The lack of a girlfriend made everything sharper. There was no other body to go home to, no other soft voice, no other set of breasts to think about when the heat rose. Only her. Only the sister who still called him bhaiya and still asked him to check the Wi-Fi and still sat near him on the sofa without any awareness of what was happening inside him.
The lust arrived like a slow fever.
At first it was only looking longer. Then it was remembering the looking when he was alone. Then it was deliberate. Late at night, after the house was quiet, he would lie in bed and let the images come. Sonam bending over the study table, the soft curve of her ass in leggings. Sonam stretching, the t-shirt lifting, the undersides of her breasts visible for a second. Sonam in the towel, skin damp, the towel slipping just a little. He would take himself in hand and stroke slowly, replaying the same moments, adding what he wanted to happen next—walking into her room, closing the door, telling her to stand, pushing the books aside, bending her forward over the same wooden table where their names were still carved. He imagined the sound she would make when he first pushed inside her. How tight she would be. How she would still try to stay quiet. How she would still call him bhaiya even while he was buried deep.
He started coming to those thoughts almost every night. Sometimes twice. The release was harder and longer than anything the usual videos had given him in years. Afterward he would lie staring at the ceiling, heart still fast, knowing that tomorrow he would sit across from her at breakfast and feel the same low, constant ache.
There were smaller, dirtier habits that grew without him deciding. After she bathed at night he would sometimes go into the still-warm bathroom and breathe in the remaining humidity and the faint scent of her soap mixed with the warmer smell of her skin. Once or twice he stroked himself right there, quiet and quick. A few times he took one of her worn kurtis or tops from the laundry basket, pressed the soft cloth to his face, and finished himself in bed with her smell in his nose.
The comments from friends and strangers and Instagram kept feeding it. Every time someone called her maal, every time an anonymous account left a dirty emoji under her photo, every time an auto driver’s eyes lingered, the heat in him grew. He was a brother. He was supposed to feel only anger. Instead he felt something else—ownership mixed with hunger, the dark, private knowledge that he was the one who lived under the same roof, who saw the skin she did not show outsiders, who heard the soft sounds she made when she thought no one was listening.
By the time months had passed, the lust was no longer new. It was a daily, heavy presence. He looked at her and his mouth watered. He heard her soft laugh and his cock twitched. He watched her move through the house in ordinary clothes and felt the constant, low pulse of wanting to put his hands on her, to pull the cloth up, to see and touch and take what no one else was allowed to see.
