“You almost gave me a heart attack there, Rico!” she said when they came up for air. “What is wrong with you?”
“Other than the fact that not being able to check up on you this morning almost killed me?”
“I’m sorry. Things got to be a lot with my mom.”
He stroked her cheek. “She’s lovely. There’s so much of her in you.”
She nodded and kissed him again, because hearing that made beautiful feelings dance inside her.
With one tug at the clasp in her bun, he made her hair slide down her back. “Did you really think I’d propose to you on live television? It’s like you think I don’t know you at all.”
“Thanks for knowing me.” She stroked his lips with the pad of her thumb. “Also, I would have killed you if you had done it. There were knives there.”
He kissed her fingers and unleashed his chuckle on her poor heart. “First, I know how you feel about proposals putting the power of a relationship’s future in a man’s hands.” She had told him that back in high school. She hated the rabid romanticizing of proposals—as though the act of women waiting to be claimed were a good thing. “If I did want to express my feelings—in a non-proposal—I would do it in private. Just you and me. Maybe in a room where I finally had you back in my arms, where I had prayed so hard to have you back, I don’t know how I didn’t crack the walls.”
He fell to his knees.
“Rico, your knee.”
“Good as new.”
She went down on her knees in front of him. “What are you doing?”
“Exactly what you think. You ready? It’s going to be a long speech.” He extracted a box from his pocket and flipped it open. There, on white satin, sat the most exquisite blood red ruby circled in diamonds.
She wiped the tear that slid down his cheek. He was too choked up to speak. “I’m waiting for the speech.”
He swallowed and squeezed her hand, his own shaking. “All those years ago when we were together, I used to wonder what might happen if you left me. I remember the terror of it. Finding you after I had lost everything—it felt like too much. I used to have nightmares about losing you too. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to bear it. I imagined each day to be hell, I imagined having no way out. But I had no idea.
“I didn’t know then that hell would be in the littlest things—in meeting a perfectly lovely person and having my heart yearn for you, in touching someone else and wanting to feel you. My heart held you up like a mirror, a line on a wall where the height of my feelings would never again be as tall. It might have been easier without the intermittent normalcy between the blasts of memory, where your voice, your taste was so vivid it undid everything. After all those years of forcing myself not to give in to the yearning to search for you, it was the best thing I ever did, because it led me back to you, back to the me I had lost. I don’t know how to be me without you.
“Ash, meu amor, will you please put me out of my misery and let me spend the rest of my life with you?”
“That was long,” Ashna said through a sniffle. “And beautiful.”
“I wrote it when you left this morning. On the hotel notepad.” He pointed at the desk. “I thought I’d bring it to you, an old-fashioned letter. Then I read it so many times I knew it by heart, and I heard my mãe’s voice telling me I couldn’t say those things without a ring. I knew rings make you uncomfortable, but I did want to honor my mãe and get you something. Good thing Song’s sister knows a jeweler.”
This time he wiped her cheek.
She took the ruby out of the box. It was a pendant on a chain. Rising to her feet, she helped him up. “It’s not something, Rico. It’s everything.”
“Turn it around.”
On the back was engraved #Ashico.
She was laugh-crying so hard she could barely speak. “Will you put it on me?”
They walked to the mirror in the alcove, where he had shown her what it meant to be beautiful. There again in his eyes was the only thing that made anyone truly beautiful. Love.
Slipping her hair onto one shoulder, he hooked it around her neck. A chain that didn’t feel like a chain but a lifeline. Then he kissed her neck, eyes locked with hers in the mirror.
“Thank you for finding me again.” She leaned into his kiss, took his hand and pressed it against her full heart. “Happiness seeps into me when you’re around, Rico. Without invitation, without notice, joy finds me. Being around you is being alive, it’s breathing, it’s home.”
Then she let him lift her up and place her on the table against the mirror, and she was reminded again exactly how loud the love of her life could be.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Smashing the patriarchy is complicated business. It’s true that you can’t throw a punch without hurting your knuckles, but it’s time to stop telling women that it’s all or nothing, that it’s only valuable if it hurts.’ That was my favorite line, Mom,” Ashna said, telling her mother again how fabulous her award acceptance speech had been.
“When you and Rico have a baby girl, she can be whomever she wants to be,” Shobi said.
“So long as she’s badass. And plays soccer—okay, any sport. And doesn’t cut her hair. And takes over the restaurant. And her grandmother’s institute,” Ashna said with a laugh.
“Goes without saying.”
Mother and daughter sat on a Sagar Mahal terrace overlooking the cliff that dropped into the Arabian Sea, drinking tea and watching the waves crash into rocks. Ashna leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder. “If you had fallen in line, I’d have had a happy childhood. And I’d have married who you and Baba picked for me. It wouldn’t have been a bad life, but then we wouldn’t know what it’s like to love these two.”
Omar came up the cliff, the breeze ruffling his silver hair and squeezed Shobi’s shoulders and dropped a kiss on Ashna’s head. Then he proceeded to pour the tea Shobi handed him from a bone china cup into a black stoneware cup.
He dropped into a wicker chair across from them. “Kya guftagu chal rahi hai ma beti mein?” Whatever he said sounded incredibly poetic and Mom’s eyes went soft and hazy.
Every woman deserved that, Ashi was thinking when a wet face pressed into her cheek from behind. “Yuck, you’re all sweaty,” she said, and Rico shook his head and splattered some more sweat all over her.
Rico and Omar were supposed to have gone for a walk. “How much did you run? You’ll hurt your knee again.”
“I won’t. It’s good as new,” he said stubbornly and poured himself tea.
“I think the man is fully capable of gauging his own pain levels,” Mom said as Rico kissed her cheek and sank down on the marble floor between Ashna and Shobi.
“Thanks, Mom, I’m not doubting his capability.”
“And yet, you won’t let me swim because I get ear infections,” Omar said sagely into his tea. There was a warm strength to him, and Mom’s entire demeanor relaxed in his presence.
“That’s because you’re not thirty anymore. And you get cranky when you’re in pain,” Shobi said with the most ineffective frown, because her eyes were twinkling.