Shape of the Sun

Introspective

The next morning - 1:37 am

Rajkumar was still up watching the rain fall onto the ground below, thump against the windowpane.

He couldn't sleep, perhaps because of the new environment. Manmeet had him take her for a Jamie Foxx rerun and by the time it was over, it was quite late to drive home. Anything after 10 pm and especially with Manmeet in the car, was not his dish. Despite her protests, he drove them to the nearest hotel and booked their best suite for the night.

Despite her protests, she still managed to sleep the earliest. Imagine that, what a darling he had. She left him alone to fixate on the mattress that didn't feel as springy as theirs at home, to grumble at the room's ugly grey curtains that were drawn apart.

It felt so wrong somehow to have grey on such an ugly fabric. Grey was a cousin to charcoal. He loved that color.

Manmeet stirred in her sleep at that moment so that he had to adjust in order to accommodate her and the curve of her belly. His hand cradled her closer and the other came down to rub her belly in a circular motion. 

Raj.

She whispered his name and edged closer for his warmth. Rajkumar's hand dropped to trail the outer expanse of her legs, the breadth between her waist and knees. She was wearing blue cargo shorts. 

Manmeet's eyes opened, still in a sleepy haze, but also filled with something that wasn't quite there before. Rajkumar silently watched this woman take his hand and place it on her blouse, his touch landing upon a tender spot, nestled beneath on the left side. It was round and full, an effect of pregnancy. It felt soft in the palm of his hand.

Raj. 

She whispered again, breath ragged.

Rajkumar bit his lower lip just looking at that face, just hearing his name spill out of her mouth. How his heart could still thump at this point and how he could feel a fever amidst the cold season was a mystery to him. He had never understood the mechanics of this spell that he fell under, ready to give his soul.

Raj.

Damn, he thought, as he moved to kiss her. His mouth claimed hers in a heat, unlike their chaste outing in the park. He had completely lost his senses for this woman, this vice of his that gave more than she took.

The last one had taken more than it gave. It had drained his blood and flushed it down the pipes. Rajkumar remembered his old love story with the bottle.

And before that, there was Anisha.

After her, he had been heartbroken. Even though her betrayal had alienated him and crushed all positive feelings, it was in the moments that he was alone that he remembered that aside from revenge, he also deserved to feel the hurt for such a shameful end to his past feelings.

It was why he could never look at Anisha as wholesome. She had been the second person that caused him emotional turmoil. The first he didn't want to remember.

Rajkumar vividly remembered that summer. It was hot outside. It didn't rain like it did tonight, he thought. In that summer, the little respite between his second and third year of medical school, Rajkumar was struggling with himself and the art of lying, of the double burden of playing a vengeful man and a man who was in pain, stuck in the shadow of innocence forever lost.

He was never going to be the same again. He could never go back to seeing things in only black and white. He had been disappointed by those he trusted and while the front was good, it had been done in such a brutish manner that the back was vulnerable, even more so when suppressed, having to smile and breeze through discussions with Anisha because of the thirty million pounds in sight, despite loathing her.