Love Takes Time {Completed} {#Wattys2017}

30. Around the World - II

Abhimanyu: I do, but not crowded like this.

Abhimanyu: I prefer a beach on a secluded island, where you can sit next to bonfire, listening to soft music, and watch your partner walk to you after skinny dipping in the ocean, and enjoy the moonlit night drinking wine from the bottle with her. He said dreamily in a soft, romantic voice.

Shanaya could totally visualize as he spoke. Him sitting shirtless on a mat, on white sand of a beautiful beach, drinking from the bottle of wine, next to a bonfire, looking devastatingly handsome in the light of bonfire. She didn't know what skinny dipping meant so her visual met a bottleneck there, but she anyways visualized him staring at some hot girl in itsy bitsy bikini,walking to him fully wet with dripping wet hair after dipping in ocean come and sit close to him, pick her own bottle of wine to drink with him. She didn't have the heart to imagine what all followed after.

Shanaya: What is skinny dipping? She asked him.

Abhimanyu: You really don't know?

Shanaya: No.

Abhimanyu: When you go swimming wearing lots of clothes, it's called skinny dipping. He smiled with a laugh.

Shanaya understood the sarcasm.

Shanaya: Do you also go skinny dipping?

 He looked at her from the corner of his eyes.

Abhimanyu : No, I just sit 'n' watch.

She didn't ask him, if he had been on any beach like that. She shouldn't care, but she knew she will not like it if he said 'yes'. Where as, he was just telling her one the fantasies, he had. The girl was her, who he imagined watching walking out nude to him, after dipping in the ocean, sitting next to him dripping wet, and him kissing her bare wet body. 

              They walked in the sand with waves reaching and receding  their feet. She picked up dry sand in her fist.

Shanaya: Why are things we want to hold on to, like sand? They just slip away.

She pressed the sand in her hand as it made it's way out of her hand. She swatted off the remaining sand in her hand.

Abhimanyu picked up some wet sand.

Abhimanyu: This is also sand, right?

Shanaya: Yes.

He pressed it in his fist tight enough but not too tight. He opened his hand.

Abhimanyu: Make it wet, and give it some tight slaps with your fingers. He said showing impressions of his fingers on it. Then see, how it dares to slip away.

Abhimanyu: We can hold on to what we want to. We might not be able to do it exactly the way we want to, but we can always use a different way to do that.

Abhimanyu: There isn't only one way to get a thing. If you really want it, you got to try whatever it takes. Try different ways, one might work.

Abhimanyu: See, what I have done here. Now, you can lock this sand in a container. It will dry to the sand you want to hold on to, and always stay with you. Hurray! Mission accomplished. I am absolutely brilliant. It's a crime for someone to be so handsome and intelligent at the same time. He grinned.

Shanaya: Oh God! So much self- praise.

Abhimanyu: Self praise is the best praise. Try sometime. I bet, you will start loving yourself a lot more.

             They took 8 pm flight to Bangkok and reached there at midnight. They checked in beautiful Shangri La hotel and went to sleep to wake up in morning for a meeting with Daifukuu Pvt Ltd. After discussions on what the collaboration would mean, and how it would benefit both the parties, they went out on lunch with them. Lunch with the directors of any company always involved conversations over food and alcohol. Abhimanyu always drank with them, but never more than a glass, and Shanaya always chose not to drink.