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A few minutes later as Koyal was about to step into the changing room, she felt a strong hand clutch her arm.
‘Amit,’ her brain blurted, petrified. She let out a little scream.
A hand clasped around her mouth to muffle a second scream and another pulled her inside a dark room. Koyal, scared senseless, was about
to start screaming in earnest when someone switched on the light in the room.
She turned around sharply to see if it was indeed Amit who had grabbed her hand.
Atharv. His eyes blazing fire.
‘What,’ he hissed, turning her around and roughly undoing the top knot of her gown, ‘is this?’
For a moment Koyal stared at Atharv, not comprehending his question.
She then felt Atharv’s fingers, red hot and ice cold at the same time, trace her back beginning from the top of her left shoulder blade.
And then it hit her.
A scar from when Amit had once hit her – the only scar that remained, really, the ugly red scar that wouldn’t go, no matter what she tried – ran from one shoulder blade to the other.
It was this that she now felt Atharv’s fingers trace.
Koyal turned around abruptly to face him and his eyes, boring into her soul, only held anger. They searched hers for answers, for consolation, for something that would say to him that this wasn’t what he feared it was.
All she could give him was a horrified stare.
‘Why did you let this happen?’ he spat out the angry words.
‘I need to go,’ she mumbled, biting her lips, desperate not to break into tears in front of this man.
Who are you to ask that question?
She batted away his hand, turned around and ran out of the room.
Atharv rested his head against the cool wood of the door and sank to the floor, exhausted. What had this girl done to herself, he wondered, wanting desperately and not wanting equally desperately to know.
‘Atharv,’ came Kimberly’s voice, bringing him out of his reverie.
Atharv looked up. One look at his face and Kimberly knew something was up. She sat down next to him, her shoulders touching his.
‘Are you okay?’
‘What do you do,’ Atharv asked, ‘when you know – even though you don’t really?’
Kimberly looked at Atharv for a few seconds, studying his face. Unslept and tired, he looked incredibly sexy, she thought, and then shushed her mind. Gently, she began to run her fingers through his hair.
‘The nightmares are back, aren’t they?’ she asked, massaging his temples, exactly the way she knew he liked it. ‘You didn’t get much sleep last night either?’ she asked gently.
Atharv closed his eyes, feeling stress ooze out of his body as Kimberly’s long elegant fingers massaged his head.
‘Yes,’ he mumbled and then looked at her, surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘When you know, even though you don’t really?’ Kimberly smiled.
Atharv smiled and nodded.
‘You do what I just did. You help in whichever way you can,’ she said and Atharv could only stare at her.
