All Strings Attached

Chapter Twelve

My father's face scrunches up, vertical lines carving themselves onto his forehead, and his lips curling, as if to barely hold back what is to leave his mouth. "Why do I have to tell you everything?" He yells at my mother. "Who do you think you are?"

My mother gasps, hiding her gaping mouth behind her palm. "What do you mean who I am?" She asks him. "I'm your wife, I'm your kids' mother. I need to know where you are. Sita and Nitya have been asking for you all day, we were supposed to take them shopping for Deepavali."

I watch my father's expressions falter, if only slightly. His eyes lower, looking down at the ground and his face droops, but very quickly, at the flick of a switch, his previous countenance returns.

He grunts, throwing the water bottle in his hands onto the sofa and stomps away, leaving my crying mother behind.

"And if I need forever?" I look up at him, noticing the shift in the atmosphere. "What if I never have enough space or time?"

Dhushyanth sighs, running a hand through his hair to push it away from his forehead. "I want this to work," he says, softly. "I want to give our marriage a shot. I know you will warm up to the idea, even if it takes forever."

"What makes you believe that?" I question. "How do you know our marriage—" I pull my shirt over my chest, afraid my heart might literally leap out because of how hard it thuds against my rib cage— "is worth giving a shot?"

"You were given the chance to back out of this marriage, weren't you?"

I nod in response, hesitantly. I don't hear the accusation in his voice, but I cannot help but wonder if he is accusing me. "More than you were, anyway," I acknowledge how his parents basically shut him up as opposed to encouraging me to make a choice. "It wasn't enough of a choice with so much on the line," I defend myself. "If the news came out, both families would've been affected, and so close to the elections it was surely not ideal."

"But while we spoke of it," Dhushyanth says, tilting his head as his eyes remain trained upon me, "you seemed to make lots of excuses, but you didn't refuse to marry me. Even now, it only seems like you're justifying why you wanted to marry me, and it makes me think the problem wasn't that you didn't want to marry me. It was just that you didn't want to marry me."

Despite how confusingly Dhushyanth relays his point, it doesn't take me less than a second to understand what he's getting it.

He wasn't so much a problem when it came down to making the choice as compared to a simple but persistent thought in my head: do I just want to dislike him?

"I don't know what you mean," I say quickly, wrapping my shirt closer around myself, and taking the blanket to cover myself. "I obviously didn't want to marry you."

Dhushyanth studies me for a moment before shrugging. "Well, in that case," he says, "we both know you're horny for me—"

My jaw drops at his lewd statement— "I am not."

"Now, you just seem like a liar," he accuses. "Two minutes ago, you were giving me shit for not being quick—"

"Can you not?"

"Can I not what?" He asks, his eyes glinting with amusement even in the dimly lit room. "It's okay to be horny for your husband, Sita," he mock-sympathises, nodding with his eyebrows scrunched up in pity, "you're still very much aligned to the characteristics of your name—"

"Dhushyanth."

"So you know what my name is," he says, his lips quirking up smugly. "Of course you do, you were moaning it just a bit ago—"