A/N - Thank you for the one and only review I have on my story so far, ChocolateIsMyDrug. Here's Chapter 2 in somewhat lesser time then I promised, cause the remainder of my day shall be packed with video conferencing for work - sigh!
If you're here (yes you, and you and you - silent readers!) I'd love to hear back from you on what you think about the story. New places always take a time settling into, and a warm welcome shall be so much appreciated - which includes all kinds of feedback, good and bad.
And now, enjoy reading!
Geet raised her knuckle to knock upon the door, then stopped looking about herself uneasily, raised it again, but couldn't bring herself to. What would she say? After making an utter fool of herself for god-knew-what-count-of-time, because heck, she had lost count!... And he had too, she supposed, wryly. Perhaps she was never going to become much of anything else in his eyes... nothing but a zealous fool...
"Geet!"
Her heart skipped a beat, unprepared as she was to hear him much less be watched by him from behind, and with significant apprehension she turned around. There he was, standing in his plain black kickboxing attire, beads of sweat glistening over his solemn visage and chiseled broad chest, looking at her so - discomfited by an odd fluttering in the pit of her own stomach she shied away her studying gaze, securing a lose strand of hair behind her ear and bidding herself desperately to say what she had to.
"You're here...?" he asked tentatively, when she stood fiddling with the hem of her dress.
"I... I came to tell you... to say... I..." her eyes remained averted amidst the verbal fumbling and yet again Maan found himself incapable of maintaining his resolve to be aloof. Briskly, he walked past her to the door of his room, and opening it stood aside indicating for her to come in.
"I came to say I'm sorry," she said in a rush, then looked up, the anticipation bare in her eyes. Maan looked back at her, steadfast, his face betraying no tell tale expression, before moving to pull a chair for her, and then grabbed himself a clean towel from the pile of freshly laundered linen lying by his bedside.
"Its okay." he said at last, and just that. "Coffee?"
She shook her head, then bit her lower lip turning her eyes away from him. It wasn't half as much like her to give way to tears as it was to defy and argue, but just then it appeared to him that she would cry, any second. Discarding the towel hurriedly, he closed on the distance between them, then holding her gently by her arms he made her face him.
"Its okay Geet." he repeated, "I'm not angry with you now. I promise." She nodded a reluctant nod, then shook her head more determinedly.
"Its not okay. Everything you said, was right. I got a cab from Princep Ghat to drive me all the way to Pinky's place across Howrah, and I barely had to bring up the topic when she broke down and confessed her feelings. I feel so terrible Maan, not having seen it all along, nor having listened to you when you told me so. Even what you did about Adi, cause he... after you had left... he said it... I was so rude to him... oh the mess I've made!" she sighed, pausing her broken sentences, and looked up with round sorry eyes. Then in a soft regretting voice she said, "I'm such a fool! No matter how hard you try to rub in even traces of sensibility... "
"Hush!" he whispered, cutting her short, cupping the small of her neck with one big hand, his fingers burying themselves into her dense tresses, urging her face to tilt up for him. "You didn't mean any harm Geet, and I know you never can and that makes all the difference. Its going to be alright. I swear, I will make it alright."
She looked up to him with eyes of a little child who was being consoled with a candy after having made everything go wrong - the hope of exoneration and dismay of its unfairness stood like distinct, coexisting emotions in her clear brown eyes which stared into his. A wall inside him crumbled to meaningless rubble. Not trusting his own hands holding her in assurance, he withdrew them with only as much gentility as he could manage, before pulling at the towel he had abandoned previously, to give his hands something else to be occupied with.
"Now tell me if you're going to take coffee with me or not?" he began again, steering the topic clear of provocative content, "I still have to hear the highlights of this afternoon's meeting with Rasika Rathod from you." Instantly, just as he had expected, her body language transformed from being genuinely distressed to donning a dramatic distaste - she rolled her eyes, making an exasperated face.
"Coffee will be good MK, thank you. Make it strong and black, if we're talking about that woman." Unavoidably, he laughed at her childlike sulking, and in reaction she pushed him an arm's length away, not roughly though. "And please keep distance till you've gotten yourself a decent shower." It made him laugh more, to her mild irritation although inside they were both relieved by the change he had brought. Like always. Purposely, he ruffled her hair making her shriek and gave her a quick half hug before backing off with his hands up in surrender at her pinched expression, shaking his head as he walked out of his room.
Geet stood following his back as it disappeared round the door, out of her sight, and still she kept looking. Gradually, when her vision had become hazy and distant, she finally withdrew her gaze, and casually, let it go over the familiarity of his room's interiors such as she had always known, when her eyes stopped at the single framed photo on one of its walls. It was a picture of their childhood, Dev and her posing with their shabby job of a sand castle at a beach and Maan kneeling beside her, fixing a wall on her end, not bothered with the lens trained onto them. For some quiet moments, Geet stood looking at the photo. Consequently, of their own accord, her feet walked up to the wall, and her fingers went over its glass, preciously.
This frame had been a part of his room for some years now, and it surprised her, that although she had ganged up with Dev in giving Maan a hard time mocking him over his odd selection for display, she had never actually come around to questioning him about it. Cautiously, she removed it, and then settled down with it at the edge of Maan's bed, while continuing to look at it, as if overcome by a vaguely forming realization. Particulars of his manner from their shared past, similar in pattern, begun sprouting inside her head, not chronologically but in a way as to trace out a singularity of purpose for her convenience. She went over the words he had spoken to her only just minutes ago, (I swear, I will make it alright), and she tried to remember all those times in the past that he had committed himself to the same, and done it, for her.
Geet sat struggling to hold together her myriad of thoughts and memories as were evoked by the photo without a warning... and a subtle chain reaction of sort was triggered inside her head. His presence in her life, vigilantly looking over her and more than occasionally patronizing, but covering up for her anyways, had been ever so unwavering. Hadn't she failed him enough times to become a lost cause? And yet, contrary to what she had accused him of only this evening, it had always been Maan, showing ceaseless faith in her, Geet. He would give her a last chance, push her to her extremities to avail it the best way, and then be there to give her yet another after that too, cause she always seemed in need of just one more time. And in the absence of this endless reserve of last chances, and their bearer, she could not imagine her life.
"A coffee for your thoughts?"
She looked up to find a steaming cup before her eyes, and a freshly groomed MK handing it over with a curious new moon cut smile. She noticed his damp hair from the shower, a black vest stretching over his taut torso identical to the one that had been replaced from before, and snug tracks underneath. It occurred to her, how comfortable he was being himself, how effortlessly he carried that enviable body of his around, owing places and people about himself so naturally. It struck her also, how everything masculine about him appeared to her as entirely unique to him, cause she had never come to associate any semblance of such raw aura with another among the male species.
Not even the shadow of his being, his own brother, her closest mate, Dev.
In fact, while countless girls through their years of schooling and university had grudged her, her camaraderie with the younger, and more people popular of the Khurana heirs, she had always secretly fancied, consciously more, her less than candid bonding with the reserved Maan whom she doggedly looked up to. Hard to believe though it was, animated conversations - involving Maan and her only - were still a source of occasional awe to her, especially at times when she found him letting lose of the characteristic stiffness about himself and indulging in some inconsequential fun. She cherished those moments with him, which were not strained either with an argument, or simply with work loads, or most often with being lectured about some principle of righteousness... but were moments of sharing a laugh of over some ridiculous joke, or mulling over a philosophy that was irrelevant to the world and its bothersome concerns, or even of unplanned long drives coupled with completely trash radio station music - the occasions were not frequent enough, and could not always boast of Maan's complete attention, but most times in the middle of such moments she would find her future self envying her then present self of the transient instant's bonding. She would take pride in believing that she unleashed a side to Maan that was not just rare, but predominantly latent.
He leaned over to place her cup on her side, when she had taken too long and still not claimed it, and smelling in a mix of his cologne and after shave snapped her out of her reverie. Abruptly, she sprung up to her feet, surprising him.
"I'm going to talk to Daadi Ma (Maan's grandmother)." She declared, quite out of any context he could relate the impulse to.
"Now? Why? I mean, what about?" It appeared for the briefest second that she was on the verge of blurting out some truth thoughtlessly, but then she shut up with a determination.
"Its personal," she said, not to his liking, "Girl talk." And with that she was making way for the door that would lead her out of his room and away from his engulfing presence.
"But Daadi Ma is not home!" he spoke up in time to stop her in her step, although, she did not turn to face him. "She's guest of honor for the convocation dinner at Presidency College this evening. I thought she mentioned to you as much..." Shit, thought Geet! Daadi Ma was her solitary hope to find an answer to her complicated speculation. She would also have been her sole means to escape Maan right now, without making it inexplicable or awkward. Mentally, she chided her ill luck. Aloud, without turning around to face him still, she shot him a dismissing reply.
"Right. Of course. Yeh, she told me... alright then, I'll see her tomorrow morning... and you too, at office, MK!"
Before he could ponder over the hesitance in her addressing of him, she was gone. Quick on his feet, he hastened to the large glass window on one side of his room, that overlooked the lush lawns which appeared spooky with shadows given the hour. Among the stealthy forms of the unmoving surroundings, he spotted her movement soon enough, as nimbly wielding her way through the intricate landscaping of the flower beds, she went about flaying her arms in rapid odd gestures.
She was making dialogue with herself, he concluded. About what though? After she disappeared through the iron gates of the Khurana mansion, and entered her own premise, he watched over her until he saw her slip in through the side entrance into the Handa villa safely, before stretching out to relax and retiring to his bed. Two cups of coffee, now cold and forgotten, lay lonely in two different spots of the room, while he reclined against a number of pillows propped up for his back. And pondered over the matter of her strange exit.
It was a while, before exhaustion from the day was taking over him, and only when his actively pursued thoughts inevitably dimmed out, did a small voice from within tempt him with an idea of its own. Abruptly, his eyes flew open, and Maan sat up, all sleep lost. He scattered the sheets on his bed to locate his object of interest - the framed picture from his wall which she had been looking at when he had walked in with the coffee. Staring at it now, the way she had been not long ago, he debated over the possibility that her queer exit would have anything to do with this photo. It was a preposterous notion, and yet, where this girl was concerned, anything was possible.
What could she have been thinking? What would he think, if he was thinking like Geet Kaur Handa...?
A/N - Reminder reminder! Don't forget to review, pretty please!