Insomniac
1329 Words
ATHARVA
He watched her sleep.
He had told himself, on the night he'd first noticed the camera angle, that this was security protocol. That the master bedroom monitor was one of nine in a standard penthouse configuration, that he reviewed the feeds occasionally in the same baseline way he reviewed everything, with the same dispassion he brought to market data and quarterly reports.
He told himself this for approximately four days.
On day five he stopped telling himself anything and simply acknowledged, with the same honesty he applied to financial problems, that he had a situation.
The situation: Maya Sharma had become — something he didn't have the right vocabulary for. A variable that had entered his operational field and then refused to behave like a variable. She was supposed to be a placeholder. A functional requirement. Something the contract defined cleanly: party of the second part, obligations enumerated, period specified.
Instead she had moved into his reading room and rearranged his furniture six inches and sat in his chair and argued about architectural theory in a way that made the argument interesting, which he hadn't anticipated, which he was finding — and this was the part he didn't have language for — difficult to set aside.
He watched her on the monitor at eleven forty-five on a Tuesday.
She was asleep on her side, facing the window. She had her hand under her cheek in the way she always slept, palm flat, the way a child sleeps, and she was wearing the grey cotton kurta she owned that was visibly too worn to be worn but that she clearly found comfortable, and her hair was loose and dark across the pillow.
He was sitting at his desk. He had been working. He had been working competently for six hours on a merger document that required his full attention, and then he had looked at the monitor — routine — and then he had been sitting here for sixteen minutes not looking at the merger document.
This is a problem, he told himself. Acknowledge the problem and route around it.
He had tried routing around it. He had spent a week — week four, approximately — constructing new distance. Staying later at the office. Coming home after she'd already eaten. Keeping the study door closed and the reading room door closed and his own counsel tight and controlled and completely uncontaminated by the particular way she looked when she was talking about something she cared about, which was different from all her other faces, which was—
And then she'd been in the library, and he'd said it wasn't unwelcome like an i***t, and she'd—
He touched his lower lip.
He looked at the monitor.
She stirred slightly in her sleep — not waking, just the body making its small adjustments — and her hand moved against the pillow, and he thought about the morning in the library with the clarity of something he'd been refusing to examine and was now choosing to look at directly.
He had almost kissed her.
He had moved toward her with intention — quiet, unhurried intention, but intention, the thing he never allowed himself regarding her — and she had bitten his lip, which had been one of the most unexpectedly honest responses he'd ever received to anything, and he had laughed.
He had laughed.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed like that. Not the social register, not the boardroom performance, but the real thing — surprised out of him, by a woman who'd bitten him to keep him back and then offered a concession about architectural theory as if the two things were naturally sequential.
He watched her sleep and he thought about concessions and what it meant to offer them.
The obsession was building. He was clear-eyed enough about himself to call it that — not softening it into interest or concern or any of the safer words. He had been built, by circumstance and choice and the particular education of growing up in a house where the person who was supposed to love you unconditionally had simply — not — he had been built to identify threat and manage it before it arrived. He was very good at it. He had never before been in a situation where the threat was also the only genuinely interesting person in the room.
She had argued about light being a revealer not a giver and he had wanted to continue that argument for a week.
She had sketched the foundation logo's flaw on a napkin without knowing he could see the napkin and her assessment had been precise and correct.
She had stood in the Mehras' living room holding an eight-month-old baby like it was the most natural thing she'd ever done, and she'd made a face at it — an actual, unguarded, ridiculous face — and the baby had grabbed her finger, and for four seconds she had been entirely unarmored.
He had been thinking about those four seconds since Tuesday.
This is a problem, he said again to himself.
She has a contract and she is counting days and she says it's strategy every time she does something that isn't strategy, and she keeps her escape plans in her portfolio and I told her the correct security timings because I wanted her to make a real choice, and if she makes the real choice she will leave.
He looked at the monitor.
She was still asleep. Her breathing was the steady, unhurried rhythm of someone who had, finally, after six weeks of sleeping badly — he knew she slept badly, the monitor had told him this in the first two weeks — learned to rest in this space.
He thought: I want her to choose to stay.
He thought: I have done nothing that makes that a reasonable thing to want.
He closed the merger document. He opened it again. He sat at the desk until the Mumbai night shifted toward morning and the monitor showed her turn over and settle and sleep on, and he worked, and did not watch the monitor again.
He was very nearly convinced that this was true.
His father called at seven a.m.
He was on his third coffee and the merger document was done, which was something.
"The Kapoors," his father said, without preamble. "Rahul called Suresh Mehra last week."
"I know."
"They're circling the board. Vikrant has Pandey and possibly Rewal."
"I know that too."
A pause. His father's silences were different from his own — his father's silences were waiting silences, the silences of a man who had learned early that information was currency and you didn't spend it before you'd established its value. "The girl," he said.
Atharva's hand tightened on the coffee cup. "My wife."
Another pause. He could hear his father calibrating. "How is she?"
"She's well."
"The Mehtas—"
"Are managed."
"I heard from Vandana Kapoor," his father said, "that Maya made quite an impression at the foundation gala."
Atharva said nothing.
"That's good," his father said. "That's useful. Keep her visible."
"Yes," said Atharva.
He ended the call.
He sat with the empty coffee cup and looked at the merger document and thought about the word useful, and what it had meant at the beginning of this, and what it was beginning to feel like now when applied to her specifically.
He thought about her face when the pandit had said the final mantra. Chin up. Eyes dry.
He thought about the slap in the car, and the laugh it had surprised out of him, and the bitten lip.
He thought about not unwelcome.
He opened a new document.
He wrote: Page 71. Light reveals what is already there. She's right.
He deleted it.
He went to get dressed and thought about nothing in particular for the rest of the morning.
He was very good at thinking about nothing in particular when required.
- Writer
