Say You'll Be My Jaan, page 28
Karthik watched her intently, his hand moving up and down her back. Somehow, he understood everything she wasn’t quite saying. She wasn’t ready to say those words. To return his declaration of love. But that didn’t bother him. They both had things to work through. They both needed time.
“Maybe we’re both right,” he said quietly.
“Maybe.”
Their mouths met, and they lost themselves for a while in kisses that made Karthik feel like he didn’t know where he ended and Meghna began. They were one unit, hearts beating in unison, their breaths in sync. They were somehow able to anticipate how the other would move and match those movements in time.
“So …” Meghna said, once they’d taken a break to come up for air. She was sprawled across his body, her head against his chest, and his arms were wrapped tightly around her.
“So …” Karthik replied.
“We’re going to have to go back eventually.”
Karthik threw back his head and groaned dramatically, making Meghna laugh.
“I’m serious. We’ve been in here a long time. They’re going to think we’re—”
“That we’re what?”
Meghna’s cheeks took on the slightest rosy glow. “You know, that … that we’re—”
“Oh. I get what you mean.” Karthik waggled his eyebrows and tried to give her a suggestive look, which only sent Meghna into a fit of giggles.
Karthik couldn’t help but smile, even after Meghna’s laughter came to an end.
“What?” Meghna asked after she’d gained control of her breath.
“I love your laugh,” he said honestly, his hand lightly playing with the ends of her hair. “I love being the one to make you laugh.”
“I like your laugh too.”
“Almost as much as you like the way I smell?” Karthik asked, his voice as smug as he could make it.
Just like he’d hoped, Meghna laughed again. “Yes, almost as much as that.”
“So, what do you want to tell them?” he asked. “When we go back in?”
“The truth?” she suggested.
Karthik leaned forward and kissed her, and it felt softer and sweeter than any kiss they’d shared before.
“That sounds good to me.” They looked at each other for a long moment, discussed the remaining details, and then left the study, walking out hand in hand.
Meghna’s mother was the first to notice that he and Meghna were back in the room. She smiled widely, then elbowed her husband in the ribs.
“Jaan, you owe me fifty bucks. They’re holding hands.”
Meghna’s father smirked but shook his head. “We don’t know what they’re going to say.”
“Well, clearly they’re still together.”
Meghna laughed. “Fifty? You’re betting higher than usual, Mom.”
“That’s how confident I am, beta.”
Karthik’s mother frowned. “I thought our bets were supposed to be secret.”
“Thank you, Shanti,” Meghna’s father said. “Excellent point. And we definitely weren’t supposed to announce them the second the kids came back.”
Karthik’s eyes widened. “Amma, you’re part of this?”
His mother shrugged. “Why not? We had to find some way to pass the time. We thought we’d make our predictions about what you two talked about. But I’m not telling anyone my guess.” She waved a small slip of paper in front of her. “They were supposed to be secret. That’s why we wrote them down.”
“I’m sorry they sucked you into this, Aunty,” Meghna said wryly. She took a seat on the couch, and Karthik joined her.
“Don’t be,” Karthik said. “I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Amma’s something of a card shark. She’s legendary at twenty-eight.” His mother denied ever cheating, but somehow she always ended up winning.
Today, though, she had an unfair advantage. Before coming here, he’d called his mother and told her his plan. And the truth. That his engagement to Meghna had been a farce from the beginning, but along the way, he’d fallen for her. His mother had been surprised and hurt, but she had put it aside for now, insisting that she come to Dallas with him.
Meghna’s mother’s eyes shone with interest. “We should play, Shanti. I’ve got a set of cards somewhere. We have an uneven number, but we could make it work. Do you usually—”
“Mom,” Meghna interrupted. “Can we save that for later? Karthik and I have something to say.” She took a deep breath. “We were planning on telling all of you that we had decided to call off the engagement.”
A sharp inhale came from Meghna’s mother.
“But we spent some time talking and, well, we realized that we really care about each other. And we don’t want our relationship to end.”
“I knew it,” Meghna’s mother said triumphantly.
Meghna rolled her eyes and looked over at Karthik, as if to ask whether he’d take the lead. He didn’t especially want to, but it was clear she was ready to pass the reins.
“But we’re still going to call off our engagement,” Karthik said.
“Ha!” Meghna’s father said. “Radhika, you didn’t guess that.”
Karthik’s mother leaned over to read Meghna’s father’s slip of paper, and her lips curled up. “Neither did you, Akshay. You guessed they were breaking up. I’m the only one who got it right.” She unfolded her own piece of paper and read, “Meghna and Karthik are going to call off the wedding, but stay together.”
The room filled with stunned silence, then Karthik laughed and turned toward Meghna. “Okay, I told Amma some stuff, but I didn’t even know we were going to do that.”
“How could you … how did you …?” Radhika sputtered in Shanti’s direction.
Karthik’s mother delicately raised a shoulder. “It was a calculated guess.”
“We’re playing twenty-eight when this is over,” Radhika said. “I demand a rematch.”
Karthik’s mother smiled serenely, and Karthik couldn’t help but grin. It looked like Meghna’s mother had finally met a worthy competitor.
“Congratulations, Shanti, on the well-deserved win,” Meghna’s father said. “But Meghna, Karthik, can I ask why you’re ending the engagement? You said you care about each other, yes?”
“We do,” Karthik said, squeezing Meghna’s hand slightly. “Very much.”
“So, why not stay engaged?”
“We don’t want to rush anything. We just want to take it a day at a time,” Meghna said. “Without the pressure of a wedding around the corner.”
They’d both agreed that ending the engagement was the right call. Karthik was looking forward to just … spending time with Meghna. Without any kind of end date. Without having to pretend.
Meghna’s mother frowned. “So, that’s it? You’re both just … dating?”
Meghna laughed, and Karthik couldn’t help but smile.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess we are.”
20
“Well, that went about as well as we could have hoped,” Karthik said.
Meghna snorted as she pulled out of her parents’ driveway. Everyone had accepted the end of their engagement rather quickly, though Meghna still hadn’t told her parents that the engagement had never been real to begin with. She wanted to tell them the truth. She wanted to be more honest with them about a lot of things. But she’d decided she would discuss it with them later. Privately.
Besides, once her mother had confirmed that Meghna and Karthik were happy and were still in a relationship and that nothing seriously bad had caused them to take a step back, she’d dropped it and reissued her challenge to Karthik’s mom. In record time, she’d wrangled up a pack of cards and started dealing. And before they knew it, Meghna and Karthik had been roped into their mothers’ high-stakes game of twenty-eight.
“This is not how you deal,” Meghna’s mother had said petulantly, after losing a hand. “There are rules for this. Everyone knows that you have to deal—”
“One at time,” Karthik had said.
“All at once,” Meghna had said at the same time.
They’d turned and looked at each other with surprise.
“No, but you have to deal them all at once,” Meghna had said. “Otherwise no one gets dealt a good hand.”
“Exactly,” Karthik had said. “Some people end up with hands that are too good. They need to be distributed evenly so it’s fair.”
“But where’s the fun in dealing them fairly? You never get half-courts if you deal like that.”
Karthik had been about to launch into his next point when they’d been interrupted by the sound of all three parents laughing. They’d finally agreed on a compromise, alternating the dealing style each round, but the fights between the two of them had only gotten more and more ridiculous until the mothers had practically shooed them out the door. They’d insisted they had a real score to settle, and they didn’t want Meghna and Karthik interfering.
“How long do you think they’re going to keep playing?” Meghna asked, grinning over at Karthik in the passenger seat.
“No idea. But I’m glad we got out of there. I don’t want to see what happens when your mom inevitably loses.”
Meghna raised an eyebrow. “Are you seriously trash-talking on your mom’s behalf?”
Karthik laughed. “I didn’t mean to. I was just telling the truth. Amma never loses.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see about that.” Meghna slowed down before coming to a complete stop at a red light. She almost turned right, but realized it was pretty presumptuous of her to head straight back to her apartment. She and Karthik had a lot to talk about. A lot to figure out. “Do you want to go get dinner?” she asked.
Karthik shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Uh, if you want to. Sure. We can.”
She peeked at him from the corner of her eye. He was looking straight ahead. Spine straight. Jaw tense. His hand clenched into a fist. Almost as if … as if he was restraining himself.
A lick of fire coursed through Meghna’s body.
“Or we could go back to my—”
“Your place. Yes. Let’s do that.”
She almost laughed at his eagerness, but managed to rein it in. Still, she couldn’t help but tease him.
“Or … I could just pull over?”
Two seconds of silence. Then a loud exhale.
“Yes,” Karthik said, his voice gravelly and rough. “Please.”
Meghna shivered. She’d meant it as a joke, but she was dead serious about it now. If she didn’t get her hands on him soon, she might combust.
She turned onto a quiet street and had barely put the car in park when she felt Karthik’s hands on her body, lifting and pulling her over to the passenger seat.
He moved all at once, a blur of motion, capturing her lips with his own. He moaned into her mouth and the sound set her ablaze. God, she’d missed this. The feel of his body against hers. The softness of his lips. The coarse texture of his beard.
The logical side of her mind knew they’d been kissing just a little while ago, but those kisses had been like cotton candy: sweetness that was so fragile, so delicate, that it melted on the tongue. Wonderful. Magical. Tender. Fleeting.
But this kiss? This kiss was a bite of green chili. Scorching heat. The kind that built and built and built, numbing her tongue, her mind, her senses. But she didn’t care. She wanted more. She bit down on his lower lip, and he let out a sound that was half-groan, half-growl. She bit down again, gentler this time, then soothed the sting away with her tongue. Quick as lightning, he broke away, moving his mouth along her jawline to her ear, nipping her lobe lightly.
She gasped.
“You like that?” he asked, catching her lobe between his teeth again.
“Yes,” she breathed, her hand coming up to grip his shirt collar. She didn’t want him to move. She wanted to keep him there. Right there. For as long as possible.
“Good,” he said. He planted a soft kiss behind her ear, then trailed more down the line of her neck. “I like it too.”
His hands came around her waist, and he gently pushed her toward his knees. He held her there for a few seconds, his breaths loud and harsh. Then he leaned his forehead against hers, almost involuntarily. As if he needed some space to calm himself down, but couldn’t help but touch her.
His hands traveled up and down the sides of her body. “I’ve been thinking about this since the card game. It was torture. Back there. In here. I needed to touch you.”
“Me too,” she said. “I needed to touch you. I need to touch you.”
She scooted forward slightly, needing to be closer. To feel him. To press against him. But Karthik’s hands tightened around her waist, so she stopped, going still.
“I don’t want to—” He broke off with a laugh. “That’s not true. I want to. So badly. But not like this. Not here. You deserve … you deserve better than this. You deserve more. So much more.”
She wanted to disagree, to say that she was more than happy to get it on in the car, but his voice held a note of something else. Something small and sad and resigned.
He let out a sound of frustration. “You deserve someone who would plan a perfect night. Who’d buy you flowers and arrange some elaborate surprise and sweep you off your feet. Not someone who just … just mauls you in a car.”
Meghna snorted, and Karthik pulled back, looking at her in disbelief.
“Are you laughing?”
“No. Well … kind of? Karthik, it was my idea to pull over. And if there was any ‘mauling’ here, it was completely mutual.”
She expected him to smile at that, or to at least acknowledge her words, but he just looked away, avoiding her gaze. He took a deep breath, but otherwise remained silent.
“Hey,” she said softly. “What’s going on?” She placed her hand on his jaw and turned his face back to hers, shocked to see genuine panic in his eyes.
He swallowed. “I … I don’t want to turn into my father. I remember him always being the way he was, but my mother said he didn’t start that way. I want to think that I can choose to be different. That I can choose to be better. But a part of me … a part of me thinks I can’t stop from becoming more like him. I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want you … anyone … to go through what my mother did. You deserve better than that. You deserve better than me.”
Meghna let out a breath, something finally clicking. As if the last puzzle piece had slid into place. She’d been staring at these crooked, jagged, disconnected pieces for so long. Holding them in her hands. Moving them around, lining them up. Trying to make them fit. Trying to make sense of them. But now she could see the full picture. She could finally see him.
“There’s no guarantee you won’t hurt me,” she said. “Or that I won’t hurt you. We’re not perfect. We’re going to hurt each other’s feelings. And when we do, we’ll apologize. And do our best to not do it again. But I’m not going to hurt you the way your dad hurt you. And you won’t hurt me that way, either. You’re not your father.”
Karthik started to speak, but Meghna placed her fingers over his lips.
“I know you don’t believe that. And I don’t blame you. After everything you’ve seen. And experienced. I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise, but let’s just take it a day at a time. You don’t need to figure all of it out right now. I don’t have it all figured out right now. But let’s just try. Try to put in the work. With me.”
Karthik nodded, his face solemn but tender. He leaned forward and kissed her, brushing his lips lightly against her own. Meghna closed her eyes. This kiss felt like a promise. An intention. A commitment.
Now all they needed was time.
He pulled back, and they looked at each other for several seconds.
“Are you ready to go home?” he asked, his voice cutting through the silence.
She nodded, and Karthik’s hands tightened around her waist. Almost as if he wanted to keep her there. As if he didn’t want to let her go. But after a moment, he lifted her, helping her scramble back into the driver’s seat.
Meghna smiled, then turned the car back on and started driving the two of them home.
As Karthik followed Meghna into her apartment, his mind started playing a tune. He concentrated, but no words popped into his head. Just the same tune. Over and over.
It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. And he recognized the tune as one he’d heard before. It had played in his head the first time he’d visited Meghna’s apartment. It was a soft melody. Subtle and sweet. And it made him feel something. The way a well-scored scene in a movie brought up all the right emotions. He just couldn’t put his finger on what that emotion was. He felt lighter, maybe?
Meghna dropped her purse on the couch, then went into the kitchen. The electric kettle clicked loudly.
“I’m making tea,” she called out. “Want any?”
He smiled, unbuttoning his shirt cuffs and rolling the sleeves up slightly. They’d had endless cups of chai at her parents’ house when they’d all been playing cards, but obviously that hadn’t been enough for Meghna. He tucked that piece of information away, adding to his ever-growing file on Meghna’s likes and dislikes, and took a seat on the couch.
“No, I’m fine,” he replied. He put his feet up on the ottoman and leaned back. He didn’t realize he’d closed his eyes until cool fingers brushed his hair off his forehead.
Meghna stood in front of him, a curious expression on her face and a mug of tea in one hand.
“Hey,” she said softly, her fingers still playing in his hair. “You okay?”
He closed his eyes again, enjoying her soothing touch. He felt fine. Ecstatic, really. But the last few hours had been an emotional whirlwind, and he was still taking it all in. He told her as much and she nodded, sitting down next to him.
“I feel the same way.” She swung her feet up onto the couch, tucking them beneath her. “It’s a little overwhelming. There’s so much to talk about. So much to square away. Like, what happens next? I still live in Dallas and your job is—”
