I stared at the floor.
She turned her face and kissed my cheek.
The same station-kiss as before. Dry. Then not dry. Her mouth stayed a half-second too long against the heat of my skin.
“Let me help you,” she whispered there. “Only this. You cleaned my mess. You are sitting here leaking like a boy and calling it morality. Let me.”
“Maa. Don’t.”
“Then say a different word than don’t. You said okay to him. Say okay to this or go to your room and I will put a saree on and we will never mention the trousers.”
I did not go.
Her hand found me over the cloth first. I made a sound I will hear until I die. She breathed out, a small shaken laugh, and pressed her palm along the length as if measuring a thing she had made and had no right to touch.
“Ohh, beta.” Soft. Wondering. Filthy with fondness. “You’ve been leaking. Look. The cloth is dark. How long. The terrace? The cuffs? When I came out wet?” She rubbed once, slow, and my forehead dropped toward her shoulder and did not land. “Don’t hide. I am already naked. You already saw me drink him. This is smaller than that. This is only a hand.”
She opened the button.
The zip.
The air of my father’s bedroom on my cock.
She pulled me out with both hands as if I might break, and then she did not treat me like I would break. Her fist was warm, soapy, sure. She jerked me the way a woman jerks a man she has decided to be kind to — not gym-tempo, not his tempo, a mother’s tempo gone wrong: attentive, close, watching my face with a frown of concentration that was almost tender.
“This thick,” she murmured. “You hid this in bank shirts. Behenchod, Arun. You have been walking around my kitchen with this. Does it hurt. Tell me.”
“It hurts.”
“Good. No. Not good. I don’t know.” Her thumb spread what I had already leaked over the head and I jerked in her grip. She made a small sound of surprise, pleased. “Leaking again. All this for what. For me sitting like this? For the thought that Vivek had me on this mattress two hours ago? Don’t answer with your mouth. Your cock is answering.”
She stroked faster.
The sitting made it worse. Shoulder to shoulder. Her breast against my arm, heavy, clean, the nipple tight from air. I looked down and saw my own cock in her married hand and the wet of her hair on her chest and I had nowhere decent to put my eyes.
“Come,” she said, not as command, as permission. “On me. Not on the new sheet, I will have to explain flowers to Lata. Here. Beta. Let it go. You have been holding the whole house in your teeth.”
I came like a fall.
No warning I could use. A broken sound against my own fist, which I had shoved in my mouth too late. I spilled on her. First the upper swell of her left breast, a thick stripe. Then the right, the nipple, the valley. A pulse that reached her collarbone. Another that caught the side of her throat near his old mark. She aimed the last of it up without asking and it striped her cheek, the corner of her mouth, one wet lash on her eyelash.
She sat there painted and laughed.
Not loud. A helpless, incredulous laugh, looking down at her own chest as if a son were a weather that had happened to her.
