All she saw in his face was openness as he waited for more. He was the ocean. Whatever piece of her pain she tossed at it disappeared into it like a pebble.

“I remember my father’s eyes lighting up,” she continued. “The loathing in his eyes when he’d warned me against being a whore turned to excitement when I mentioned Yash.”

Over the years, Dr. Kohli had brought it up several times. “I’ll talk to Shree,” he had said. “We can set it all up.”

Her response had always been panic. “You know how ambitious Yash is. He doesn’t even want to think about marriage yet,” she’d told him year after year, the lies coming easy. Unsurprising, given that the very soul of their family was his lies.

“It makes sense that he wants to establish himself in his work first.” That’s what he always said about Yash, while not affording Naina the same understanding.

She’d been twenty-eight when she’d gotten into the arrangement with Yash. That should have been old enough to be able to do whatever she wanted with her life. The fact that she’d been working for the Ford Foundation and doing postdoc work should have meant something to her father. It hadn’t. Not even a little bit.

She was thirty-eight now. Too old to get into another arrangement. But Yash and she hadn’t sat down face-to-face like this. They hadn’t talked about it. That had never been an option.

She was thirty-eight. Too old to not know what to do when a man this beautiful was scooting closer to her because he knew how irresistible he was. Why should she resist him?

“This has nothing to do with your father. This is about nothing but us. Just you and me. And what we want,” he said with a sincerity that made her want to forget that the world was not a safe place. “I can’t stop thinking about—” He paused, as though it was important for him to get it right, to say the thing that would convince her, to not say the thing that would scare her away. “You against that door. You against my tongue. You against my thigh.”

Her lips parted, and her breath came out heavy and hot. She hadn’t stopped thinking about it either. It was an undercurrent, a substructure to all her thoughts since the moment it had happened. Which made it dangerous.

“You’re never going to stop using that against me, are you?”

He was inches from her now, and she saw every dirty thought that flashed in his mind in his eyes. “The only thing I want to use against you is my thigh, and my tongue, and my hand. Again and again. It’s beautiful to watch you come, Knightlina.”

How she could speak right now, she didn’t know. “Don’t call me that.”