Silently Falling in Love: Lucky Charm THIS IS THE EDITED VERSION

Chapter 9 - The Good Wife

I hung up the phone with Tarun cha-cha and continued to mindlessly stir the sugar in my coffee. For as long as I remembered, I loved the notion of being in love and being with someone who was romantic. As a young adult, my family assumed I would marry an Indian man. I watched Bollywood movies and my interpretation of Indian romance came from the heroes in those movies. I wanted a good-looking Indian guy that was sweet, romantic, and strong and could save you if ever the need arose. But reality and movies were two different things.

Reality was far from the image put into our heads by the movies. I discovered that in college, the Indian guys I met didn't know how to court a woman. My junior year of college an all-American boy asked me out and kept asking me out no matter how many times I said no. Why should I date someone who I would never marry? But he was persistent, and not to mention very handsome. He couldn't believe I turned him down because of his race. When he said that, it made me realize what a jerk I was. Eventually I gave in because I was attracted to him. Our first date was a fabulous, nothing like the men I'd dated before, the ones that met my parents' expectations.

We had a lot in common – we were interested in politics, social issues, adventure and we were thrill seekers. To top it off he didn't mind dancing with me. Each date was more thrilling than the last. We took advantage of the trips offered through college and explored the town finding hole in the wall restaurants to eat at and local bands to listen to. We even took a scuba class in the college pool. We never made it out to the ocean, but we finished our training and got partial certification.

Some nights we stayed up talking about the problems of the world we would never solve. He learned about Indian culture and other Asian cultures from me. He had never traveled overseas, and he really didn't know much about other cultures and how different they could be from his upbringing. The more I shared with him, the more he wanted to learn.

I dated Josh for the rest of college, but I never told my parents about Josh because I wasn't sure how they would react, and I didn't know where things were going after college. After dating for a year, Josh confessed he was in love with me and I'd fallen in love with him. Which was the only reason I lost my virginity to him. In my heart, I hoped he was the one, and we had a future.

Before I finished my senior year, I had a job offer in New York City while he was still looking for a job in journalism. Josh asked me and other friends to join him on a trip to Africa after graduation. He wanted to explore and experience other countries now that he had learned about them in school.

We went to several places in Africa for the summer before I started work. It was an amazing trip. Everything you could imagine an adventure, fun, and sex. We made love in the most exotic places – inside, outside, under the sky, all over. He was my first lover, and I was his second so neither of us had a lot of experience before each other, but it never seemed like that. The chemistry between us was incredible. We both learned to explore each other and experiment on each other. One night we camped in the Chawaba Camping grounds near Dar Es Salaam. It was the first time we made love outside, the hard ground beneath me and the stars and the moon above me. I felt the night air on my naked body and heard all the surrounding sounds. The thrill of the outdoors, being in a foreign land, and the risk of getting caught heightened the experience.

By the end of the summer, I still didn't know what would happen to us after the trip was over. A few weeks before my return flight home I asked Josh what next.

Josh looked up at me. "I'm not going back to the States. I'm staying."

"What are you going to do?" I asked shocked to my core. It never entered my mind that Josh wasn't going back to the New York City, much less the States.