“Why? Why you always have to make difficult, Naina? Why Mummy can’t have peace? What I did to deserve no peace? Any time?”

Naina really was getting cold, all the way down to her bones. There was nowhere good this conversation could go. Her mother’s peace was too tied up with things Naina couldn’t give her.

“I’m sorry,” Naina said. “We’ll talk later, okay? I won’t do anything that will embarrass you or Mina Auntie.”

Her mother heaved a sigh of relief and squeezed Naina’s arm. Why that made Naina feel so tied up in knots, she would never know.

“Look at pictures I brought for you. I know you don’t look when I send on phone, so I make print. For you. For you, Naina. He very good boy. Promise me you look.”

Naina nodded, and her mother patted her cheek and left.

When Naina opened the door to her closet, sadness was lodged inside her again.

The sight of Vansh on the floor of her closet tucked behind her clothes made a smile wobble in her heart, sunshine through clouds.

“I love these,” he said as she pulled him to his feet, pointing to the cushion covers he’d been sitting on. The bright green and magenta ones her mother had stripped off her couch and replaced with her “polished” grays.

If Naina had been sad before, looking at those cushion covers cracked her in half. It didn’t take much self-awareness to know that her reactions were outsized right now. Old wounds with their scabs plucked off. Her emotions would subside soon enough, settle the way they always did.

Without answering, she pulled out a T-shirt and joggers for herself and found a large-ish T-shirt from a fundraising run last year for Vansh.

“Sorry. You were probably cold in there.” She handed him the shirt and a towel.

“I wouldn’t describe how I’m feeling as cold,” he said, picking up on her mood as he always did and trying yet again to shake her out of it.

She pushed past him into the bathroom and changed into dry clothes.

“What did your mother want?” he asked from outside her door as though they changed clothes around each other all the time.

Not that they were changing clothes around each other. Technically, there was a door between them. He hadn’t seen her naked yet. He’d just had his tongue up in all parts of her. Her thighs squeezed together. Stop it.

Don’t do all such things, her mother’s voice said in her ear.

When she let herself out of the bathroom, he was drying his hair with her towel, whilst shirtless. Whilst shirtless with that body. That body with cuts in places she’d never seen cuts before. Even through clothes it was hard and smooth, with ridges that filled her hands. Bare, it was just too much.