Not the kitchen kiss I had only imagined. This one I saw. Slow first. Her face tipped up, honey and lamp-gold, his hand in her open hair. Her mouth opened under his. I saw the wet flash of it. I saw her smile into the kiss and break it and hide her face in his neck and giggle like the word giggle had no business on a forty-seven-year-old teacher, and then come back for his mouth as if the giggle had been a dare.
He kissed her cheeks. The same cheeks she had put on mine. Then her throat, carefully beside the old mark, and she made a sound that was not quite a moan, not quite a laugh, and pushed at his chest with no strength.
“Vivek. Don’t. He will—”
“He said okay.”
“Okay is not watch.”
They both looked at the door again. Then they laughed, stupid with nerves, forehead to forehead, two people in a room that still had my father’s vests in the cupboard.
She took his hand and put it on her, over the gown, on her breast, and her eyes shut. He said Aparna into her hair. She said aata nako bolu, then kissed him anyway, deeper, her palm at his jaw, the gown slipping off one shoulder. I saw the yellowing mark on the upper swell. I saw his thumb find the nipple through cotton and her mouth fall open on a silent ah. She bit his lower lip to keep the sound in and failed; a small helpless noise came through the jali and onto the terrace and into my mouth like smoke.
“Tickles,” she gasped, giggling again when his stubble scraped the good place under her ear. “Saala— stop— don’t stop—”
He laughed against her skin. Lifted the gown. She raised her arms for him the way she had raised them in a Baner kitchen. The cotton went. Lamp on bare shoulders, bare heavy breasts, the body the gym had sharpened and the house had dressed for decades. She crossed her arms for half a second, shy in her own bedroom, then let them fall because shyness could not survive his looking.
He said something filthy and fond. She slapped his arm, grinning, colour high.
“Don’t say that here.”
“Then where.”
“Not with his name in the same air.”
He kissed the sentence off her mouth.
I held the parapet so I would not hold the jali.
Below me they were still playing. Still at the kissing. Still at the laughing. His shirt came off. Her hands mapped the chest she had only felt under gym light. She hid her face again, giggled into his sternum, said mi according nahi, and he said you called me, and she said my son said I could, and that sentence went through the ventilator like a nail.
She looked toward the door when she said it.
Not toward me.
I was air. I was vests on a line. I was a pair of eyes in a grid.
He eased her back onto the bed that has heard only one man’s sleep for years. She went, hair spreading on her pillow, his pillow, the empty space. He followed on his hands, kissing her smiling mouth, her chin, the marked throat, the valley between her breasts. She threaded her fingers in his hair and pulled him up to giggle into another kiss, nervous, hungry, whispering slow, first only this, let me be a girl for two minutes.
