Wordlessly, he took the wipe from her and, with the gentlest touch, dabbed beneath her eyes. Two strokes and he was done.
He was close enough that his smell poured over her, his breath, his skin. He smelled like the best parts of her childhood, like forgotten parts of her, like home and longing. Like joy.
At the center of his blue irises, obsidian pupils opened wide and deep. I will not fall into them. I will not fall into them. The last time she’d seen him, he’d wiped her tears for hours. Over and over, his callused fingers steady on her cheeks, his shirt soaked with them. Tears that had been the most unbearable thing she’d ever lived through. Tears she’d thought would never dry. Tears that had changed everything.
She stepped away from him. “Why are you here, Emmitt?” She hadn’t meant for the question to slip out.
“It’s Bela and Eddie’s wedding,” he answered simply.
Bela and Emmitt had always loved each other. The summer that Emmitt and Ayesha had finally gotten together, right after she’d graduated high school and he’d graduated college, the most beautiful summer of Ayesha’s life, Bela had convinced her parents to let Emmitt stay in their basement. Emmitt’s father had moved back to California, and there had been nowhere for Emmitt to live while he worked at Mangalore Stew with Ajay before they both headed off to grad school.
“I wish you hadn’t come,” she wanted to say, but his eyes were too vulnerable, too filled with seeing her again, and she couldn’t.
Turning away from the seismic pull of him, she shoved down everything that had tunneled up from the deepest parts of her and returned to the backyard.
Music blasted out of speakers strategically placed to make conversation impossible. “No thinking. Only dancing,” Bela had decreed.
Excellent plan, Bela!
“There she is!” Sarita Auntie, Bela’s mother, said as she rushed at Ayesha. Her silk palazzo pants and flowy kurta were covered in so much gold sequin that you could barely decipher the purple beneath it.
Behind her came a gaggle of aunties, all in variously colored ghagras and saris, all apparently participants in an all-out sequin war.
“How beautiful she looks!” the auntie who was clearly winning the sequin war said as she pulled Ayesha into a hug. The others followed, swallowing Ayesha up in clouds of Estée Lauder and Chanel, air kisses, and voluptuous compliments.
The Tragic Shetty Girl was out in public, and they were committed to supporting her.
Then Emmitt stepped out into the yard, and Sarita Auntie let out a gasp. “Amit! Beta! When did you get here?” She pulled him into a hug and winked at Ayesha. “I mean Emmitt. Ehm-mitt. Sorry, sometimes your uncle rubs off on me. Oh ho. See, all this wedding excitement has made my brain go phut.” She made a splattering action with her hands. “Ayesha, there’s someone I want you to meet.” She spun around. “Where is he? Ladies, did we lose Dr. Samrat?”
And just like that, a hunt was launched. A game of telephone commenced, messages passing from guest to guest in search of the doctor. Tall, thin, dark skinned . . . or maybe fair skinned, with a mustache . . . or maybe no mustache. Glasses . . . did he have glasses? How tall was he again?
“They’re trying to set you up with someone named ‘Some Rat’?” Emmitt said, and Ayesha turned, meaning to glare at him.
He wasn’t wrong. It was pronounced “Some-raat.” And now she had to deal with the visual of a rat in scrubs peering at her vagina. Groan.
“Hilarious, Amit!” she said. How did he even know it was a setup? Before she could ask, Bela’s dad hurried up to them.
“How can your auntie lose a grown man?” he asked. “I’ve tried a few times, and I can’t seem to wander off even for a moment.” He was carrying a crate of wine that looked heavy.
Emmitt took it from him. “Where do you want it?”
“These need to go back down to the cellar.”
“The cellar,” both Ayesha and Emmitt said together.
Heat rose up Ayesha’s face even as Emmitt’s neck flushed under his collar.
“Yes, you both know the cellar in the basement.” Raj Uncle looked confused. “Do you remember where it is?”
Emmitt cleared his throat and nodded, words obviously eluding him.
Of course he knew where the cellar was. They both did. They knew it quite well, actually. It was where Emmitt had first kissed her. More accurately, it was where she had first kissed him. Smashed her lips into his, almost cracking their teeth in her artless enthusiasm. But he’d turned it into something beautiful. He’d always turned all her messy, impulsive, unfettered emotion into something beautiful.
Raj Uncle snapped his fingers between them.
Ayesha blinked. Emmitt swallowed.
“Ayesha, do you want to go down and show Amit where it is? In case he’s forgotten.”
“No!” Ayesha stepped back. The last thing she needed was to go anywhere near that cellar with him. “He hasn’t forgotten.”
Bela’s dad shook his head as though she were a prized doofus. Was everyone a matchmaker now? And had he not received the memo about who the intended match was?
“She’s right,” Emmitt said. “How could I forget anything about your home after your generosity, Dr. Gupte?” With that, he headed into the house.
“Make sure you prop the door open when you go inside. That door locks you in otherwise,” Raj Uncle called after him, then turned to Ayesha. “I suppose you’re going to go off in search of this gynecologist now?”
Ayesha nodded. “We can’t just let him be lost. Aren’t you worried something might have happened to him?”
Bela’s dad, who’d taken Ayesha with Bela and him to all the father-daughter dances after her father died, patted Ayesha’s cheek. “He’s not the one I’m worried about.”
Chapter Four
It’s amazing how long a cervix can stay at five centimeters,” Samrat declared.
“It’s shocking he’s still single,” Bela whispered to Ayesha as Ayesha pressed her legs together and tried not to choke on her malbec.
“What is the longest you’ve had a cervix stay at five centimeters?” the beautiful bride asked sincerely, batting five miles of fake eyelashes at the once lost, now found, doctor.
The death glare Ayesha threw her had about as much impact on Bela as Bela’s insincerity had on Samrat. That is to say, it went entirely unnoticed.
The good doctor dived into details for the rapt audience of aunties with such enthusiasm that Ayesha yearned for the half hour during which they’d lost him. As it turned out, someone had helped him find a bathroom earlier. The Gupte home had seven bathrooms. Only one of them had a lock that stuck if you didn’t engage it right. It was also the bathroom that was hardest to find.
By the time Ayesha had found the man trying to crawl out of the window and into the side yard, every single person at the party knew his name and the reason he was here. The temper that had reappeared inside Ayesha after all these years simmered in her gut. As if on cue, Emmitt emerged through the crowd like a mythical god rising from an ocean of sequins.
Bela waved him over, shouting his name because the music was loud enough to wake the dead. Fitting, because the songs were old enough that only the uncles and aunties closest to having a foot in the grave were dancing. If you could call miming the words of the high-pitched ballads with flailing arms dancing.