The Girl in the Bookshop- - MG || (Part 9 |Page 7) - Page 7

Wonderful 👍 😊 update simply amazing 😀

Chapter Nine: The Proposal

The letter from Mrs. Kapoor arrived a second time on Thursday, and this one came with a date attached.

Geet found out about it from Mehek, who delivered the news in the tone of someone reporting a minor natural disaster, sliding into the kitchen doorway while Geet was scrubbing the pressure cooker and announcing, without preamble, "Ma is on the phone with Anil's mother. They're talking about him coming to Shimla next week."

Geet's hands went still in the sink. "Next week?"

"That's what I heard. Something about 'seeing how things are' before anyone commits to anything." Mehek pulled a face. "She sounded almost cheerful. It was unsettling."

"She's never cheerful."

"That's what I mean."

Geet dried her hands slowly, giving herself a moment she didn't entirely need, and went to find her aunt anyway - not because she expected the conversation to go differently than the last one had, but because some part of her needed to hear it stated plainly rather than secondhand through an eighteen-year-old with a flair for drama.

She found her aunt in the sitting room, the phone already back in its cradle, an expression of brisk satisfaction settled over her features like something she'd been waiting to wear.

"Anil's coming next week," Geet said. Not a question.

"His mother thought it made sense. Rather than continuing to write letters back and forth like we're negotiating a trade agreement." Sunita didn't look up from the stitching in her lap. "He'll stay two nights. There will be a proper meeting. Nothing needs to be decided immediately."

"And if I say no, once he's here?"

"Then you say no." Sunita's needle didn't pause. "But you'll have met him. You'll have given the idea a fair hearing, which is more than you've given it so far. That's all I'm asking."

It wasn't all she was asking, and they both knew it - a week from now, a stranger would be sitting in this house being formally presented to her like an offer she was expected to seriously weigh, and the fact that Sunita hadn't technically forced anything would matter very little once Anil was standing in the doorway and the whole extended family machinery of expectation had started turning around him.

Geet left the room without saying anything else. There didn't seem to be anything else worth saying.

She told Maan that evening, at the tea stall, in fewer words than the news probably deserved.

"He's coming next week."

Maan didn't ask who. He didn't need to. Something in his face went very still, the particular stillness she'd learned, over the last several days, to recognize as him thinking faster than he was letting on.

"Next week," he repeated.

"Two nights. A proper meeting." She said it flatly, watching the valley rather than him, because it was easier to say out loud when she wasn't looking at anyone's reaction to it, including her own. "Nothing has to be decided. Apparently."

"Do you believe that?"

"I believe that's what she'll say right up until the moment something has, in fact, been decided, and I'm expected to be grateful it happened so efficiently."

Maan didn't say anything for a while. Geet glanced over, expecting one of his usual deflections, and found instead that he was looking at her with an intensity that made her look away again almost immediately.

"I have to go back to Delhi tomorrow," he said. "For two days. A meeting I can't move."

Something in her chest sank, small and unreasonable, and she was annoyed at herself for how much the sinking felt like loss rather than simple disappointment. "That's fine. You don't need to plan your week around my aunt's timeline."

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?"

He looked at her for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that she couldn't read, and then, instead of answering, said only, "I'll be back before he arrives."

It wasn't an answer to anything she'd actually asked. She let it go anyway, because pressing him rarely produced more than he'd already decided to give her, and because some small, unexamined part of her had already noticed that his answer had contained a promise she hadn't asked for, and found she wanted it anyway.

He was back in three days, not two, and he didn't go to the hotel first.

Geet was closing the shop when the bell rang, later than he usually came, dust already settling into the blue evening outside the window, and she looked up to find him standing in the doorway looking as though he hadn't slept properly in longer than three days could account for.

"You're back."

"I'm back."

"You look terrible."

"Thank you."

"I mean it kindly."

"I'm aware." He didn't move from the doorway, which was unlike him, and Geet set down the ledger she'd been closing out and gave him her full attention.

"Maan. What is it?"

"I need to ask you something," he said. "And I need you to actually hear it before you tell me it's insane."

"That's an alarming way to start a sentence."

"It's an alarming sentence."

She came around the counter slowly, something in his voice pulling her toward him before she'd consciously decided to move. "All right. I'm listening."

"Marry me."

The words landed in the space between them and simply sat there, and for a moment neither of them moved at all.

"That's not funny," she said finally.

"I'm not joking."

"Maan, you've known me two weeks."

"I know."

"Stop saying that."

"I know I'm handing you the single strangest proposal in the history of proposals, from a man you've known for fourteen days, standing in a bookshop that still smells like the storm that trapped us both here." He crossed the remaining distance between them, close enough now that she had to tilt her head back slightly to keep looking at him. "I've thought about how insane it sounds for three days straight, in a city four hundred kilometers from you, in meetings I could not concentrate on."

"And?"

"And I still think it's the most sensible decision I've made this year."

"Sensible."

"Wrong word." He shook his head, correcting himself. "I don't want you to marry me because it's sensible. I want you to marry me because I have not stopped thinking about you since the exact moment the power went out in this shop, because I would rather sit in that ridiculous chair listening to you explain cell signalling than sit through a single one of the meetings I just flew to Delhi for, because three days ago, in a boardroom, I caught myself thinking about the sound you make right before you start laughing, and lost an entire conversation because of it." He held her gaze, steady, entirely serious. "That's not sensible. That's the least sensible thing I've felt in years. But it's true, and I'd rather say it badly than not say it at all."

Geet looked away first, toward the darkening street outside, and when she spoke again her voice had lost some of its earlier certainty. "You know what marrying me actually means. Legally. The estate."

"I know."

"It's not nothing, Maan. The moment I marry, everything my parents left me becomes mine to control. You'd be - " she gestured, searching for the shape of the accusation without quite wanting to make it " - connected to that. To all of it."

Here was the place where the truth belonged, and Maan felt the shape of it rise in his chest - the folder in his hotel room, the manager, the parcel his entire project had come to depend on, the exact, ugly convenience of how neatly this solved two problems at once. He felt it arrive, and felt himself, in the same instant, decide not to say it, the way he'd decided in this same shop on the very first night, except this time the stakes were no longer a stranger's harmless omission. This time it was a wedding.

"I'm not asking you because of your estate," he said, and every word of it was true, which was precisely what made it so easy to say. "I'm asking you because I want you. What comes with you is what comes with you. I'm not afraid of it."

It was true. It simply wasn't the whole truth, and Maan, watching her consider him with something that was slowly, visibly, softening into hope, let the true part stand in for the rest of it, and told himself that the part he hadn't said didn't actually change anything that mattered.

"This is insane," Geet said quietly.

"Almost certainly."

"Anil is arriving in four days. My aunt has already decided how this week is supposed to go."

"Is that what you want? The version where she decides?"

"No." The word came out immediately, with more force than she seemed to expect from herself.

Something flickered across Maan's face before he could hide it - a kind of undisguised pleasure at the certainty in her voice.

"You look very pleased," Geet said.

"I'm trying not to."

"Try harder."

He arranged his expression, unsuccessfully, and she almost laughed before catching herself, because there was still something she needed to know before any of this could go further.

"If there were no Anil," she said slowly, "would you still be asking?"

"Yes."

He hadn't even paused. "What if there were no will? No estate. No land, no money, nothing to unlock."

"I would still be asking."

Something in her chest shifted at how quickly the answer came, at how little it seemed to cost him to give it. She believed him. That, more than anything he'd said so far, felt dangerous.

"And if I say no?"

The question changed the air between them. Maan answered carefully, without the easy charm he usually reached for.

"Then you say no."

"And?"

"And nothing."

"You wouldn't keep asking?"

He considered it honestly, the way he considered most things that actually mattered. "I would probably keep wanting you. I wouldn't keep asking."

"You wouldn't speak to my uncle?"

"No."

"My aunt?"

"Absolutely not."

"Your family?"

"Not unless you asked me to."

"You wouldn't find some way to make this difficult to refuse?"

That one reached somewhere he clearly hadn't expected her to go, and he held her gaze without flinching from it. "No."

It was true, and it mattered to him that it was true in a way he couldn't entirely explain to himself - he would not involve Vikram, would not use Sunita's pressure, would not let his own family's weight fall anywhere near her answer. Whatever his wrongdoing amounted to, it wasn't going to be this. It wasn't going to be an answer she felt cornered into giving.

Geet looked down at the counter between them, the shop grown darker around them while they'd talked, only the lamp behind the register and the last of the streetlight still holding back the evening. "I don't want to marry you because you're the easiest way out of that house," she said. "I don't want to wake up in six months and understand that I said yes because you made leaving look beautiful, and Anil didn't."

"Then don't," Maan said. "Marry me because you want me. If the rest helps, fine. If it doesn't, fine. I don't want to be interchangeable with whatever door happens to be open." He paused. "Choose it. Not the door. Me."

"And if I need time?"

"Then take it. I'm proposing marriage, Geet, not issuing a tender."

That surprised a laugh out of her, quick and unguarded, and something in his chest eased at the sound of it even as the rest of him stayed carefully still, waiting.

"Go back to the hotel," she said finally.

"I can stay."

"I know you can. I'm asking you not to."

"That's oddly specific."

"I need to think. Without you standing here being Maan Khurana at me."

"That isn't an activity."

"It is when you do it."

He almost smiled at that, and then saw that she meant it, and didn't argue - didn't bargain, didn't try to extract an answer before she had one ready to give. "All right," he said, and left without being asked twice, and Geet watched him go and understood, distantly, that the fact of him leaving so easily had just told her something true about him that no amount of talking could have.

He didn't call that night, and didn't message the next morning either, and Geet found herself checking her phone anyway, which irritated her considerably more than his silence did.

The house, meanwhile, had moved past discussing Anil's visit into actively preparing for it - sheets checked, the guest room aired, Vikram quietly interrogated about whether he remembered Anil's father's preferences at the table, Mehek instructed twice not to embarrass anyone. No one asked Geet whether she was nervous. Perhaps because Sunita assumed she ought to be grateful. Perhaps because everyone in the house had simply grown used to Geet managing herself without anyone's help.

That night she lay beneath the sloping ceiling of the attic and listened to the ordinary sounds below - a cupboard door, running water, her uncle coughing, Sunita calling for Mehek - the small, familiar architecture of a life she'd spent years imagining leaving in fragments rather than in one enormous, irreversible piece. A room nobody entered without knocking. A cup left in the sink that stayed merely a cup. Coming home late without rehearsing the explanation on the walk back. Silence that belonged entirely to her, and no one keeping count of it.

She had never once imagined the escape as grandeur. Only as ease.

She turned the questions over slowly, one at a time, the way she'd have worked through anything else that frightened her. Would she want him if the Will didn't exist? Yes - the answer arrived quickly enough to embarrass her. Would she keep seeing him if marriage had never once been mentioned? Yes. Would she miss him if he simply left Shimla tomorrow and didn't come back? Yes, immediately, painfully.

Would she marry him?

That question took longer, and she let it, turning over everything he'd said and everything he hadn't needed to say - that he wouldn't go around her to Vikram, that he wouldn't use her aunt's pressure, that he'd left the moment she asked him to, without an argument. She thought of her father asking for one more impression at the dinner table, her mother laughing before she'd even finished - the particular freedom of being ridiculous because love was already there and couldn't be taken back simply for being loud or difficult or too much. She'd felt a version of that with Maan more than once this past fortnight, usually without noticing until it had already happened.

Perhaps two weeks wasn't nearly enough to know whether a marriage would last.

But perhaps it was enough to know whether she wanted the man asking.

Those weren't the same questions. She fell asleep before she'd finished deciding which one actually mattered more.

The next evening, she sent him three words.

Come after closing.

He arrived eleven minutes early and waited outside anyway, because she'd specified after closing and he wasn't going to risk being wrong about what that meant. When Geet finally turned the sign and opened the door, she found him standing under the awning with his hands in his coat pockets, doing a poor job of looking like eleven minutes hadn't cost him something.

"Come in."

He came in. Neither of them spoke right away - the shop felt different somehow, the same shelves and the same worn chair and the same bell overhead, all of it holding the memory of their first night in it a little too close to the surface.

Geet moved behind the counter, then stopped, and looked at him.

"No."

Maan went very still. For one long, terrible second she watched him absorb it completely, his face changing only slightly, no argument rising to meet it.

"All right," he said.

He would take it. She could see that plainly - he wasn't going to ask if she was sure, wasn't going to tell her she was making a mistake, wasn't going to do anything at all except accept it and, presumably, leave.

Something in her chest broke open into an entirely different kind of warmth.

"No," she said again, and this time the corner of her mouth moved, "that wasn't my answer."

He stared at her.

"You asked badly the first time," she said. "If I'm going to do something completely insane, I'd at least like a proper proposal."

For a second he only looked at her. Then he laughed, once, disbelieving, and dragged a hand down his face. "You are a genuinely terrible person."

"I've been told."

"I have had the worst twenty-four hours of my adult life."

"You probably deserved some of them."

"Probably." But he was smiling as he said it, and the smile was still there when he crossed the last of the distance between them - close, but not too close, never close enough to take away her ability to step back if she wanted to.

Geet looked down at his hand, and then, before he could offer it, reached for it first. His fingers closed around hers, and for one full second he seemed to forget how to breathe.

"Ask me properly," she said.

The teasing left his face entirely. For the first time since she'd met him, Maan looked young - not uncertain, exactly, just twenty-six, a man asking for something he had no way of negotiating into existence.

"Geet Thakur." His hand tightened carefully around hers. "Will you marry me?"

There was no Sunita in the room. No Anil, no Vikram, no Will, no trustees, no Khurana family waiting anywhere to approve or disapprove. Only Geet, and the answer, which was entirely hers to give or withhold.

She knew the speed of it was absurd. She knew affection wasn't the same as knowledge, that there were things about him she hadn't seen yet and things about herself he couldn't possibly know. But she also knew, with a clarity that startled her, that if every door in her life stood open right now, she would still turn around and look for him.

"Yes," she said, very softly.

Maan stared at her.

"You can speak," she said, after a moment.

Apparently he couldn't, not immediately, and that delighted her more than it had any right to.

"You said yes."

"I'm aware."

"You actually said yes."

"I can withdraw it, if this is going to become repetitive."

"No." The word came out so fast that Geet laughed, and he laughed too, helpless, and then they were simply standing there in the half-dark shop where the storm had first trapped them together, holding hands, neither of them entirely sure what came after a proposal that had actually been accepted.

"So," Geet said. "What happens now?"

Maan smiled - bright, unguarded, almost startlingly boyish. "I have absolutely no idea."

For once, that answer didn't frighten her at all.

And for once, Maan Khurana didn't immediately try to solve it.

Nice chapter dear, actually maan proposed geet for marriage, geet took time and maan gave her time without disturbing her, after two days geet accept maan's proposal.

Chapter 9

Mehak and Geet share a lovely bond

Of cos she told Geet about Anil coming to Shimla

Glad that Geet questioned her aunt

Sunita was indeed clear

As expected Geet told Maan

Maan's reaction was justified

So he had to leave for work

But assured Geet that he will be back before Anil's arrival

Now Maan returned

Not surprised that he asked Geet to marry him

Geet's reaction was reasonable

It was clearly unexpected

Glad that Maan was direct with Geet

Wish that he would have been honest with Geet that he knew about the land and will

He just wants her

Liked that he reassured her

She certainly needed time

Geet'sthoughts were understandable

So she wanted a proper proposal

The proposal was simple

Maan was really overwhelmed

Eager to know about Maan's family

9

very nice update

geet says to maan that her aunt forcing her n call anil next week for meeting

maan goes back to delhi to clear his mind

after coming back to shimla maan propose geet n give her time to think n respond with her mind n soul , maan wont involve any one from her n his family if she refuse his proposal

that he will wait not pressurise her in any way

geet took her time n says yes to maan

hope land issue never form misunderstanding in maan n geet

Beautiful ❤️ update

Chapter 9

Incredibly Cute Update

I loved the fact that Maan finally asked Geet to marry him

not for her will but instead just for her

while Geet thinking about her answer came to the decision that

she too can be with him as both are good together

and he brings out her natural behavior when they together

waiting now to see what will happen next

First a no, then a yes. She made him ask her properly too. Made him stress a bit.

Everything changes now.