A minute later, she snapped a selfie while pretending to bite into an entire cake and sent it off. As long as his sister kept the images she sent Harlow Chan G-rated, Raj wouldn’t have to find the boy and smash his phone to smithereens.
His own phone finally pinged with an incoming message around five: Hope you’re having a good Christmas Day.
It was a message that told him nothing, made him feel as if she was distancing herself. Raj’s abdomen tensed, his jaw tight. About to reply in an effort to break through her self-defensive walls, he thought of Aditi sending her crush photos, and he thought about how Nayna had touched him that night at the party—and in the park.
Ducking into his flat for a little privacy, he took a photo just for her.
It took him three tries to get it right.
He’d never in his life done anything like this, but the current cock-up called for desperate measures. I got you a gift, he wrote, trying to figure out if he was flirting right—he wished she was in front of him so he could kiss her and melt her and remind her that the promise of what they had was worth a little risk.
Oh, you didn’t have to do that, she wrote back.
Raj sent the photo of his upper body, adding, From Santa, to the message at the last minute.
2.7/10 she replied.
Raj’s grin spread slowly across his face. It sure looked like he was doing the flirting right, because her response fairly demanded he avenge his honor. Maybe he’d send her a photo a day. No, one in the morning, one at night so she couldn’t forget him even if she tried. More, he’d do everything in his power to throw a wrench in their parents’ New Year’s Eve plans. He would let no one make Nayna feel hunted.
* * *
Having stolen a moment of privacy, Nayna fell back in her bed, her phone clutched to her chest and a surely goofy smile on her face. Lifting up the phone, she stared at the photo again, at gorgeous ripped abs and smooth brown skin. He had a small scar on his upper left pectoral that she wouldn’t mind licking, and the sprinkling of crisp hair on his chest made her fingers curl into the sheets as her breath caught.
She couldn’t help rubbing her thighs together in a vain effort to assuage the ache he’d aroused. “You’re a fiend,” she whispered to the man who was playing with her again, then carefully made a new folder in her photos just for him.
The panic that had held her captive all day receded a little, but it wasn’t gone. She still had the feeling of having boarded a runaway train, and every so often her heartbeat would spike, her skin burning in a way that had nothing to do with pleasure. It didn’t help that Madhuri flitted around the Christmas party, carefree and without worries once more.
As if the past had never been.
But it had been and it had left scars on all of them. Her father, who patted her on the shoulder and called her a good girl for making sure the food table was never empty but who never hugged her. Gaurav Sharma had stopped being affectionate with her after Madhuri’s defection, as if he blamed his occasionally indulgent parenting for having set Madhuri on the wrong path.
Her mother, who smoothed her hair and whispered, “You’ll have your own home soon, Ninu, your own family” in a way that told Nayna that, on some level, Shilpa Sharma was aware of her younger daughter’s need to break free of this inhibited and stifling existence full of people she loved.
Her aji, who was dressed in a glorious gold-and-pink caftan for this event and who smiled at Nayna and said, “I know I can rely on you, beta,” when all Nayna had done was bring out a chair so she could rest her feet. “I know I never have to worry about you not being there if I need you.”
And even Madhuri, who hurt one day a year… and who couldn’t commit to any man now, though the entire time they’d been growing up, being married and having “tons” of babies had been all she’d talked about.
By the time Nayna turned in that night, she was exhausted both in the body and in the soul.
When her phone vibrated, she picked it up, looked at the message, and moaned. Raj had sent her another photo, this one focusing on his flexed arm, part of his naked chest visible along with half his face.
He was smiling.
Nayna traced the line of that smile, utterly and totally demolished, her heart mush.
3.2/10, she wrote back, and her fingers, they trembled. This man, he was dangerous to her. He could seduce her into abandoning her dreams of freedom to live life in the predefined world that had been chosen for her. And yet she couldn’t just walk away. Couldn’t give up this serious, often-unsmiling, and rock-solid man who was cracking his shell bit by bit to let her in.
19
Half-Naked Raj (No Further Enticement Required)
Nayna ended up out of town the next day when Aji suddenly asked if she wouldn’t mind driving her to the small coastal town of Raglan. “My old friend, Parvati, is visiting her younger son there and then going straight back to Wellington. I haven’t seen her in, oh, twenty years!”
The road trip went fine except for a flat tire on the return leg that meant they got home after dark. In the interim, Raj had sent her three ab selfies. He was wearing a hard hat in one of them, streaks of dust on his chest—he’d captioned it to tell her he was putting in some time on a job over the vacation period in order to free up his schedule for a large project that was looking like it might be more complicated than initially believed.
I thought you might like to see me in my natural environment, he’d added.
If he’d been standing in front of her, Nayna would’ve pounced on him like the she-cats in Aji’s “leopard cologne” ad. Missing him far too much but scared and confused at the same time, she squeezed her phone and fought the urge to ask him to meet her despite the late hour. In the end, she decided he must already be in bed after pulling a long day—he’d snapped that hard hat photo that was the stuff of her pornographic dreams at around eight in the morning, which meant he must’ve already been on the site for some time, taking advantage of the summer light.
She fell asleep wondering if he’d mind recreating a live-action version of that image and woke the next morning bad-tempered and wildly aroused. No matter what, she was hunting him down tonight and ordering him to do something about it! It was his fault she was a walking bag of hormones.
The phone vibrated while she was scanning through her private Raj folder.
Tonight?
Nayna bit down hard on her lower lip and almost broke the phone typing back: Soon as it gets dark. Bring the hard hat.
That night, fate decided to have another giggle at their expense.
A water pipe broke while she was impatiently waiting for night to fall, and, after turning the water off at the mains, her father said, “Call Raj! He probably knows a plumber who’ll come out during the holidays at night!”
Raj turned up himself and crawled under the house to diagnose the problem as something he could fix. He’d brought supplies and was under there for an hour while Nayna’s father held the flashlight for him and Nayna despaired of ever getting time alone with him. When he finally emerged, the pipe was fixed and he was filthy.
Nayna wanted to haul him into the shower and join him there. Naked.
But after shaking hands with her father and directing a nod toward her that held none of his playfulness in the messages, he left. Her phone vibrated two minutes later: I can shower and be back in thirty minutes.
Nayna’s heart pounded. Meet you then.
Which was how she found herself literally sneaking out her window. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered as she pushed up the window with care for squeaks. Everyone was still wide awake—and though Aji had given her a measuring look when she said she was tired and turning in early, she didn’t think her grandmother had any idea Nayna was about to sneak out.