mine, the gravitational pull that neither of us has acknowledged but both of us feel.
He has retreated behind every wall he owns, and I can feel him behind them, locked in, reinforced, furiously repairing the breach that the polo field blew open.
I let him.
I let him have his three hours of silence, because I have been patient for two years and I can be patient for three more hours, and because I know something now that I didn’t know before the polo match. I know what his face looks like when the walls come down all the way. Not the three-second cracks. Not the morning-extraction glimpses. All the way down. And I know that what’s behind them is a man who wants me so badly he can’t look at me after he lets it show.
At dinner, he sits beside me and passes me the dal without being asked, and his fingers brush mine on the bowl, and neither of us mentions it, and neither of us pulls away, and the silence between us is not cold.
It’s the silence of a man who showed too much and is trying to figure out how to live with it, and a man who saw everything and is telling him, with every patient, steady, quiet breath: take your time. I’m not going anywhere.
Chapter 17
The Terrace
Arjun
Ihave been avoiding Casey for six hours and forty-three minutes, and I am running out of rooms.
The estate has thirty-seven rooms. I know this because I grew up here and because I counted them at age eleven during a particularly dull monsoon when Mother had cancelled our trip to Mumbai and I was cataloguing the house out of spite. Thirty-seven rooms, not including the kitchen, the service wing, or the various storage spaces where generations of Kapoors have deposited furniture they are too sentimental to discard and too proud to admit they have no use for.
I have, in the past six hours and forty-three minutes, occupied fourteen of them.
The study. The library. The small drawing room that nobody uses because the afternoon sun hits it at an angle that fades the upholstery. The music room, where I sat at the piano and stared at the keys without playing a single note because my hands were shaking and I did not trust them. The upper gallery, where I pretended to examine a portrait of my great-grandfather that I have seen approximately eight thousand times, and where I caughtmyself thinking, with a sudden and dangerous clarity, that Casey has been waiting for me in small ways for far longer than I am prepared to acknowledge, and I left the gallery quickly. The prayer room, which felt blasphemous given that my current emotional state is the antithesis of spiritual serenity.
I have been running from what happened on the polo field. Not the match. The match was polo. I have played polo for as long as I can remember. I understand the mechanics, the game plan, the controlled aggression that the sport demands. What happened on the polo field was not polo. What happened on the polo field was me losing control so completely, so publicly, that I rode a horse like I was going to war because Rohan touched Casey’s thigh.
I do not lose control. I am a neurosurgeon. Control is not a personality trait for me. It is a professional requirement. It is the thing that allows me to hold a blade inside a child’s skull and move it a fraction of a millimetre without tremor. Control is the architecture of my entire existence, and this afternoon, on a polo field in front of my cousin and the most provocative man in the British Isles, it crumbled like wet plaster because Casey Welling scored a goal and smiled at me and Rohan Mathur’s hand was on his thigh and something inside me, something deep and ferociously territorial, simply detonated.
And then there was the stare. The moment after the match when Casey caught my eyes across the field and I could not look away, and everything I have spent thirty-three years learning to hide was on my face, visible, readable, a complete, uncensored transmission of want and desire so raw it frightened me, and Casey saw it. He saw all of it. I know because I watched him see it, watched his blue eyes widen and his lips part and his expression shift into something steady and loving and patient that said, very clearly, I know. I see you. I’m not going anywhere.
Six hours and forty-three minutes. That is how long I have been hiding from the only man who sees me.
It is after eleven. The estate is quieting. The household staffhave retired. The aunties have dispersed to their rooms, their WhatsApp reports filed, their intelligence gathered. Karan left after dinner for Jaipur, something about meeting a supplier for his restaurant, and kissed my forehead again on his way out with the breezy, unearned intimacy that I have never been able to cure him of. Rohan, mercifully, has retreated to the guest wing, presumably to compose further schemes for my psychological annihilation. Priya cornered me after dinner, studied my face for approximately four seconds, and said, “You have been haunting this house like a Victorian ghost with a romantic crisis, which is exactly what Gabriel called you, so congratulations on achieving consistency. Go find your fake fiancé before I lock you both in a broom closet and solve this myself. And Arjun? If you quote a single medical term at that man instead of telling him how you actually feel, I will tell Daadi about the Harlequin novels, and she will never, ever let you forget it.” Then she walked away.
I did not go talk to him.
Instead, I went to the terrace. The upper terrace, the one that overlooks the main gardens, the fountains, and beyond them the dark silhouette of the polo field and the mango grove. It is my favourite place on the estate and always has been. When I was a boy, before Cambridge, before Edinburgh, before I became the Dread Prince of anything, I used to sit on the stone railing with my legs dangling over the edge and look at the sky. The Rajasthani sky. There is nothing like it. No light pollution, no overcast grey, no Toronto winter cloud cover pressing down like a ceiling. Just an enormous, impossible vault of stars, so many and so bright that they seem close enough to touch, and the Milky Way cutting across the centre like a river of crushed glass.
I am sitting in a low stone chair, my knees drawn up, a glass of whisky in my hand that I have not drunk. The night is warm and dry and fragrant with jasmine and the distant, dusty sweetness of the desert. The stars are exactly as I remembered.
I am trying to think clearly. I am failing.
The problem is not that I want Casey. I have wanted Caseyfor two years. I have managed that want with the same discipline I apply to every other unruly variable in my life: I identified it, categorized it, filed it in a sealed compartment, and proceeded with my daily functions. Wanting Casey from across a hospital corridor was manageable. Wanting Casey from behind an observation gallery window while he made a child laugh was survivable. The want lived at a distance, controlled by the gap between us, the professional boundary, the fundamental impossibility of a man like him being interested in a man like me.
The problem is that now the distance is gone.
The distance disappeared the moment he took my hand in his kitchen in Toronto, and every day since then, every shared bed and demolished pillow wall and unconscious migration, every brush of his arm against mine and every laugh that fills a room and every time he puts his hand on my knee under a table without being asked, the distance shrinks. And now there is no distance at all. Now there is just Casey, enormous and warm and patient and so deeply, quietly present in every part of my life that I cannot remember what it felt like before him, and the want is no longer a manageable variable filed in a sealed compartment. The want is a living thing with its own heartbeat, and it is consuming me alive.
I hear him before I see him.
