* * *
No panties.
ísa went skinny-dipping with the hot gardener (aka Sailor). Only, he has AWFUL taste in friends. He was there the night Cody the Slimeball publicly dumped ísa, and ísa is totally confused and disoriented. She’s making up conspiracy theories that it’s all a way to humiliate her again, but really she’s afraid of trusting her instincts. I wish I could kick Slimeball’s ass for making her doubt herself.
Dad was waiting up for me. Good thing I fixed my hair and makeup at ísa’s apartment. People at work can’t understand how I still live at home, but this is my reality. All my cousins still live at home too. Moving out is “a waste of money,” as said by every Indian parent ever—and why would you want to move out unless you were “up to something”? Only Madhuri gets a pass. I’m considering marrying the donkey just so I can divorce him and gain my freedom.
Raj. Raj happened.
8
No Sex Things
Nayna barely slept that night, tormented by dreams of an angry man with intense brown eyes who’d left stubble burn on her throat and whose hand she could still feel on her breast.
Gritty-eyed, she handled Sunday—and Madhuri chirping on about the “cute blue sofa” she’d just bought for her apartment.
She had a slight breakdown on Monday night. Thankfully, ísa was on hand with ice cream and stories of the Slimeball’s face getting punched. Even better, said punching had been done by the hot gardener.
“At least one of us might have a chance at a happily-ever-after,” Nayna muttered to her spreadsheet on Tuesday afternoon.
Unfortunately for her, that spreadsheet was simple. She still had enough work to take her through to Friday and the mandatory two weeks of Christmas vacation, but none of that work was complex. It left her with far too much time to think… and to remember. How Raj’s hands had felt on her body, how his mouth had tasted, how she’d wanted to rub herself all over him.
She jumped when her mobile phone rang. Seeing it was her grandmother, she picked up at once. “Aji, hello.”
“Nayna, beta,” her grandmother said, her voice upbeat. “Is this leopard cologne popular with men these days?”
Leopard cologne?
“Do you know the name of it?”
“It’s the one on television with the oiled men spraying themselves and the big black cats and the girls clawing the men like she-cats.”
Nayna’s cheeks heated at the memory of how she’d clawed Raj. If he’d left her with stubble burn, she’d left him with a few marks of her own. She wondered if he’d thought about her, winced immediately. If he did, it would be to freeze her to the spot with an icy glare. Raj hadn’t struck her as the forgiving type.
“Oh, I know the cologne you mean,” she said to her grandmother. “But if you’re thinking of buying a gift for Dad, he doesn’t use that one.”
“It’s not for him,” her grandmother said airily.
Nayna blinked. “Aji?”
“I just think Mr. Hohepa’s a nice man,” her grandmother answered, coy and nonchalant.
Nayna’s mouth fell open. Mr. Hohepa was their new neighbor, having moved in only six months earlier. He and his dog, Pixie, had become firm friends with Aji. The two elders often went for walks together, Pixie bounding between them.
Mr. Hohepa, however, was at least eight years her grandmother’s junior.
Nayna narrowed her eyes as she realized her grandmother had started getting the velour tracksuits around then too—with the excuse that her sari wasn’t convenient for walking. “How good of a friend is Mr. Hohepa,” she asked suspiciously; if that Lothario was leading her grandmother along…
A very un-aji-like giggle. “We don’t do the sex things, beta,” her grandmother said, turning Nayna’s ears red. “But I’m not dead and he’s a fit young man. I’m going to buy him the leopard cologne.”
Nayna sat staring at her phone a long time after her grandmother hung up. “Aji has a boyfriend.” She wrote it down on her notepad, stared at it, wrote it again, and still couldn’t get it to settle in her brain.
“Nayna?” One of her more senior colleagues stuck his head inside. “I’m doing a coffee run,” Douglas said. “You want your usual?”
“I think my seventy-five-year-old grandmother has a boytoy boyfriend.”
“Well, dayum! Good on your grandma!”
Yes, Nayna thought after her workmate had left, good on Aji. She’d loved Nayna’s grandfather, of that Nayna had not a single doubt, but she’d also been widowed for ten long years. She deserved fun and joy and romance.
How about you, Nayna?
The voice came from deep inside her, and it was of the fourteen-year-old who hadn’t been allowed to go to dances, or to wear makeup, or to be anything less than perfect. That fourteen-year-old looked at her grandmother, living life more joyously and wickedly than she ever had, and it could be that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Or it could be it was the most recent evidence of Madhuri’s carefree life that pushed her over the edge. Highly likely it also involved the reason for her semi-breakdown last night: realizing on Monday morning as her father laughed at something her sister had said that Madhuri would always be his favorite. It didn’t matter what Nayna did—she’d never be good enough, perfect enough. Her family would be fine if Nayna was no longer around; it was Nayna who had to be ready to suffer the repudiation.
Then there was Raj.
The idea of allowing a shadowy “suitable match” to put his hands and mouth on her as Raj had done, it made her shudder. “No more introductions, no more trying to impress assholes and idiots,” she said in a strangely calm tone.
Nayna was done.
* * *
She had the words to her bombshell decision all worked out by the time she left the converted villa that functioned as their offices that night. An urgent client request had come in, and Nayna had volunteered to handle it just to give herself a couple more hours to build up to the confrontation. It was as she was packing up that her father called and asked her to be home by eight thirty for a surprise.
“I’m almost done,” she told him and was about to ask about the surprise when he hung up.
Most likely they had an unexpected guest from Fiji. Many of their extended family still called the tiny island nation home, and while her parents had left it more than three decades earlier, they remained deeply connected to people there. Nayna had last visited two years ago, when she’d taken Aji over for a catch-up with her younger sister.
The two older women had laughed and told her stories deep into the humid tropical night as they sat on a porch screened against the mosquitos. Nayna had seen small fruit bats take off from the breadfruit trees during the dark orange of sunset, heard the sounds of the frogs croaking their courtship songs, and felt her skin settle into the easy rhythm of life in a rural town far from Fiji’s cosmopolitan resorts and hotels.
That night she’d been in charge of keeping up the supply of tea and snacks, those snacks mostly consisting of mango slices cut before the fruit was fully ripe, then rubbed with a little fresh chili pepper before being sprinkled with salt. It was rare to find unripe mangos in New Zealand, since the fruit didn’t grow here, but the rare times she did, the taste immediately brought back the memory of that hazy, lazy night.
Smiling, she wondered if Aji would like to go in the new year sometime. Her grandmother had decided not to accompany Nayna’s parents on their upcoming trip, saying “husbands and wives should have time alone.” Everyone had scratched their heads over that, as Aji usually chose to stay with her sister while Gaurav and Shilpa went around on their own, doing as they pleased, but Aji had been adamant.