Chapter 8: Breakfast of Champions
The silence after Shanaya’s question was a living thing, thick and charged. The smell of their sex hung in the air, a sweet, musky reminder of what they’d just done. Tanya’s blissful smile froze, then slowly melted into confusion. She propped herself up on an elbow, looking from Shanaya’s serious face to Divakar’s stricken one.
“What do you mean?” Tanya asked, her voice still breathy. “It’s… it’s us. Having fun.”
“Fun,” Shanaya repeated flatly. She extracted herself from Divakar, sitting up and pulling the sheet around her. The gesture was defensive, a sudden retreat from the intimacy of moments before. “Right. Because walking in on my husband with another naked woman, being pulled into a threesome I didn’t agree to, is just fun. What’s really going on, Divakar? Who is she?”
Divakar’s mind raced, a torrent of panic and lame excuses. He saw the trust in Tanya’s eyes beginning to cloud with doubt. He saw the hurt and suspicion hardening Shanaya’s beautiful features. The web he’d woven was contracting, the strands pulling tight.
“She’s Tanya,” he said, the name feeling like a confession.
“And you just… what? Ran into her on the ship? Decided to have a friendly reunion?” Shanaya’s voice was rising, sharp as shattered glass.
Tanya sat up fully now, her nakedness suddenly seeming vulnerable rather than powerful. “We’re together,” she said, but it sounded like a question. “Aren’t we, Divakar?”
He was trapped. The ocean outside, so vast and freeing, mocked him from behind the glass. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The truth was a boulder in his throat.
Shanaya’s eyes narrowed. She was a model, used to reading micro-expressions, to spotting a lie in a twitch. She saw his guilt. “Look at him. He can’t even answer.” She turned to Tanya, and her expression shifted from anger to a dawning, horrific pity. “Oh, you poor thing. You don’t know either, do you?”
“Know what?” Tanya whispered, her hand reaching for Divakar’s but stopping mid-air.
“That he’s married,” Shanaya said, the words dropping like stones. “To me.”
The room seemed to tilt. Tanya recoiled as if struck. Her gaze locked onto Divakar’s, searching for a denial, a laugh, anything. She found only a wretched, silent plea.
“That’s not possible,” Tanya breathed. “We’re married. In Jaipur. My parents were there.” Her voice broke on the last word.
The two women stared at each other over Divakar’s prone body, the reality crashing over them in successive, terrible waves. The shared kisses, the shared pleasure—it curdled into something ugly and shared: betrayal.
“You son of a bitch,” Tanya said, the words soft but venomous. She scrambled off the bed, grabbing her robe and wrapping it around herself like armor. “You fucking married me. You married her. How?”
Shanaya was colder, more analytical in her fury. She didn’t move, just kept the sheet wrapped around her, a queen holding court in her outrage. “Different cities. Different circles. A man with a talent for lying and a seemingly endless capacity for… performance.” She glanced dismissively at his now-softened cock.
“It’s not like that,” Divakar finally managed, pushing himself up. “I love you both. It’s real. Every bit of it.”
“You don’t get to say that!” Tanya shrieked, a tear finally tracing a path through her cheek. “Love isn’t a fucking buffet! You don’t get to load up your plate with multiple main courses!”
“He saved me from a mob,” Shanaya said to Tanya, almost conversationally. “Bought me chai. Told me I was the most fascinating woman he’d ever met. What was your story?”
Tanya laughed, a harsh, brittle sound. “Wrong yoga class. He was so embarrassed. So charming. I fell for the fucking humility.”
They were bonding over their devastation. It was the worst possible outcome.
“I was going to tell you,” Divakar said weakly.
“When?” both women snapped in unison.
He had no answer. The morning light, once warm, now felt like an interrogation lamp.
Shanaya finally stood, letting the sheet fall. She dressed with quick, efficient movements, not bothering with modesty. Every line of her body screamed finality. “I’m going to my cabin. I need to think. About lawyers. About police. About what the hell to do with the fact that my husband is a bigamist and I just let his other wife finger me.”
She walked to the door, her posture ramrod straight. She paused, hand on the knob, and looked back at Tanya. “For what it’s worth… you have great taste in betrayal.” Then she was gone.
The door clicked shut. The silence she left behind was worse. Tanya stood by the bed, trembling. Divakar moved toward her.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed, wrapping her arms around herself. “All this time. The apartment in Mumbai. The weekends. You’d leave for ‘work trips.’” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Was it her? Were you with her?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted, the truth now the only currency he had left.
She nodded, as if confirming a terrible theory. “And the third phone? The one you said was for a failed startup project?”
Divakar’s blood ran cold. Soumya. She’d found the third phone months ago. He’d concocted a story about a bankrupt app idea.
Tanya opened her eyes. They were empty. “It’s another one, isn’t it? There’s a third. Of course there is. Why stop at two?”
He was silent. His silence was the confession.
A strange calm settled over Tanya. The tears stopped. She walked to the sliding door, staring out at the endless blue. “Get out,” she said, her voice flat. “Get out of this room. I can’t look at you.”
“Tanya, please—”
“OUT!”
He dressed with clumsy hands, the phantom smells of their bodies on his skin now a punishment. He fumbled with his belt, his shoes. He paused at the door, a thousand apologies dying on his lips. She didn’t turn around.
He stepped into the corridor, the door shutting firmly behind him. The muted sounds of the ship—a distant laugh, the clink of china from a room service cart—felt alien. He leaned his forehead against the cool wall, the enormity of his collapse pressing down on him.
From inside the stateroom, through the door, he heard it. A single, shattered sob. Then nothing.
He was adrift.