Chapter 4: Morning After
The dawn was a thief, stealing the comforting anonymity of the dark. It crept in as a slow, gray wash, outlining the shapes of the suite: the silhouette of the abandoned glass table, Sid’s discarded belt coiled on the carpet like a snake, her own blouse hanging limply from the arm of a chair.
Anya was awake before the light. Her body thrummed with a residual electricity, a stark contrast to the leaden weight in her stomach. Sid’s arm was a heavy band across her ribs, his breathing deep and even against the back of her neck. Their skin was stuck together in places, a map of the night’s fervor. She stared at the wall, watching the texture of the paint emerge from the gloom, and tried to pin down a single feeling. Triumph? Disgust? A giddy, nauseating awe? It all swam together, inseparable.
His phone, on the nightstand, lit up. The vibration was a persistent, angry insect against the wood. The screen cast a blue glow on his profile—the strong line of his nose, the dark fringe of his lashes. It was his wife’s face, a smiling photo from some sun-drenched vacation. Priya. The name landed in Anya’s gut like a stone.
Sid stirred. A low groan escaped him, part sleep, part something else. He blinked, his eyes finding the phone, then squeezing shut again. His arm tightened around her briefly, a reflexive pull, before his body went rigid with awareness. The night came crashing back in, replacing the haze of sleep.
The phone stopped. The silence was worse.
“You should get that,” Anya whispered. Her voice was sandpaper.
He didn’t move. “It’s just the alarm.”
“It wasn’t an alarm.”
Another silence. The room grew colder. He exhaled, a long, weary sound, and carefully extracted his arm from beneath her. The loss of his warmth was immediate. He sat up, the sheets pooling around his waist, and ran a hand through his hair. He looked at the phone like it was a loaded weapon.
It started buzzing again. Priya’s smiling face. Incessant.
This time, he moved. He snatched the phone, his thumb swiping to silence it. Not decline. Just silence. He held it in his palm for a long moment, then placed it back on the nightstand, screen down. The deliberate nature of the act—the choice not to speak, but not to fully reject the call—was its own kind of confession.
He didn’t look at her. He stared at the blank, dark television screen across the room. “She thinks I’m at a last-minute partner meeting in Singapore. Time zone difference. She was probably just… checking in.”
Anya said nothing. The justification, offered to the air, was flimsy and tragic. She pictured Priya, maybe in their kitchen, making morning tea, wondering why he hadn’t texted goodnight. The image was so clear it hurt.
Sid finally turned his head. In the dull morning light, he looked older. The charismatic ease was gone, stripped bare. She saw the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the shadow of stubble, a faint smudge of her lipstick just below his ear. A mark. A claim.
“Say something,” he said, his voice rough.
“What is there to say?” She pulled the sheet up higher, though it was futile. They’d seen every part of each other. “You have a seven-thirty recall on the Singapore narrative. I have to figure out what to tell Sam about why I never came home.”
“Tell him you were with me.” The words were quick, defiant.
Anya barked a laugh, short and harsh. “Right. ‘Hey Sam, crashed at my boss’s penthouse suite. We talked conversion rates and then he fucked me on the dining table. Bagels?’”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “It’s not a joke.”
“No,” she agreed, the word flat. “It’s not.”
He moved then, sudden and fluid. He rolled, his body covering hers, pinning her back into the mattress. The weight was familiar, a thrilling and terrible anchor. He looked down at her, his eyes searching her face. The guilt was there, in the tight set of his mouth, but it was warring with something hotter, hungrier. The phone call had severed the afterglow. This was something else—a reassertion, a desperate reach for the feeling that was already slipping through their fingers.
“I silenced it,” he said, as if that meant something.
“I saw.”
“I’m here. With you.”
His knee nudged hers apart. The sheet was between them, a flimsy barrier. She could feel him hardening against her thigh. The visceral response of her own body was a betrayal, a surge of heat that clashed violently with the cold knot of shame in her chest.
“The promotion,” she said, needing to taint it, to test it. “The new vertical. Was that real? Or was that just… table talk?”
He flinched, just a little. He lowered his head, his lips brushing hers, not quite a kiss. A threat. A promise. “It’s real. You’re the best I have. You know that.”
“Do I?”
He answered by closing the distance, his mouth capturing hers. This kiss was different. It wasn’t the exploratory heat of the night before. It was consuming, frantic, a attempt to burn away the dawn and the phone and the other lives waiting for them. It tasted like sleep and regret and an impossible longing.
Her hands came up, not to push him away, but to grip his shoulders, her nails biting into his skin. She kissed him back with equal ferocity, a silent scream into his mouth. This was the thrill, twisted now with the acid of guilt. Every rational thought—Sam, Priya, the irrevocable line they’d crossed—was fuel for the fire.
He broke the kiss, his breath hot on her cheek. “Forget them,” he murmured, a command to himself as much as to her. “Just for now. Forget everything.”
He shifted, sliding down her body, his hands pushing the sheet aside. His mouth found her breast, his tongue circling, then closing over the peak with a suction that made her back arch. The sensation was a sharp, bright wire of pleasure, cutting through the murky emotion. He was using his mouth, his hands, his weight, to rewrite the script, to bring them back to the pure, amoral physics of the night before.
And she let him. She surrendered to the sensation, because the alternative was to think. To think was to drown. She tangled her hands in his hair as he moved lower, past the swell of her stomach, his stubble scraping a path that made her gasp. He hooked her legs over his shoulders, his world narrowing to a single point of focus.
Outside, the city was coming alive. The first horns blared, a distant, mundane symphony. The gray light turned warm, gilding the edges of the furniture. In the golden glow of the rising sun, in a bed that still smelled of them, Sid Khurana set about the business of making them both forget, if only for a few minutes more. The phone on the nightstay remained silent, a dark and knowing eye.