Secrets & Saris by Shoma Narayanan Page B

before, and carrying his shirt over one arm. Bare-chested, with his hair still rumpled, he looked gorgeous, but his expression was way too serious.
    ‘Good, you’re awake,’ he said, coming to her side and leaning down to give her a hard kiss. ‘I need to leave now—I’ll see you tomorrow.’
    ‘Why d’you need to leave?’ Shefali protested, her voice still thick with sleep. ‘Can’t you go in the morning?’
    ‘I need to be at home when Nina wakes up,’ he said. ‘And if my car is parked outside your house in the morning we’ll have created a fine scandal.’
    Not having thought of that, Shefali floundered a little. ‘We could say it broke down and you left it here and walked home?’ she suggested.
    ‘You won’t be asked to answer questions about it in a court of law,’ he said, and his voice was stiff, almost harsh. ‘There’ll just be a lot of unnecessary gossip, which you won’t be able to contradict, and neither of us can afford that.’
    Shefali looked up at him silently. She hadn’t been thinking clearly. She hadn’t been thinking at all. She’d never slept with a man before, and at some point, incredibly moved by the experience, she’d told Neil so. Judging by the way he was behaving now, it had most definitely been a mistake. Probably he was expecting her to become clingy and possessive, and he was trying to stave it off by making it clear that he didn’t mean to hang around.
    ‘OK, then, if you need to go, you need to go,’ she said finally, amazed at how steady her voice was. Perhaps she’d missed her calling after all—she could have won an award for being so perfectly calm and collected when her mind was in such utter turmoil.
    ‘See you, then,’ he said, and there was a note of relief in his voice.
    A minute later Shefali heard the front door close gently behind him.
    Getting up to latch the door, Shefali caught a glimpse of Neil driving off. He looked older than his years and very grim. A far cry from his usual cheerful self.
    It was four o’clock. Too early to start the day. But in her current frame of mind there was no way she could go back to sleep. Sitting down on the bed, she tried to sort out her thoughts. From a purely physical point of view the night had been amazing, and her body still ached pleasurably in unfamiliar places. If she could ask it if it wanted to repeat the experience, she was sure that she’d get a resounding yes—every cell in her body would be shamelessly willing to sign a petition to get Neil back into her bed.
    Moving on to the more complex subject of how she felt about Neil, Shefali faltered. Her hand came up to brush tears away from her eyes impatiently. It was all very well trying to be calm and mature about the whole thing, but the impulse to throw herself on the bed and start howling was immense. Neil’s evident eagerness to be gone had hurt her badly. He hadn’t even thrown a casual endearment her way, and though he’d said he’d see her later she would bet anything he’d call her with a dozen reasons as to why they shouldn’t be with each other.
    Maybe he was right. They’d both been carried away by passion, but there wasn’t really much point in a relationship that was geared to fail. Neil had a lot of baggage, and he’d already told her that he didn’t want to marry again. For that matter, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to marry either, or even become involved in a serious relationship. Theoretically, a light-hearted fling with no strings attached would have been the perfect recipe to get over Pranav. But if she extended that logic she’d need to have another fling to get over Neil—and something told her that getting over Neil would be a lot more difficult than getting over Pranav.
    She could write Neil off as a therapeutic one-night stand, of course, only she wasn’t ready to give up what they had together just yet. In spite of the risk it posed to her heart, a short fling seemed to be the only solution. She gave a little