Before You Leave

Some people walk into your life quietly. Kian Mehta walked into mine like a warning I chose to ignore.

Some people walk into your life quietly.

Kian Mehta walked into mine like a warning I chose to ignore.

One

The first thing he said to me was: Don't.

I'd just stepped off the elevator at Lume Architecture — camera bag, three coffees, zero attention — and walked straight into him. My coffee hit his white shirt. He caught my arm before I went down.

I looked up.

Dark eyes. Sharp jaw. A mouth that wasn't smiling.

"I'm so sorry, I wasn't—"

"Don't," he said.

"Don't what?"

"Apologize like that." He looked at the stain on his chest. "It was an accident."

"I just ruined your shirt."

"It's a shirt."

He said it like shirts were nothing. Like anything replaceable wasn't worth the energy.

I'd think about that later. When I understood what he meant by it.

"I'm Zara. I'm here for the tower shoot."

"I know who you are." He picked up my camera case from where I'd dropped it. Handed it back. "I'm Kian."

He walked away before I could say anything else.

I stood there holding my wrecked coffee thinking: well.

Two

His assistant told me he'd take me to the restricted floors personally.

"Does he do that often?" I asked. "Walk people around himself?"

She looked at me with an expression I couldn't place.

"No," she said. "He doesn't."

Three

Day three. Floor thirty-eight.

He was already at the window when I arrived, coffee in hand, looking at the city like it owed him something.

Bombay from up here was something else. Haze over everything, the monsoon still hanging in the air, the light going gold and strange.

I forgot I had a camera for a full thirty seconds.

"The morning light changes at seven," he said, without turning. "I built it for that."

"I need the haze," I said. "Not the morning light."

"Haze blurs the lines."

"That's what I want."

I raised my camera. Started shooting.

He didn't leave. I'd expected him to drop me off and go back to his actual life. He stayed near the window. Quiet.

I was used to people watching me work. It had never been like this.

After an hour he said: "You hold it differently than you used to."

I lowered the camera. "What?"

"Three years ago. That magazine shoot — the Sea Link hotel." He nodded at the camera. "You used to grip it tight. Now you're loose with it."

I stared at him. "You saw that shoot?"

"I designed that building."

Oh.

"You follow photography?" I said.

A pause. "I follow your work."

I turned back to the window and lifted the camera. My hands were steady — I've always been good at steady — but my pulse was doing something else entirely.

He followed my work.

Don't, I told myself. Don't make it into something.

I was already making it into something.

Four

Day six. The roof.

One floor above restricted. Off-limits. He'd brought me up without explaining and I hadn't asked.

The wind was strong. The city was enormous. We'd been standing there five minutes saying nothing.

"Zara." Low, under the wind.

"Yeah."

"I need to say something."

I looked at him.

He kept looking at the city. "I know what this is. Between us. These six days."

My heart got loud.

"I'm attracted to you," he said. Flat. Like stating the weather. "I think you know. I think it goes both ways."

I said nothing.

"But I can't give you more than that." A pause. "Whatever you might want this to be — I can't do it."

"Why?" I said.

His jaw tightened for a second. Then: "Because I'm not capable of it. Not anymore."

Not anymore. Two words carrying something heavy.

"What are you offering?" I said.

"Three weeks." He turned to look at me. "Whatever we want. No pretending, no what-does-this-mean conversations. And then you go back to London and that's it."

I should have said no.

I knew what he was telling me. I knew what it would cost me.

"Okay," I said.

He exhaled. Something between relief and regret, both on his face at once.

"Tonight," he said. "If you want."

"Tonight," I said.

Five

THEN

The worst part of falling for someone who told you the rules upfront is that you can't even be angry.

He didn't lie. He said: this is what I have. This is the limit.

And I said: okay.

So whose fault is it, really, that I'm awake at two a.m. counting the days?

Six

NOW

He opened the door and I walked in. The city came through the windows and painted the room orange and low.

He reached out and pushed my hair back from my face. Slow. Barely touching.

My whole chest went tight.

"You okay?" he said.

"Yeah." Wasn't sure that was true.

He kissed me.

Patient. Focused. Like he'd decided to be here and nothing was going to rush him out of it. I'd been kissed urgently before, desperately, like something to get through. This wasn't that. This was someone who'd stopped the clock.

I made a sound against his mouth I hadn't planned on.

He pulled back just enough to look at me. Then pulled me back in.

I followed him into the dark.

Here is what I know about Kian Mehta from that first night:

He is patient in a way that will ruin you.

He pays attention — not politely, not to seem like he's paying attention. He's just actually there, fully, and it makes you feel like the only interesting thing in the room.

He doesn't rush. He doesn't check in every thirty seconds. He watches your face and he knows.

And when I finally stopped trying to be fine about it — stopped managing myself, stopped keeping score of what I was allowed to feel — he pressed his mouth to my temple and held on.

I lay there afterward thinking: you're in so much trouble.

I was right.

Seven

The rules held for four days.

During the days I had my camera. I knew who I was.

The nights were different.

There's something about the way he looked at me that I couldn't file away neatly. Not like I was desirable. Like I mattered. Like what I said and did and felt was worth paying close attention to.

I didn't know what to do with it.

So I kept leaving before my feelings could catch up.

Day nine. His apartment. Late.

I was pulling on my shoes when he said: "You don't have to go."

He was sitting against the headboard watching me. His face was open in a way it usually wasn't.

"The rules," I said.

"I know the rules." A pause. "I'm saying you don't have to go."

"That sounds like it's outside the rules."

He looked at the window. "Maybe."

I sat there with one shoe on and one off.

"Kian. You told me what this was."

"I know what I told you."

A long moment.

I took my shoe off.

Lay back down beside him.

In the dark, quietly: "I don't sleep well."

"Okay," I said.

"I'm saying — if I'm restless. It's not you."

"What is it?"

Silence.

"Old things," he said.

I didn't push. He didn't explain.

At some point his hand found mine.

I woke up and he was still holding it. Already awake, staring at the ceiling, jaw tight even in the morning light.

"The old things," I said. "Do they always keep you up?"

He looked at me. "Yes."

I wanted to ask badly enough that it sat heavy in my chest.

I put my head on his shoulder instead. He put his arm around me.

This is already more than the rules, I thought. You know that.

I knew.

Eight

Day thirteen. The roof again.

"Who was she?" I said.

He went still.

"Her name was Mira." He didn't turn around. "Four years. We had plans." He stopped. "She got sick. The kind of fast you don't come back from."

I felt it in my chest.

"Kian—"

"Don't." Rough. "Don't do the sorry thing. I can't stand it."

I closed my mouth.

He turned around. His face was controlled. He was working at it.

"I'm not telling you so you'll understand me," he said. "I'm telling you because you keep looking at me like there's something to figure out. There isn't. I'm just someone who lost someone and decided not to do it again."

"That's why the rules," I said.

"Yes."

"No feelings. Nothing to lose."

"Yes."

I walked toward him. Close enough to see the tension he was carrying in his jaw.

"I'm not her," I said.

"I know."

"And I'm not asking you to love me." I put my hand flat on his chest. "But you're allowed to be a person, Kian. Even around me. You don't have to hold it together every second."

He looked at my hand for a moment.

Then put his over it.

He kissed me there on the roof, the city below us, the wind everywhere. Slower than before. Something in it had shifted — not named, not agreed to, just there.

I kissed him back and left it unnamed.

Nine

Day fifteen. Something gave.

I was at the sink and he came up behind me and put his arms around me and pressed his mouth to the back of my neck and something in me just went.

I turned around and kissed him like I meant it.

Not the rules version. The actual one.

He went still for half a second, surprised. Then kissed me back the same way — no patience, no careful management of himself, just him. The real version.

We knocked into the counter. The wall. I pulled his shirt and he pulled mine and we fell into each other like people who'd been holding something back for fifteen days and had both, at the same moment, stopped.

Afterward I lay against his chest. His hand in my hair.

Neither of us said: that wasn't the rules.

Neither of us said: what does this mean.

We just lay there.

I thought: I'm going to miss you so much.

I didn't say that either.

Ten

THEN

He took a photo of me once.

Floor thirty-eight, early morning. I didn't know he was doing it. I was at the window with my camera up, the light coming through sideways.

I found it on my phone two weeks later. Must have airdropped it without saying anything.

I looked like someone who'd let their guard down. Who was, for one second, not performing anything.

That's the thing about Kian Mehta.

He notices. Even when you don't know he's looking.

Especially then.

Eleven

NOW

Day nineteen. Three days left.

I was finishing shots on thirty-eight when he walked in, crossed the room, and put both hands on my face and kissed me like the rules had never been said.

When he pulled back his forehead dropped to mine.

"Kian," I said.

"I know."

"What are we doing?"

His eyes were closed. His hands still at my face.

"I don't know," he said.

First time he hadn't had an answer ready.

"Tell me what you're feeling," I said.

His jaw moved.

"Things I said I couldn't feel." Quiet. Like each word cost something. "I don't know what to do with it. I told you the rules. I meant them." He exhaled hard. "And now it's three days before you leave and I—"

He stopped.

"I don't want you to go," he said.

I felt that in my stomach.

Two choices. Hold the line. Leave in three days with everything still contained.

Or.

"I don't want to go either," I said.

He looked at me.

"I'm not saying I'll stay — my life is in London, that's real. But I want to try. Not the rules version. The actual thing."

His chest rose and fell.

"I don't know if I can—"

"You don't have to know yet," I said. "Just tell me if you want to."

The city below. The light through the glass.

"Yeah," he said. "I want to."

I kissed him.

He held on and didn't let go.

Twelve

The last night.

No talk of flights or schedules. We'd handled all that already, quietly, like adults doing something they're scared of.

Tonight we just stayed.

His arm around me. My hand on his chest. The city outside.

"Tell me something I don't know about you," I said.

He thought about it.

"There's a song I can't listen to," he said. "Mira's favourite. It still comes on sometimes and I have to leave the room. Three years on." A pause. "I thought grief had a finish line. You get through it and then you're through it."

"But you're not."

"Enough," he said. "Enough to do this. Enough to try."

I looked up at him.

"That's enough," I said.

He kissed me. Soft and unhurried.

I held on.

Thirteen

Departure gate. Early morning.

He didn't come to the airport. I'd asked him not to. Airports are for endings.

He stood at his door when I left. Looked at me the way he had on the thirty-eighth floor that first day — like something he was still trying to work out.

"Three weeks," I said. "I'll be back."

He nodded.

"Kian."

"I'll be here," he said.

I kissed him once. Pulled back.

"New rule," I said.

He raised an eyebrow.

"No going quiet. If it gets hard, you say so."

He put his hand against my jaw.

"Okay," he said.

I left.

On the plane I opened my photos.

Buildings. Light through glass. Bombay from forty-two floors up.

Then one I didn't take.

Me. Floor thirty-eight. Early morning. Light coming through sideways. I'm at the window with my camera raised and I have no idea anyone is watching.

He'd taken it without saying anything.

I looked at it for a while. At this version of me that had, for one unguarded second, stopped performing okay.

I saved it.

Somewhere over the sea I looked at that photo and thought:

He said he had nothing left to feel.

Then he took my picture.

We're going to be okay.