The trembling started again. Her lips, her hands. She wrapped her arms around herself, and sagged against the wall. Her mouth opened but nothing came out.
“What is it, Ash, what are you not telling me?”
The word hung in the air between them. A name he hadn’t let slip from his lips for twelve years.
Pushing away from the wall, she started pacing. Her hands went to her hair, and with a frustrated grunt she unhooked her bun. Hair cascaded down her back. Electricity kicked in his gut like a damned bolt of lightning.
She shook it out, then gathered it back in a bun.
Leave it down. Just for another moment.
She let it go and pulled the sharp dagger-like hair clasp out of her mouth. “We can’t win, Rico. We can’t win because . . . because . . .” Her hands went to work on the bun again. She rolled it back up and poked it with the dagger to keep it in place. No points for guessing what else the dagger pierced.
“Because what?”
Her eyes were stripped bare when they met his. “Because I can’t cook.”
His brain had to still be stuck on her hair, because that made no sense. “You made that omelet perfectly.”
“I can only cook certain things.”
Excuse him?
“I’ve . . . I’ve never told this to anyone.” Her hands twisted together. “I can only cook things on the menu at Curried Dreams. If . . . if I try to cook anything else, I . . . well, I can’t.”
Suddenly everything made sense.
Then, nothing did.
“Can you . . . can you please not ask questions. Please.” She was breathing hard. Her hands were shaking like leaves in a storm, a storm she had swallowed whole and trapped inside her lungs, under her skin.
He reached out and took them. “You’ve never told anyone?” They were ice cold and he wrapped them in his. “No one?”
That made her laugh and she clamped her mouth shut. It made her eyes water as she choked it back.
He tamped down the rage that rose inside him. He was going to dismember whoever had done this to her. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.
He’d tell the network that he wanted to be the one doing the cooking. They’d accommodate him. He’d make them. He’d make this go away for her.
His thumb traced the backs of her hands. The rise of veins, the ridges of tendons, the sparklers bursting in his heart. Letting her hands go was going to be the hardest thing he’d ever done.
“Thanks.” The word was the barest whisper on her lips.
He’d never known how not to give her what she asked for.
I need you to not ask me questions right now. I need to handle my father my way. Please.
Look where it had gotten him. “How do you hold in so many secrets, Ashna? Why?”
She snatched her hands out of his and pushed him away.
His hands fell like lead to his sides. “Why does he have such a hold on you?”
That made her step back. Without another word she went to the door. Yet again, done with the conversation, done with him.
But she stopped and Rico hated the relief of it. “You know what? I don’t want you to take care of it. I will take care of it myself. I don’t need your help.”
“How? How will you take care of it? By walking away?” Again. “You’re a chef, and you’re telling me you can’t cook! I could never have imagined you like this. What happened to you?”
“I should never have told you. I should have known you wouldn’t understand.”
“Understand what? Is this what happens when you push away what you want for too long? You forget who you are.”
This wasn’t her. This Ashna had suffocated the Ashna he knew—his Ash. She might have been just a girl he dated in high school, but that girl had breathed life back into him and he had to bring her back. Even if she wasn’t his anymore.
She leaned her head into the door. “Is this what happens when you do exactly as you wish for too long? You stop understanding anyone? You end up selfish and alone?”
Damn right. And it was a condition she had thrust him into. “So, you’re not alone, is that it? You’re surrounded by people who love you. People who love you so much that you need to hide anything that’s important to you from them?”
“Will you ever let that go?”
Never. “Sure, I’ll let it go. But have you ever thought about what it means to hide what’s important to you from those you love?”
“Have you ever considered that maybe I hide it because it’s not worth sharing?”
That should have hurt, but it didn’t. He knew she was lying, and she knew it too.
“Or maybe if you stopped hiding it, you’d have to admit its worth. You’d have to admit your own worth. You’d have to admit that you’re deserving of happiness. And if you did that you’d have to fight for it, and maybe you’ve forgotten how to fight for anything.”
Her hand squeezed the doorknob until her knuckles turned white. His heart felt like that doorknob, squeezed tight in her grip. Silence flooded them like a spotlight, leaving no place for their words to hide.
They stood there like that, time slipping and sliding around them. In the end, she was the first to leave. Instead of going back into the studio, she ran around the building and disappeared, exactly the way she had done twelve years ago.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Wanting to run away was never a conscious thought Ashna had. It was this constant, beating sense that was threaded into her being. So much a part of her that she never examined it. She had sure as hell never acted on it.
There was only an hour before they started shooting the competition segment. But she couldn’t stand to be at the studio. She ran out onto the Embarcadero and slowed to a walk.
Her hand went to her phone. She had no idea what she was doing when she dialed Shobi’s number. Hindi rap burst from the speaker instead of a ring and Ashna hung up, realizing that she couldn’t remember the last time she had called Shobi.
Anger pulsed inside her. The constant, inexhaustible anger at Shobi, at Rico. Every single time she walked away from him, she felt like she had walked through fire, and the flames had burned off her clothes, leaving her naked, her flesh blistered.
The memory of his hands wrapped around hers lingered like a phantom touch. The solidity of his arm beneath her fingers every time they walked into the studio had become a phantom crutch. Why had she taken strength from it? How had she let it soften her?
Soften her enough that she’d exposed herself to him and he’d used it to strike at her.
How dare he talk to her about fighting for things? She’d fought so hard for him that she’d pushed her own father over the edge. In return he’d left her.
It didn’t matter that he regretted it now, because obviously, he did. It didn’t matter that he saw right to the center of her. That he remembered everything she’d been, everything she’d wanted so badly to be.
She’d shared so much with him. What it was like to grow up in Sagar Mahal, a child alone in a palace. Parts of her she’d never shared with anyone else. But it had felt essential for Rico to know about the home she’d grown up in. Especially because she had never been able to let him into her real home.
Have you ever thought about what it means to hide what’s important to you from those you love?