It was plain in his eyes how badly he wanted to understand. It made the mismatched size of his eyes more apparent. Even more important than how well he had understood her was how badly he’d wanted to. How much she had needed that. How many things it would have changed to have had it for longer.
For a few moments the emerald centers hypnotized her. But the golden flecks asked questions she had no answers to, questions that proved how little he knew her now.
“I grew up,” she said finally before pushing off the hood and getting in the car.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
One moment they were standing close enough that Rico could drop a kiss on her head, and the next moment she was inside the car, leaving behind the scent of her wet hair. God, her hair smelled like magic.
He followed her into the car.
She turned the ignition and looked at him. “Can I ask you a question too?”
“Sure.”
“How did you convince China to give me her car?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Right. China told me she’s going to some sort of corporate dinner and wanted me to take her car home, so she could, you know, imbibe.”
He shrugged. They were both suppressing smiles and it felt even better than straight-out smiling. It wasn’t fair how every cell in Rico’s body lapped up just how good it felt.
Shifting gears, she pulled out of the parking spot.
They merged into traffic with cars packed back to back. She switched gears again. On the drive in he’d been in such a haze of anticipation, he hadn’t noticed that the car had a manual transmission. He had no idea she could drive manual. There was something insanely hot about it.
She caught him looking at her hand on the gear box. “My uncle insisted we all learn how to drive stick shifts. Wanted to make sure we had essential life skills.”
“Driving manual is a life skill? I must have missed that memo.” He barely drove anymore. Hadn’t in years.
She looked mock-horrified. “What will you do when you’re stranded in . . . um . . . anywhere in the world where they still drive only stick?”
“Take George with me?” he said.
Her answering laugh was husky and teasing. She followed it up with a quick lesson on the gears and the clutch.
It was the first time they were talking. Not using words to transfer pain and regret, just talking. Suddenly he was terribly curious about her life.
“Is it hard to manage the restaurant with the show?” Talking about the restaurant felt tenuous, but they were crawling along. He’d never been so grateful for traffic.
“My aunt’s helping. That’s Trisha’s m-mother.” Her voice stuttered on the word mother and she pursed her lips, obviously mortified that it had.
“I know,” he said gently, knowing their moment of casual conversation had passed. “Is your mother still in Sripore?”
Another word that made a muscle twitch in her jaw. At first he’d found it amazing that she had grown up in a palace, then he’d realized that to her it was just a home she missed.
When was the last time you visited? If he asked her, he’d have to deal with the fact that he’d never gone back to the home of his childhood even when he went to Rio.
“She’s here right now.”
Okay. The one person she had never talked about was her mother. All Rico knew was that any mention of her mother turned Ashna into a ball of longing and anger. Having her here was obviously not a simple thing. “Does she live here permanently now?” He had no idea why he pushed, but it felt important to.
“She’s been here a few weeks.” A breath. “She just won a prestigious national award in India and she’s having . . . never mind.”
“Let me guess. She’s having a Large Life Moment. She wants to go back and examine all the things that went wrong.” If that didn’t cut too close to home, Rico didn’t know what did.
Is that why you’re here? Maybe the question didn’t actually shine in her eyes. Maybe he just imagined it. “Something like that,” she said.
“So, you don’t want her here then.”
“She’s my mother.” She kept her voice dead flat. It was one of those lines that could mean entirely different things depending on which word you emphasized. Like one of those acting exercises. But she didn’t let emphasis fall on any single word.
“And yet you don’t want her here.” That he would do anything for another day with his parents was plain in his voice.
Growing up, Rico could never have imagined being able to live in a world without his parents. They hadn’t let him feel unloved a single day that he’d had them. For all the challenges a relationship like theirs had to have come with, his mãe and pai had always put his happiness before everything.
Even though Rico knew none of the details, he knew that Ashna’s parents had inflicted the kind of hurt on her that had become woven into her fabric. Her father had willfully snatched the possibility of happiness from her hands. How Rico hated him. Not for the first time, Rico regretted how badly he had reacted to the man.
For years he had been too angry to admit it, but the things he had said to Ashna about her father had been thoughtless. It had ruined everything, pushed her into a corner where she’d had to choose between Rico and him. And she had made her choice.
At least her mother was a safe topic. “If your mother is here to fix things, why don’t you want her to?”
They were at a standstill again and Ashna wiggled the gear stick impatiently. “Is it that easy? To fix things you broke?”
He stared out the window. Six lanes of traffic unable to move, the gridlock turning a small distance endless.
“I don’t know.” He stayed silent for a while before speaking again. “But does it matter?” He twisted in his seat and met her eyes, the glossy black clouded with painful memories. “Does it matter if it’s easy or hard? If the person is essential to you, then fixing things with them is essential.” The word felt magical in his mouth. The way his tongue wrapped around it, he could almost taste it. Essential.
That’s how this felt. Being here. Figuring this out. Her. “Your mother isn’t someone you can just cut out of your life. If you could, you would have by now.”
Her knuckles turned white around the steering wheel. He’d hit a nerve.
“Or you find a way to stop the person from being essential to you.” She slipped a glance his way. “How do you do that?”
Was she suggesting that it was something he had greater expertise at than her?
All he could do was stare at her. The stalled traffic meant she could meet his stare.
“You think I know?” His hand rubbed his leg. How was he in love with a girl so willfully obtuse? She had literally dumped him because her father believed she was too good for him. She’d walked away from him without a backward glance and now all he could get from her was this sense of being wounded.
She didn’t look away. Just watched him the way you watch liars, with curiosity and disbelief.
His hand kneaded the knots that seemed permanently lodged around his knee. “Sometimes when people leave you, you get so caught up in trying to convince yourself that you can cut them out of your life that you think you’ve actually figured it out. You keep moving. You ignore the feeling of being chased, even as you can’t stop running and running to get away. But then you realize that you haven’t moved at all. Those who are essential to you have always been an absence. Even when you refused to acknowledge it, their void was always there.”