CHAPTER ONE

2024, Pune.

Saying that Sanika Joshi was in a cranky mood would be putting it mildly.

The alarm on her phone screamed at five-thirty, and she did what she did every morning -- reached for it with the blind, fumbling desperation of a woman who had been engaged in a lifelong war against early mornings, silenced it, and lay in the grey half-light of her bedroom arguing with herself about whether today was the day she finally became a morning person.

It was not.

It was never going to be. Sanika had accepted this about herself the way she had accepted other immutable truths -- that Pune traffic would never improve, that her mother would never stop worrying, and that she, Sanika Joshi, twenty-seven years old and possessed of three broken engagements and a tongue sharp enough to cut glass, was constitutionally incapable of greeting the dawn with anything other than resentment.

Twenty minutes and two snoozed alarms later, she dragged herself vertical.

The bedroom was still dark, the blackout curtains doing their job with the ruthless efficiency of things that cost too much money. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, feet flat on the cold marble floor, and took stock. Body: functional. Mind: reluctant. Heart: don't ask. Three broken engagements will do that to you. Not break you -- nothing so clean or dramatic as that, nothing like the slow-motion shattering in the Hindi serials her mother watched with religious devotion. It was more like a rewiring. A quiet rearrangement of expectations. Now, every time something good happened, she found herself bracing. Not hoping. Bracing. Because hope had been wrong three times and bracing had never let her down.

She shook off the thought the way she shook off most inconvenient emotions -- violently and incompletely -- and stood up.

Her house -- a two-storey independent bungalow in Baner, one of the best residential areas of Pune -- was quiet except for the distant hum of the inverter. Her parents had bought this house almost three decades ago, when Pune real estate was still a reasonable proposition and not the fever dream of optimistic millionaires it had become since. The house was old-fashioned by current standards -- no modular kitchen, no false ceiling with recessed lighting, no rain shower in the bathroom -- but it was solid and spacious and filled with the accumulated warmth of a family that had lived well within its walls.

Sanika padded to the bathroom in her oversized COEP Pune t-shirt (borrowed from her army brother and never returned), caught her reflection in the mirror above the sink, and gave herself the same appraising look she gave quarterly financial reports at work.

Twenty-seven years old. Sharp features inherited from her Maharashtrian mother -- high cheekbones, a strong jawline, skin the colour of milky tea that held its tone without much effort. Her eyes were her best feature, or so Mira insisted -- dark grey circling black, almost amethyst in certain lights, what Mira called bedroom eyes and what Sanika called eyes that had seen too much bullshit to pretend otherwise. Her mouth was generous, with the kind of full lips that attracted attention whether she wanted it or not. Her hair was cropped short -- a pixie cut that she had got three years ago, partly because Pune traffic and the mandatory helmet made long hair a logistical nightmare, partly because life was too short to spend forty-five minutes with a blow dryer every morning, and partly because the look on her second ex-fiance's face when he had seen it had been worth every scandalised WhatsApp message from her extended family.

Three broken engagements. That was her score. In cricket terms, she was a solid middle-order bat who kept getting run out by her partners.

The first had been a rich jackass from a prominent business family -- the kind of family that measured a woman's worth by the weight of gold in her wedding trousseau and the obedience with which she served chai to visiting relatives. He had been charming during the courtship, attentive in that performative way that rich men sometimes are when they're still in acquisition mode. Then, a week after the ring ceremony, he had decided she was bad luck. Two major contracts lost since they got engaged, he said. His astrologer confirmed it -- her stars were malefic, her horoscope incompatible, her very presence a drain on his fortune. Sanika had returned the ring with a suggestion about where he could store his horoscope that had made his mother faint.

The second had been worse. He was a perfectly acceptable man -- kind, educated, well-employed -- the sort of man mothers dream about and daughters settle for without complaint. Everything had been going smoothly. The invitations were printed. The venue was booked. The mehndi ceremony was scheduled for Thursday. Then, on Wednesday evening, while Sanika was trying on her wedding sari for the final fitting, his pregnant ex-girlfriend had shown up at his parents' house, belly first, demanding acknowledgment. The engagement ended that night. Sanika had cried for three days, then stopped. The humiliation was worse than the heartbreak -- the pitying looks from relatives, the whispered conversations that stopped when she entered the room, her mother's brave face that fooled no one.

The third had been the strangest of all. He was a quiet, well-mannered man who worked in software, who said all the right things and never raised his voice and made Sanika feel vaguely uneasy in a way she could not articulate. She had found him kissing his boyfriend in a car outside a Koregaon Park pub. The revelation had landed not with anger but with a peculiar, sad clarity. He had been gay, closeted under the crushing weight of parental expectation and societal shame, and Sanika had felt more sorry for him than she had for herself. She had kept his secret, letting both families believe the engagement had ended over "compatibility issues," which was, if you thought about it, technically true.

But three was enough. Three was a pattern. Three meant her parents stayed up at night whispering in their bedroom, her relatives whispered at pujas and family gatherings, and her brother Saket -- Captain Saket Joshi of the Indian Army, currently posted somewhere in Rajasthan that he was not allowed to name -- called every week to simultaneously check on her emotional state and resist the urge to vet her social circle like a military intelligence operation. Her eldest brother, who worked in the US, was worse. He had taken it upon himself to find her a suitable match from among his American-Indian colleagues, sending her photographs and biodata with the persistence of a matrimonial algorithm that had been set to desperate mode.

She had sent her parents to the US for their thirtieth wedding anniversary, a gift pooled from all three siblings. Go. See Niagara Falls. Visit dada in New Jersey. Stop worrying about your unmarried daughter for six blessed weeks. They had protested, of course -- her mother invoking every possible catastrophe that could befall a young woman living alone in a house ("What if there is a gas leak? What if there is a break-in? What if there is an earthquake?"), her father deploying the quiet, disappointed silence that was his most effective weapon. But the flight tickets were non-refundable, and her mother had always wanted to see New York, and eventually they had gone, leaving Sanika with six weeks of solitary bliss.

Well. Hers and the neighbour's bass-heavy music collection's.

The neighbour. Sanika's jaw tightened as she pulled on her running shoes. That... that man had entered the scene a couple of weeks back and made it his personal mission to destroy whatever peace and quiet she had been enjoying since her parents' departure.

God knows what the owners of the neighbouring house had been thinking when they leased it to a guy like him. The previous tenants had been the owners themselves -- a lovely elderly couple, Uncle and Aunty Deshpande, who went to the temple with her parents, accompanied her mother on vegetable shopping trips, and generally embodied everything that was good and wholesome about having neighbours in a quiet residential street. But their son had moved abroad and wanted them close, and so the Deshpandes had left, and in their place had arrived... him.

She didn't even know his name. All she knew was that he was tall -- significantly taller than her, which was saying something because she was not a short woman. He was built like a man who either spent serious time in the gym or regularly subdued people who did not want to be subdued — the kind of man who could carry you out of a burning building and still look annoyed about it. He had a face that, under different circumstances, she might have described as handsome — strong features, sharp nose, brown-black eyes with striations that caught the light in interesting ways. He wore his hair in a close-cropped military style and had a moustache that curled slightly at the edges, giving him the appearance of either a 1980s Bollywood villain or a particularly menacing freedom fighter. He had the permanent scowl of a man who had a personal grudge against the concept of daytime.

He rode a Royal Enfield Bullet that announced his arrivals and departures like a one-vehicle Independence Day parade. He kept insane hours -- leaving before dawn, returning well after midnight, sometimes not coming home for days at a stretch. His lights blazed at all hours. And his taste in music ran to old Hindi film songs -- Kishore Kumar, specifically -- played at a volume that suggested he believed his neighbours were either stone deaf or enthusiastic fans of the maestro's oeuvre.

Last night had been the worst. He had ridden home at 2:45 in the morning. 2:45! Her bedroom was on the side of the house that faced his driveway, and she had left the windows open to catch the cool night breeze -- a decision she was now bitterly regretting. He had accelerated the Bullet twice before turning the engine off, because apparently once was insufficient to wake the dead. His helmet had clattered to the ground. His front door had made all manner of ungodly noises as he shoved it open with all the subtlety of a battering ram. Then he had turned on his porch light -- a porch light that, by some diabolical architectural coincidence, was positioned to shine directly through her bedroom window with the concentrated malice of an interrogation lamp. He had slammed the door. Gone back out. Slammed it again. And then, having apparently satisfied his quota of noise pollution for the evening, he had gone inside and switched off his hall light but left the porch light blazing like a miniature sun.

Sanika had lain in bed, staring at the ceiling, counting her heartbeats, and imagining a variety of creative scenarios involving the neighbour, his Bullet, and a large body of water. She had finally fallen asleep sometime around four, which meant that when her alarm went off at five-thirty, she had managed approximately ninety minutes of rest.

No wonder she was cranky.

"Damn it! Damn it!" she muttered as she jumped into the shower and jumped out ninety seconds later, wrapped a towel around her wet body, and started brushing her teeth over the sink. With her free hand, she attempted to towel-dry her hair, which was the advantage of a pixie cut -- the whole process took thirty seconds instead of the twenty-minute production number required by long hair. Her mother had been horrified by the haircut. Her father had been offended on some deep, patriarchal level that he would never admit to. But they had been given a choice: their daughter's hair or their daughter living with them. They couldn't have both. The hair lost.

The ringing of the landline telephone snapped her out of her multitasking. A landline, in 2024 -- her parents refused to disconnect it, insisting that mobile networks were unreliable and that in a true emergency, the landline would be the last thing standing. Sanika suspected they kept it primarily to give her elder brother a dedicated channel for his lectures.

She was right. It was not her parents. It was her elder brother, calling from the US.

"Yes, dada," she said in greeting, wedging the phone between her ear and shoulder as she continued drying herself.

"Hey, Choti, how is it going? Getting ready for work?"

"Yes, and I'm already late, so if it's nothing urgent, we'll catch up tomorrow." She pushed aside the hangers with saris on them -- no time to wrap, drape, and pin today. "God, why aren't jeans made an official dress code!" she muttered.

Her dada laughed. "Don't tell me. You shut off the alarm instead of snoozing it."

"Dada, I really do not have time for this. I'm fine, the house is fine, my car is fine, no new scratches since last week, and no, there is absolutely nothing for you to worry about. Tell Mom and Dad that I'll talk to them tonight."

"Fine, OK, but be careful. I don't like you staying alone in that house. If it were an apartment, it would be a different thing..."

"Yeah, but it's not an apartment, and the street is safe. Residential area," she reminded him, dashing back into the bathroom for a hurried makeup job -- tinted moisturiser, a swipe of kajal, lip balm, done. She slipped a pair of small gold studs into her earlobes, strapped on her watch, and reached for the outfit she always grabbed when she was running late: black skirt, white top, and a multicoloured scarf looped around her neck. Prisma had a formal dress code for the management teams, and her boss was the sort of man who would note a wrinkled collar the way other people noted a fire alarm.

"Did you have your breakfast?" her brother fretted.

"Dada, FYI, I'm twenty-seven, not seven. I'm off now, bye."

She disconnected the call without giving him a chance to append further instructions, threw the phone in the general direction of the sofa, slipped her feet into a pair of flats, grabbed her backpack, car keys, and mobile, and made for the front door. She had a hairbrush in her backpack and would use it in the car before getting out at the office. One major advantage of the pixie cut: even on its worst day, it could be tamed in thirty seconds.

She locked the front door, slung the backpack over one shoulder, and stepped out into the Pune morning. The air was already warm, carrying the faint scent of jasmine from the garden her father had cultivated with military precision -- roses in three colours, two varieties of hibiscus, marigold along the pathway, and a lily plant that was the pride of both father and daughter. Between the two of them, they had turned the small front garden into something that drew admiring comments from the entire street and provided her mother with a steady supply of flowers for her daily puja.

She backed her car -- a metallic grey Hyundai i20 that had replaced the ancient Honda Brio her father had originally gifted her -- out of the shaded portico. The car had a reverse horn, as most Indian cars did. It didn't help the noise pollution, but it prevented dents and scratches, which in Pune traffic was a trade-off worth making.

The reverse horn, however, apparently did not agree with her neighbour.

He came stomping out of his house like a grizzly bear with a sore paw. He was wearing what appeared to be yesterday's clothes -- wrinkled track pants, a faded t-shirt that had seen better decades -- and from the thunderous scowl darkening his face, you would think Sanika had been playing death metal at stadium volume for the past hour. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw was clenched, and every line of his body radiated the kind of hostility usually reserved for people who talk in cinemas.

"You trying to wake the dead or what?" he growled.

Sanika gritted her teeth and gave diplomacy one final, heroic shot. "I'm sorry," she said, in a tone so even and controlled it deserved a medal for restraint. She walked past him to shut and lock her gate.

He muttered an indistinctive reply before striding back into his house and banging the door shut. The sheer injustice of the situation -- the man who had woken her at 2:45 AM with his motorcycle symphony was complaining about her reverse horn at 8:30 in the morning -- spiked her temper so hard she could feel her pulse in her temples. But she controlled it. She would not admit it to anyone, not even herself, but there was something about this man that made her uneasy. Not afraid, exactly. She was Sanika Joshi, sister of two brothers who had taught her to throw a punch before she learned to ride a bicycle. She did not do afraid.

But he was big. And he was angry. And she didn't know what he did for a living, which meant she didn't know what he was capable of.

She drove to work with the radio on, letting the morning RJ's mindless chatter drown out her irritation. Prisma Technologies -- Prisma Systems India -- occupied six floors of a glass-and-steel tower at the Hinjewadi IT Park Phase 2 that looked exactly like every other IT park building in Pune: architecturally soulless but impressively air-conditioned. The company had been founded in 2005 by Pramod Gadkari, a man whose genius for software solutions was matched only by his genius for making his employees feel simultaneously essential and expendable. It had survived two recessions, a global pandemic, and the rise of AI-driven automation by doing what Pune IT companies did best: adapting, hustling, and billing American clients in dollars while paying Indian employees in rupees.

The atmosphere inside Prisma was a bizarre mixture of geeks in jeans and wrinkled t-shirts, management types in three-piece suits, and a few people in smart casuals who served as go-betweens for the two tribes. If Sanika had been in the engineering department, no one would have cared if she showed up in pyjamas. But she was in Finance, and her boss, Vijay Khandekar, was a stickler for punctuality whose pointed look at the clock as she walked in meant she would be staying late today to compensate.

Great. Another Monday gift-wrapped in annoyance.

She grabbed her ID badge, locked her car in the basement parking, and took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, scrolling through the morning's notifications on her phone. Three emails from Rao marked "URGENT" (they never were -- the man used the urgent flag the way other people used punctuation, reflexively and without meaning). A WhatsApp message from her mother confirming they had landed at JFK safely. Two missed calls from a number she didn't recognise. And a message in the group chat with Shruti and Mira:

Sanika: Dinner, ladies?

Two replies popped up almost simultaneously, making her grin. Thank God it was Friday. Well -- it wasn't Friday yet. It was Monday. But the promise of Friday dinner was what got her through Mondays. The three of them had been doing this for three years -- every Friday without fail, a standing date that survived broken engagements, marital crises, work catastrophes, and at least one episode per quarter that qualified as a Category 5 life meltdown.

She pocketed her phone, grabbed a coffee from the machine, and sat down at her desk. Her boss's office door was open, which meant he was watching. She opened her laptop, pulled up the quarterly projections, and prepared to have a completely ordinary, thoroughly unremarkable week.

It would not be either of those things.

---

Shruti Gokhale packed both the lunch boxes -- hers and Runal's -- and snapped them shut with the mechanical precision of a woman who had performed this task a thousand times and could do it in her sleep. She stacked the dirty dishes from breakfast in the sink for the maid to find, praying as she did every morning: Please, Kantabai, don't take the day off. Please, please. Don't make me come home to this mess tonight.

"You know, you really need to stop mumbling to yourself," Runal said, wandering into the kitchen in his boxers for his morning coffee. "It's become a habit now."

Shruti loaded the washing machine without looking at him. "You didn't have dinner last night."

"It was cold."

"We have a microwave, Runal. The cook makes rotis in the evening, so of course they're going to be cold by the time you get home. That's what microwaves are for."

"I come home tired from work. I'm not in a mood for heat-it-and-eat-it," he snapped. "I had a heavy snack at the office anyway."

"And a few drinks too."

"I was out with friends and it was just one drink."

"Right," Shruti said, in the particular tone of voice that wives deploy when they know something is not right but have decided that this particular morning is not the morning to pursue it. She handed him the coffee cup and left the kitchen. "I'm off to work. Your breakfast is on the table."

"It's cornflakes. You make it sound like hot parathas are waiting for me," he scoffed.

"If you want hot parathas, you need to help me make them. I don't have time." It was an old argument. They had been having it, with minor variations, for almost three years. They lived in a three-bedroom apartment in Koregaon Park -- a nice apartment, in a good building, in a location midway between his office and hers. It was the apartment of a couple that was doing well. From the outside, it looked like the life everyone aspired to. From the inside, it felt like a show flat -- everything polished and precisely arranged, but no one actually living in it.

"What do you have time for? Seriously!" Runal's voice followed her down the hallway to their bedroom. "Weekdays you go to work. Weekends you go shopping. You're never home before me. You don't want to go out with me..."

"Both of us work on weekdays. I go to buy groceries and vegetables over weekends. You don't want to come with me for that either, so I guess we're even."

"Don't start that again. You know I'm not used to doing all that stuff. I never did it before and have zero interest in doing it now."

"And I did it since the day I was born?" she snapped back. "But I learnt, didn't I?"

Shruti stood in their bedroom and started getting dressed, pulling on black tights and a maroon-black kurta -- comfortable, professional, easy to move in. She was in sales, and Prisma was particular about appearance for client-facing teams. She had been recently promoted to sales manager for her sub-division, which meant she couldn't afford to go lax in the dressing department. The promotion itself was a source of unspoken tension between them. Runal had encouraged her to take a job when they first married, envisioning a wife who would keep herself occupied during the day and be waiting at home, refreshed and available, when he returned. He had not expected her to be good at it. He had certainly not expected her to be promoted -- twice in one year -- while his own career remained stubbornly static. The shift in their dynamic had been gradual but unmistakable: she was rising while he was standing still, and neither of them knew how to talk about it.

"OK listen, Mom and Dad are planning to come next month," he said from the doorway.

"Great!" The word came out with an edge that she had not intended but did not retract. Shruti's in-laws were a particular trial. They did not approve of her working. They did not approve of her friends. They did not approve of her cooking, her housekeeping, her choice of curtains, or the brand of dal she bought. And in their last visit, her mother-in-law had done something that Shruti still could not forgive: she had blamed their childless marriage on Shruti. Said that there must be something wrong with her that she hadn't conceived after three years. And Runal -- the man Shruti had fallen in love with in college, the man she had fought her parents to marry, the man who had stood outside her hostel gate all night when she was sick with malaria -- had not said a word. Not one word in her defence. He had changed the topic, and later, when she confronted him, he had said: "My mom wouldn't understand, Shruti. Just ignore it."

Just ignore it. As if three years of trying, of hoping, of Shruti silently wanting children while Runal silently dreading the responsibility, could be dismissed with just ignore it.

"What does that mean?" he snapped, reading the tone correctly.

"Nothing." She threw a long stylish scarf over her shoulder, slung her backpack, grabbed her phone and keys. "I'm off now. Don't forget your lunch box."

"Shruti!"

She stopped at the door and sighed before turning back. "Look, I heard what you said and I'll try, but I can't promise. You know I can't promise." She met his irritated eyes with an expression that was carefully, deliberately inscrutable. "See you tonight."

Her phone pinged with the familiar notification sound. She checked it quickly. It was from Sanika.

Dinner, ladies?

Yes, she typed. Thank God it was Friday. Well, it would be Friday soon. Friday meant escape. Friday meant Sanika and Mira. Friday meant she could stop pretending that everything was fine.

---

Mira Patil frowned at her reflection as she pulled back her thick, curly hair and secured it with a large clip at the back of her head. The dark circles under her eyes were getting worse, she noticed with a twinge of anxiety. She needed cucumber slices, or one of those Korean sheet masks that Sanika kept ordering online, or honestly just eight consecutive hours of sleep -- a luxury that had become increasingly rare since Karan had started spending most nights at her apartment.

Karan wouldn't like the dark circles. He noticed things like that. He noticed when she wore the wrong shade of lipstick, when her eyebrows needed threading, when she gained half a kilo. He noticed everything about her appearance with the attentiveness of a man who treated his girlfriend's body the way a car enthusiast treated his vehicle -- something to be maintained, polished, and displayed.

Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow is the weekend. I'll get a facial done, use the under-eye cream Sanika recommended, and sleep for twelve hours. He loved to show her off to his friends. Sometimes it hurt that he gave more importance to how she looked than to who she was underneath. But she wanted to make him proud. She loved him. She couldn't imagine living a day without him.

Could she?

The thought flickered and she pushed it away, the way she had been pushing it away for months. She focused on her makeup -- a light application of foundation to even out her fair complexion, a swipe of mascara, a neutral lip colour that was office-appropriate. Mira worked in HR at Prisma, in charge of regional recruitment and initial screening of candidates. She was twenty-six, the youngest of the three friends, short and almost boyish in figure, but with the kind of thick, dark curls and wide, sloe-eyed face that drew people to her like a warm light on a cold night. Men, especially. They were drawn to her cheerful smile and her gentle voice and her maddening tendency to see the best in everyone, even when the best was not there to be found.

Karan Malhotra was the most prominent example of this tendency.

They had met at Prisma two years ago, when Mira had been screening candidates for a managerial position and Karan had been one of the applicants. He hadn't got the job -- his qualifications were thin and his interview performance was mediocre -- but he had got her phone number. He was handsome in the way that certain men are handsome: symmetrically, undeniably, the kind of handsome that works on you before you have time to evaluate whether the personality behind the face is worth your attention. He had flirted with her, complimented her work, her observation skills, her looks. She had blushed and glowed and refused his invitation for coffee. He had taken the refusal graciously, left his number, and waited. She had called the next day. Coffee had become lunch. Lunch had become dinner. Dinner had become weekends. Weekends had become everything.

Now, two years later, they were -- what? Not engaged. Not officially living together, though Mira had moved into a one-bedroom apartment directly across from his two-bedroom in Kalyani Nagar, which meant they might as well have been. He spent most nights at her place, or she at his. She cooked for him. She did his laundry when his maid was absent. She reorganised her schedule around his. She had quietly, gradually, handed over the controls of her life to a man who drove it with the carelessness of someone who knew there was always another vehicle in the garage.

Firm arms wrapped around her from behind, pulling her against a body that was warm and hard from sleep. She could feel all of him -- the flat plane of his stomach against the small of her back, the solid wall of his chest, and lower, pressing insistently against her backside, the unmistakable evidence that he was already aroused. His skin smelled of last night's cologne -- Dior Sauvage, his one extravagance -- mixed with something saltier underneath, musk and sleep-sweat and something that was just him, something that made her inhale deeper than she meant to. Lips found her neck, the soft spot below her ear that he'd mapped out within their first week together and had been exploiting mercilessly ever since. His stubble scraped against the sensitive skin there. She felt the rough drag of it like a current running straight down her spine, pooling hot and liquid between her thighs.

"Morning," Karan murmured against her throat, his hands sliding under her shirt, palms flat against her bare stomach, fingers spread wide. His thumbs traced slow, deliberate circles on her hip bones, dipping just below the waistband of her underwear. His hips rocked against her once, slow and suggestive. "Come back to bed."

"I can't," she said, hating how breathless she sounded. Hating more that her body was already arching back into him, that her head was tipping against his shoulder to give his mouth better access, that the heat of his bare chest against her spine was dissolving every rational thought. She could feel her nipples hardening against the cotton of her shirt, could feel the dampness building between her legs. Her body was a traitor and it had been his accomplice for two years. "I'll be late."

"Five minutes. I'll be quick."

She let him pull her back to the bed. She always let him. He peeled her shirt over her head and she wasn't wearing a bra -- hadn't put one on yet -- and the cool morning air hit her bare breasts a half-second before his mouth did. He took one nipple between his lips, sucking hard enough to make her gasp, his tongue swirling in tight circles while his hand cupped the other breast, thumb brushing back and forth across the stiffened peak. She moaned -- a raw, involuntary sound that embarrassed her even as it left her lips -- and her fingers tangled in his thick hair, pulling him closer.

He pushed her back on the rumpled sheets and knelt between her legs. His hands hooked into her underwear and dragged it down her thighs in one smooth motion, and she lifted her hips to help because her body had stopped consulting her brain entirely. He kissed his way down her stomach -- slow, open-mouthed kisses that left wet trails on her skin -- and when his mouth reached the crease of her thigh she held her breath, her fingers twisting in the sheets, her back arching off the bed. He parted her with his fingers and his tongue found her, hot and wet and devastatingly precise.

She cried out. Couldn't help it. He knew exactly how to do this -- the flat of his tongue in long, slow strokes, then the tip, circling, teasing, building pressure until her thighs were shaking and her hand was pressing his face harder against her. He slid two fingers inside her, curling upward, and the combined sensation made her vision blur. Her hips bucked against his mouth. She was panting, sweating, one hand fisted in his hair, the other gripping the headboard behind her.

"Karan -- I'm going to --"

He didn't stop. He increased the pressure, his fingers driving deeper, faster, and she shattered. The orgasm ripped through her like a wave, her inner walls clenching around his fingers, her back bowing off the mattress, a sound tearing from her throat that was half his name and half something wordless and raw. He worked her through it, his mouth gentling but not stopping, drawing every last pulse from her until she was gasping and boneless and oversensitive to the point of pain.

Before she could recover, he rose over her, pushed her thighs wider apart with his knee, and entered her in one long, deep stroke. She was so wet he met no resistance, but the sudden fullness after the intensity of her orgasm made her cry out again, her nails raking down his back. He groaned against her neck -- a sound she felt in her own chest -- and began to move. Hard, rhythmic, practiced thrusts that hit that spot inside her with unfailing accuracy. He hooked one arm under her knee, opening her wider, driving deeper, and the angle made her see stars.

He knew her body the way a mechanic knows an engine. Every lever, every switch. Where to apply force and where to be feather-light. He could take her apart in minutes and he did, every time, with the efficient expertise of a man who took pride in his performance. His hips snapped against hers, the wet sound of their bodies meeting filling the small bedroom, and she was climbing again, impossibly, her second orgasm building from the ashes of the first.

"Come for me," he breathed against her ear, and she did -- clenching around him so hard that he swore and slammed into her one final time, burying himself to the hilt as he came with a shudder that racked his entire body.

For thirty seconds, the only sound was their ragged breathing. His weight on her. His heart hammering against her ribs. The smell of sex and sweat thick in the air. She felt him soften inside her, felt the warm trickle of him between her thighs.

This was the moment. The fragile, naked moment when two people have just been as close as two people can be, and what happens next reveals everything. She waited for him to say something -- anything -- that would make this feel like more than what it was. A word. A look. I love you would have been enough. Even that was amazing would have sufficed. Something to acknowledge that what had just happened was not merely physical, that she was more than a warm body that happened to live across the corridor.

He rolled off her, reached for his phone, and started scrolling through Instagram.

She pulled up her cream trousers five minutes later, buttoned her olive green shirt, and checked her makeup in the mirror. Still acceptable. Her lips were swollen and red. She pressed them together hard until they weren't. Between her legs she was still wet, still tender, and she hated that her body was still humming with satisfaction when her heart felt so hollow. She grabbed her keys and laptop bag.

"Hey Mira, my sister and her family are coming next week," Karan said from where he lay lounging on her bed, a thin sheet barely covering him. He looked like a magazine advertisement for something expensive and unnecessary.

Mira's face lit up. This was progress! His family, meeting her -- this could be the beginning of acknowledgment, of being accepted, of finally having a place in his life that extended beyond the bedroom. "Wow, that's great! What's the plan?"

"I don't know," he shrugged, getting up to grab a towel. "Just thought I'd give you a heads-up that for the whole of next week, until they leave, you and I are going to be just neighbours." He winked, walking past her toward the bathroom. "Know what I mean?"

The words hit her like a slap.

"But... why?"

"What do you mean, why? One whiff and my sister will holler it to the hills, and my parents..." He shuddered dramatically and disappeared behind the bathroom door.

Mira stood there, holding her laptop bag, staring at the closed door. The question circled in her mind like a dog chasing its tail: Would she hesitate to introduce him to her parents as her lover? Yes, of course. But as a friend? As someone she was seeing? Why couldn't he give her even that much? Why couldn't he tell his family that she existed?

Because she didn't hold that kind of place in his life. She had never held that kind of place. She was a convenience. A comfort. A body he enjoyed and a presence he tolerated and a secret he kept with the casual efficiency of a man who had always known, on some fundamental level, that she was temporary.

Swallowing down tears that burned her throat, she grabbed her keys and headed for the door. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A message from Sanika.

Dinner, ladies?

Hell yes! she typed, blinking hard. Thank God it was Friday. Or would be soon. Friday meant Sanika and Shruti. Friday meant honesty. Friday meant she could stop pretending that being someone's secret was the same thing as being loved.

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End of Chapter One.

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