The One She Was Warned About. Shoma Narayanan

remembered it quite vividly. She’d grabbed a wooden blackboard duster off the teacher’s table and thrown it at him. But it still hadn’t wiped the mocking grin off his face. A thin ribbon of blood had trickled down one side of his face and he’d mopped it off with a grimy handkerchief. He’d been laughing all the while. Right, so that was one time she remembered touching him—evidently he hadn’t had the same effect on her then as he did now.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she said awkwardly. In retrospect she was—a few centimetres the other way and she could have blinded him.

      ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said. ‘From what I remember I was quite an obnoxious little beast—you helped knock some sense into me. And every time I look in the mirror now I think of you....’

      He lowered his voice to a sexy rasp for the last part of the sentence, and Shweta felt a visceral reaction kick in. It wasn’t fair—he was just playing around without realising what he was doing to her. And with Siddhant watching...

      Belatedly, she remembered Siddhant’s existence, and turned around to look for him.

      ‘Too late,’ Nikhil said. ‘He gave you a minute and then he went in, looking like a thundercloud. You’ll have to grovel to get him to forgive you.’

      ‘Fat chance,’ Shweta said shortly.

      Nikhil’s accurate reading of Siddhant was unnerving, though. Right from when they’d first started dating Siddhant had given the impression that he was assessing her against a set of strict criteria. Rather like the way he screened job applicants, actually. At all times she was conscious of his approval or disapproval. He rarely lost his temper, retiring instead into a stately silence that she had to coax him out of. Completely out of the blue she wondered what a relationship with Nikhil would be like. Unpredictable, definitely, but lively—she could imagine impassioned arguments followed by equally passionate reconciliations.

      ‘Dreaming of something?’ Nikhil asked teasingly.

      Her eyes whipped back to him. She shook her head, trying to stop thinking of what a passionate reconciliation with him would be like.

      ‘Look, are you really keen on watching the show? It’d be nice to catch up, but I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Want to sneak off with me somewhere?’

      Oh, yes, she did want to sneak off with him. Put like that, it sounded deliciously wanton—also, no one had ever suggested sneaking off with her before.

      Shweta tried not to look over-eager. ‘I can slip away. I’m not terribly keen on the Bollywood dancers anyway.’

      ‘Maybe you should tell Siddhant you’re leaving,’ Nikhil suggested.

      But Shweta had decided to spend at least one evening free of his petty tyranny. ‘He’s not even my boss,’ she said. ‘I’ll message Priya so that she doesn’t get worried.’

      It was only once they were in the black SUV that Nikhil had hired for the day that it occurred to Shweta to ask where they were going.

      ‘It’s a place where the locals hang out,’ he said. ‘Good music, and the food’s to die for. Not too swanky. But we can go to one of the five-star hotels around here if you’d prefer that?’

      ‘Yes—like I’d choose the five-star hotel after that introduction,’ Shweta said. ‘And you should know I’m not the swanky restaurant type.’

      ‘You might have changed,’ Nikhil said. ‘You don’t look the same—for all I know you might have turned into a wine-sipping socialite, scorning us lesser mortals...’

      Shweta punched him in the arm and he laughed. ‘Still violent, I see,’ he said, but his tone was more tender than mocking. She felt her heart do an obedient little flip-flop in response. At least now her reactions to him weren’t coming as a surprise. All she had to do was work harder at concealing them.

      They were on the outskirts of the city now, and driving down a narrow lane flanked by fields and coconut trees.

      ‘OK if I roll down the window?’ Nikhil asked.

      When she nodded, he switched off the air-conditioning and got the windows down.

      ‘We’re lucky it’s not raining,’ he said. ‘Kerala gets most of its rains in winter...’

      ‘I know. I used to pay attention in Geography,’ Shweta said pertly. ‘Unlike you.’

      Nikhil gave her a mocking smile. ‘You were such a gooooood little girl,’ he said, dragging his words out. ‘Of course you paid attention.’

      Shweta carefully controlled an urge to hit him on the head with a high-heeled shoe. ‘And you were such a baaad boy.’ She copied his tone as closely as she could. ‘Of course you paid attention to no one and were good for nothing.’

      ‘Bad boys are good at some things,’ he murmured suggestively.

      Shweta flushed as all the things he was probably very, very good at sprang to mind. God, was he doing it on purpose? Probably he thought it was fun, getting her all hot and bothered. There was no way he could be actually flirting with her—or was he?

      ‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asked in her best auditor voice—the one that Priya swore made entire finance departments quake in their shoes.

      Nikhil nodded. ‘Almost there.’

      The road had developed some rather alarming twists and turns, and he was concentrating on his driving. In Shweta’s opinion he was going too fast, but she’d boil her favourite shoes in oil before she said anything—there was no point giving him an opportunity to make remarks about fraidy-cat accountants. She fixed her eyes on Nikhil instead, hoping the man would take her mind off his driving. It worked. The moonlight illuminated his rather stern profile perfectly, throwing the planes and angles of his face into relief.

      He was really quite remarkably good-looking, Shweta thought. It was a wonder she hadn’t noticed it in school, but she had an explanation. In those days she’d been completely obsessed by a rather chocolate-faced movie star, and had unconsciously compared everyone she saw with him. Nikhil was the complete opposite of chocolate-faced—even at fourteen his features had been uncompromisingly male. Her eyes drifted towards his shoulders and upper body, and then to his hands on the steering wheel. He had rather nice hands, she thought, strong with square-tipped fingers. Unbidden, she started to wonder how those hands would feel on her body, and she blushed for probably the twelfth time that evening.

      The car negotiated a final hairpin bend, after which the road seemed to shake itself out and lose steam. It went on for a couple of hundred metres through a rather dense copse of coconut trees and ended abruptly on a beach.

      ‘Are you lost?’ she enquired. He shook his head. ‘Come on,’ he said, opening his door and leaping down lightly.

      He was at her door and handing her down before she could protest. Locking the car with a click of the remote, he put an arm around her shoulders and started walking her to the beach.

      Their destination was a small, brightly lit shack thatched with palm fronds. There were small tables laid out in front, some of which were occupied by locals. Nikhil chose a table with a view of the beach. The moon had risen now, and the sea had a picture-postcard quality to it. A motherly-looking woman in her fifties bustled out, beaming in delight when she saw Nikhil. She greeted him in a flood of Malayalam which Shweta didn’t even bother trying to follow. She wasn’t particularly good at languages, and Malayalam was nothing like Hindi or any other language she knew.

      ‘Meet Mariamma,’ Nikhil said. ‘She’s known me since I was a kid.’

      Shweta smiled and Mariamma switched to heavily accented English. ‘Am always happy to meet Nikhil’s friends,’ she said, dispelling any notion that this was the first time Nikhil had brought someone here with him. ‘Miss Shweta, do sit down. I’ll get you a menu.’

      ‘I thought you didn’t have one?’ Nikhil murmured.

      Mariamma