“It’s a good thing getting people to dance is one of my favorite things,” Vansh said, making her want to kick his shins.

“Good.” Jiggy rubbed his hands together. “I love a man who loves challenges.”

Chapter Eight

Vansh didn’t have to take Naina a peace offering, but her apartment was on the way to the hotel Hari was staying at. He also had the odd urge to discuss the Hari situation with her. If he talked to her, if she met Hari, she’d know that her accusation that Vansh was acting out of ennui wasn’t true.

There was a mild drizzle falling from a dreary sky. It was one of those magical San Francisco evenings, when all the good and the bad in the world fit on one inexhaustible canvas under a gray-blue sky, with the edges blurred like a watercolor.

As Vansh turned the corner onto the street where Naina’s building was located, a man urinated onto the window of one of the ground-level units. He grinned at Vansh, and Vansh grinned back and looked away to afford him privacy. Before he could make his way to her building, his gaze fell on a familiar figure across the street, bent over next to a bundle of blankets.

Naina?

For a second he thought she might be fighting with the homeless person she seemed to be talking to. But her body was gentle, the lines soft. She came to standing with the umbrella that had been sheltering the man, who smiled at her from behind his thick beard. The umbrella had two spikes that poked out fabric-less. She pulled something out of her humongous bag and started fidgeting with the broken umbrella.

Vansh stood there under the mist of the drizzle and watched as she stretched the fabric and secured it to the spikes and put the umbrella where it belonged. Then she ran across the street, damp hair escaping a messy ponytail and falling all over her face, black tights hugging her legs under a huge Berkeley sweatshirt.

It took her a moment to notice him.

“Vansh?” She’d always said his name like this, as though it were hers to say. The kind of ownership his family wielded over it.

It reminded him of the many times she’d found him off in a corner, too young and pesky for his siblings to include at parties, playing with the pets or bored with his Game Boy. All their parents’ friends’ children had been much older than him. It had never struck him before this that she’d always seemed on the outside too. Part of the gang without ever being on the inside.

As the grown-up kids did grown-up-kid things, Naina and he had played tic-tac-toe on pieces of paper or twenty questions about places they wanted to visit. She’d always asked questions. Never assumed everything about who he was the way everyone else did.