Free Nights Like This by Divya Sood Page B

of the light overhead spilling onto us, but I knew that Vanessa and I had only just begun. But did she know it too?
    â€œYou talk of lays and then of love all at once,” I said.
    â€œSo fuck me for being as confused as anyone else,” she said.
    I kissed her.
    â€œI’m glad you’re as fucked up as anyone else,” I said. “If you were just a fuck, it would kill me.”
    â€œI’m not, Jess. And princess, neither are you.”
    I kissed her wrist as she touched my face. I wanted to sleep beside her, to feel the ebb and tide of her chest as she breathed. But at the same time I did not want anything more than what we had. In a way, I wanted to return to the night before when she was nothing more than my squatting stranger. But then I wanted to be connected to her in every way a body can be connected to another. I didn’t know what was wrong with me or what I was after.
    â€œJess?”
    â€œYes, Vanessa?”
    â€œI just like hearing you say my name.”
    I sat up. She sat up as well. We leaned back against the wall.
    â€œYou ever get scared?” she asked.
    â€œOf what?”
    â€œOf not knowing. Sometimes of what you know.”
    I held her hand and played with her fingers.
    â€œOf both sometimes,” I said.
    â€œI’ve known you a day and already we talk of love.”
    â€œI know. But then…” I stopped.
    â€œBut then what?”
    â€œNothing.”
    I could not bear to tell her that she had captured my heart in a glance and I wanted it back, untouched. “You ever get scared?” she had asked. How could I say, “I’m terrified of what I feel for you?” How could I say, “If you were just a random fuck, it would break my heart?” I couldn’t tell her these things because for all I knew, she would not understand. So I said, “nothing” as in “Nothing I say can impart what I feel and what I feel is a ball of confusion but the only thing I know is that I was meant to love you even if I am terrified of loving and don’t know how.”
    â€œI need a massage,” I said.
    â€œI can give you one later if you want.”
    â€œMaybe.”
    And so we started talking of random things, safe things that had nothing to do with love or lays but everything to do with the details of our lives, our likes, our dislikes, food, clothes and our routines in general. She told me usually wore Romance but hadn’t worn perfume that day because she had forgotten. I told her I never told anyone what I wore and that it wasn’t something I ever discussed. She said I smelled faintly of cloves mixed with another scent she couldn’t quite place. And so in shadows we spoke in whispers and I had never been more content than I was in that five-story walk up, talking to my lover. We talked the night into breaking and when dawn came, we were still sitting and whispering to one another about randomness. For two people who didn’t want to fall in love, we should have known that these kinds of dialogues could lead to nothing else. But I think we believed we could defy it all if we just stuck to the little things, the simple things.
    When we could see the sun outside her window, Vanessa suggested we sleep. I rest my head on her shoulder and heard her breathing. There was nowhere else I would rather have been. Anjali seemed a faraway dream, the princess of some faraway land that had captured my body once. And Vanessa? Vanessa, above anyone I had known, was meant to be the princess of jasmine.

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Chapter Eight
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    I left Vanessa’s at noon. It was a cool autumn afternoon and I decided to walk the entire way home. It wasn’t that I couldn’t have taken the subway. It wasn’t that I didn’t realize that the walk from East tenth to West 55th was a long walk. It was that I wanted to be alone within my mind. I kept thinking back to her soft, whispered words, “ You’re fucked, Jess....